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Vampire   Listen
noun
Vampire  n.  (Written also vampyre)  
1.
A blood-sucking ghost; a soul of a dead person superstitiously believed to come from the grave and wander about by night sucking the blood of persons asleep, thus causing their death. This superstition was once prevalent in parts of Eastern Europe, and was especially current in Hungary about the year 1730. The vampire was often said to have the ability to transform itself into the form of a bat, as presented in the novel depicting the legend of Dracula published by Bram Stoker in 1897, which has inspired several movies. "The persons who turn vampires are generally wizards, witches, suicides, and persons who have come to a violent end, or have been cursed by their parents or by the church,"
2.
Fig.: One who lives by preying on others; an extortioner; a bloodsucker.
3.
(Zool.) Either one of two or more species of South American blood-sucking bats belonging to the genera Desmodus and Diphylla; also called vampire bat. These bats are destitute of molar teeth, but have strong, sharp cutting incisors with which they make punctured wounds from which they suck the blood of horses, cattle, and other animals, as well as man, chiefly during sleep. They have a caecal appendage to the stomach, in which the blood with which they gorge themselves is stored.
4.
(Zool.) Any one of several species of harmless tropical American bats of the genus Vampyrus, especially Vampyrus spectrum. These bats feed upon insects and fruit, but were formerly erroneously supposed to suck the blood of man and animals. Called also false vampire.
Vampire bat (Zool.), a vampire, 3.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Vampire" Quotes from Famous Books



... VAMPIRE, the ghost of a dead person accursed, fabled to issue from the grave at night and suck the blood of the living as they sleep, the victims of whom are subject to the same fate; the belief is of Slavonic origin, and common among ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... travelled over a dusty road as far as my feet could go. At a sudden turn I have stepped upon starved, ignoble weeds, and reaching out my hands, I have touched a fair tree out of which a parasite had taken the life like a vampire. I have touched a pretty bird whose soft wings hung limp, whose little heart beat no more. I have wept over the feebleness and deformity of a child, lame, or born blind, or, worse still, mindless. If I had the genius of Thomson, ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller

... some people to call her the 'Judic des salons'. Wanda Strahlberg was now holding between her lips, which were artificially red, in contrast to the greenish paleness of her face, which caused others to call her a vampire, one of the cigarettes she had for sale. With one hand, she was playing, graceful as a cat, with her last package of regalias, tied with green ribbon, which, when offered to the highest bidder, brought an enormous sum. Her sister ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... look," said the officer, "work your own face up a bit. This isn't a vampire scene. Don't look as if you were going to lure him. Y'know you're supposed to be angry with your opponent when you meet him in battle, quite put out in fact. And furthermore you're ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.

... sight of which, it has been stated, so appalled the late Lord Strathmore on entering the room, that he had it walled up. Some assert that, owing to some hereditary curse, like those described in a previous chapter, at certain intervals a kind of vampire is born into the family of the Strathmore Lyons, and that as no one would like to destroy this monstrosity, it is kept concealed till its term of life is run. But, whatever the mystery may be, such rooms, like ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer

... Like the vampire that soothes its victim while drawing its life-blood, the parasitic German organism cast a spell over influential Italians of the community and imparted to them a feeling that things were going well with themselves and their country. Money passed from hand to hand. Labour ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... my generous friend has been robbing himself. He told me that he had one hundred and forty forcats—slave-prisoners —at the village, whom he meant to put to good use in constructing store and dwelling-houses, &c. The hunters brought on board to-day an East India bat, or vampire, measuring two feet ten inches from tip to tip of wing. Its head resembled that of a dog or wolf more than any other animal, its teeth being very sharp and strong. Among the curiosities of the island is a locust, that has a whistle almost as loud ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes

... impressed that they shortly afterwards fell sick. Some time afterwards the people wished to drag him from the grave again, that a stake might be driven through his body, in the belief that he had been a vampire, and that the sick women would by this means recover. But they found the ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... Robin Goodfellow, and will milk the cows, and sour the milk, or pull your hair, if you wander about at night in certain well-known uncanny places. A more dangerous demon is heard in the crackling of the dry leaves of the date-tree in the night wind; and some trees are haunted by a vampire, who will drag you up and devour you, if you venture near them in the darkness.' (N.W.P. Gazetteer, 1st ed., vol. vii. Supplement, p. 4.) See also the same author's work Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, 2nd ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... fiesta of the unusual occasion. Miss Bailey, a small, round, efficient person with nice eyes and good manners, moved about among her guests, all of whom she seemed to know. The best cheese sandwiches in New York went round. A girl in a vampire costume of grey—hooded and with long trailing sleeves—got up from her solitary place in the corner. She seemed to be wearing, beneath the theatrical garment, a kimono and bedroom slippers. Obviously she had simply drifted ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... lurking in the wood, With medicine more strong than his," they said, "Stole in last night and gave the fatal wound." The warriors scoured the country miles around, Seeking for sign or trail, but naught they found: The murderer left behind no clue or trace More than a vampire's ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various

... lash of conscience uncoiled at last in Cuthbert Laurance's hardened soul that the blood so suddenly ebbed from his lips, and he drew his breath like one overshadowed by a vampire? Only once had he caught the full gleam of her indignant eyes, but that long look had awakened torture's that would never entirely slumber again, until the solemn hush of the shroud and the cemetery was his portion. No suspicion of the truth crossed his mind, even for an instant,—for ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... Twin-whelp to Theroigne, captain of the hags; Jourdan, red-grizzled mule-son blotched with blood, Headsman forever "famous-infamous;" Keen, hag-whelped journalist Camille Desmoulins, Who with a hundred other of his ilk Hissed on the hounds and smeared his bread with blood; Lebon, man-fiend, that vampire-ghoul who drank Hot blood of headless victims, and compelled Mothers to view the murder of their babes; At whose red guillotine, in Arras raised, The pipe and fiddle played at every fall Of ghastly head the ribald "Ca Ira;" And fiends unnamed and ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... "Paranoid?" He had always thought Senator Lefferts was slightly on the batty side, and the idea of real paranoia didn't come as too much of a surprise. After all, when a man was batty to start out with ... and he even looked like a vampire, Malone thought confusedly. ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett

... breath of the Man-Beast came at me, and did sicken me; and I held the face off from me; for I had died with horror, if that it had come more anigh; and surely the mouth of the Man was small and shaped so that I knew that it did never eat of aught that it did slay; but to drink as a vampire; and in truth, I did mean that I chop the Man to pieces, if that I have chance ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... the occasional visits of this life-consumer, this vampire that sucks out the blood, to his constant, never-failing presence? There are those who feel within themselves the power of living fullest lives, of sounding every chord of the full diapason of passion and feeling, yet who have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... as well tell you just what I suspect. I fear that the hold of Senora Mendez is somehow or other concerned with it all. I even have suspected that somehow she may be working in the pay of the government that she is a vampire, living on the secrets of the group who so trust her. I suspect anything, everybody—that she is poisoning his mind, perhaps even whispering into his ear some siren proposal of amnesty and his estate again, if he will but do what she asks. My poor father—I must save him ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve

... Hours Rainy Season Mail on the Ranch The Vampire Bat Conservatism Little Pigs The Silly Ewe The Snake The Years Burning Mountains I-III Tropical Winter Talk on ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott

... however, after the first flush of enthusiasm, somewhat moderately. There was no disguising the penalty of his deed of kindness. To Ann Jimmy Crocker was no rescuer, but a sort of blend of ogre and vampire. She must never learn his real identity—or not until he had succeeded by assiduous toil, as he hoped he would, in neutralising that ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with its maladies has passed!... She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... be a society vampire, you see," she announced coolly, and went on to inform him that bobbed hair was the necessary prelude. She added that she wanted to ask his advice, because she had heard he ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... were you, then," said Sepia, "I would not lie still; I would get up and bite—I mean, be a vampire." ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... "Hush," said the vampire, "you must hear more—you must know more ere you speak of the matters that have of late exercised an influence ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest

... The vampire-night sucks all my blood; Warm home and love seem lost for aye; From cloud to cloud I steal away, Like guilty soul o'er ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young

... ear which is a stumbling-block to the simple theory-monger. It is in fashion among a tribe of bats to which belongs the so-called vampire of India. This monster is fond of coming into your bedroom at midnight through the open windows, but not to suck your blood, for it has little in common with the true vampire of South America. It brings its ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)

... Appleditch made a courtesy. She was a very tall woman — a head beyond her husband, extremely thin, with sharp nose, hollow cheeks, and good eyes. In fact, she was partly pretty, and might have been pleasant-looking, but for a large, thin-lipped, vampire-like mouth, and a general expression of greed and contempt. She was meant for a lady, and had made herself a money-maggot. She was richly and plainly dressed; and until she began to be at her ease, might have passed for an unpleasant lady. Master Appleditch, the ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald

... of an assured victory over my reluctance? I knew him, indeed, to be masterful, to lead my life at a sign. Suppose, then, this experiment to succeed; suppose him to return to me, hideously restored, like a vampire in a legend; and suppose that, by some devilish fascination . . . My head turned; all former fears deserted me: and I felt I could embrace the worst ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson

... blindly about in the sunshine, and alighted on a man's sleeve. I looked at him,—a droll, winged, beast-insect, creeping up the man's arm, not over-clean, and scattering dust on the man's coat from his vampire wings. The man stared at him, and let the spectators stare for a minute, and then shook him gently off; and the poor devil took a flight across the green to the meeting-house, and then, I believe, alighted on somebody ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... proportion. Measured by any of the other men in the watch, it was frail, immature, and tender. The moving sunlight that flowed around the door touched the fair skin and showed the great, puffed bruises that stood on it, swollen and horrid, like some vampire fungus ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon

... beautiful woman there, but she was unrivalled by any other in the grace, the variety, the meaning of her gestures, the dramatic transformations of her countenance. She was Pandora, she was Hope, she was Lady Hammerton, she was the Vampire, and she was ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... and impatient crystals spoiling the plans of patient ones, irreparably; just as things go on in the world. And sometimes you may see hypocritical crystals taking the shape of others, though they are nothing like in their minds; and vampire crystals eating out the hearts of others; and hermit-crab crystals living in the shells of others; and parasite crystals living on the means of others; and courtier crystals glittering in attendance upon others; and all these, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... of their unmarried sisters." Mrs. Carrie Schwabacher, offered a linen shower to the first couple that were married on board, but they all seemed bashful. Louis Mooser suggested that the name of the ship be changed from Empire State to "Vampire State." ...
— The Log of the Empire State • Geneve L.A. Shaffer

... of money. But—of course, you've never met my Aunt Agatha, so it's rather hard to explain. But she's a sort of human vampire-bat, and she'll make things most fearfully unpleasant for me when I go back to England. She's the kind of woman who comes and rags you before ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse

... cinnabar; the upper part lumpy with the tops of the great trees. Some of the trees were bright green, and some red, and the sand of the beach as black as your shoes. Many birds hovered round the bay, some of them snow-white; and the flying-fox (or vampire) flew there in broad daylight, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... anything of the sort. You are probably lying to me. You always lied to me. I think you are on your way to meet a vampire now." ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell

... helplessly choking, "Oh, my girl! My daughter!" But by this time Buck was three steps from the bottom, and the back of the burglar was toward him as he crouched over the struggling girl, choking the screams in her delicate throat. Like a vampire, Buck sprang from the third stair, landing on the man's back, his legs worked inside the man's elbows, pinioning the scoundrel's arms back like a trussed turkey, his arms went round the bull-like neck, and his tough young fingers closed on a sinewy throat. He clung to the ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... the midst of a grove of fruit-trees and pupunha palms. Past midnight, when all became still, after the uproar of holidaymaking, as I was listening to the dull, fanning sound made by the wings of impish hosts of vampire bats crowding round the Caju trees, a rustle commenced from the side of the woods, and a troop of slender, long-tailed animals were seen against the clear moonlit sky, taking flying leaps from branch to branch through ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... for months I have not seen the sun; The minatory dawns are leprous pale; The felon days malinger one by one; How like a dream Life is! how vain! how stale! I, too, am faint; that vampire-like disease Has fallen on me; weak and cold am I, Hugging a tiny fire in fear I freeze: The cabin must be cold, and so I try To bear the frost, the frost that fights decay, The frost ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service

... that to Burden, to Bond, to Tax, to Tribute, to Impoverish, to Grind, to Pillage, to Oppress, to Afflict, to Plunder, to Vampire the Life Labouring to Create Wealth is ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... seemed to me to be veritable demons. The livery of the very least among them would have served for the gala-dress of an emperor. There have always been very strange stories told of this Clarimonde, and all her lovers came to a violent or miserable end. They used to say that she was a ghoul, a female vampire; but I believe she was none ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier

... and dreadful suspicion took me. While Trewlove tortured himself to my model, was I, by painful degrees, exchanging brains with him? I laughed; but I was unhinged. I had been smoking too many cigarettes during these three weeks, and the vampire thought continued to flit obscenely between me and the pure seascape. I saw myself the inheritor of Trewlove's cast-off personality, his inelegancies of movement, his religious opinions, his bagginess at the knees, his ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... count four modes of housebreaking, (1)picking out burnt bricks; (2) cutting through unbaked bricks; (3) wetting a mud wall and (4) boring through a wooden wall (Vikram and the Vampire p. 172). ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... Biddle 'died at his country-seat, where he passed the last of his days in elegant retirement, which, if justice had taken place, would have been spent in the penitentiary.' This is the first instance I have known of the vampire of party-spirit seizing the lifeless body of its victim before its interment, and exhibiting its bloody claws to the view of mourning relatives and sympathizing friends. How such a black-hearted misanthrope as Bryant should possess an imagination teeming with beautiful poetical images astonishes ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice

... screamed the shoemaker's wife to her neighbours, "always so dressed up, the ugly jade. She decks herself with the blood that vampire of an uncle sucks from ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... on the Stand and entered a General Denial. He had been all that a Rattling Good Husband could be, but she had been a regular Rudyard Kipling Vampire. She had continued to make his Life one lingering Day-After of Regret. His Record for Patience and Long-Suffering had made Job's Performance ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade

... terrible drought! When the sky turns to brass; when the clouds are like withered leaves; when the sun sucks the earth's blood like a vampire; when rivers shrink, streams fail, springs perish; when the grass whitens and crackles under your feet; when the turf turns to dust; when the fields are like tinder; when the air is the breath of an oven; ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... she should not work upon me again. With such as she, a vampire and yet a woman, a man's safety lay not in words but ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... is the man I love; but apart from that he is a stranger to me. We do not think or feel alike. He has his world and I have mine. I should only be like a vampire to him. His work would be hateful to me before a month was past. All women in love are like Magna Wellmann. I shudder when I think of the big ugly room where he lives and works; the bare deal table, the dusty books, the ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis

... had by this time become in the last degree maudlin, and wept abundantly, inferred from the foregoing avowal, that it was his mission to communicate to others the blight which had fallen on himself; and that, being a kind of unintentional Vampire, he had had Miss Pecksniff assigned to him by the Fates, as Victim Number One. Miss Pecksniff controverting this opinion as sinful, Moddle was goaded on to ask whether she could be contented with a blighted heart; and it appearing on further examination that she ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... plutocrat, every profiteering pirate, every food vulture, every exploiter of labor, every robber and oppressor of the poor, every hog under a silk tile, every vampire in human form will tell you that the A. F. of L. under Gompers is a great and patriotic organization and that the I. W. W. under Haywood is a gang of traitors in the pay ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... did so thus: There being a bright moon that night, he ascended, shortly after sunset, the towers of the chapel here, from whence he could distinctly see the churchyard beneath him; you can see it from that window. From this point he watched until he saw the vampire come out of his grave, and place near it the linen clothes in which he had been folded, and then glide away towards the village to plague ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... for?" cried Moore in a rage. "Every man's got his price. Latimer's poor as a church mouse. He's got a wife like a vampire. And as for you—I know ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman

... everywhere," said Hadria, "the poor, sterile lives exhaust the strong and full ones. I will not be one of those vampire souls, at least not while I have my ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... myriadislanded, within her, blood not mine, oinopa ponton, a winedark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled. Omnis caro ad te veniet. He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... Theophile Marzials "Mother, I Cannot Mind My Wheel" Walter Savage Landor Airly Beacon Charles Kingsley A Sea Child Bliss Carman From the Harbor Hill Gustav Kobbe Allan Water Matthew Gregory Lewis Forsaken Unknown Bonnie Doon Robert Burns The Two Lovers Richard Hovey The Vampire Rudyard Kipling Agatha Alfred Austin "A Rose Will Fade" Dora Sigerson Shorter Affaire d'Amour Margaret Deland A Casual Song Roden Noel The Way of It John Vance Cheney "When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly" Oliver ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various

... offer to take Mabel," he added, after a time, "were I not solemnly convinced that it would be better for you both that she should stay here. Mrs. Austin seems necessary to her very existence; and that old woman is your vampire, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... suckle them. The bats of England and other cold climates remain in a torpid condition, and only spread their wings of stretched skin when the songbirds report the advent of the warmth of spring. The visitor will notice amongst the varieties in the three first cases, the Brazilian bats, including the vampire bat (which has been known to attack a man in his sleep and suck blood from him), the remarkable leaf-nosed bats which are ranged upon the upper shelves, and the Indian and African varieties; and underneath ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold

... posterity, and it will bear on its mighty bosom our virtues, or our vices, our glory, or our shame, or whatever else we may transmit as an inheritance. Thus it depends upon ourselves whether the moth of immortality and the vampire of luxury shall prove the overthrow of this country, or whether knowledge and virtue, like pillars, shall support her against the whirlwinds of war, ambition, corruption, and the remorseless tooth of time. And while assembled ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson

... the misery the whole thing causes me. I cannot understand it. What possible affinity there can be between myself and that disgusting little snob passes my comprehension. I assure you, my dear Mac, the knowledge that I was a ghoul, or a vampire, would cause me less nausea than the reflection that I am one and the same with that odious little Whitechapel bounder. When I think of him every nerve ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome

... the "Manuscripts of Erdely," has been struck by ill health and reduced to poverty, and an amateur play has been prepared for his benefit at the Soho Theater. He wrote "The Vampire," "Montezuma," and "Martinuzzi." ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various

... an earthquake, quietly one grey morn, One grey October morn of mist and rain When all the window-panes in Plymouth dripped With listless drizzle, and only through her streets Rumbled the death-cart with its dreary bell Monotonously plangent (for the plague Had lately like a vampire sucked the veins Of Plymouth town), a little weed-clogged ship, Grey as a ghost, glided into the Sound And anchored, scarce a soul to see her come, And not an eye to read the faded scroll Around her battered prow—the Golden Hynde. Then, thro' the dumb grey ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... to the throne; his ministers are in sympathy with himself, and he has already (1899) distinguished himself by putting his finger on the sore which is festering at the heart and is sucking up as a vampire the life's blood of Europe; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... to the former conclusion. Naturally a Japanese child, when sent in the dusk to draw water, will do so with fear and trembling, for this limp, floppy apparition might scare the boldest. Another bogie, a terrible creation of fancy, I take to be a vampire, about which the curious can read in Dom Calmet, who will tell them how whole villages in Hungary have been depopulated by vampires; or he may study in Fauriel's 'Chansons de la Grece Moderne' ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang

... monsters more hideous and terrible than are to be found in the eastern portion of Texas, over which nature appears to have spread a malediction. The myriads of snakes of all kinds, the unaccountable diversity of venomous reptiles, and even the deadly tarantula spider or "vampire" of the prairies, are trifles compared with the awful inhabitants of the eastern bogs, swamps, and muddy rivers. The former are really dangerous only during two or three months of the year, and, moreover, a considerable ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat

... will eat you,' it would have been much nearer the mark, for he was no BrĂ¢hman, but a dreadful vampire, who loved to devour handsome young men and slender girls. But, knowing nothing of all this, the couple went home with him quite cheerfully. He was most polite, and when they arrived at his house, said, 'Please get ready whatever you want to eat, for I have no cook. Here are ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel

... would befit a "star," but an actress of genius and discernment might prefer the dumb part of Miss Y. One thing is certain: that the latter character has few equals in its demand on the performer's tact and skill and imagination. This wordless opponent of Mrs. X. is another of those vampire characters which Strindberg was so fond of drawing, and it is on her the limelight is directed with ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg

... disturb her, which proved at once that he was right. Linda regarded herself with interest as a supremely reprehensible person, perhaps a vampire. The latter, though, was a rather stout woman who, dressed in frightful lingerie, occupied couches with her arms caught about the neck of a man bending over her. Every ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer

... simply threatened to resign, which wrought consternation, for no man of ability would attempt to unwind the tangle of Bigot's dishonesty during a critical war. Montcalm wrote home complaints in cipher. The French government bided its time, and Bigot tightened his vampire suckers on the lifeblood of the dying nation. The whole era is a theme for the allegory of ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... voluble young hustler in the firm, who alone seems to know anything of the business, is real actresses as distinguished from members of the directors' families, and above all a good vampire. A vampire is the very immoral and under-dressed type of woman that wrecks hearts and homes, and without which no film with a high moral purpose is conceivable. You must have shadows to throw up the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various

... the back of her neck. She was before the glass, busy with her hair. "You don't ask me. You wouldn't ask me. No woman wants to make a fool of a man. If she does, she's a vampire." ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... now we've got him. Ages ago they tried to get him to compromise for a lump sum down, but he wouldn't. Said he would only spend it, and preferred to get it by the week. Well, by the time we've paid that vampire, there isn't much left out of our profits. That's why we are at the present ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill

... Vampirism, has still many adherents in Eastern Europe. The vampire is a human being who in his tomb maintains a posthumous existence by ascending in the night and sucking the bodies of the living. His punishment was necessarily less tremendous than that of the witch: the dead body only being burned to ashes. An official ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams

... superstition, as was Charles Channing, the terror still exists, college boys though they may be. He could not have told (had he been collected enough to tell anything) what his precise dread was, as he flew through the cloisters. None can do so, at these moments. A sort of vampire rises in the mind, and they shrink from it, though they see not what its exact nature may be; but it is a vampire that can neither ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood

... been asserted that Bertrand was a vampire; but there are absolutely no grounds for associating him with vampirism. A vampire is an Elemental that under certain conditions inhabits a dead body, whether human or otherwise; and, thus incarcerated, comes out of a grave at night to suck the blood of a living person. ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell

... were great rank growths of toadstools, yellow, blue, livid white, or spotted like adders, which squirmed and squelched underfoot to send up a sickly odour of decay. The only green thing was some ivy, a parasitic vampire which drew its lifeblood from the mouldering corpse of ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees

... Joyless mate and bloodless heart? She will bring thee for her dower Shrunken limb and shriveled breast, Bitter thralldom, bootless power, Days and nights of endless quest, She will take thee heart and brain, Hold thee with a vampire charm, Kiss thee cold in every vein, Drink thy blood ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove

... after their enfranchisement united themselves. It was a fearful misnomer. The Republican party in the South, composed of ninety-nine ignorant negroes to one renegade white, about as truly represented the progressive party of Lincoln as a black vampire the ornithology of all lands. Indeed, since the war, there has never been in the South either a Republican or a Democratic party. The party line is not drawn on belief but on race and color. The white men, believing everything they please from free trade to protection, vote a ticket which they ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore

... change, for not only shall we then act in the true interests of the patient, but we shall also confer on those near to her an inestimable benefit. An hysterical girl is, as Wendell Holmes has said in his decisive phrase, a vampire who sucks the blood of the healthy people about her; and I may add that pretty surely where there is one hysterical girl there will be soon or late two sick women. If circumstances oblige us to treat ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell

... Coolie's great toe, which had been severely bitten by a vampire in the night. And here let me say, that the popular disbelief of vampire stories is only owing to English ignorance, and disinclination to believe any of the many quaint things which John Bull has not seen, because he does not care to see them. If he comes to those parts, he must be careful ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... seconds, perhaps, it was like struggling with some vampire creatures in a hideous dream. And then, just when it seemed to Nat that he was going mad, he found the path free, and the huddled remnants of the Moon men piled up about him on ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various

... no doubt, that simplicity and plainness are the soul of elegance, Miss Brass wore no collar or kerchief except upon her head, which was invariably ornamented with a brown gauze scarf, like the wing of the fabled vampire, and which, twisted into any form that happened to suggest itself, formed an ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... d'ailes; L'eau gronde, et tout ce groupe enorme vogue, et fuit, Et s'enfle et roule avec un prodigieux bruit. Et le lugubre roi sourit de voir groupees Sur quatre cents navires quatre-vingt mille epees. O rictus du vampire assouvissant sa faim! Cette pale Angleterre, il la tient donc enfin! Qui pourrait la sauver? Le feu va prendre aux poudres. Philippe dans sa droite a la gerbe des foudres; Qui pourrait delier ce faisceau dans son poing? N'est-il ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo

... mine alone! A wave of resentment rose up at the thought—it was the old hatred that she tried to fight down—and she clasped her hands and gazed straight ahead as she beheld in a vision, the woman! A lank rag of a woman, a Kipling's vampire, who lived by the blood of strong men! And to think that she should have fastened on Rimrock, who was once ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge

... the vampire bat, Rattus Norvegicus, the common rat, Mus Domesticus, the common mouse, The Common Locust, Sylvilagus, the Cottontail Rabbit, Passer Domesticus, the House Sparrow, ...
— Join Our Gang? • Sterling E. Lanier

... There was a booth-theatre fitted up, and luring the folk to its dingy green canvas enclosure. "The repertoire comprised blood-curdling tragedies. I went in and saw 'The Midnight Assassin; or, The Dumb Witness.' Next evening was to be given 'The Vampire's Feast; or, The Rifled Tomb.' This tragedy was followed by Allingham's play, 'Fortune's Frolick,' adapted to the narrow capacities of the company. It was performed in broad Cornish, and interspersed with some rather good and I fancy original songs. But surely nowhere else but at Looe could ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... Julian, and the doctor was amazed anew at the silent decree that the invisible shall be made visible in forms comprehensible to the commonest minds. Sin would surely flee from a temple sculptured in such a shape as the body of Valentine, as a vampire would flee from the bloodless courts of the heaven of the Revelation. Lust cannot lie at ease on a crystal couch, or rest its dark head upon a pillow of pale ivory. And the message of this strange, unearthly youth now given in music, and to the air and the dust—for Valentine ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... application for an appointment under Monsieur. This Manicamp is a regular vampire:—he is carrying on a ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... their trade in the rear of glory? Some philosophers—Voltaire among the number—affirm that it is precisely those persons have made the glory. It is the same men, they say; there is no relief corps; those who are erect pillage those who are prone on the earth. The hero of the day is the vampire of the night. One has assuredly the right, after all, to strip a corpse a bit when one is the author of that corpse. For our own part, we do not think so; it seems to us impossible that the same hand should pluck laurels and purloin the shoes from a ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... subserved by the possession of the dead villain's body, I have not learned. But a very curious story, in which a vampire resuscitation of Crooke the sexton figures, may throw a light upon this ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... sooner or later been hunted down and slain—just like any other murderer. The mange came upon her, and she lost flesh, and certain of her teeth began to come out. She was no longer the beautiful female of her species, to be sung to by the weaver-birds as she passed beneath. She was a hag and a vampire, hatred of whom lay deep in every human heart in ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... see that she drove out in attendance on Mrs. Grant, but to them she was only an uninteresting shadow that waited on the other's splendour. They often wondered among themselves how Mrs. Grant could have a daughter as drab and uninteresting as Miss Grant; they did not realize how, like a vampire, the older woman lived upon the younger one's vitality. People like Mrs. Grant exist at the expense of those they come in contact with. You either have to live for them or away ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson

... unaccountably, there fell over his eagerness a chilling gloom. The delightful sprite named Expectation, who had whispered so piquantly of this same eventful morn, had basely changed herself into a hideous vampire, and she muttered at him, in frightful, raucous tones. Yet the hag's snarls were true promises. There was to come, surely, inexorably, a certain other eventful morn, and he would awake, and without his mother's calling him, he ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... civilization that had brought her into being, her slippers the lustrous waters of the Bay itself. Later I came to know that she, too, was a goddess of moods, and dangerous moods; a coquette to some, a love to others, and to many a heartless vampire that sucked from them their hard-wrung dust, scattered their gold to the four winds of avarice that ever circled enticingly about the vortex of shallow joys that the City harbored, and, after intoxicating ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady

... vampire, not seaweed, but it doesn't matter. It's too warm to be particular about one's parts ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... scamp go to the States and find himself instead of worrying old Jerry's very life out of him—the vampire!" ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock

... ghostly things that in November died, How come they thus again adream with pride? I saw the Red Rose lying in her tomb, Yet comes she lovelier back, a redder rose; What paints upon her cheek this vampire bloom? Beloved, when to the dark thy beauty goes, Thee ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne

... Horse-Guards to keep up his character. A person is already upon the stage, for whom you instinctively shudder—you perceive, at once, that he is "in" for dinner, wine, theatre, and supper—you pity him; you see the sponge, speciously, but surely, fasten himself upon his victim like a vampire. Mr. Pye Hilary, being a barrister and a man of the world, resigns himself, however, to his fate. As to shaking off his leech, he knows that to be impossible; and he determines to make what use of him he can. There is a fine opportunity, for Mr. Pye Hilary is in love, in despair, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... a girl after my heart," Madge replied, carelessly; then added, under her breath, "She's a vampire, but she shan't drain ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe

... off their beauty by juxtaposition with some frightful Hottentot, took as his competitor in this election a phantom, a vision, a socialistic monster of Nuremberg, with long teeth and talons, and a live coal in its eyes, the ogre of Tom Thumb, the vampire of Porte Saint-Martin, the hydra of Theramenes, the great sea-serpent of the Constitutionnel, which the shareholders have had the kindness to impute to it, the dragon of the Apocalypse, the Tarask, the Dree, the Gra-ouili, a scarecrow. Aided by a Ruggieri ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo

... modern folklore, wherein a mistress or wife dies, or seems to die, and is buried, yet is afterwards recovered from the tomb, and lives to wed, if a maiden, and to bear children. He supports these by references to the vampire superstitions, and to the case of Osiris, who returned after death to Isis and became the father of Horus. And, following Uhland, he compares the sleep-thorn, with which Odin pricked the Valkyrie, Brynhild, and so put her into a magic slumber, to ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... Gandharvavivaha form of marriage, see note to page 28 of Captain R. F. Burton's "Vickram and the Vampire; or Tales of Hindu Devilry." Longman, Green & Co., London, 1870. This form of matrimony was recognised by the ancient Hindus, and is frequent in books. It is a kind of Scotch Wedding—ultra-Caledonian—taking place by mutual consent without any form or ceremony. The Gandharvas are heavenly ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana

... operation of his favourite motive, the sense of wild power, under a sort of mask, or assumed habit, realised as the very genius of nature itself; and that interest, with some superstitions closely allied to it, the belief in the vampire, for instance, is evidenced especially in certain pretended Illyrian compositions—prose translations, the reader was to understand, of more or less ancient popular ballads; La Guzla, he called the volume, The Lyre, as we might say; only that the instrument of the Illyrian minstrel ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... their wants are simple. Most bats feed on insects which they catch on the wing; some of them eat fruit; and a few enjoy a bad name because they suck the blood of other animals. Of these last are the so-called vampire bats, respecting which it used to be said that they fanned their victim with their wings while they sucked its life's blood. Though it is quite true that horses and cattle in South America are attacked by some bats, this hideous tale ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various

... manner, and having consumed that he turned on his friend, and with his sharp nails tore his cheek and ripped off one of his ears. Asmund, who had no ambition to be eaten, made a desperate resistance, and finally succeeded in driving a stake through the body of the vampire. Out of delicacy due to old friendship, Asmund did not have recourse to the usual means of quelling the posthumous vivacity and vitality of a corpse, which was to cut off the head and make the dead man sit on it. [Footnote: "Saxo Gramm.," V., chap, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... little German girl, always managing to have a boil either on her forehead or the back of her neck,—I believe in my soul it's from overfeeding,—who follows my footsteps like a misanthropic vampire. By what ingenuity she manages to cajole me out of my money I know not, but I positively assert that in the last fortnight, according to her account, her unhappy mother has suffered from eleven different incurable diseases. My God! what a complication of misfortune! ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong

... we may entertain "angels unawares," so we may pass the world's avatars upon the street, and judging from the external, the physical environment, we may not know them from the vampire ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... foggy on the subject of zoology in general, and my attempts to obtain a satisfactory description of this animal were futile. Some of the definitions of this rare chat-sauvage, indeed, might have answered for specifications of a griffin, or of a vampire-bat. At last, one day, when walking about in the market-place at Quebec, I saw a crowd assembled round a gray-clad countryman, who presided over a small box on which the words Chat-Sauvage were painted. Now was my time to set the question at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various



Words linked to "Vampire" :   vampire bat, lamia, false vampire bat, evil spirit, hairy-legged vampire bat, folklore, true vampire bat, false vampire



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