"Basilisk" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they were very beautiful. The eyelashes were long and perfect, and the long, steady, unabashed gaze with which she would look into the face of her admirer fascinated while it frightened him. She was a basilisk from whom an ardent lover of beauty could make no escape. Her nose and mouth and teeth and chin and neck and bust were perfect, much more so at twenty-eight than they had been at eighteen. What wonder that with such charms still glowing in her ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... sorry that we were not dining "at home." At least they might have left me alone there. That he did not turn to stone as he uttered these words was not my fault; at least I fixed upon him such basilisk eyes as I was capable of. What an idea! To refuse a dinner with my P. C. uncle for his sake! Grandmother, too, discovered that I also must ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... she executes it in a manner sufficiently maladroit. In passing the strap over the high coon-skin cap, her fingers become entangled in the brown curls beneath. Her eyes are not directed that way: they are gazing with a basilisk glance into the eyes ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... dislike for Lady Pinkerton, and she for me. I hate those cold, shallow eyes, and clothes drenched in scent, and basilisk pink faces whitened with powder which such women have or develop. When I look at her I think of all her frightful books, and the frightful serial she has even now running in the Pink Pictorial, and I shudder (unobtrusively, ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... except Murillo, whose St. John I should like to own. As far as my own pleasure is concerned, I could not say as much for any other picture; for I have always found an infinite weariness and disgust resulting from a picture being too frequently before my eyes. I had rather see a basilisk, for instance, than the very best of those old, familiar pictures in the Boston Athenaeum; and most of those in the National Gallery might soon affect me in ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... seriously indisposed by indolence and intemperance, he requested to know what he was to do, and the doctor ordered him to eat a basilisk, stewed in rose water, which he asserted would effect a complete cure. His slaves searched in vain for a basilisk; at last they met with Zadig, who was introduced to this mighty lord, and spoke to him ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... glowworms had gathered. And more than once, in passing, Eve delayed a moment, and almost caught that gaze; she was sensible of his presence there, felt it, as she might have felt an apparition, as if the eyes were those of a basilisk and she were fascinated to look and look again, till filled with a strange fear and unrest. It grew late; by-and-by, before they separated, Eve sang. It would have been impossible for her to say why she chose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... "Mount Calybe" for iron, are characteristic of monkish geographical science; the recipe for the making of Spanish gold is interesting, as affording us a clew to the meaning of the mediaeval traditions respecting the basilisk. Pliny says nothing about the hatching of this chimera from cocks' eggs, and ascribes the power of killing at sight to a different animal, the catoblepas, whose head, fortunately, was so heavy that it could not be held up. Probably the word "basiliscus" in Theophilus ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... goat-sucker, a Nycteribius, I believe, who goes by the name of jumby-bird among the English Negroes: and no wonder; for most ghostly and horrible is his cry. But worse: he has but one eye, and a glance from that glaring eye, as from the basilisk of old, is certain death: and worse still, he can turn off its light as a policeman does his lantern, and become instantly invisible: opinions which, if verified by experiment, are not always found to be in accordance ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... of an effort to control himself under Britt's basilisk stare, Vaniman showed how much ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... he), keep the deposit, avoid profane novelties of words.' Avoid (quoth he) as a viper, as a scorpion, as a basilisk, lest they infect thee not only by touching, but also with their very eyes and breath. What is meant by avoid?[370] that is, not so much as to eat with any such. What importeth this avoid? 'If any man (quoth he) come unto ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... didn't trouble his friends for information on natural history, not for a playwright," said Hall. "I myself should not mind what liberty I took with the cuckoo, the bee, or even the basilisk. I should not trouble you for accurate information on the subject; I should not even mind saying the cuckoo lays eggs in its own nest if ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... That exceeding comeliness Which their fancies doth so strike, They borrow language of dislike; And, instead of Dearest Miss, Jewel, Honey, Sweetheart, Bliss, And those forms of old admiring, Call her Cockatrice and Siren, Basilisk, and all that's evil, Witch, Hyena, Mermaid, Devil, Ethiop, Wench, and Blackamoor, Monkey, Ape, and twenty more; Friendly Trait'ress, loving Foe— Not that she is truly so, But no other way they know A contentment to express, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... paused with a basilisk stare till Renouard had conceded a casual: "I dare say," and only then went on to explain that old Dunster, during his European tour, had been made rather a lion of in London, where he stayed with the Moorsoms—he meant the father ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... of that night, none has left a more unpleasant odour in my memory than the manner of that woman in the chamber of death. Her voice was incredibly hard. Her dull, basilisk eyes, seeking in mine the answers to her questions, gave me an eerie sensation that makes my blood run cold whenever I ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... find, under the head of the medicining of the body, some things on the subject of medicine in general, which could be better said there than here, because the wrath of professional dignitaries,—the eye of the 'basilisk,' was not perhaps quite so terrible in that quarter then, as it was in some others. For though 'the Doctors' in that department, did manage, in the dark ages, to possess themselves of certain weapons of their own, which are said to have proved, on the whole, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... strange mill-stone, the human soul, than I can explain. Any one who has ever seen an old fortune-teller of "the people" keeping some simple-minded maiden by the hand, while she holds her by her glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner, with a basilisk stare, will agree with me. As Scheele de Vere writes, "It must not be forgotten that the human eye has, beyond question, often a power which far transcends the ordinary purposes of sight, and approaches ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... be the Devil of a Lady, for she bears Malice, and will never forgive me, that I would not let her be an Angel; but like a very Devil as she is, she endeavours to kill me at a Distance; and indeed the Poison of her Eyes, (Basilisk-like) is very strong, and she has a strange Influence upon me; but I that know her to be a Devil, strive very hard with my self to drive the Memory of ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... affair. The idea that her son should have called every day for a week on a married lady, beautiful and attractive, would have filled her with alarm amounting almost to horror. Yet such was the innocent case. It might at the first glance seem difficult to reconcile the rival charms of the Basilisk and Lady Bertie and Bellair, and to understand how Tancred could be so interested in the preparations for a voyage which was to bear him from the individual in whose society he found a daily gratification. But the truth is, that Lady Bertie and Bellair was the only person who ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... stairs to open the door, and shortly afterward Maria Remedios, who was not now a woman but a basilisk enveloped in a mantle, entered Dona Perfecta's room. Her face, ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... knee-joints, and broad shoulders; his face was round, tanned, and pitted by the small-pox; his chin was straight, his lips had no curves, his teeth were white; his eyes had that calm, devouring expression which people attribute to the basilisk; his forehead, full of transverse wrinkles, was not without certain significant protuberances; his yellow-grayish hair was said to be silver and gold by certain young people who did not realize the impropriety of making a jest about Monsieur Grandet. ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... trembled, dropped his wine-glass from his hand, and levelled at Thaddeus the glance of a basilisk. The Assessor was less noisy and less given to gestures than the Notary, thinner and shorter; but he was terrible at masquerade, ball, or village diet, for they said of him that he had a sting in his tongue. He could make up such witty jests that you might have had them ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... his dark basilisk-like eyes on the soldier, gazed a moment, as if to read his soul; then he jerked a thumb backward, over his own shoulder, and said, with a ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... or royal ensign of the Pharaohs, often occurs on the monuments—a serpent in folds, with his head raised erect above the folds. The basilisk was the Phoenix of the serpent-tribe; and the vase or urn was probably the vessel, shaped like a cucumber, with a projecting spout, out of which, on the monuments of Egypt, the priests are represented ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the rod which smote you is broken, for out of the serpent's root shall come forth a basilisk, whose fruit is a ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... hand was put out to push back the padded shutters. A few minutes later, Esther, in her dressing-gown, came to breathe the air, leaning on Lucien; any one who saw them might have taken them for the originals of some pretty English vignette. Esther was the first to recognize the basilisk eyes of the Spanish priest; and the poor creature, stricken as if she had been shot, gave ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... is Conway Castle in Wales, where abides Earl Osmond, a feudal tyrant of the "Otranto" type, who is planning an incestuous marriage with his own niece, concerning which he thus soliloquizes: "What though she prefer a basilisk's kiss to mine? Because my short-lived joy may cause her eternal sorrow, shall I reject those pleasures sought so long, desired so earnestly? That will I not, by Heaven! Mine she is, and mine she shall be, though Reginald's ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... gaily and happily amongst the plants and flowers that were blooming in the balcony, but it gradually became more and more slow on the wing, and at last poised itself unusually steadily for an insect of its class. Below it, on the window sill, near the wall, with head erect, and its little basilisk eyes upturned towards the lovely fly, crouched a chameleon lizard, its beautiful body, when I first looked at it, was a bright sea-green. It moved into the sunshine, a little away from the shade of the laurel bush, which grew on the side it first appeared on, and suddenly the back became transparent ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various |
