"Weird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted dirty-looking, repulsive water moccasins and brilliant yellow and ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... dreamily heard the words "money," "Spratt," "great-great-grandfather," "rich, wife," "family estates;" and they sounded to him vague and afar off, like whispers from the world of romance and legend—weird prophecies ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... the only service I have rendered. I have tried to banish from the stage the crazy fools who strutted from side to side, and waved their arms from right to left; who tried to play the orator by uttering their pathetic phrases in weird, solemn sounds from the throat, or trumpeted them through the nose. I have placed living men upon the boards, who by natural speech and action lend truth and reality to the scenes they wish to portray. You, comrades, have assisted me faithfully ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... told Mr. Stewart that in their childhood this weird spot was held to be sacred to the Great Wolf, the totem of their tribe. Here, for more generations than any could count, their wise men had gathered about the mystic birch flame, in grave council of war. Here the tribe had assembled to seek strength of arm, hardness of heart, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... notion of what fields or roads they would be. Their boots were beginning to break up and the confusion of stones tried them severely, so that they were glad to lean on their swords, as if they were the staves of pilgrims. MacIan thought vaguely of a weird ballad of his own country which describes the soul in Purgatory as walking on a plain full of sharp stones, and only saved by its own ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... picture once I saw; and there Wild as of old and weird and sweet In sevenfold splendour blazed the moon Not on ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... and impetuous flight, whirred threateningly overhead, and returned to foot, fluttering and purring, as if endowed with affection for its unlovable master. None so mastered the missile; but for all his weird influence over it, he was subject to the restraints of another weapon which seldom left his hands. Is there not a spiritual law which imposes checks on the bombastic tricks of crude and cultured alike, or was it by force of gravity that the point of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... now had he appreciated the warm magenta coloring of gorgeous poinsettias and bougainvillea, the glowing-hearted, waxy white flowers of frangipani; not until now did he realize the prodigality of Nature towards Java in the matter of weird and awesome ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... not the low, sweet music of Cummins and the little Melisse that he played now, but a wild, wailing song that he had found in the autumn winds. It burst above the crackling fire and the tumult of man and dog in a weird and savage beauty that hushed all sound; and life about him became like life struck suddenly dead. With his head bowed Jan saw nothing—saw nothing of the wonder in the faces of the half- cringing little black men who were squatted ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... Bradley was a frequent and welcome visitor to Oldenhurst. Apart from his strange and chivalrous friendship for the Mainwarings—which was as incomprehensible to Sir Robert as Sir Robert's equally eccentric and Quixotic speculations had been to Bradley—he began to feel a singular and weird fascination for the place. A patient martyr in the vast London house he had taken for his wife and cousin's amusement, he loved to escape the loneliness of its autumn solitude or the occasional greater loneliness ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... door, opening into a vault. Throughout this scene there is a suggestion of music, rising into full orchestra at significant moments. The voices of the Nibelungs are accompanied by stopped trumpets and other weird sounds.] ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... 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
... pleasant to hear. The summery call of a turtle dove came dreamily through the forest; while nearer, towhees filled the place with their "fine explosive trills." Down in the ravine chats were uttering their strange notes, so weird that they won from the Indians the name of "ghost bird." Vireos and tanagers vied with each other in persistent singing. The vireo sang more constantly but the notes of the tanager were more wild and possessed greater resonance of tone. The call of a quail came clear and sweet from a distant ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... social life there was often a weird mingling of civilization and barbarism. Upon one occasion, a concert was given, in which the audience were in full dress, and all evening in the principal streets of St. Cloud a lot of Chippewas played foot-ball with the heads of some ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... the meaning of these apertures there came a repetition of the weird cry, but this time the lad was so startled that he almost lost his balance ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... called "silver witches," and as they dart off, when disturbed, like a streak of light, their bodies being coated in a suit of shining mail, which the arrangement of the scales resembles, they have really a weird ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... tumbling stream—the spot where he and Conrad Lagrange had slept at the foot of the mountains. Where the road curves toward the creek, the man, without checking his pace, turned his head to look back upon the valley that, far below, was fast being lost in the gathering dusk. In its weird and gloomy mystery,—with its hidden life revealed only by the sparkling, twinkling lights of the towns and cities,—it was suggestive, now, to his artist mind, of the life that had so nearly caught him in its glittering sensual snare. A moment ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... had just finished his lunch, and certainly his empty dish bore evidence to the good appetite with which his housekeeper had credited him. He was, indeed, a weird figure as he turned his white mane and his glowing eyes towards us. The eternal cigarette smouldered in his mouth. He had been dressed and was seated in an ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... retirement to rest. It was easy to retire, but not so easy to sleep. Bessie's mind was astir. It became retrospective. She went over the terrors of her first coming to Caen, the dinner at Thunby's, and the weird talk of Janey Fricker in the ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... reached the shield, and on hands and knees we crawled out into one of its compartments. Here we experienced for the first time the weird realisation that only the "air" stood between us and destruction from the tons and tons of sand and water overhead. At some points in the sand we could feel the air escaping, which appeared at the surface of the river ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... not 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 utterly impossible. Please ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... clanking of chains, a rumbling as of distant thunder; we are approaching a shaft. The shafts in this mine are not sunk perpendicularly, but are slightly inclined: the huge buckets, lowered and raised by means of powerful machinery, are but ancient caldrons, counterparts of those in which the weird witches in "Macbeth" might have brewed their unholy decoctions, or such as the dreadful giants that formed the nightmare of my childhood might have used in preparing those Brobdignagian repasts among the ingredients of which a plump child held the same ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... framework, and even details, of stories which from time to time I have contributed to various magazines. A ghost story,* published some years ago in a London magazine, and much commented on because of its peculiarly weird and startling character, had this origin; so had a fairy tale,** which appeared in a Christmas Annual last year, and which has recently been re-issued in German by the editor of a foreign periodical. Many ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... the desert, along the Suez Canal[2], I watched the ghastly pallor of the wan unhappy moon, as the horrible shadow crept slowly over her face, stealing away her beauty, and turning the lone and level sands that stretched away below to a weird and ashy blue, as though covering the earth with a sepulchral sympathetic pall. For we caught the "griesly terror," Rahu, at his horrid work, towards the end of May, ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... the evening before, he had been observing things about him for the purpose of detailing them to his new friend. Little beauties of nature—as when a strange bird shone for an instant in vivid contrast to the mountain laurel near his window; an unusual effect of pine silhouettes near the sky; a weird, semi-poetic suggestion of one of Poe's stories implied in a contorted shadow cast by a gnarled little oak in the light of the moon—these he had noticed and remembered, and was now eager to tell his companion, with full assurance of her sympathy and understanding. Three days ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... plates of butter, pies, and smaller dishes distributed at regular intervals. Two lanterns hanging from the roof and a row of candles stuck into the wall on either side by means of slit sticks cast a dim, weird light over ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... Mannering, and recognized him. It appeared that while one detective kept guard outside, the others watched within. At the sound of voices the door of the Grey Room opened, and in the bright light that streamed from it a weird figure stood—a tall, black object with huge and flashing eyes and what looked like an elephant's trunk descending from between them. The watchers, wearing hoods and gas masks, resembled the fantastic demons of a Salvator ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... moved as if the dust cloud that inclosed her was an impenetrable medium that interposed itself between her and the weird setting of the way. She was drugged with the wine of a new life. She did not think of sin, of herself in relation to her past, of the breaking with every tie that held her to her old self. All her background was gone. Her conscience that, in her dealings with David, had been so persistently ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... failure, and recovering, turn again to renew it. He must not be on the same spot when that time came. And as there was no better opening offered than the enclosure mentioned by Jotham, he started for the same, with the cow in full pursuit, and his chums shrieking all sorts of weird advice. ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... wooded shores of Glena Bay, we pass Stags, Burnt, and other islands, and come to Glena Cottage, hiding in the foliage of leafy trees. Glena means "the valley of good fortune," and a name more suggestive of happier thoughts than weird Glownamorra across the lake—"the glen of ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... "Hotel de la Paix" a weird thing happened. One (p. 092) often hears strange stories of the powers different men and women have over individuals of the opposite sex. As a rule, one hears, one smiles, or one is rather disgusted; but seldom do we admit to ourselves that ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... coast of Brazil, where the crew were allowed to escape to the shore. The Peterborough was re-christened the Victory and was manned by half of England's crew, while the other vessel was burned at night; the pirates dancing on the beach to the light of the flames and singing the weird songs ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... door. It was past the time for singing the poem of Tennyson which "Tom Brown" Hughes used to say they always gave out instead of a hymn in Finsbury Chapel; and some one else was preaching in Conway's pulpit, or at his desk. I do not know what weird influence of sermonizing seen but not heard took the sense of reality from the experience, but I came away feeling as if I had looked upon ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... yelled and shouted and waved their flags at each other in good-natured defiance. At the upper end a band played popular airs that nobody cared for, and half the time in the din and tumult did not even hear. In front of the stands the cheermasters jumped up and down and went through their weird contortions, as they led the cheers and gave the signal ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... man having undertaken for that sum to make all the witches in the parish dance on the knoll together; and though he grew up a penurious man, (and lived a bachelor till fifty), he never ceased to lament that such an opportunity of seeing these weird-sisters collected together, never occurred again. He used to say he had seen a witch "swam on Polstead Ponds," and "she went over the water like a cork." He had, when a boy, stopped a wizard in his way to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 327, August 16, 1828 • Various
... weird, savage, hurried chorus, interspersed with hoots and flapping of wings, all talking together and rocking themselves ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... a direct hit. In front of the big white house there had once been an asphalt tennis court—there was now a plain pitted at every few yards by huge shell holes. The summer-house at the edge of the wood—once the scene of delightful little flirtations in between the games of tennis—was now a weird wreck, consisting of three tottering walls and a broken seat. Oddest of all, there lay near the white marble steps an old, tyreless ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... Water. The excitement of the abbot and his companions momently increased, and the sentinels shouted as each new beacon was lighted. At last, almost every hill had its watch-fire, and so extraordinary was the spectacle, that it seemed as if weird beings were abroad, and holding their ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... soft, and lissom; the peace, and the pity—a sort of look of: "Why—why—when I was so alive?" Well, this elderly Johnny took a good squint at it, to see if the hole was big enough, then off he went again, sobbing and digging like a fiend. It was really a bit too weird, and I mouched off. But when I'd gone about half a mile, I got an attack of the want-to-knows, came back, and sneaked along the hedge. There he was still, but he had finished, and was having a mop round, and putting the last touches to a heap of stones. ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... answer, did not so much as seem to hear. He was standing before the Brigadier. His eyes gleamed in his alert face—two weird pin-points of light. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... possessed of no shame, no diffidence, no reserve; he was innocent, and her eyes had assured him that she knew it. As they passed through the door it creaked again on its dry hinges. Before she had laughed at the weird complaining; now it sounded like a moan of misery. Outside the village street was deserted; there was ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... fascinated with this weird spectacle of the sea-lions, which seemed to me like an unhallowed prying into some hidden and monstrous secret of nature, I could better realize the fantastic and brutal wildness of life in the earlier geological ages, when monsters and chimeras dire wallowed about ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... rapidly as a weathercock before a thunderstorm. One moment she said her "mutch" was the only thing that gave her comfort, and the next she slackened the strings and let it back upon her neck, in a passion at it for making her too hot. Her talk was a wild, somewhat weird, farrago of utterly meaningless balderdash, mere inarticulate gabble, snatches of old Jacobite ballads and exaggerated phrases from the drama, to which she suited equally exaggerated action. She "babbled of green fields" and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the gangway was audible. Through the thin walls came the dull, confused murmur of many voices. Doors banged, and when they opened, brief, broken sounds penetrated from the cabins, evidence of the bewilderment and alarm of their tenants. The thing that was particularly weird to Frederick in that swaying corridor, creaking like a new boot and lighted by electricity, was the incessant ringing of electric bells. In a hundred cabins at the same time, frightened persons, who had paid dear for their passage and were entitled to ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... have not learned the secret of modest and unselfish delights, we shall vainly seek for joy in the vulgar excitements and coarse titillations of appetites and desires which the world offers. 'Calm pleasures there abide' in Christ. The northern lights are weird and bright, but they belong to midwinter, and they come from electric disturbances, and portend rough weather afterwards. Sunshine is silent, steadfast, pure. Better to walk in that light than to be led astray by fantastic ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... you've only heard them daytimes, you don't know a bit what pine trees really are. But I can tell you. Listen! This is what they say," finished the boy, whipping his violin from its case, and, after a swift testing of the strings, plunging into a weird, ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... five acts of piffle that was mostly talky junk to me. And, at that, I wa'n't sufferin' exactly; for when them actorines got too weird, all I had to do was swing a bit in my seat and I had a side view of a spiffy little white fur boa, with a pink ear-tip showin' under a ripple of corn-colored hair, and a—well, I had something worth watching ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... civilization. I looked in every direction at what seemed to have been the work of angry Titans. Far as the eye could see, the earth around me appeared to have been a battle-field on which an army of giants had pelted each other with mountains. The whole country was broken, weird, precipitous, and grand. In every direction huge cliffs towered perpendicularly about you; bottomless abysses yawned at your feet; and every scarped pinnacle and beetling crag scowled menacingly at ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... Indian shawl having carried me home to England, and the old camphor trunk which my own mother, herself born in India, had taught us boys to reverence as the old man did his, filled as ours was with specimens of weird patterns ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... simple sublimity of his verses; the rare and chaste beauty of his conceptions; the richness and grandeur of his thoughts, and their easy, natural flow; the refined elegance and captivating force of the terms he employs as the medium through which he communicates those thoughts and the weird fancy which throws around them charms peculiarly their own. These, and perhaps other merits, will win for their ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... He hated Nappy and Pop and every one of the millions of people looking silently on around the world. But most of all, he hated Milt. It was a weird, sickening thing, that hatred. But only a mentally sickening thing. Physically, it seemed to make Frankie stronger, because when the bell rang and he got up and walked into a straight right, it ...
— Vital Ingredient • Gerald Vance
... Alpleich, that weird music with which Bunting, the pied piper of Hamelin, led forth the rats into the river Weser, and the children into a cave in the mountain Koppenberg. The song of the sirens is ...
— 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.
... Ralph and mysel' we were walking up to the Moss together ya day, when we heard Angus and Wilson at a bout of words. Wilson he said to Angus with a gay, bitter sneer, 'Ye'll fain swappit wi' me yet,' said he. 'He'll yoke wi' an unco weird. Thy braw chiel 'ul tryste wi' th' hangman soon, I wat.' And Angus he was fair mad, I can tell ye, and he said to Wilson, 'Thoo stammerin' and yammerin' taistrel, thoo; I'll pluck a lock of thy threep. Bring the warrant, wilt thoo? Thoo savvorless and ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... left His plump moss couch, and strolling near the tree Saw in the pomp of moonlight that old form Still rocking, and, with deep awe at his heart, Hastened to join his comrades. Morn awoke, And the first light discovered to their eyes That weird shape rocking still. The pioneers, With kindly hands, took food and at his side Placed it, and tried to rouse him, but in vain. He fixed his eye still dully down the hill, And when they took their ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... garment which combined the functions of stockings, trousers, and shirt. This was made of a double thickness of stout canvas, each thickness being well coated on both sides with two coats of boiled oil. It was a weird-looking garment, as it was intended to fit on outside the armour arrangement which he called his diving suit; but it was merely intended to exclude the water, and when it was finished and fitted I saw that it would serve its purpose perfectly well, and there seemed ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... man of many bodies, had been given some weird assignments in his time, but saving The Glory of the Galaxy wasn't difficult—it ...
— A Place in the Sun • C.H. Thames
... snoozing in 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 ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... Sorceress instantly stepped into the middle of the boat and held the instrument so that the sparks fell all around her and covered every bit of the blackened steel boat. At the same time Glinda crooned a weird incantation in the language of sorcery, her voice sounding ...
— Glinda of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... to speak o' me to the lanesome moon, An' weird kind wishes to me, in the lark's saft soun'; I doat upon that moon Till my very heart fills fu', An' aye yon birdie's tune Gars me greet ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the weird figure of Jack o' Judgment. He had lifted her from the bed and had laid her on the floor. She remembered seeing him slip beneath the blankets, and then Pinto had come. She recalled the cracked voice of her rescuer, his ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... which a black, who must have attained to some consequence among his superstitious brethren on account of his gigantic height, stood now in the ruddy glow tossing his arms on high, gesticulating and uttering a weird strange chant, until the English party saw that their guide had approached quite close to the huge giant, and was evidently talking to him eagerly and with a great ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... pulled Garrigan to freedom. Getting the other men up to the floor was the work of but a few moments. They were a weird-looking crew in the torn fragments of clothing that remained to them. Foster stationed them beside the locked cavern door so that they would be hidden behind it ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... been warned, put on his guard, made fully aware of all of Miss Brandon's tricks; they had told him of the weird charm of her eyes; he himself had caught her that very evening in the open ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... foot of a big hollow tree, from which he pulled a large bundle. This he opened and showed a number of ghostly uniforms. He distributed these among the boys, who at once donned them, making a weird looking ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young
... to Bud. He had often spent the night out in the open, had often stood guard by a lonely camp-fire, when darkness was all around and only the weird voices of the night were heard; and he gave little thought to these things. He was very tired and very sleepy and it took about all the thought power he had to compel himself ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... Humphrey; and five minutes afterwards a match was applied to the heap of perfectly dry wood underfoot. It caught fire at once and began blazing up, sending forth such a glow of light that the men set up a cheer, drawn from them by the excitement and wonder of the weird scene which ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... tiny chunk of plastic, four by four inches square and one-half inch thick, resting in the middle of the machine between the carefully aligned pole-faces of the magnet, was subjected to the cumulatively devised stresses, a weird distortion of its own stresses and of the inertia that was ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... left hand, and placed her against the wall between the Thier and himself. Werner's men were well content to let their master fight it out. The words spoken by Henker Rothhals, that the Devil had forsaken him, seemed in their minds confirmed by the weird song which every one present could swear he heard with his ears. 'Let him take his chance, and try his own luck,' they said, and shrugged. The battle was between Guy, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... stove and thrust into the artistic arena. It was lucky for him that his scene was set in Boston, which is always sympathetically on edge to embrace exotic genius. In a society delicately attuned to intellectual harmonies from all sources, however strange or weird, the success of a Chinaman possessing the slightest facility with the brush was assured from the first. His industrious compatriots in the local laundries, themselves more impassionate critics, doubtless regarded ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... under the archway did not penetrate far, and the young people were soon in total darkness. The air was damp and chilly. Strange draughts crossed each other from unexpected quarters, and the water dripping from overhead, awoke weird echoes which seemed to be repeated among ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... other is that my father as he went along talked about himself, not so much to me as to himself, and about life and what he had done with it. He monologued so that at times he produced an effect of weird world-forgetfulness. I listened puzzled, and at that time not understanding many things that afterwards became plain to me. It is only in recent years that I have discovered the pathos of that monologue; how friendless ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... out. It was followed by a succession of wild cries, and with one accord the terror-stricken conspirators made for the highway. But at every step a white figure rose in the path filling the air with weird, mournful wails. Fright lent speed to sophomore feet, and without daring to look behind, eight badly scared girls ran steadily along the road to Overton, intent only on putting distance between themselves and the terrifying apparitions that had sprung up before them. If ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... arrived, with his attendant, about six months ago; and since then things have gone from bad to worse. There has been crystal-gazing and star-worship and necromancy of all sorts. I confess I didn't understand very much of it," he added. "It was all so wild and weird; but it ended not only in Mr. Vaughan's becoming a convert to whatever religion it is the yogi practises, but in a determination that his daughter should become a priestess of the cult. It was from that she wished me to help her ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... ran from the dining room at the first sound of the yells of the old man. The lamps within enlightened the weird scene without. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... comical; droll, funny, laughable, pour rire, grotesque, farcical, odd; whimsical, whimsical as a dancing bear; fanciful, fantastic, queer, rum, quizzical, quaint, bizarre; screaming; eccentric &c (unconformable) 83; strange, outlandish, out of the way, baroque, weird; awkward &c (ugly) 846. extravagant, outre, monstrous, preposterous, bombastic, inflated, stilted, burlesque, mock heroic. drollish; seriocomic, tragicomic; gimcrack, contemptible &c (unimportant) 643; doggerel; ironical &c (derisive) 856; risible. Phr. risum teneatis ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... crossroads a vague sense of change struck him. The roads were better. There was an odd little building near the yellow house. It was the new school, but of that Northrup had not heard. From the distance the chapel bell sounded. It did not have that lost, weird note that used to mark it—there was definiteness about it that suggested a human hand ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... shyly, and looked in startled wonder. The baby was strikingly like Gila, with all her grace, delicate features, wide innocent eyes. The sweep of the long lashes on the little white cheeks, that were all too white for baby flesh, seemed old and weird in the tiny face. Yet when the baby looked up and recognized its father it crowed and smiled, and the smile was wide and frank and lovable, like Tennelly's. There was nothing artificial about it. Courtland drew a long sigh of relief. ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... improvements like the "ultramicroscope" have greatly increased our knowledge of the invisible world of life. To the bacteria of a past generation have been added a multitude of microscopic animal microbes, such as that which causes Sleeping Sickness. The life-histories and the weird ways of many important parasites have been unravelled; and here again knowledge means mastery. To a degree which has almost surpassed expectations there has been a revelation of the intricacy of the stones and mortar of the house of life, and the microscopic study of germ-cells ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... Torlogh O'Brien The Home by the Churchyard Uncle Silas Checkmate Carmilla The Wyvern Mystery Guy Deverell Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery The Chronicles of Golden Friars In a Glass Darkly The Purcell Papers The Watcher and Other Weird Stories A Chronicle of Golden Friars and Other Stories Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery Green Tea and Other Stones Sheridan LeFanu: The Diabolic Genius Best Ghost Stories of J.S. LeFanu The Best Horror Stories The Vampire Lovers and Other Stories Ghost Stories and Mysteries ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... serves as a bridge to the patriotism which was the vital force in the Wars of Liberation and which, by well-marked gradations, destroyed the cosmopolitanism engendered by the French Revolution. Art went hand in hand with nature; the wild, weird landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, fascinating and specifically German, express the Romantic spirit fully as well as the delicate, spiritual, and thoroughly sane fancies of Philip Otto Runge, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... crowd of homeward-bound folk. As I saw them then it seemed that they were the shadows—impalpable, fantastic shadows—that divided for Mrs. Wessington's 'rickshaw to pass through. What we said during the course of that weird interview I cannot—indeed, I dare not—tell. Heatherlegh's comment would have been a short laugh and a remark that I had been "mashing a brain- eye-and-stomach chimera." It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable way a marvelously dear experience. Could it be possible, I ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... paper, or unmanageable package, and then his own interfered. It was a bright packing up—without a shadow, at least that could be called such. But once or twice, when with some quick movement of Faith's hand the diamonds flashed forth their weird light suddenly,—she did see that Mr. Linden's eyes went down, and that his mouth took a set which if not of pain, was at least sad. It never lasted long—and the next look was always one of most full pleasure at her. But the second time, Faith's ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... it was, twilight lingered over the silent moor, with its old Pictish mounds and burial places, giving them an indescribable aspect of something weird and eerie. No one could have been insensible to the mournful, brooding light and the unearthly stillness, and Margaret was trembling with a supernatural terror as she stood amid the solemn circle of gray stones and looked over the lake of Stennis ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... said Daddles, turning slowly about, with the pie in one hand, "my poor grandmother has often told me about it, and I did hope to see the weird, old custom practised on its native heath—won't ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... there came the familiar frou-frou of gentle surf on drying sands. The swell was dying away, the channel narrowing; dusky and weird on the starboard hand stretched leagues of new-risen sand. Two men only were on deck; the moon was quenched under the vanguard ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... was about to strike, when his eyes met Jeanne's. The young woman was smiling, happy to die for her lover. Her pale face beamed from out her black hair with weird beauty. Cayrol trembled. That look which he had loved, would he never see it again? That rosy mouth, whose smile he cherished, would it be hushed in death? A thousand thoughts of happy days came to his mind. His arm fell. A bitter flood rushed ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... it became clear to everyone that it was not a fire. As the weird illumination continued its fantastic gambols, little points of light began moving about ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... a man just come up from a mine—that look in Mary Fortune's eyes. He went out of her office like a man in a dream and wandered off by himself to think. But that was the one thing he could not negotiate, his brain refused to work. It was a whirl of weird flashes and forms and colors, like a futurist painting gone mad, but above it all when the turmoil had subsided was the thought of going back. He had told her when he left her that he would come around again, and that fixed idea had held to the end. But how? Under ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... is a strange, weird region. Here is a vast basin at the head of the Gulf of California which was once a part of the gulf, but is now separated from it by the delta of the Colorado River. With the drying up of the water, the centre of the basin was left a salt marsh more than two hundred and ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... weird stuff the Secretary Bird spouted when you showed Phillis to him, Kit? About her being forward, or coy, or something. It ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... hungry cows among their lower branches, and a damp veil of mist hangs perpetually over the scene, softening the landscape, but sometimes depressing the spirits. As the hours pass the place grows on you: a weird beauty begins to loom up from among the mist-wreaths, the jagged rocks, the restless waves, and you forget the desolate moor, which in itself displays attractions you will realize later, in the grandeur of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... to Durer's Melancholia, and was so perfect an image of a type which I, in my ignorance, supposed to be extinct, that while she rose before me I was almost as much startled as if I had seen a ghost. I afterwards concluded that Miss Ambient wasn't incapable of deriving pleasure from this weird effect, and I now believe that reflexion concerned in her having sunk again to her seat with her long lean but not ungraceful arms locked together in an archaic manner on her knees and her mournful eyes addressing me a message of intentness ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... volume, it is a product of the great year at Stowey. He himself told a friend in later years: "I had the whole of the two cantos in my mind before I began it," adding very truly, "certainly the first canto is more perfect, has more of the true wild weird spirit than ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... night at Yedo, as I was sitting, with a few Japanese friends, huddled round the imperfect heat of a brazier of charcoal, the conversation turned upon the story of Sogoro and upon ghostly apparitions in general. Many a weird tale was told that evening, and I noted down the three or four which follow, for the truth of which the narrators vouched with ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... composer for the violin was the German Ludwig Spohr (1784-1859), who was born the same year as the wizard Paganini, and who, although having less scintillant genius than the weird Italian, is believed to have had a more beneficent influence over violin playing in his treatment of the instrument. He set an example of purity of style and roundness of tone, and raised the violin concerto to its present dignity. His violin school ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... notorious wrong! I did but echo the words you spake a week agone. You marvel at my meaning. Nay, then, 'tis not less strange and weird than the tongue in which you tell of his perfections; less bizarre, if you will ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... the country, of course, so that their first view of Dorsham did not affect them as it would have affected a town child, but even they exclaimed with delight at the weird, wild beauty which opened out before them. The station appeared to have sprung up in the heart of a little forest of firs, as being the most sheltered spot it could alight upon in that open country, and it was not until they had walked a little way along the white road which skirted the woods, ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... once occupied by his father, and the moonlight shining through the tall old trees in the courtyard outside, that entering by the half-open blinds cast shadows like trembling lace on the wall opposite to him. It seemed to Sulpice then that he could hear the sounds of the weird demon's chase as told by old Catherine, the cook, in ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... which has heretofore been associated in the public mind with the Negro Minstrel business. Certain weird barbaric melodies, which defy all laws of musical composition, but which haunt one like a dream of a lonely night on some wild African river, are said to have been written by "OLD EMMET." Is there any such ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... white man had many years preceded him. "What, ho!" he muttered to himself; "methinks I see a paleface toying with a dusky maiden. I will have speech with him." On approaching near where the two were engaged in some weird incantation the voyageur overheard the dusky maiden impart a strange message to the paleface by her side. "From the stars I see in the firmament, the fixed stars that predominate in the configuration, I deduce the future destiny of man. 'Tis with thee. O Robert, to live always. This elixer which ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore
... too, now, very well. They were giving voice all around me, but never a gun could I see, for all my peering and searching around. Even the battery we had passed below was out of sight now. And it was a weird thing, and an uncanny thing to think of all that riot of sound around, and not a sight to be had of the batteries that were ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... a philosophical disquisition on some such lines did Phineas McPhail seek to initiate Doggie into the weird mysteries of the new social life. Doggie heard with his ears, but thought in terms of Durdlebury tea-parties. Nowhere in the mass could he find the spiritual outlook of his Irish poet-warrior. The individuals that may have had it kept it preciously to themselves. The ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... hours had passed away, long secret labour had been expended in the erection of this weird and tottering structure; but it was all the work of one hand. Night after night had the Pagan entered the deserted temples in the surrounding streets, and pillaged them of their contents to enrich his favoured shrine: the removal of the idols from their appointed places, which ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... accordions of all sizes joined them, the drumsticks beat upon the drums, the penny trumpets sounded, and the yellow flutes took up the melody on high notes, and bore it away through the trees. It was weird fairy-music, but quite delightful. The nearest approach to it that I know of above ground is to hear a wild dreamy air very well whistled ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... a child will make the holiest day more sacred still. Strike with hand of fire, O weird musician, thy harp strung with Apollo's golden hair; fill the vast cathedral aisles with symphonies sweet and dim, deft toucher of the organ keys; blow, bugler, blow, until thy silver notes do touch and kiss the moonlit waves, and charm the lovers wandering 'mid the vine-clad hills. ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... laid in, and the Indian rowers too, for as soon as they had ceased pulling they lay down forward to sleep, and that night the boat was moored to a tree on the eastern side of the stream, far-away from the haunts of civilised man, while Rob lay sleepless, listening to the strange and weird sounds which rose from the apparently impenetrable forest on the far-away ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn |
