"Obscene" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... women was rarer still. The affection of parents for young children was requited by no kindness on the part of youth for old age. Carving never rose higher than grotesque decoration. The attempts at portraying the human face or form resulted only in the monstrous and the obscene. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... wearily measuring the dark, empty blocks, footsore, into the smaller hours of the night; slyly, insinuatingly, pathetically offering herself—all she possessed—to the hovering beasts of prey. And even these rejected her, with gibes, with obscene jests that sprang to her lips and brought a shudder to those ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... large bundle sooner than he had expected; and he came quickly forth from the cellar in which he lived like a cruel spider and tried to intercept them, but they glided through the gate and were out of his reach before he could get near. He could follow them only with obscene invectives and horrible oaths. Well he knew what had been done—that there had been a robbery in the "Hawk's Nest," and he not in ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... time when eminent prelates of the older Church were eulogizing debauched princes like Louis XV, and using the unspeakably obscene casuistry of the Jesuit Sanchez in the education of the priesthood as to the relations of men to women, the modesty of the Church authorities was so shocked by Linnaeus's proofs of a sexual system in plants that for many years his writings ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... his partner, or his young ward; he lives on husks, and brown bread; though dastardly and unfit for war, he is useful at home, if you allow this, that great things may derive assistance from small ones. The poet fashions the child's tender and lisping mouth, and turns his ear even at this time from obscene language; afterward also he forms his heart with friendly precepts, the corrector of his rudeness, and envy, and passion; he records virtuous actions, he instructs the rising age with approved examples, he comforts ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... in horror. As they sat grouped about their spoil, in the scanty light afforded by the old man's lamp, he viewed them with a detestation and disgust, which could hardly have been greater, though they had been obscene demons, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Ceylon, the Isle of Gems, with its Sacred Mountain and its Tomb of Adam; of India the Great, not as a dreamland of Alexandrian fables, but as a country seen and partially explored, with its virtuous Brahmans, its obscene ascetics, its diamonds and the strange tales of their acquisition, its sea-beds of pearl and its powerful sun; the first in modern times to give any distinct account of the secluded Christian Empire of Abyssinia, to speak, though ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... helplessness when it was present, and mendacity after it had passed, the annals of despotism scarce afford an example of the elevation of such a favorite. It has been said that his talent for the relation of obscene stories engaged the attention and confidence of President Lincoln. However this may be, great was the consternation at Washington produced by his incapacity. The bitterness of official rancor was sweetened, and ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... returned the woman, 'who trouble even this obscene resting-place of the dead, and strip the gibbet of its honoured burden? Where ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... he had a bottle and Purdy needed a drink. The man was idly twirling the end of his rope and singing a song as he rode. He seemed care-free, even gay. The song that he sang was a popular one on the cattle range, grossly obscene, having to do with the love intrigues of ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... carrying all before him with his cue, in the full flush of triumph, and a great heap of five-franc pieces before him, you may conceive with what wrath the proud, hasty, passionate man drove out, cane in hand, the obscene associates, flinging after them the son's ill-gotten gains; and with what resentful humiliation the son was compelled to follow the father home. Then Roland took the boy to England, but not to the old Tower; that hearth of his ancestors was still ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tried to force their way out against the current, pushed and elbowed, struck at random, fell and were trampled, rose and trampled in their turn. They seized one another by the garments, the hair, the beard—fought like animals, cursed, shouted, called one another opprobrious and obscene names. When, finally, Alvan Creede had seen the last person of the line pass into that awful tumult the light that had illuminated it was suddenly quenched and all was as black to him as to those within. He turned ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... regret. You have submitted to the insolent demands of Southern politicians with such prompt and easy acquiescence, that many of your oldest friends have mourned over your lost manhood, and sadly abandoned you to the worship of your ugly and obscene idol. A Northern man, descended from the best Puritan stock, surrounded from childhood by institutions really free, breathing the atmosphere of free thought, enjoying the luxury of free speech, you have deliberately allied yourself to a party which has owed its long-continued political ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... the aim to make it the unconscious atmosphere of the whole hut. It is a striking fact, to which every soldier will testify, that while the language of the barrack room and beer canteen is often reeking with the profane and the obscene, the whole tone of the Association hut is entirely different. As one soldier says: "You don't realize the enormous difference of atmosphere between this and any other place where soldiers congregate. A man simply does not talk bad language and ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... only a servant. It was, therefore, always the practice at my table for females to stay as long as they found it pleasant, without being liable to a disgusting hint to depart, in order that the men who remained might have an opportunity of disgracing themselves by obscene and loathsome conversation. What a disgrace this to the national character! what a blot upon the very name of polished society! what an everlasting stigma upon British hospitality! what an indelible stain upon English manners! I always found ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... about the state of their souls now surrounded the midnight table, where, amidst the bounding of champagne corks, a drunken prince, enthroned between Dubois and Madame de Parabere, hiccoughed out atheistical arguments and obscene jests. The early part of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth had been a time of license; but the most dissolute men of that generation would have blushed at ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... see a youth who suffers, Rather than live a favored prince's life. Your soul is still alive, but here at court They'll lull it fast asleep with love and music. I had a soul once, like the rest of the world; But—! And I wither, decently obscene— Till some day, in the cause of liberty, One of those rash young fools of the University Amid my sweetmeats, perfumes, and dishonor Slays me as Kotzebue was slain by Sand. Yes, I'm afraid—do try a sugared raisin— That I shall perish ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... title-pages, frontispieces, illustrations, and book-plates. He prowls furtively among public and private libraries, inserting wetted threads, which slowly eat away the illustrations he covets; and he broods, like the obscene demon of Arabian superstitions, over the fragments of the mighty dead. His disgusting tastes vary. He prepares books for the American market. Christmas books are sold in the States stuffed with pictures cut out of honest volumes. Here is a quotation from ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... Bracebridge look grave, he having a great antipathy to an indecent jest. In a word, the general is a complete instance of the declension in gay life, by which a young man of pleasure is apt to cool down into an obscene old gentleman. ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... floors. Rafters and beams had been hewn down; doors and windows with their frames had been torn out. On some of the walls rude drawings had been scrawled in paint or red chalk, with facetious inscriptions and obscene jokes; but from most of them the whitewash had fallen, leaving bare the rough masonry. It was a depressing picture of desolation. One could almost imagine that the smell of burning ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... moral force, but it is vitiated in much the same way as is the idea of Samsara, while it is further weakened by the fact that the Hindu gods themselves are often represented as immoral, bloodthirsty, obscene and criminal. ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... Gentile nations were wrapped up in the very worst idolatry, having little or no connection whatever with morality, except to corrupt it with the infamous examples of their gods. "They all worshiped a multitude of gods and demons, whose favor they sought by obscene and ridiculous ceremonies, and whose anger they tried to appease with the most abominable cruelties." With them, heaven was open only to legislators and conquerors, the civilizers and destroyers of mankind. This was the summit of their religion, and even this was limited ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... eloquent in giving lessons to novices as his compeers in our own prisons, and he carefully instructs his hopeful pupils in the best ways of avenging their wrongs upon society. Some in the prison are merry, and enjoy a dance, while others are indulging in obscene jests and ribaldry. Still, there are those that find means to labor and to work at repairing shoes or clothes in the midst of this babel of ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... foul, indecent, obscene, tainted, defiled, gross, indelicate, polluted, tarnished, dirty, immodest, lewd, stained, unchaste, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... sombre squalid streets, past narrow courts in which innumerable children tumbled and yelled, disturbed and desolated her. It appeared that she had entered the secret breeding-quarter of the immense city, the obscene district where misery teemed and generated, and where the revolting fecundity of nature was proved amid surroundings of horror and despair. And the hospital itself was the very centre, the innermost temple of all this ceaseless ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... there came to him some premonition of the future, some half-revealed, half-blurred picture of prophecy. Perhaps that picture was one of himself, lying in the darkness on the roof of the railway carriage, and an obscene Boolba standing erect in a motor-car on the darkened station, waving his rage, ere the ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... Tolstoy's "Sebastopol" and Zola's "La Debacle," and with some of the short stories of Ambrose Bierce. The comparison with Bierce's work is legitimate; with the other books, I think, less so. Tolstoy and Zola see none of the traditional beauty of battle; they apply themselves to a devoted—almost obscene—study of corpses and carnage generally; and they lack the American's instinct for the rowdy commonplace, the natural, the irreverent, which so materially aids his realism. In "The Red Badge of Courage" invariably the tone is kept down where one expects a height: the most heroic ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... had scorned to shelter him in the flash kens, which were the natural harbours of pickpockets. But now, says his biographer, he began to seek evil company, and, the victim of his own fame, found safety only in obscene concealment. ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... my collection of obscene pictures, and I begged Leah to give me the box, telling her that I would shew her some of the most beautiful breasts in ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... should produce. It was at the period when Greece was led captive and Asia made tributary to the Republic, fast verging itself to slavery and ruin, that a multitude of Syrian captives, bigoted to the worship of their obscene Ashtaroth, and the unworthy successors of Socrates and Zeno, found there a precarious subsistence by administering, under the name of freedmen, to the vices and vanities of the great. These wretched men were skilled to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... object lesson to show the Mars Convicts the full measure of our determination to submit to no threats of force! Let this prisoner and the other convicts who doubtless are lurking in nearby space beyond Earth's defense fields know that for every day their obscene threat against the high officers of the Machine continues hundreds of malcontents who would welcome them on Earth will ...
— Oneness • James H. Schmitz
... takes it upon himself to describe the comedy as "lascivious.'' Lascivious the comedies of the time commonly were, but later writers, instead of drawing their ideas from the eyewitness, prefer the dark hints of Infessura, and are persuaded that the comedy, the whole festivity, was "obscene.'' Hence arises the notion, so popular, that the second Borgia Pope delighted in shows which anticipated those of the Folies Bergere, or which surpassed the danse du ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... greater sure my merit, who, to gain A point sublime, can such a task sustain; To wade through ways obscene, my honour bend, And shock my nature, to attain my end. Late time shall wonder; that my joys will raise: For ...
— The Revenge - A Tragedy • Edward Young
... birds and reptiles, alligators, enormous bull-frogs, night-owls, ahingas, herons, whose dwellings were in the mud of the swamp, or on its leafy roof, now lifted up their voices, bellowing, hooting, shrieking, and groaning. Bursting forth from the obscene retreat in which they had hitherto lain hidden, the alligators raised their hideous snouts out of the green coating of the swamp, gnashing their teeth, and straining towards us, while the owls and other birds circled round ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... protect society against the obscene and the lewd, they make no distinction between the scientific works of human emancipators like Forel and Ellis and printed matter such as they are ostensibly aimed at. Naturally enough, then, detectives and narrow-minded ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... shuffling steps and cowering shivering forms, looking into the roads and kennels as they went in search of refuse food or disregarded offal. These forms were never beheld but in those nights of cold and gloom, when the terrible spectres, who lie at all other times in the obscene hiding-places of London, in archways, dark vaults and cellars, venture to creep into the streets; the embodied spirits of Disease, and Vice, and Famine. It was whispered by those who should have known, that these were Sampson and his sister Sally; ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... description of them.40 There were two popular festivals, of which Michelet gives a full and amusing description, one called the "Fete of the Tipsy Priests," when they elected a Bishop of Unreason, offered him incense of burned leather, sang obscene songs in the choir, and turned the altar into a dice table; the other called the "Fete of the Cuckolds," when the laymen crowned each other with leaves, the priests wore their surplices wrong side out and threw bran in each others' eyes, and the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... but not from the impression. It left him with a prevailing sense of horror and, at first, with a sense of disgust too. "It's a damned obscene country," he would say. But he stayed in it, for he had no choice. All the money which he could save went to the support of his family, and for six years the firm he served moved him from district to ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... and the softness of mud, the ingrained belief in a certain ancient kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of the race of man—these influences are truly moral. When we put beside them the trumpeting and tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscene purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... right to that. If the reader does not draw from a book the moral that should be found there, the reader is an imbecile or the book is false from the point of view of accuracy. For, the moment that a thing is true, it is good. Obscene books likewise are immoral only because they lack truth. Things are ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... as the leader of a sect, and whose doctrines of art five or six faithful disciples spread while copying his waistcoats and even imitating his manner of speaking with closed teeth, is reduced to writing stories for obscene journals. "Chose," the fiery revolutionist, had obtained a good place; and the modest "Machin," a man hardly noticed in the clubs, had published two exquisite books, genuine works ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... pulling off his spectacles, to talk filthily upon it? Methinks I see him now," added the bold slut, "splitting his arch face with a broad laugh, shewing a mouth, with hardly a tooth in it, and making obscene remarks upon what ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... Knowlittle, Hasty and Slovenly; he called the witnesses Calumny, Lie and Suspicion; and, in obvious allusion to Ferdinand's seizure of property, he named the statute-book "The Rapacious Defraudment of the Land." He saw the lords oppressing the poor, sitting long at table, and discussing lewd and obscene matters. He saw the rich idlers with bloated faces, with bleary eyes, with swollen limbs, with bodies covered with sores. He saw the moral world turned upside down. No longer, said Comenius, did men in Bohemia call things by their right names. They called drunkenness, merriment; greed, ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... is distressingly common, and during the Pongol festivities in southern India young people dance round or leap over a fire. Other remarkable features in the Mahavrata are the shooting of arrows into a target of skin, the use of obscene language (such as is still used at the Holi festival) and even obscene acts[238]. We must not assume that popular religion in ancient India was specially indecent, but it probably included ceremonies analogous to the Lupercalia and Thesmophoria, in which licence in words and deeds was supposed ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... king; Or virtue, or religion turn to sport, To please a lewd, or unbelieving Court. Unhappy Dryden!—In all Charles's days, Roscommon only boasts unspotted bays; And in our own (excuse some courtly stains) No whiter page than Addison remains. He, from the taste obscene reclaims our youth, And sets the passions on the side of truth, Forms the soft bosom with the gentlest art, And pours each human virtue in the heart. Let Ireland tell, how wit upheld her cause, Her trade ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... from which the fortunes had been derived, they were no viler nor more terrible than the purposes for which they had been spent. Mrs. Vivie Patton had hinted to Montague of a "Decameron Club," whose members gathered in each others' homes and vied in the telling of obscene stories; Strathcona had told him about another set of exquisite ladies and gentlemen who gave elaborate entertainments, in which they dressed in the costumes of bygone periods, and imitated famous characters in history, ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... let me break the thread of my story for a moment to speak an earnest word of kindly caution to my youthful readers. Avoid the use of foul, obscene, or blasphemous language, my lads, as you would avoid the most deadly pestilence. I am grieved to notice that it is sometimes the fashion among lads, ay, even in some cases those of respectable parentage, to freely garnish, ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... "was sent to me fifteen years ago by on of my constituents, when I was in Congress. I never wore it, of course, but it would have been criminal to have thrown away such a magnificently obscene example ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... strove to pull him from the place. He, on the other hand, manfully maintained his ground, hurling back every missile, struggling with his assailants, and continuing the while to pour forth a malignant and obscene discourse. At last a young sailor, warm in the Catholic Faith, and impulsive as mariners are prone to be, ascended the pulpit from behind, sprang upon the mechanic, and flung him headlong down the steps. The preacher grappled with his enemy as he fell, and both came rolling to the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... at him, calling him by all the obscene terms I had ever learned or heard. This, and the astounding fact that I no longer squirmed nor cried out, but physically yielded to him, as limp as an empty sack, brought him to a puzzled stop. But he ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... prophet of the eternal truth. And when all false faiths, and their priests who have oppressed men and traduced God, have vanished; and when kings that have prostituted their great and godlike office to personal advancement and dynastic ambition are forgotten; and when every shrine reared for obscene and bloody rites, or for superficial and formal worship, has been cast to the ground, then from out of the confusion and desolation shall gleam the temple of God, which is the refuge of men, and on the one throne of the universe shall sit the Eternal Priest—our Brother, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... a man should have enquired of Boccace or of Chaucer, what need they had of introducing such characters, where obscene words were proper in their mouths, but very undecent to be heard; I know not what answer they could have made: for that reason such tales shall be left untold by me. You have here a specimen of Chaucer's language, which is so obsolete that his sense is scarce to be understood; and you have ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] but not [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]. Perhaps they might be used in the solemn part of their ceremonies; and the Fescennine, which were invented after them, in their afternoons' debauchery, because they were scoffing and obscene. ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... cheers with which the people greeted him. They still thought that he was the Lord-Lieutenant, and, expectant of benefits of some sort, they shouted their best. He glanced at the veiled statue, but turned his eyes away from it immediately, as if it were something obscene or otherwise disgusting. He took no notice of Mary Ellen, though she smiled at him. Father McCormack and Doyle followed him, crestfallen. Major Kent, who seemed greatly pleased, also followed him. ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... in his place O'er all the rest by head and shoulders; No sunshine on that noble face Which Nature meant to charm beholders! Mad with his self-made martyr's shirt, Obscene, through hatred of obsceneness, He from a pulpit built of Dirt ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... entry, the premiere danseuse pretended to be overcome by shame, as though led on beyond what she had meant, and her male assistants made a feint of driving her away like one who had disgraced herself. Similar affectations accompany certain truly obscene dances of Samoa, where they are very well in place. Here it was different. The words, perhaps, in this free-spoken world, were gross enough to make a carter blush; and the most suggestive feature was this feint of shame. For such parts ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a chief his favourite wives were invariably strangled with him. Numerous slaves also were killed, to form his band of attendants to another world; and a great cannibal feast was also held. Human victims were offered to their obscene deities by their priests in their temples, groves, and high places. When a house was to be built for a chief, four live slaves were placed in deep holes to support the corner posts, when the earth was filled ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... remembering the provocation, apologizing for the injury he had done and offering to make any reparation in his power, replied by an oath still more shocking than that of the lost girl, hurled at her the most opprobrious epithet which man bestows upon woman in the English language, and one by far too obscene to be repeated in these pages,—and was passing on, leaving the poor girl to gather her torn drapery as she best could, when his course ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... one thing that it said—that all good things are one thing. There is no conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and a comic-opera tune played by Mildred Wain. But there is everlasting conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and the obscene pomposity of the hired mute: and there is everlasting conflict between the comic-opera tune and any mean or vulgar words to which it may be set. These, which man hath joined together, God shall most surely sunder. That is what I am feeling . . . now every hour of the day. All good things ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... crown the work he goes, Gods! What a stink salutes his nose! Where are the honest toilers? Where The gravid mistress of their care? A busy scene, indeed, he sees, But not a sign or sound of bees. Worms of the riper grave unhid By any kindly coffin lid, Obscene and shameless to the light, Seethe in insatiate appetite, Through putrid offal; while above The hissing blow-fly seeks his love, Whose offspring, supping where they supt, ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... a dispute with a scurrilous fellow, who, in addition to obscene remarks and insolent abuse, reproached him with the misfortune of his mutilated person. "Look you," said {the Eunuch}, "this is the only point as to which I am effectually staggered, forasmuch as I want the evidences of ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... rove on, and, both delighting in contrast, enter some squalid and obscure quarter of the city. There, one night, quiet observers of their kind, they paused beside a group congregated together by some common cause of obscene merriment or unholy fellowship—a group on which low vice had set her sordid and hideous stamp—to gaze and draw strange humours or a motley moral from that depth and ferment of human nature into whose sink the thousand streams of ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sickness; he tried to pray, but no words would come, and he felt indeed that the evil was too strong for him. Presently the beast desisted from its play, and looking wickedly about it, came near to the Father's bed, and seemed to put up its hairy forelegs upon it; he could see its narrow and obscene eyes, which burned with a dull yellow light, and were fixed upon him. And now the Father thought that his end was near, for he could stir neither hand nor foot, and the sweat rained down his brow; but he ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... questions arising out of the study of this particular spirit of jesting, with reference to which I have called it the Grotesque Renaissance. For it is not this period alone which is distinguished by such a spirit. There is jest—perpetual, careless, and not unfrequently obscene—in the most noble work of the Gothic periods; and it becomes, therefore, of the greatest possible importance to examine into the nature and essence of the Grotesque itself, and to ascertain in what respect it is that the jesting of art in its highest flight, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... home in a raging fever, which increased during the night to delirium. His ravings were of magistrates, the jeering crowd, dungeons, chains, and the convict-ship. Then he was at the penal settlement. He heard the frightful oaths, obscene jests, and blasphemous laughter of the convicts. Among them he beheld Caroline Clifford—haggard, and in rags—now toiling at her task, now shrieking beneath the bloody lash—and he seemed to grasp the throat of Jennings, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... obscene!" In this truly Gallic fashion he flung his glove into the face of Privilege, determined, you see, upon no half measures; and the rippling laughter perished on the instant quenched in ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... Maurice, and returned before the close of the year. He had an audience of the King at the palace of Whitehall early in November, and found him as immovable as ever in his apathetic attitude in regard to the affairs of Germany. The murder of Sir Thomas Overbury and the obscene scandals concerning the King's beloved Carr and his notorious bride were then occupying the whole attention of the monarch, so that he had not even time for theological lucubrations, still less for affairs of state on which the peace of Christendom ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... loyalty? I have left my beautiful France and come here to this foggy London to aid this flat-footed homme de bout, Dawson, in his researches. Yet he tells me nothing. He disguises himself before me, and laughs, laughs, when I fail to recognize his filthy, obscene countenance. But I am loyal, of a ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... of British women, with their knuckled hands, their splayed feet. Their abominable dressing, too, a bust and a brooch and a hooped skirt—their grocers' conventions, prudish, almost obscene, avoiding of the natural in word, deed, or thought.... He wanted Fenzile, with her eyes, vert de mer, her full childish face, her slim hands with the orange-tinted finger nails, her silken trousers, her little ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... your possession, any intoxicating liquors, tobacco or snuff in any form; gamblers' or obscene cards or pictures; concealed weapons; or soil the floors with spittle or ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... best we could by constructing fearfully wicked, obscene and insulting parodies on these, and by singing them with irritating effusiveness in the hearing of the guards who were inflicting these nuisances ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... that you may have a man of noble mind, full of every lofty aspiration, and that a gross physical cause, such as the fall of a spicule of bone from the inner table of his skull on to the surface of the membrane which covers his brain, may have the ultimate effect of turning him into an obscene creature with every bestial attribute! That a man's individuality should swing round from pole to pole, and yet that one life should contain these two contradictory personalities—is ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... As he grew older, he made some reckless changes in the text, chiefly with the unhallowed object of mystifying those engaged in the same field. With a malignity that was not without humour, he supplied, too, many obscene notes to coarse expressions, and he pretended that he owed his indecencies to one or other of two highly respectable clergymen, Richard Amner and John Collins, whose surnames were in each instance appended. He had known ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... small crowd in front of a shop-window. He stopped mechanically. It was a photograph and picture-postcard shop: there were pictures of girls in chemises, or without them: illustrated papers displayed obscene jests. Children and young girls were looking at them calmly. There was a slim girl with red hair who saw Christophe lost in contemplation and accosted him. He looked at her and did not understand. She took his arm with ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... very depths of Paris life: prostitutes and criminals, the murderers of to-morrow, who came to see how a man ought to die. Loathsome, bareheaded harlots mingled with bands of prowlers or ran through the crowd, howling obscene refrains. Bandits stood in groups chatting and quarrelling about the more or less glorious manner in which certain famous guillotines had died. Among these was one with respect to whom they all agreed, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... somehow, she never expected a man with a red nose to have a wooden leg. This man was always cheery, and very voluble. He used the worst language possible in the pleasantest way, and his impervious good-humour was proof against all remonstrance. What he said was either blasphemous or obscene as a rule, but in effect it was not at all like the same thing from the other men, because, with them, such language was the expression of anger and evil moods, while with him it was the vehicle of thought ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... a handsome man, and came from Naples to Rome, his sole outfit being a toga made of a piece of cloth adorned with obscene pictures and a small Asiatic mitre. Like many of his kind at that day, he sold poisons and invented five or six new remedies which were more or less haphazard mixtures of wine and poisonous substances. He had the good luck to ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... it by word or feature. He went on humming a tune without words as he worked, handing out biscuits and ham to the hungry crew. Jim had eaten his breakfast already, and was smoking a cigarette at his ease. Now and then he addressed somebody in obscene jocularity. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... refers also to the Durga festival, in which the weird and often horrible and obscene rites of Skakti worship not infrequently ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... offensive libel, which led to his arrest and imprisonment in the Tower, from which he was released—on the ground that the general warrant on which he was apprehended was illegal—amid general rejoicing among the people; he was afterwards prosecuted for an obscene production, an "Essay on Women," and outlawed for non-appearance; he sought an asylum in France, and on his return was elected for Middlesex, but instead of being allowed to sit was committed to prison; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... those of ancient days! Theirs taught the truth in academic shades, Ours in lewd hops and midnight masquerades. So changed the times! say, philosophic sage, Whose genius suits so well this tasteful age, Is the Pantheon, late a sink obscene, Become the fountain of chaste Hippocrene? Or do thy moral numbers quaintly flow, Inspired by th' Aganippe of Soho? Do wisdom's sons gorge cates and vermicelli, Like beastly Bickerstaffe or bothering Kelly? Or art thou tired of th' undeserved applause Bestowed on bards affecting ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... ignoble wreath, Ere yet the sharp, decisive word Light the black lips of cannon, and the sword 120 Dreams in its easeful sheath; But some day the live coal behind the thought, Whether from Baal's stone obscene, Or from the shrine serene Of God's pure altar brought, 125 Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught, And, helpless in the fiery passion caught, Shakes all the pillared state with ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... and why bad Writers are at present the most proper Objects of Satire. The True Causes of bad Writers. Characters of several Sorts of them now abounding; Envious Critics, Furious Pedants, Secret Libellers, Obscene Poetesses, Advocates for Corruption, Scoffers at Religion, Writers for ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... cents each. He held the religious press up to the scorn of church members for accepting advertisements which the publishers knew and which he proved to be not only fraudulent, but actually harmful. He called the United States Post Office authorities to account for accepting and distributing obscene circular matter. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... granite junctions in the glen, the stream comes down from them pure to the Garry; but in Beddington Park I am stopped by the newly-erected fence of a building speculator; and the bright Wandel, divine of waters as Castaly, is filled by the free public with old shoes, obscene crockery, and ashes. ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... thin cheeks as he picked up the thing. There were horrible woodcuts in it, coloured with liberal splashes of red and blue and yellow, and the print contained matter more lurid still. Vice mopped and mowed and slavered, obscene and hideous, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... secret good offices? In one version of the legend the hosts of Demeter were not Celeus and Metaneira, but Dusaules and Baubo. The part of Baubo was to relieve the gloom of the Goddess, not by the harmless pleasantries of Iambe, in the Hymn, but by obscene gestures. The Christian Fathers, Clemens of Alexandria at least, make this a part of their attack on the Mysteries; but it may be said that they were prejudiced or misinformed. {87a} But, says M. Foucart, an inscription has been found in Paros, wherein there ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... or flesh, so close they gather round the brazier; and vapours issue forth that blind and suffocate. From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark retreats, some figure crawls half-awakened, as if the judgment-hour were near at hand, and every obscene grave were giving up its dead. Where dogs would howl to lie, women, and men, and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... the traveller! And it was precisely characteristic of Mr. Critchlow to jump in the dark at a horrible conclusion, and to be right after all. For Sophia Mr. Critchlow had always been the personification of malignity and malevolence, and now these qualities in him made him, to her, almost obscene. Her pride brought up tremendous reinforcements, and ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... close of the Roman Empire without becoming more dignified; rather the reverse. The names of some authors of mimes have survived: Publius Syrus and Laberius, in the time of Caesar. What is curious is that these mimes, licentious and even obscene though they were, throughout gave occasional utterance to highly moral observations which Latin grammarians have preserved for us. This curious mixture may be explained or contrasted at pleasure; perhaps it was only a ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... where I now found myself, the waters abounded with ichthyosauri, and along the margins the iguanodon dragged his obscene bulk in indolent immunity. Great flocks of pterodactyls, their bodies as large as those of oxen and their necks enormously long, clamored and fought in the air, the broad membranes of their wings making a singular musical humming, unlike anything that I had ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... leave for my children Brave medals that I have worn, But the blood in my veins shall leave no stains On bride or on babes unborn; And the scars that my body may carry Shall not be from deeds obscene, For my will shall say to the beast, OBEY! And I will come ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... loud and obscene, such as I never heard before from any but the most depraved and beastly women of the streets. Upon observing me they dropped their voices, but not with any appearance of shame, and continued their altercation until their mistresses ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... would take care of him. Well, this theory was put to the test one day. A teacher came to him and said, "I've got a boy in my class that must be taken out; he breaks the rules continually, he swears and uses obscene language, and I cannot do anything with him." Mr. Wannamaker did not care about putting the boy out, so he sent the teacher back to his class. But he came again and said that unless the boy was taken from his class, he must ...
— Moody's Anecdotes And Illustrations - Related in his Revival Work by the Great Evangilist • Dwight L. Moody
... believe, to doubt or to hope, "for these," said Biard, "we had to labor and sweat; in these were the pains of travail." They were compelled to make a thousand gesticulations and signs that greatly amused their savage instructors who sometimes palmed off on them words that were ridiculous and even obscene, so that the Jesuits labored with indifferent success in the preparation of their catechism. Their work was still in the experimental stage when the destruction of Port Royal by Argal in 1613, and the capture and removal of the missionaries brought everything to a stand and ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... of alarm occurred, and in consequence, this evening, the head cooly gave his orders to his men in the following terms: "Watch to-night well." Nobody answering him, he continued, "Do you hear what I say?" Then addressed himself to them in the most obscene terms, which habit and uncivilized life seem to have adapted to common conversation amongst these people without any breach of modesty or decorum; and amongst the Assamese such expressions likewise form not an uncommon mode of ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... brightly lighted passageway, and snored all night long, when she should have been attending to her duties,—which duties were to keep an eye on us lest we rob one another of the few pennies we might have under our pillows, or that we might not scrawl obscene verses on the whitewashed walls, in case we had succeeded in smuggling in a forbidden lead-pencil. For such offenses, and they happened only too often, we were all held equally guilty in the eyes of the sour, autocratic matron. As each night brought a fresh relay of girls to the ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... god of the Moabites; also called Baal-Pe'oer; the Pria'pus or idol of turpitude and obscenity. Solomon built a temple to this obscene idol "in the hill that is before Jerusalem" (1 Kings xi. 7). In the hierarchy of hell Milton gives Chemos the fourth rank: (1) Satan, (2) Beelzebub, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... pederast and forger examined by Professor Filippi was tattooed on his forearm with a sentimental declaration addressed to the object of his unnatural desires; a criminal convicted of rape was covered with pictorial representations of his obscene adventures. From these few instances, it is apparent that these personal decorations are of the utmost value as evidence of ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... the world, their effect on Nero was curious. Seneca was his preceptor. But so too was Art. The lessons of these teachers, fusing in the demented mind of the monster, produced transcendental depravity, the apogee of the abnormal and the epileptically obscene. What is ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... idolatry I find a disorderly confusion of the vilest and most abominable things [77] worthy of its inventor, although in examining the walls within this infernal cave, I discover an infinitude of loathsome creatures, foul, obscene, truly damnable, it is my task, aided by the light of truth, to reduce them to order—so that we who upon opening our eyes find ourselves within the light of truth may offer praise to Almighty God, and have compassion for those who, blinded by their ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... of pure horror burst from Rick's throat. High on the rocket's side, metal slowly peeled back like obscene steel lips opening, and green fire gushed forth. The shuddering ceased, and he knew the rocket was dead. The gash opened ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... let me speak about it. She's funnier than ever. She treats me as if I were some obscene monster just crawled up out of the ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... thee nor me these things obscene; We have a higher pleasure, purer taste. My draughts have been with thee of hippocrene, And our delights ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... Dr. Maudsley thinks that the same view may be extended to the brain in its degenerated condition in some insane patients; and asks, whence come "the savage snarl, the destructive disposition, the obscene language, the wild howl, the offensive habits, displayed by some of the insane? Why should a human being, deprived of his reason, ever become so brutal in character, as some do, unless he has the brute nature within him?"[12] This question ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... inside and showing silhouettes worked by hand. Nothing could be more Fescenntne than Kara Gyuz, who appeared with a phallus longer than himself and made all the Consuls-General-periodically complain of its abuse, while the dialogue, mostly in Turkish, as even more obscene. Most ingenious were Kara Gyuz's little ways of driving on an Obstinate donkey and of tackling a huge Anatolian pilgrim. He mounted the Neddy's back face to tail, and inserting his left thumb like a clyster, hammered it with his right when the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... now declare that I will abstain from [323] the use of all low or profane language; from the taking of the name of God in vain; and from all impurity, or from taking part in any unclean conversation or the reading of any obscene book or paper at any time, in any company, or ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... seemed exactly like that. A nightmare in which all of Earth stood helpless, unable to resist or flee, while the obscene shapes slithered and flopped over all her green fields and fair cities. And the awakening had not brought the reassurance that it had all been a bad dream. That if it had happened in reality, the people of Earth would have been capable of dealing with the ...
— The Mightiest Man • Patrick Fahy
... conversation with a physician, or any other person whom he wishes to treat with deference and respect, he always introduces the subject with some such apology as we make in Europe, when we are obliged to speak of things which are regarded as disgusting or obscene. Conformably with this Asiatic prejudice, Tamerlane was highly affronted with the vanquished Turkish emperor Bajazet, for mentioning, in his presence, such impure creatures as women are considered by the ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... up in the hats and gowns of her mistress and were dancing and shouting, imitating feminine seductiveness and affectations. . . . One of them had been greeted with roars of enthusiasm upon presenting himself with no other clothing than a "combination" of Mademoiselle Chichi's. Many were taking obscene delight in soiling the rugs and filling the sideboard drawers with indescribable filth, using the finest linens that they could ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... sufficiently admired. As an epigrammatist Mr. Watson has no rival in Victorian or in contemporary verse. The epigram is a quite definite form of art, especially cultivated by the poets in the first half of the seventeenth century. Their formula the terse expression of obscene thoughts. Mr. Watson excels the best of them in wit, concision, and grace; it is needless to say he makes no attempt to rival them as a garbage-collector. Of the large number of epigrams that he has contributed to English literature, I find the majority ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... directed against the Queen in particular; I shudder even now at the recollection of the poissardes, or rather furies, who wore white aprons, which they screamed out were intended to receive the bowels of Marie Antoinette, and that they would make cockades of them, mixing the most obscene ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... them into butts of mockery?—nay, worse—use it to degrade the healthy appetites and affections of our nature as they are seen to be degraded in insane patients whose system, all out of joint, finds matter for screaming laughter in mere topsy-turvy, makes every passion preposterous or obscene, and turns the hard-won order of life into a second chaos hideous enough to make one wail that the first was ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... recount them at length to Christophe; for hours she would try to recollect some detail that she had forgotten; she never spared him one; absurdities piled one on the other, strange marriages, deaths, dressmakers' prices, burlesque, and sometimes, obscene things. He had to listen to her and give her his advice. Often she would be for a whole day under the obsession of her inept fancies. She would find life ill-ordered, she would see things and people rawly and overwhelm Christophe with her jeremiads; and it seemed hardly ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... of greatness is purity and justice, then Chinese myth must be placed among the greatest of all; for it is not obscene, and it ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... suspecta sit, et invisa, the very name of love is odious to chaster ears; and therefore some again, out of an affected gravity, will dislike all for the name's sake before they read a word; dissembling with him in [4416]Petronius, and seem to be angry that their ears are violated with such obscene speeches, that so they may be admired for grave philosophers and staid carriage. They cannot abide to hear talk of love toys, or amorous discourses, vultu, gestu, oculis in their outward actions averse, and yet in ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... "Open candle baudery," in verse 7, is an additional argument against Dr. Grosart's explanation: "Obscene words and figures made with candle-smoke," the allusion being merely to the blackened ceilings produced by cheap candles without ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... Grinned homage to viragoes on the shore. * * * * * And now, behold! a shadow of repose Upon a line of gray, She sleeps, that transverse cuts the evening rose— She sleeps, and dreams away, Soft blended in a unity of rest All jars, and strifes obscene, and turbulent throes, 'Neath the broad benediction of ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... nature's a true son of earth,' By rapine enriched, though a beggar by birth; In genius the lowest, ill-bred and obscene; In morals most Wicked, most nasty in mien; By none ever trusted, yet ever employed; In blunders quite fertile, in merit quite void; A scold in the Senate, abroad a buffoon, The scorn and the jest of all courts but his own: A slave to that wealth that ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... admiring it," said I; "I was thinking of the difference between its present and former state. Formerly it was a place devoted to gorgeous idolatry and obscene lust; now it is a quiet old barn in which hay and straw are placed, and broken tumbrels stowed away: surely the hand of God is ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... For us to live together any longer would be an obscene joke. Let's end it while we still have some sanity and ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... their reading, Stoneman would send to the Clerk's desk an obscene tirade from a party newspaper, and the Clerk of the House would read it amid the mocking groans, laughter, and applause ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... early printing may be distinguished the various splendid editions of Primers, or Prayer-books. These were embellished with cuts finished in a most elegant taste: many of them were grotesque or obscene. In one of them an angel is represented crowning the Virgin Mary, and God the Father himself assisting at the ceremony. Sometimes St. Michael is overcoming Satan; and sometimes St. Anthony is attacked by various devils of most clumsy forms—not of the grotesque ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... laws, to specify each shade and degree of wrong. Had it been, there could have been no end of legislation, and no end to books of law. I ask the dealer in ardent spirits, where is there a formal prohibition of piracy, or bigamy, or kidnapping, or suicide, or duelling, or the sale of obscene books and paintings? And yet does any man doubt that these are immoral? Does he believe that the Bible will countenance them? Will he engage in them, because they are not specified formally, and with technical precision, in the ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... of Escobar and of Sanchez have left a deplorable reputation for them in this branch of ecclesiastic literature. The treatise De Matrimonio of the latter contains such profound immorality, and such dangerous and obscene queries and doctrines, that the Inquisition included the publication in its index of prohibited books. But far greater scandal was produced throughout Europe by the book entitled De Rege et Regis Institutione, ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... a-barking furiously. Even in bed one could not be secure. Once or twice some wild cry in the night—a woman's scream, a man's volley of oaths—has drawn me hurrying to my window in dread that outrage was afoot; and often the sounds of obscene singing from the road, where men were blundering homewards late from the public-houses in the town, have startled me out of my first sleep. Then, besides the distresses brought upon the people by their own folly, there were others ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... twenty-third rank of canters, who carry pins, tape, ballads, and obscene books to sell, but live mostly by ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... dull, They the gladsome tidings bring Of the sunlight's hastening: Never can these hills of bliss 169 Be o'erclimbed by feet like his! But enough! Oh, do not dare From the next the veil to tear, Woven of station, trade, or dress, More obscene than nakedness, Wherewith plausible culture drapes Fallen Nature's myriad shapes! Let us rather love to mark How the unextingnished spark Still gleams through the thin disguise 179 Of our customs, pomps, and lies, And, not seldom blown to flame, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the door be opened his son will stand before them alive, but fearfully mangled and mutilated, so he is groping upon the floor for the Monkey's Paw, and the audience feels that on the other side of the door is an obscene horror fresh from the grave. There was a sigh of relief in the theatre when the father found the talisman, and, using the last wish, prayed successfully that his son might be dead and ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... of Stalin are with us!" a lumpy man said. "Go and die in a kennel filled with fleas and old newspaper! Go and freeze to the likeness of an obscene statue of a bourgeois deity! Go and hang by the ears from a monument four thousand feet high in the center ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... untainted. It was Jinny's great merit, after all, that she had not married a man who had the taint. The marvel was how the editor had contrived to carry intact that innocence of his through the horrors of his obscene profession. It argued an incorruptible ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... mortal venom dipt on high, Full-drawn the deadliest shafts of satire fly; Where Churchill brandishes his clumsy club, And Wilkes unloads his excremental tub, Down to where Entick, awkward and unclean, Crawls on his native dust, a worm obscene! While with unnumber'd wings from van to rear 220 Myriads of nameless buzzing drones appear: From their dark cells the angry insects swarm, And every little sting attempt to arm. Here Chaplains, Privileges, moulder round, And feeble Scourges, [2] rot upon the ground: Here hungry Kenrick ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... claim to have seen the sight. Sometimes they cackled and gibbered through the night before the houses of the clergy, and it was only at Christmas that their power failed them. The meetings were devoted to wild and obscene orgies, and the intercourse of fiends and witches begot a progeny of toads ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... seven quarto pages. The charges may be briefly classified as blasphemy, heresy, spitting and trampling on the crucifix, obscene and ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... Palestrina undertook, or was entrusted with, was the ending of the old scandal brought upon the Church by the elaborate lengths to which contrapuntal composers had gone in using popular melodies, and often even street songs of an obscene nature, as a foundation melody or cantus firmus for their vocal gymnastics. The churchmen of that day did in a more elaborate fashion what Wesley did in his day and the Salvation Army in ours for the popular ballad of ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... to a Balliol cheek. But whatever the merciless hand of the architect has done to turn her into a jumble of sham Gothic spikes and corners, no one can doubt her wholesome democracy of intellect, her passion for sound scholarship, and the unsurpassable gift of her undergraduates for the delicately obscene. This may be the wake of a tradition inaugurated by Belloc; but I think it goes farther back than that. At any rate, in Oxford the young energumen found himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked brilliantly, was a notable figure in the Union debates, argued ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... smiled, and listened to the smooth rhythmic control. Nothing sinister now! No snapping malevolence! All those other times ... his unreasoning panic, the askance remarks from Arnold, the humiliation ... the very thought of it now was gibing and obscene. How could he ever have been caught up in such a ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... leave people to find in newspapers. Men can safely see in the papers what they have already seen in the streets. They may safely find in their journals what they have already found in themselves. But we do not want the imaginations of rational and decent people clouded with the horrors of some obscene insanity which has no more to do with human life than the man in Bedlam who thinks he is a chicken. And, if this vile matter is admitted, let it be simply with a mention of the Latin or legal name of the crime, and with no details whatever. As it is, exactly the reverse is true. ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... Malleus maleficorum, that terrible code of Jacob Sprenger which permits the Church wholesale burnings of necromancers and sorcerers, Des Esseintes recognized in the witches' Sabbath, all the obscene practices and all the blasphemies of sadism. In addition to the unclean scenes beloved by Malin, the nights successively and lawfully consecrated to excessive sensual orgies and devoted to the bestialities of passion, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... signify that we are ourselves responsible for the multitude of horrible, utterly vulgar, heinous and vile or obscene illusions that menace us at night and yet all bear an unmistakable imprint of thought and imagination, compiled with reason and deliberation, and thus betray a thinking mind though a low-thinking one? Do you not know ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... once more they found that already a whole army of vultures had gathered about the carcass of the strange monstrous beast, and were busily engaged in devouring the malodorous flesh. The trio made a wide circuit so as not to disturb the obscene birds at their disgusting banquet, and in due time found their way back again to their camp, where, after a hearty meal, they set to work in earnest upon the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... that," Shatov went on imperiously, keeping his flashing eyes fastened upon him. "Is it true that you declared that you saw no distinction in beauty between some brutal obscene action and any great exploit, even the sacrifice of life for the good of humanity? Is it true that you have found identical beauty, equal enjoyment, in ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... square it," he said. "You just send over word that you'll be pleased to death to be at his dinner, and it'll still be all right. I'll square it. And don't you worry. You won't be bored. Pig-iron's dinners are—now—well—" He closed an obscene lid. "A good time will be had by all! And Pig-iron will be pleased to have you there. Pig-iron, he likes to ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... brass knocker filmed with the floating muck of the air he saw the numeral, Two, painted beneath the fanlight. The windows on the left were blank, curtained. The house rose silent and without a mark of life above the obscene clamor of the city. He knocked sharply and waited; then he knocked again. Nothing broke the stillness of the facade, the interior. He tried the door, but it was solidly barred. Then a second fact, a memory, joined the bare location in his ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... gentleman said that at the Bodyke evictions, of which so much has been heard, the girls and women swarmed about the police using language so revoltingly obscene that the policemen blushed—such language, he said, as was never heard from decent Irishwomen in the days ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... their power, and being swayed by passion and superstition, they constituted, after a time, a body correspondent to the voodoos, or wizards, of our Gulf States. With hideous incantations, with mad dances, with obscene songs, with the slaughter of animals, with oaths on an altar and crucifix, they invoked illness, ruin, and death on their enemies. In time they gained accessions to their fraternity from Spanish residents,—thieves, vagrants, deserters from the army, the half-witted ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... dishevelled and lewd, carried wine; and when they spilt it there were stains like the stains of blood. And it seemed to Margaret that a fire burned in her veins, and her soul fled from her body; but a new soul came in its place, and suddenly she knew all that was obscene. She took part in some festival of hideous lust, and the wickedness of the world was patent to her eyes. She saw things so vile that she screamed in terror, and she heard Oliver laugh in derision by her side. It was a scene of indescribable ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... concludes the night's proceedings, the ordinary salutation of the osculum in tergo being first given. But these circumstances are innocent compared with the obscene practices when the lights are put out; indiscriminate debauchery being then the order of the night. A new rite of baptism initiated the neophyte into his new service: the candidate being signed with the sign of the devil on that part of the body least observable, and submitting at ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... while over his face he wore a heavy, old wooden mask, imitating an animal's head. The other was older, dressed in a leather suit, with a wooden mask like a vacant-looking human face. These two were very popular, and indulged in many acts that bordered on the obscene. We got no satisfactory explanation of this whole performance. The cura said that it represented the conflict between Christ and the ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... Jesus. I was with Paris when he gave the fateful apple to Venus, I saw Troy burn, and followed Ulysses on his wanderings. The prototypes of all that is beautiful sank deep into my soul, and consequently at the time when other boys are coarse and obscene, I displayed an insurmountable aversion to ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... when this is over they go to the place where Mahadeo is worshipped and the Baiga pours milk over the stone that represents him. The people then dance. Plenty of rice-beer is brought, and a scene of debauchery takes place in which all restraint is put aside. They sing the most obscene songs and give vent to all their passions. On that day no one is responsible for any breach ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... fancied (I might be wrong) that it was not so much because I was below, as above the common standard. I did feel, but I was ashamed to feel, mortified at my repulse, when I saw the meanest of mankind, the very scum and refuse, all creeping things and every obscene creature, enter in before me. I seemed a species by myself, I took a pride even in my disgrace; and concluded I had elsewhere my inheritance! The only thing I ever piqued myself upon was the writing the Essay on the Principles of Human Action—a work that no woman ever read, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt |
