"Weird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... until then, that he knew she had been crying, for not once had he looked back. That she should cry, changed everything. And no wonder she was afraid. To the fences on either side of the country road, horses and mules were tethered. Torch-lights cast weird shadows. Here and there lounged dimly some fellow who preferred the society of side-kicking, shrilly neighing horses, to ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... character with which the writer has surrounded the central figures. No writer living is so consummate a master of landscape, and besides the forest we here have an elaborate sea-piece, full of the weird, ineffable, menacing suggestion of the sea in some of her unnumbered moods; and there is a scene of late twilight on a high solitary down over the bay of Mont Saint-Michel, to which a reader blessed with sensibility to the subtler impressions of landscape will turn again and again, as one visits ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... and beard floating in the wind, the bronzed naked figure, like some weird old Indian fakir, still climbed on steadfastly up the mizzen-chains of the ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... winding path. This ultimately led her to a spacious glade, in the centre of which stood a dozen or more rough monoliths of mossy gray and weather-worn stones, disposed in a circle. Probably these were all that remained of some Druidical temple, and archaeologists came from far and near to view the weird relics. And in the middle of the circle stood the cottage: a thatched dwelling, which might have had to do with a fairy tale, with its whitewashed walls covered with ivy, and its latticed windows, on the ledges of which stood pots of homely flowers. There was no fence round ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... conventual life, the extraordinary austerities to which he had condemned himself, the monotonous solitude of his existence, all tended to exalt the vivacity of the nervous system, which, in the Italian constitution, is at all times disproportionately developed; and when those weird harp-strings of the nerves are once thoroughly unstrung, the fury and tempest of the discord sometimes utterly bewilders the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... women signified that they were in league with the arch-enemy of mankind—in plain English, that they were witches. The celebrated Three Witches who figure in Macbeth, "and palter with him in a double sense," had evidently this distinguishing mark, for says Banquo to the "weird sisters" (Act ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... arrived, headed by Sammy, a very different Sammy from the wailing creature who had gone out to execution an hour or two before. Now he was the gayest of the gay, and about his neck were strung certain weird ornaments which I identified as the ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... off a great quantity of red fire he could not more effectively have drawn all eyes upon him. The weird, shrill yell cut the ringmaster short, and a pleased murmur ran through the crowd. Of course, this must be part of the show, but ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... shelves all put t' rights an' was stretched out on my counter, with my head on a roll o' factory-cotton, dawdlin' along with my friendly ol' flute. I tooted a ballad or two—Larboard Watch an' Dublin Bay; an' my fingers bein' limber an' able, then, I played the weird, sad songs o' little Toby Farr, o' Ha-ha Harbor, which is more t' my taste, mark you, than any o' the fashionable music that drifts our way from St. John's. Afore long I cotched ear of a foot-fall on deck—tip-toein' aft, soft as a cat; ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... sculpture a weird charm attaches to his monuments in honour of the Medici in the chapel of San Lorenzo, Florence. Perhaps something of this weirdness has to do with the tragic history of the men, and with a certain mystery which has always shrouded the sculptor's ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... there came a weird groan and then the rattle of some heavy chains. Stanley turned pale and began to tremble, but the ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer
... coffee, and sleeping in lectures through the interim. A rare scene, the Casino. A big, barnlike auditorium, dotted with boys as girls, boys as pirates, boys as babies; the scenery in course of being violently set up; the spotlight man rehearsing by throwing weird shafts into angry eyes; over all the constant tuning of the orchestra or the cheerful tumpty-tump of a Triangle tune. The boy who writes the lyrics stands in the corner, biting a pencil, with twenty minutes to think ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... directed backwards, others, wearing scarlet aprons, carry brooms and with slow and mystic movements sweep widely on either side with the intent of gathering up the wandering soul. Meanwhile crackers are fired to the weird sound of a minor, falsetto lilting. After a considerable journey over the countryside they return to prove the success of their venture. For this the clothes of the sick man must be reweighed to see whether the weight of the ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... the old shepherd, though used to the weird and dismal, as one living alone in the bush must necessarily be, felt the icy breath of ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... my warm bed, I would awesomely think of it, and how solemn it looked when I had reluctantly left it at dusk, an hour or two before; then I would picture it to myself, later, lying deep and cold and still under the stars, in the dark thicket, with all that weird, uncanny lite seething beneath its ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... musical instruments, and all the mysterious paraphernalia of the peripatetic Jadugar. While Siddeshur was looking on, and in the broad, clear light of the afternoon, a man was shut up in a box, which was then carefully nailed up and bound with cords. Weird spells and incantations of the style we are all familiar with were followed by the breaking open of the box, which, "to the unqualified amazement of everybody, was found to be perfectly empty." All this is much in the usual style; but what followed ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... world; yet not all asleep, for far down the road skirting yonder wood, a strange procession approaches;—goblin-like figures, hideous with enormous horns, glaring eye-balls and lolling red tongues, and mounted upon weird-looking steeds, ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... historical and legendary lore gathered round the Oaks of England that it is very tempting to dwell upon them. There are the historical Oaks connected with the names of William Rufus, Queen Elizabeth, and Charles II.; there are the wonderful Oaks of Wistman's Wood (certainly the most weird and most curious wood in England, if not in Europe); there are the many passages in which our old English writers have loved to descant on the Oaks of England as the very emblems of unbroken strength and unflinching constancy; there is all the national ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... to one of the picturesque incidents that Sturt has introduced in his narrative, and that help to fix on our memory the strangely weird picture of the lonely band of men confronted with the unaccustomed forces of nature ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... and others of neutral hue, seemed to be moving slowly and silently amongst the dwellings of the dead, as if holding what you could scarcely call a carnival, in their own sombre way. The time, the place, the supermundane conditions, acting together on a half-drowned mind, gave to the whole scene a weird reality which writing cannot convey; so, after pinching myself to make sure I was awake, and doing a small sum in mental arithmetic to verify my sanity, I advanced toward the perturbed spirits, got them against ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... of the darkness, thus made singularly visible, the white travellers sat dozing and nodding on their luggage, while the cries of metallic-toned horned frogs and other nocturnal sounds peculiar to that weird ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... the Colorado rise in lakes in the enchanted Wind River Mountains. Mr. Stuart mentions the weird tales, told by trappers and hunters, of places—avoided, if possible, by man and beast—in these mountains where trees and game and even Indians are petrified, and yet look natural as in life. These trappers are accustomed to exaggerate. I remember hearing a very serious account ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... standing by the wayside rent the air with shrill lamentations, on hearing which Jesus said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but for yourselves and your children; for behold the days come when they shall say to the mountains, Fall on us! and to the hills, Cover us!" It was a weird prophecy, and ere a generation passed it was to the letter fulfilled. There were those in that company who lived to see the Holy City compassed about by a forest of hostile spears. Its inhabitants were brought low by famine and pestilence, insomuch that the eyes of mothers ...
— The Centurion's Story • David James Burrell
... guide did not encourage this suggestion. There was, he thought, no historical evidence for it. But it seemed to me that if these people ever practised such sacrifices this was the place for them. A gloomier chamber for weird ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... seas—their storms and calms, their fish that flew, and the fearsome monsters that gambolled along their surface. He took his hearers into the gloomy forests, with their myriad forms of life, their gaudy birds and gorgeous insects, their lurking beasts and dense-packed horrors. Weird cries and terrifying howls rang out in imaginative sounds. And what horrific beings stalked in the dim alleys betwixt the giant trees, or peeped forth at the intrepid traveller from cave and den! One-horned beasts with fiery hoofs; dragons ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... pen dipped in melted pearls on black enamel. My seal was an emerald, Faith also, impaled. I snatched it up and laid it by the ring on her hand. She smiled—such a smile! intensest sympathy, deepest! Could it be? to love the same old symbols, the same weird music? I caught her close, and bent over her lips. The gold hair waved over my shoulder; the great, glittering eyes foamed into mine, then melted and swam into deep, quivering seas of dreams. I whispered, 'Zoe mou!' Oh, the quick, golden whisper, the flash ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... primitive savage he would ever be able to examine; and he studied every action. When the dinner was over, and the twilight coming on, he sometimes asked me to row him out on the lake to see the nightfall and watch the "procession of the pines," that weird and ghostly phenomenon I have before ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... I wish such things would happen in Milton! And, oh, look at those colours! Was anything ever like them!" Helen exclaimed as the wagons came up out of the river bed and in full view of the painted desert as it stretched out in its weird, fascinating beauty. "Oh, I just can't ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... no reply, and horse and rider were motionless. They seemed for an instant to be phantoms, but then Harry knew that they were real. He was oppressed by a feeling of the weird and menacing. He would make the sinister figure move and his hand dropped toward his ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... musical murmurings, the rain pauses, the sky softens, and our minds grow calm and gentle. But when, again, the clouds gather darkness, and make strength for a new onslaught, we become sober with fear and doubt. Tell me, if, as we view these changes, and hear these stirring or weird sounds, we do not indeed behold battle scenes, and listen to music from which even ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... dine we are not tempted by the Voice. We are wary of weird sauces. We shun the cunning aspics. We look about at our neighbor's table. He is eating of things French, and Russian and Hungarian. Of food garnished, and garish and greasy. And with a little ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... sank, the shadows fell, the lights of the city sparkled out, for hours New York roared about me unheeded while I listened to the tale of that utterly weird, stupendous drama of an unknown life, of unknown creatures, unknown forces, and of unconquerable human heroism played among the hidden gorges of ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... Sunday morning, streaming into the room, fell upon a weird, dishevelled figure, that still stared fixedly at the wall, and every now and then muttered strange and wholly unclerical words and phrases. Still the hours wore on, until the sun rose high in the heavens, and the bells began to ring for church. Then ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... foliage the stars gleamed down upon the quiet world, and Fred, looking up to the heavens, was absorbed in deep thought as he listened to the breezes that rocked the crowns of the trees, or to the strange, weird noises that came from out of the forest in which beasts of prey were looking for their food. On the other side of the camp the Indian servant watched over the horses, while the Indian guide, ever wary ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... called Officer was coming with them, and that the janitress was coming likewise, and that divers lower-floor tenants were joining in the march, and that as they came the janitress was explaining to all and sundry how the weird miscreant had sought to inveigle her into admitting him to Mr. Slack's rooms, and how she had refused, and how with maniacal craft—or words to that effect—he had, nevertheless, managed to secure admittance to the house, and how he must ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... curtain slowly ascend, revealing only a dazzling row of footlights beyond. Then gradually out of the dusk loomed the vast auditorium with its row after row of dim white faces, reaching back and up, up further than she dared lift her head to see. From down below somewhere sounded the weird tinkle of elfin music, and tiptoeing out from every tree and bush came a green-clad gnome, dancing in stealthy silence in the sleeping forest. Quite unconsciously Nance began to keep time. It was such glorious fun playing at being animals and fairies in the woods at night. Without realizing ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... open door and listened—listened to a strange, wailing chant, which rose and fell with almost weird monotony. ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... grassy spears, And singing bird that called to singing bird. Heard but the savage tongue Of my brown savage children, that among The hills and valleys chased the buck and doe, And round the wigwam fires Chanted wild songs of their wild savage sires, And danced their wild, weird dances to and fro, And wrought their beaded robes of buffalo. Day following upon day, Saw but the panther crouched upon the limb, Smooth serpents, swift and slim, Slip through the reeds and grasses, and ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... barely lost consciousness when he leaped to the floor, roused by loud voices, tramping feet and the flash of weird lights on the lawn. Growls and long calls echoed from point to point on the spacious grounds, hulloes and echoing answers and ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... 1898 Dr Bullock Workman and his wife marched along it across the Shyok river, up the valley of the Nubra, and over the Sasser-la to the Karakoram pass. The scenery is an exaggeration of that described by Dr Neve as seen on the road from the Zoji-la to Leh. There is a powerful picture of its weird repellent grandeur in the Workmans' book entitled In the Ice World of Himalaya (pp. 28-29, 30-32). The poet who had found ideas for a new Paradiso in the Vale of Kashmir might here get ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... the anguish none can draw; So your future veils its face, Shenandoah! But the streaming beard is shown (Weird John Brown), The meteor of the ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... and then to listen expectantly. Then again he seated himself to wait. Several times, passionately insistent, he shook his head, and it was as if the refusal were being made to an invisible presence. Suddenly he lifted his face as the sound of a weird, wild wail was borne to him, mingling with the elf-like moaning of the wind. He leaned forward slightly, listening intently. From somewhere above him pleading notes from a violin were making the night even more mournful. A change came over ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... bell-ropes, and was answered by faint jinglings far below in the engine room, and our speed slackened. The steam began to whistle through the gauge-cocks. The cries of the leadsmen went on—and it is a weird sound, always, in the night. Every pilot in the lot was watching now, with fixed eyes, and talking under his breath. Nobody was calm and easy but Mr. Bixby. He would put his wheel down and stand on a spoke, and as the steamer swung into her (to me) ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... possible number of moves necessary in order to arrive at the following position? The moves for both sides must, of course, be played strictly in accordance with the rules of the game, though the result will necessarily be a very weird kind of chess. ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... ordinary barnyard rooster's "cock-a-doodle-do" combined with the scream of a cat when its tail is trodden upon by a heavy-booted foot. Here in these silent, darkened aisles of the forest it sounded weird and uncanny in the extreme, and aroused an intense desire to knock the creature over; but I forebore to fire, although we once had a view of a fine bird, attended by a hen and chicks, scurrying across the leaf-strewn ground ...
— "Martin Of Nitendi"; and The River Of Dreams - 1901 • Louis Becke
... itself began to settle. Howland felt a grip on his arm. Dumbly he turned and looked into the white, staring face of the superintendent. His ears tingled, every fiber in him seemed unstrung. MacDonald's voice came to him strange and weird. ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... "Ha! ha!" laughed the weird old creature who ushered the astonished youths into this strange banqueting hall, ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... where the sea had undermined the cliff, and had made strange holes and caves, which could only be entered at low tide. I clambered over the rocks, and crossed about half a mile of slippery seaweed, until I came to one of these weird places. Creeping inside, I felt myself safe from any human eye. I was ...
— Christie, the King's Servant • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... the first sergeant of his Macabebe company. Sometimes, when the surface was calm, he spent wonderful hours in studying the cool depths of the waters, the lee-shore coral ledges which bore fairy gardens of oceanic flora, brilliant-hued, weird-shaped, swaying gently in the tidal current: strange forms of sea-life moved among the marine growths,—some beautiful in form and color, others hideous. Once, while he watched a school of smaller fish playing around ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... by Four Bits before the chill moon rose above the black line of the distant hills and flooded a transformed land with magical light, touching a parched and arid earth to a vibrant and mysterious beauty of whispering yucca and fantastic cactus and weird outline of mesquite. ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... Poor fellow! He was the smallest in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September 1849 and remaining in his aunt's possession. "Stone has painted," Dickens then wrote to me, "the Ocean Spectre, and made a very pretty ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... moments later he stood above the squaw, who crouched on the trader's doorstep, wailing her death song into the night. He could not check her; she paid no heed to him, but only rocked and moaned and chanted that strange, weird song which somehow gave strength to ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... colour from a myriad tropical trees, gorgeous orchids, climbing lilies and enormous ferns. The town itself was a bower of beauty, and here the visitors saw the Temple of the Tooth, which is an object of adoration to hundreds of millions in Burmah, China and India; the procession of the Elephants—a weird portion of the Buddhist ritual; the devil dancers, who excel the Dervishes of the Soudan in the fantastic nature of their antics. On the succeeding day the Duke received an address from the planters of the Island, enclosed in a beautiful coffer of ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... rheumatism, or a useful cattle medicine—so these stones are said to be the work of the devil. A friend tells me that in his childhood his nurse used to frighten him by saying that the devil lurked in a dolmen which stands near his father's house in Oxfordshire; and many weird traditions ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... straight road which led to Braster. I had barely gone a hundred yards when a small motor brougham, with blazing lights and insistent horn, came flying past me and on into the darkness. I caught a momentary glimpse of Mrs. Smith-Lessing's pale face as the car flashed by, a weird little silhouette, come and gone in a second. Away ahead I saw the mud and rain from the pools fly up into the air in a constant stream caught in the broad white glare of the brilliant search-lamps. Then the car turned a corner ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... out the palm of my hand for inspection and tried to look like a man pretending he does not believe in magic. Whatever Maga thought, the old hag was delighted. She began to croak an incantation, shuffling first with one foot, then with the other, and finally with both together in a weird dance that almost shook her old frame apart. Then she went through a pantomime of finger-pointing, as if transferring from herself to Maga the ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... A weird, unpleasant feeling had stolen into the little room, the presence of unfamiliar thoughts and of foreign ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... heard Joe Lorey's startling imitation of the panther's cry, outside, and, rising, presently, when careful listening revealed the fact that the less obtrusive sound of human voices followed what had seemed to be the weird, uncanny call of the wild-beast, he went to the door and opened it, so that ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... Strange, weird, inconceivable effects may be met with at night in Paris. Only those who have amused themselves by watching those effects have any idea how fantastic a woman may appear there at dusk. At times the creature whom you are following, ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... huge icicles that hung like a great white shroud over the bier of the two dead heroes. It was a gas-fixture factory, and the hundreds of pipes, twisted into all manner of fantastic shapes of glittering ice, lent a most weird effect to the sorrowful scene. I can still see Chief Gicquel, all smoke-begrimed, and with the tears streaming down his big, manly face,—poor Gicquel! he went to join his brothers in so many a hard fight only a ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... father, and he married, when nearly forty, Elizabeth Pilfold, reputed a great beauty. The first child of this marriage, born on August 4, 1792, was the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, born to all the ease and comfort of an English country home, but with the weird imaginings which in childhood could people the grounds and surroundings with ancient snakes and fairies of all forms, and which later on were to lead him far out of the beaten track. Shelley's little sisters were ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... the young man who woke up with a strange sensation in the middle of the night, and found his rich bachelor uncle standing by his bedside. The rich uncle smiled a weird sort of smile and vanished. The young man immediately got up and looked at his watch. It had stopped at half-past four, he having forgotten ...
— Told After Supper • Jerome K. Jerome
... entrance to the palace, and suddenly, as though at a given signal, every outline of the building became marked out by countless points of light which sparkled starlike against the darkening sky. At the same instant, the temple to their left took form in a hundred colors, and a burst of weird music broke on the ears of the wondering spectators. It was a strange and beautiful scene, such as few of them had ever seen. Fairy palaces of fire seemed to hover miraculously in the evening air, and over everything hung the curious, indefinable ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... fibre brush—a beard that got redder the longer it grew; he had a hooked nose, and his hair stood straight up (I never saw a man so easy-going about the expression and so scared about the head), and he was very tall, with long, thin, hairy legs. We must have looked a weird pair as we sat there, naked, on the low three-legged stools, with the billy and the tucker on the box between us, and ate our bread ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... description of the last, dim, weird battle in the west, beginning at the bottom of page 240 with the line "A death-white mist slept over land and sea," is one of the most stirring things in the poem, and deserves particularly close reading. The pictures are crowded, the figures vivid, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... search of adventures in the thick of a 'London particular,' Mr. Guppy's phrase for a fog. When you are once ensconced in your garden seat by the driver, you go lumbering through a world of bobbing shadows, where all is weird, vague, grey, dense; and where great objects loom up suddenly in the mist and then disappear; where the sky, heavy and leaden, seems to descend bodily upon your head, and the air is full of a kind ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... renouncement of the premiership, and the loss, certainly for the immediate future and probably for all time, of the affection and regard of his own people as a body. The proposition doubtless looked to him weird and impossible, and not a little impudent. The argument that the proposed government could better serve the general interests of the public, or even the cause of the war, than a purely Liberal government, of which he would be the head, probably ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... above all by the flittering of the marvellous sleeves—apparitional, soundless, velvety as a flitting of great tropical bats. No; nothing I ever dreamed of could be likened to this. And with the consciousness of the ancient hakaba behind me, and the weird invitation of its lanterns, and the ghostly beliefs of the hour and the place, there creeps upon me a nameless, tingling sense of being haunted. But no! these gracious, silent, waving, weaving shapes are not of the Shadowy Folk, for whose coming the white fires ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... way to the palace steps. Weird figures sprang up from the muck, and were shot back ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... The three weird voices whispered low Where the eagles swept in their circling ward; But only one shadow scarred the snow As I clambered down ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... with a laugh stranger than her first one, and her great black eyes were fixed on him as he had remembered seeing her fix them when she was a child and full of some wild fancy or weird sadness. ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... confirmed him in his suspicions about his wife. He no longer doubted that his wife, with the aid of the Evil One, controlled the winds and the post sledges. But to add to his grief, this mysteriousness, this supernatural, weird power gave the woman beside him a peculiar, incomprehensible charm of which he had not been conscious before. The fact that in his stupidity he unconsciously threw a poetic glamour over her made her seem, as it were, ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... made to form a tripod and the kettle is suspended from the vertex of the angles or the crossing point of the poles. Music, in which string instruments figure most conspicuously, should be selected, as this lends itself best to the weird effect which should be sought. Three or four pieces will generally be sufficient and they may consist of a violin, guitar, banjo and snare drum or the drum may be omitted if not convenient. The committee appointed to gather the refreshments must have the assistance of all the other women of the club, ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... heart was full of tender pity for the old deaf woman, with her weird helpless ways, at whose side he had grown since his infancy; though she could hardly have been said to "bring him up," for Granny Baxter had been shiftless and unlovable when she was in possession of her faculties, and her character had not improved under her trying infirmities. Her ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... part, been able to buy a wondrous gold-and-crimson worsted bird suspended from an elastic string, a bird which bobbed up and down to command in the most lively and artistic manner? And had not her hired baby actually laughed at the clumsy toy—laughed an elfish and weird laugh, the first it had ever indulged in? And Liz had laughed too, for pure gladness in the child's mirth, and the worsted bird became a sort of uncouth charm to ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... The rustle of the flames at the Hotel de Ville and the great fires across the river, the crash of the falling roofs and walls, the incessant rattle of distant musketry, and the boom of cannon, formed a weird contrast to the silence that prevailed in the quarter. Cuthbert felt that he breathed more freely when he issued out ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... ghost—moaning and gibbering to himself, and tearing at a walled-up door with bleeding hands. The train of thought thereby suggested was so very sombre, that I preferred returning to my cabin, and climbing into an unfurnished berth, to spending more minutes in that weird company. I never made the man out satisfactorily afterwards. It is possible that he was one of the few who scarcely showed on deck, till we were in sight of land; but rather, I believe, like other visions and voices of the night, he changed past recognition ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... "A fig for your weird autumn fancy," responds Aulus; "down to the streets of Hierosolyma we will go, and among their novel sights we will forget your ...
— An Easter Disciple • Arthur Benton Sanford
... pride in kindling bonfires on heights which might seem inaccessible, the scene is very striking when the darkness of night is suddenly and simultaneously lit up by hundreds of fires, which cast a glare on surrounding objects, producing an effect at once weird and picturesque.[551] ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... respectful decorum. Rosendo and Lazaro, relaxing somewhat their vigilance over the girl, labored daily on the little hacienda across the lake. The dull-witted folk, keeping to their dismally pretentious mud houses during the pulsing heat of day, and singing their weird, moaning laments in the quiet which reigned over this maculate hollow at night, followed undeviatingly the monotonous routine of an existence which had no other aim than the indulgence of the most ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... endless marches, these reckless rides through rocky wastes and silent forests—to the accompaniment of the tramp of horses, the creaking of saddles and the rush and roar of rolling stones on lonely mountain-trails—that those strange, weird rhythms and melodies arose, which lived on long afterwards in the minds and hearts ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... incubus of savage life all around weighed on our hearts. Thus it was day and night. Even those hours of twilight, which brood with sweet influences over so many lives, bore to us, on the evening air, the weird cadences of the heathen dance or the chill thrill ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... gleamed white, and the shrubbery looked dark, the whole landscape was weird and unlike the sunny scenes they knew ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... me, and I went boldly on. For the life of me, however, I could not keep from mentally repeating those weird and awful lines in Burns' 'Tam o' Shanter,' descriptive of the hero's journey homewards on that unhallowed and awful night when he ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... Sir Richard Burton's intimate knowledge of the language. To all who understand the ways of the East, it is as witty, and as full of what is popularly called "chaff" as it is possible to be. There is not a dull page in it, and it will especially please those who delight in the weird and supernatural, the ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... serious, however, is the general public failure to realize the gift which is within their reach. Flying was first a circus stunt and later a war wonder. The solid practical accomplishments have been lost sight of in the weird or the spectacular. People who marveled when a British plane climbed up nearly six miles into the air, or 30,000 feet, where its engine refused to run and its observer fainted, failed generally to analyze what the invasion ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... form and face, Showed she was come of gentle race. 'Twere strange in ruder rank to find 610 Such looks, such manners, and such mind. Each hint the Knight of Snowdoun gave, Dame Margaret heard with silence grave; Or Ellen, innocently gay, Turned all inquiry light away: 615 "Weird women we—by dale and down We dwell, afar from tower and town. We stem the flood, we ride the blast, On wandering knights our spells we cast; While viewless minstrels touch the string, 620 'Tis thus our charmed rimes we ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... himself a little dry, and was not cheered by the name of the author, HUGH DOWNE, which seemed to suggest he could not get up again. He is eagerly waiting for more fiction, as "Expiation" by OCTAVE THANET has scarcely satisfied his craving for the weird and the horrible. In the meanwhile, he has found a cheerful interlude in Sanity and Insanity, a text-book (written in a popular yet scientific strain) of the maladies of the mind. He says, that Dr. MERCIER, the author, is to be congratulated on having ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • Various
... met in the hotel the day before yesterday told me all sorts of queer stories about her," replied the girl. "She's apparently a most weird person, and she has uncanny good luck at the tables. He said that she had won a large fortune during the last couple ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... A seven-year-old boy who had received a long lecture on the impropriety of keeping dead crabs in his pockets said, after it was all over: "Well, they were alive when I put them in. You are wasting a lot of my precious time." These little brains have a way of working out combinations that seem weird to ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... the tumult of futile chase faded into silence behind the straining fugitive, there might have been seen whirling through the ancient streets of London a weird and ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... were already gone. The music trailed off into a weird, rippling rhythm, with young hearts beating time to its melody and young feet keeping step to its measure. Then the tired, happy company broke into groups. Good-bys and good wishes were given again and again, and the party ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... o'clock. The rain has ceased falling, but the sky is still gray and threatening. The wind howls dismally among the old trees that surround John Burrill's shallow grave, and its weird wail, combined with the rattle and creak of the branches, and the drip, drip of water, dropping from the many crevices into the old cellar, unite to form a fitting requiem for an occasion so strange, ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... outgoing of a long, rich day, Checkered with storm and sunshine, gloom and light, Now passing in pure, cloudless skies away, Withdrawing into silence of blank night. Thick shadows settle on the landscape bright, Like the weird cloud of death that falls apace On the still ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... it up, and after some delay a place for it was found. The two lights now plainly showed a sudden enlargement in the area of the cave, and above them hung what appeared to be huge icicles, giving the interior a weird appearance. Still no water ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... human eye had been in the Graveyard of Genius at that instant it would have sworn that it perceived in the inky blackness of the tilting rock a passage, and in the shadows of that passage a huge, weird, grotesque figure ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... from below, "he has got the money! Glad to hear it. But," he added, as he glanced at sundry weird and astrological symbols with which he had been diverting himself, "that's not it. The true horary question, is, WHAT WILL ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... at her so frankly that from very shame she could not urge them again, and they were soon forgotten in her wonder at the mystery and glamour that envelops the home of the drama. There was something weird to her in the alternate spaces of light and shade. Without any feeling of its ugliness, she looked at the curtain as at a door that should presently open between her and a house of wonders. She looked at it with the fascination that one always experiences for what either ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... August came, the day preceding the grand event of the century. Mary Trigillgus and her mother were lingering at the breakfast-table. The girl seemed wild and hawk-like, startling her mother with her unnatural merriment, commenting with weird brilliancy and grotesqueness and sparkle on the various items as Mrs. Trigillgus read them. At length she read a paragraph about the eclipse. "'And we would advise every reader,'" she continued, "'to furnish himself with an ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... lay on to the weather brace, the A.B.'s (or able-bodied seamen) leading and the O.S.'s (ordinary seamen) at the tail. Some one slacks off the lee braces and sings out 'Haul away!' Then the watch proceed to haul, with weird, wild cries in minor keys that rise and fall and rise again, like the long-drawn soughing of the wind itself. {109} Eh—heigh—o—az! Eh—heigh—ee! Eh—hugh! In comes the brace till the trim suits the mate, when he calls out 'Turn the crossjack brace!' which ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... is told regarding a solitary, weird figure which stands out, rudely weatherworn, from a hill-top in the pass called Shao-hsing Gorge, Canton Province. This point of the pass is called Lung-men, or Dragon's Mouth, and the hill the Husband-expecting Hill. The figure itself, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... from side to side, sometimes whirling around, but with feet always flat on the floor, often turning on her heels. All the time her arms were extended and her fingers snapping, and snapping also were the black eyes. She was the personification of grace, but the dance was weird—made the more so by the setting of bright evening dresses and glittering uniforms. One never sees a dance of this sort these days, even in the South, any more than one sees the bright-colored turban. Both have passed ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... to take the car down there, as if I did "it was likely that the car would stop some pieces of metal." There was nothing for it but to walk down the road leading to the recently captured village. It was very dark, but star-shells, with their weird green light, would illuminate the countryside every five minutes or so. In the darkness one could vaguely discern the shape of the first-line transport wagons taking up rations to the trenches, and small columns of silently ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... that," he said quietly. "If we spare you one pain we give you another. Miss Darryll, I should say Mrs. Richford, a terrible thing has happened, a strange, weird thing. As you know, the inquest was to have been to-day. Events have rendered that ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... His weird cry ended in a gurgle. He lowered his rifle and teetered on his feet. The flying knife had found its mark—the half-breed's throat! The keen-pointed blade had buried itself nearly to the guard! Clawing at the steel, Tucumcari staggered, then dropped to the floor with his clattering ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... fell over a deep breath. She stepped across to the door and closed the transom softly just as the next weird line hissed out above the tumult and then sank into its smothering welter and moan of ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... children up. An accordion that must have come a long distance—for it was never claimed—was found so entangled in the branches of a tree that it was alternately pulled apart and pressed together by the wind, thus creating such weird and uncanny music during a whole night that an already sufficiently scared settlement of negroes were kept in a state of frantic dismay until daylight ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... black, was plaited in a stiff thick braid resembling a Chinese pigtail, and was fastened at the end with a bow of ribbon,—and a pair of wonderfully brilliant dark eyes flashed under her arching brows, suggesting something weird and witchlike in their roving glances, and giving an almost uncanny expression to her small, sallow face. But she was full of the most exuberant vitality,—she sparkled all over with it and seemed to exhale it in the mere ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli |
