"Weirdness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was riding not being able to keep pace with the rest. All the following day our route lay over stony plains of a bolder type than any we had yet seen, and when in the heart of the Hadendowah Hills we came suddenly upon a scene in its weirdness the most extraordinary and most appallingly grand I had ever seen. A huge wilderness lay before us like the dry bed of a vast ocean, whose waters by some subterranean convulsion had been sucked into ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... resigned and quiet again. And on the island other Norwegians have settled, voices of charming children sound sweetly in the solitude that echoed so awfully to the shrieks of Karen and Maren. But to the weirdness of the winter midnight something is added, a vision of two dim, reproachful shades who watch while an agonized ghost prowls eternally about the dilapidated houses at the beach's edge, close by the black, whispering water, seeking for the woman who has escaped him—escaped to bring upon him the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... greatly interested in the beautiful Renie during the walk along the beach. He had become deeply impressed with the purity, yet weirdness of her character. He had pressed the girl for some reminiscence of her early childhood, but she had no recollections beyond the sea and the fisherman's cabin where she had lived with old Tom Pearce ...
— The Dock Rats of New York • "Old Sleuth"
... pieces. Nevertheless there are few sagas, if there are any, which produce so distinct and individual an effect, which remind us so constantly that we are in Iceland and not elsewhere. In pathos and variety of interest it cannot touch Njala or Laxdaela: in what is called "weirdness," in wild vigour, it surpasses, I think, all others; and the supernatural element, which is very strong, contrasts, I think, advantageously with the more business-like ghostliness ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... first song, when I knew what to expect, I soon grew used to the strange surroundings. The weirdness and the mystery wore off, and I began to enjoy myself tremendously. The conditions were simply ideal; indeed, they were perfect, for the sentimental songs that soldiers always like best. Imagine how "Roamin' in the ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... more pitiable object of abject terror and cowardice. But the Indians did not seem in the least affected by their captive's misery. With stern, impassive faces they went on with their chanting, which steadily increased in weirdness as ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... the hallucination. Scarcely had he resumed his reading when the bell again tolled. He could stand it no longer, and must come upon the solution of the mystery. Bells do not toll at nine o'clock, and the weirdness of the affair disconcerted him. The nearer he drew to the foot of the stair, in his quest for information, the more foolish he felt his question would seem to the members of the family. But the question ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... you have been enthralled by weirdness?" he cried, as one who, all at once, has been profoundly moved. Yet laugh he did, in loud tones that were almost wild with strange elation. "Pardon me," he stammered, passing a trembling hand across his forehead. "You do not know the man that I have ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... flints examined. Paul knew what it all meant. The Shawnees would attack in the darkness, and there would be all the confusion of a midnight battle, when one might not be able to tell friend from friend nor foe from foe. The sense of weirdness and awe overcame him again. They were but the tiniest of atoms in that vast wilderness, which would be just the same to-morrow and the next day, ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... felt too keenly the weirdness of the whole situation to do more than lean my back against a tree and wait till his fancy wearied of the moonlight and silence. The stones about us, glooming darkly through the night, were not the most cheerful of companions, and when you add to this the soughing of the willows ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... for the shore in the steam pinnace, and on looking back beheld Mr. Burns actually standing up by the taffrail, still in his enormous woolly overcoat. The bright sunlight brought out his weirdness amazingly. He looked like a frightful and elaborate scarecrow set up on the poop of a death-stricken ship, set up to keep the seabirds from ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... moving fitfully; strange, racking gasps came from her throat. The other two were similarly affected. Almost frightened, held motionless by the weirdness of it, the ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... was the busy sound of loading going on, the soft silence of the night being broken by the querulous moaning and complaining of the camels as burden after burden was balanced across their backs, the uncanny noise sounding weird and strange, the weirdness applying, too, to the dimly seen, long-necked creatures, which rapidly grew into shapeless monsters writhing their long necks and snaky heads as seen in the darkness, till they looked like nothing so much as the strange fancies indistinctly ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... to the weirdness of the scene. It all seemed unreal—the dim glow from the spluttering wood, freshly put on, the beautiful shining copper coffee-pot, the dark obscurity on the top of the oven. The low ceiling with its massive wooden beams, the table spread for the early breakfast—or maybe the remnants ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... of this type, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of the Year 1793, and Edgar Huntly. The results of his own experience with the yellow fever plague in Philadelphia give an American touch to Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, and at the same time add the Gothic element of weirdness and horror. Arthur Mervyn is far the better ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... New York Sun says: "To readers who care for a really good detective story 'The Circular Staircase' can be recommended without reservation." The Philadelphia Record declares that "The Circular Staircase" deserves the laurels for thrills, for weirdness and things unexplained ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... often but enhances the beauty and grandeur of mountains. When the lower parts are hidden, and the peaks stand out above the clouds, they look much loftier than if the whole mountain side is visible. The gloom lends a weirdness and mystery to the scene, while the flying clouds ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... meeting-hall. We were close to the window, in the full glare of daylight. A few feet off the room was in semi-darkness which, still farther off, lapsed into night. As the plush cushions stretched their lengths into the deepening gloom their live red died away. There was a touch of weirdness to the scene, adding to the ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... empty. Not a bit of furniture; a blank, bare apartment with an old-fashioned high ceiling. Nothing else. Whatever the weirdness and adventure, Jerome was getting nowhere. The old lady was still clinging to his ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... the crimson ruby of thy lips, I feel the witching weirdness of thy breath! I droop! I sink into my soul's eclipse,— I fall ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... path led downhill from the cleared space. Trix set off down it, swinging her hat airily by the brim the while. Presently the sense of uncanniness abated somewhat; the elfin in her went out to meet the weirdness of the wood. ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... Edgar Poe carried it himself to Mr. Graham and offered it for the magazine. Mr. Graham promised to examine it and give him an answer next day. That night he read it over several times, but for the life of him he could not make up his mind about it. Its weirdness, its music, its despair, affected him greatly. But Mr. Graham was a business man and he doubted whether, from a business point of view, the poem was of value. Would people like it? Would it take? He would consult Griswold about it—Griswold was a man of safe judgment ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... look upon the public and private life of this incredible world, your first sensation would be dizziness, not to mention the weirdness of all sights that would confront you at every turn. People would seem to be in a mad rush, and it would appear that all business is done with ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... extended arms, and, in his great hands, he bears an elephant's head, a twisted serpent, a human skull, and a bird resembling a heron. The moon, shedding her light on the profile of this statue, serves to augment the weirdness of its aspect. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... and stiff gestures, seemed to own a sort of factitious life, due to the rays of the setting sun, and the ruddy hue which time lends to marble in warm climates. The inscriptions in antique characters, graven beside them after the manner of legends, enhanced still more the mysterious weirdness of the long procession of figures ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... clasping hands they faced it. With awful rapidity it approached, increasing, deepening, pervading the air to the sky, bellowing as if from the centre of the earth, filling their ears with its unutterable and penetrating power, and appalling their hearts by its supernatural weirdness. They shrank before it down the balcony and through the window into the drawing-room, ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... I had been reading this engrossing narrative, I had thought that I had seen across the page streaks of shade, which the weirdness of the subject had made to seem like the shadow of a hand. On the first of these occasions I found that the illusion came from the fringe of green silk around the lamp; but on the second I had looked up, and my eyes had lit on the mummy hand across the room on which the ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... the weirdness of the thing, the servants could not help laughing. Sure that he had been bewitched, they now seized him, and pulled him up on his feet, and by main force hurried him back to the temple,—where he was immediately relieved of his wet clothes, by order of the priest. Then the priest insisted upon ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... feeling of awe that seemed to over-master everything, while the very fact that where he had plainly made out the movement of figures as they evidently sought concealment, all was now motionless, and not a leaf waved or was pressed aside, added to the weirdness of his position, and made him draw farther back in the full expectation that the next moment the vivid green of the surroundings would be cut by a flash of light and then turn dim as it was deadened by the ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... light in the eyes of the giant figure changed from white to a deep blood-red, illuminating the strange place with a ruddy glow that increased its weirdness, and was a signal for a large number of sacrifices. Indeed, the worshippers now lost their self-control absolutely, and when the horrible mouth, dripping with blood, again unclosed, there was such a press of those anxious to ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... of the fun and success of the sturgeon fishing the boys were simply wild in anticipation of the events of the coming night. The very uncertainty and weirdness of it had a fascination for them that made it impossible for them to shut their eyes and have a short sleep in the early hours of the evening, as Mr Ross suggested. The very idea of sleeping seemed an utter impossibility. So they kept awake, and were alert and watchful on ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... their own denouements are what might be called "stories of premonition," in which the interest depends upon comparing actual events to the prophecy of dreams or some other mystical agency. In such tales the real interest is usually in the weirdness of the whole affair—though, to be sure, they do not always turn out as they are expected to. For, after all, this introduction of surprise into fiction is simply an imitation of nature, and "it is the unexpected ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... him wonderingly. If he were aware of the weirdness of their situation no sign betrayed it. The crackling flames mounted straight in the air, the smoke made a pillar reaching into the darkness. Fifteen paces from Stonor lay his prisoner, staring unwinkingly at him with eyes that glittered with hatred; and from all around them ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... kept bachelor's hall, so to speak. We found him seated on a keg, by the side of an enormous caldron that might have contained the witches' compound, judging from the strange forms of steam that arose from it, while the lurid flames beneath, fed by the oily drippings, lent a still greater weirdness to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... White in the little wheelhouse, the mournful chuckle of the Southern nightingale, as it sounded time after time from the cavernous darkness of the jungle shore seemed to strike at him personally with a note of knowing mockery. The weirdness and the elusiveness of the scene seemed the inevitable ending of the strange day. On the rippling water the moonbeams twinkled like silvery fairy sprites at play; and in the junglelike woods on the shores yawned great caverns of darkness, their evil suggestiveness ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... silence fell on all, and the pillars and roof cast great ghostly shadows on the floor, conjuring up mighty forms of weirdness, ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... strangeness of things in Japan produces (in certain minds, at least) a queer thrill impossible to describe,—a feeling of weirdness which comes to us only with the perception of the totally unfamiliar. You find yourself moving through queer small streets full of odd small people, wearing robes and sandals of extraordinary shapes; and you can scarcely distinguish the sexes at ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... and his pay was doubled. More work rushed in, and Gustave illustrated serial after serial with ease and surety, giving to every picture a wildness and weirdness and awful comicality. The work was unlike anything ever before seen in Paris: every one was saying, "What next!" and to add to the interest, Philipon, from time to time, wrote articles for various publications concerning "the child illustrator" ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... scholars in the University of Helsingfors (where there is now a great and flourishing university) began to take literary interest in the popular songs of Finland. For years the people had been singing extraordinary songs full of a strange beauty and weirdness quite unlike any other popular songs of Europe; and for centuries professional singers had been wandering about the country teaching these songs to the accompaniment of a kind of biwa called Kantela. The scholars ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... out-posts, and the flares dropped from scores of planes, passing and repassing in the darkness overhead, can never be forgotten. It was a nightly and wonderful Fourth of July celebration, enhanced by the weirdness ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... the heavy canvas from circumference to tent pole. She bought the tickets; they entered the circular enclosure where the animals were kept; where the strong beams of the sun, in trying to force their way through the canvas roof, created an unnatural, jaundiced twilight, the weirdness of which was somehow enhanced by the hoarse, amazingly penetrating growls of beasts. Suddenly a lion near them raised a shaggy head, emitting a series ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to, Das fremde Kind, a curious mixture of reality and fairyland, and Der Zusammenhang der Dinge, which is not devoid of interest. Several of the things in this collection suggest comparison with Poe's writings for weirdness and bizarre imaginative power, though of course there are wide differences between the ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... something of a sigh of relief, and realized suddenly that the dusk was upon me, for the window was grey and unfriendly. Then 'round at the big, empty room, over the double barrier of electric and candle light. I had an abrupt, extraordinary sense of weirdness thrust upon me—in the air, you know; as it were, a sense of something inhuman impending. The room was full of the stench of bruised ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... room is stark bare, save for two mattresses, a heap of disheveled bed clothes, and two men. The hours are small and the dim, guarded light, intended to soften, probably intensifies the weirdness of the picture. The suspiciously plain woodwork is enameled in a dull monochrome. The windows are guarded with protecting screens. One man, an attendant, lies orderly on his pallet; the other, a slender figure in pajamas, crouches in a corner. His hair is bestraggled; his face is livid; ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... and inborn snobbishness. And that being assumed, how did I stand with regard to Rosetta Rosa? Was the thing a coincidence, or had I indeed crossed her path pursuant to some strange decree of Fate—a decree which Emmeline had divined or guessed or presaged? There was a certain weirdness about Emmeline that ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... mechanically uttered, suggested something, and I thought that if they were in for weirdness I would give them as much weirdness as they could ask for. "When you get along toward fifty you'll find that the foot you've still got out of the grave doesn't work so lively as it used. Besides, I was interested in the night effect. It's so gloriously ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... ordinary man the night with its dusk, the wilderness with its ghostly tree trunks, and the silence would have been full of weirdness and awe, black with omens and presages. Few would not have chilled to the marrow to be alone there, but to Henry it brought only hope and the thrill of exultation. He had no sense of loneliness, the forest hid no secrets for him; ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... flickering light of torches. The rich clothing of the participants loses nothing of its beauty in this dim light, while the bells and rattles with which each dancer surrounds arms, legs and ankles, add to the din and weirdness of the occasion. Before the dance has progressed far the musicians begin to keep time with their feet and frequently dance away from their instruments, circle, and then return to continue ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... in the Rue Morgue." I do not see how either of those could be bettered. But I would not admit perfect excellence to any other of his stories. These two have a proportion and a perspective which are lacking in the others, the horror or weirdness of the idea intensified by the coolness of the narrator and of the principal actor, Dupin in the one case and Le Grand in the other. The same may be said of Bret Harte, also one of those great short story tellers who proved himself incapable of a longer flight. He was always like one of his own ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that evil was sure to befall. A minute's exploration showed that the cave did not extend 30 feet, and that it was dry, and resonant with "the whispering sound of the cool colonnade," with no suggestion of unwholesomeness or weirdness. But the blacks still pass it by. The legend is as indestructible as the odour of attar of roses. Although the boys persist in their account of the origin of the cave, it is known to them as "Coo-bee co-tan-you," which signifies ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... "There is not the weirdness in the scenery here, Helga, as further north, on the west coast of Norway. The hills here are rounder in form, as if by the action of ice ages ago," said Hardy. "Your father has often explained to you the action of glaciers, and how the ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... schoolmaster, published a series of poems, which he claimed to have translated from an old manuscript, the work of Ossian, a Gaelic poet of the third century. This so-called translation in prose may have been forged either in whole or in part; but the weirdness, strange imagery, melancholy, and "other-world talk of ghosts riding on the tempest at nightfall," had a ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... often the case when he visited the cabin, for the apes had no love for it; the story of the thunder-stick having lost nothing in the telling during these ten years had quite surrounded the white man's deserted abode with an atmosphere of weirdness and terror for ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a certain picturesque weirdness in these night marches in the desert—when one could dissociate one's self from the discomforts. The camel men had some sad, plaintive songs of their own—quite melodious and in good tune with the accompaniment ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... minutes before. There was nothing within sight calculated to awaken distrust, and yet a feeling of distrust (the first I had really felt) had come with the look he had thrown above and around the mosque-like interior of the room he called his study. Was it the calm confidence he showed, or the weirdness of finding myself amid Oriental splendors and under the influence of night effects in high day and within sound of the clanging street cars and all the accompanying bustle of every-day traffic? It is hard to say; but from this moment on I found myself affected by a vague affright, ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... heard a darkie's howl of terror at what he believes to be an apparition it is utterly impossible to convey any idea of its weirdness. ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... indeed it is, having too this strange interest, that though mainly characterised by a great plainness and simplicity of thought, and, in the earlier stages, of expression, we feel, oftentimes, a sudden weirdness, a strange glamour shoots across the poem when the tale seems to open for a moment into mysterious depths, druidic secrets veiled by time, unsunned caves of thought, indicating a still deeper range of feeling, a still ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... There wasn't any weirdness about the ship when I woke in the sunlight. She was old and slow and rather small. She carried Lumsden (master), Mercer (mate), a crew that seemed no better and no worse than any other crew, and the old gentleman who had thrown me the rope the night before, and who seemed to think that ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... began to speak in whispers, for the silence and weirdness of the fog quieted us all. And, moreover, when the fog lifted we had seen no ship, though there must be one close to ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... weirdness held him. A heavy mist enveloped its crown, that steaming mist which ever hung above the suspended lake. It was denser now than usual. It had been growing denser for the last two days, and, in a vague way, he supposed that those ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... was on the spot of its birth. Far back in the cave—upstairs in the garret, as they facetiously called it—were three or four biggish boys, who were undressed, but had not lain down. One of them, moving about with a flickering light in his hand, contributed greatly to the weirdness of the scene. Beside the child spoken of, we were told of another birth in the cave, and we heard also of a recent death there, that of a little child from typhus. The Procurator-Fiscal saw this dead child ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... housemaids had been turned into it with their dust- pans and feather-brushes. I almost hesitated to light a cigarette and was doubly startled when, in the act of doing so, I suddenly saw the sister of my host, who had, at the best, something of the weirdness of an apparition, stand before me. She might have been posing for her photograph. Her sad-coloured robe arranged itself in serpentine folds at her feet; her hands locked themselves listlessly together in front; her chin rested on a cinque-cento ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... low hill covered with scrub oak, and across part of a narrow valley, through which wound a small, marsh-bordered stream. The night was sultry, and the dampness of the swamp formed in a shallow strata of fog, filling this valley, but not rising above the level of the uplands. To add to the weirdness of his surroundings, the thin crescent of a new moon threw a faint light over all and outlined the winding turns of this mist-filled gorge. Away to the northward a belt of dark clouds emitted frequent flashes of heat lightning, and occasional sharp reports along ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... she said, infusing just the right shade of weirdness into her voice, "about a man who saw the devil. Now, ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... told her how a French author who has written well and largely of this odd corner of the earth, called these steep dark streets, "mysterious staircases leading to silence," which greatly impressed them all as entirely descriptive of their weirdness. ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... Unity, storming the gates of heaven. And fused with these merely physical memories, there flowed into the music the peace of Sabbath evenings and shining candles, the love and wonder of childhood's faith, the fantasy of Rabbinic legend, the weirdness of penitential prayers in raw winter dawns, the holy joy of the promised Zion, when God would wipe away the tears ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... pack. No wonder that the bull-roarer is sometimes used to bring luck in a mystic way to hunters. More commonly, however, at the present day, the bull-roarer serves another type of mystic purpose, its noise, which is so suggestive of thunder or wind, with a superadded touch of weirdness and general mystery, fitting it to play a leading part in rain-making ceremonies. From these not improbably have developed all sorts of other ceremonies connected with making vegetation and the crops grow, and with making the ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... to say? As they waited, a clock struck from some neighboring steeple—three sonorous peals! The two directors glanced at each other. Doubtless they felt the weirdness of the hour as well as of the occasion. It was a new experience for ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... down. The mettle of those California-bred horses was wonderful; the quick beating of their hoofs upon the graveled road was as regular as the motion of machinery, steam-driven. It was an exciting ride, and there was a weirdness in the sound of the night-breeze floating by us, and ghostly, shapes seemed looking at us from above and below, as we wound our way through the hills, while the bright stars shone like funeral-tapers over a world of death. Death! ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... the finer taste, left New York nowhere; and the good lady, as the exponent of this doctrine—which she set forth at a certain length—made, obviously, to Densher's mind, her nearest approach to supplying the weirdness in which Milly's absence had left them deficient. She made it indeed effective for him by suddenly addressing him. "You know nothing, sir—but not the least ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... out to all who beat their wives and children!" chanted Jack. At the same time he raised his hand to his head and Fred played tremulous music on the harmonica, lending a weirdness to the scene. ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young
... which she had approached the coffin of her dead lover were very different from the blind manner in which she stumbled back to his bier, and the hand which a second time raised the lantern trembled so that its wavering light shed an added weirdness on the still face, so strange to her eyes, and stranger still to ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... gravedigger's work, and trying to toss shovelfuls of wet sand up to windward. At every tumble of the ship you could see vaguely in the dim light men falling down with a great flourish of shovels. One of the ship's boys (we had two), impressed by the weirdness of the scene, wept as if his heart would break. We could hear him blubbering ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... temple, or Joss-house, the last devotee had departed. The hanging lights had been dimmed and now the fantastic shapes with which the place was decorated, seen in the subdued light, stood out in all their shadowy weirdness. ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... on the river a great deal more," returns Violet. "It is so tranquil and soothing, and there is a suggestive weirdness in it, as if you were going on to ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... things, and he was naturally eager to get a sight of another creature of the same species. Then a view at close quarters of the swamp added further to his excitement, for even then, in the dazzling glare of the morning sun, there was a certain suggestion of weirdness and uncanniness about the place that appealed very strongly to his imagination. To young, prosaic Dick Cavendish, a sailor pure and simple, whose only knowledge of science was that connected with navigation, the swamp was just—well, a swamp, and nothing ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... who now also had climbed out of the water. His elongated form only partly clothed, his garments dripping and clinging to his slim body, increased the weirdness of his appearance. ...
— Go Ahead Boys and the Racing Motorboat • Ross Kay
... up as stiff as a church, but there was a certain indescribable hollowness in the sound of it—that is the only fitting term I can find to apply—that was quite unlike anything that I had heard before, and that somehow seemed, in its weirdness, to indisputably forebode disaster. ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... could be heard getting up hurriedly, stumbling against something, and Levin saw, facing him in the doorway, the big, scared eyes, and the huge, thin, stooping figure of his brother, so familiar, and yet astonishing in its weirdness and sickliness. ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... spiel no more—until the morrow brought its fresh crowd of amusement seekers, and the Proprietor led the way into the Arena. Brandu and his two native assistants were carrying the boxes which contained the snakes into the big exhibition cage, and, when the three men joined them, the weirdness of the surroundings made a profound impression upon the Stranger. All of the lights in the Arena were extinguished, with the exception of the small cluster directly over their heads, and pairs of luminous spots from the great semicircle of ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... Despite the suggestion of weirdness the goblin-like scene created in her mind, the grimaces and antics of the manikin, and the sulkily responsive movements of the bear, were too absurd for anything. She thought of Rory's story of how the "b'ar" resented being left out of its share in Pepin's castor-oil; and was so tickled ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... you come from?" inquired Antonia, feeling the weirdness of her visitor as she had never felt it in the hall ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Chopin's best compositions, and in its way no less a masterpiece than these. Unfettered by the scheme of a definite form such as the sonata or concerto, the composer develops in the Fantaisie, Op. 49 (published in November, 1841), his thought with masterly freedom. There is an enthralling weirdness about this work, a weirdness made up of force of passion and an indescribable fantastic waywardness. Nothing more common than the name of Fantasia, here we have the thing! The music falls on our ears like the insuppressible outpouring of a being stirred to its heart's core, and full of immeasurable ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... 'In the weirdness of the story, in the faithfulness with which the characters are depicted, and in force of style, it closely ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... be imagination, or pathos, or weirdness, or some form of humour, or a personal charm in the character that awakens the soul of Henry Irving and calls forth his best and finest powers. There is little of that quality in Shylock. But Henry Irving ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... four-wheeled cab standing by the curbstone with no one on the box, seemed cast out into the gutter on account of irremediable decay. Mrs Verloc recognised the conveyance. Its aspect was so profoundly lamentable, with such a perfection of grotesque misery and weirdness of macabre detail, as if it were the Cab of Death itself, that Mrs Verloc, with that ready compassion of a woman for a horse (when she is not sitting behind him), ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... daunt the heart of many a brave man, but Henry Ware was not appalled. His primeval instincts had risen to the surface again. He saw the grandeur of it rather than the weirdness and danger. Like Long Jim, though less outspoken, he had been troubled by the intrigue, the shiftiness, and the false seeming of New Orleans, and now his spirit replied to the battle of the elements. He was the ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... O'Brien, the weird tales of writers of all tongues have been thoroughly sifted by me in the course of my reading, and I say to you now that in the whole of my life I never read one story, one paragraph, one line, that could approach in vivid delineation, in weirdness of conception, in anything, in any quality which goes to make up the truly great story, that story which came into my hands as I have told you. I read it once and was amazed. I read it a second time and was—tempted. It was mine. The ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... are countless adventures and journeys, "transformations of fair females into foul fiends, conversions wholesale and individual, allegorical visions, miracles, and portents. Eastern splendor and northern weirdness, angelry and deviltry, together with abundant fighting and quite a phenomenal amount of swooning, which seem to reflect a strange medley of Celtic, pagan, and mythological traditions, and Christian legends and mysticism, alternate in a kaleidoscopic maze that defies the symmetry ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... of eternity; winds held their breath; slow waveless caressed the bland brown beach with a sound as of kisses and whispers. To one who found himself alone, beyond the limits of the village and beyond the hearing of its voices,—the vast silence, the vast light, seemed full of weirdness. And these hushes, these transparencies, do not always inspire a causeless apprehension: they are omens sometimes—omens of coming tempest. Nature,—incomprehensible Sphinx!—before her mightiest bursts of rage, ever puts forth her divinest ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... odorous. Nevertheless, they both deemed it necessary to enwrap themselves in the single blanket. The eye beamed fitfully upon them, occasionally a wave of lambent tremulousness passed across it; its weirdness was an excuse for their drawing nearer each other ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte |
