"Contorted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Falcon was not in existence. And now as the Luso steamed along shore, no external change appeared. A bird's-eye view of the islet suggests a podao or Madeiran billhook, about six miles by three. The tool's broken point is the Ilha da Cima, facing to north-east, a contorted pile which resembles a magnified cinder. The handle is the Ilheu Baixo, to the south; and the blade is the tract of yellow sandy lowlands—the sole specimen of its sort in the Madeiras—connecting the extremities. ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... of mystery and unreality stole over Mr. Chalk. He began to think that he must be dreaming. He turned and looked at Mr. Duckett, and Mr. Duckett, trying to smile at him, contorted his face so horribly that he shrank back appalled. He looked about him and saw that they were now in open water and drawing gradually away from the land. The stillness and mystery became unbearable, and with an air of resolution he cocked his rifle and proceeded ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... still, if we chose, these two rooms could be Margaret's and mine, and the corridor as well, with a beautiful balcony which commanded an enchanting view of the rich Pusterthal up and down, right and left, with a row of jagged, contorted dolomite mountains thrown into the bargain. All this was to be ours if only the Hofbauer would have us. So down we went, casting longing looks around us—down into the entrance-hall, where a crowd of poor people were streaming out of the stube, the parlor of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... by one, Edgarton handed the articles to her, and then sank down on the foot of her bed with his thin-lipped mouth contorted into a rather mirthless grin. "Don't care much for your old father, ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... danced it was far less graceful, and at times bordered on the grotesque. They contorted and twisted themselves out of all semblance to the human body; they made their abdominal muscles rise and fall with the music; they seemed at times to put the body out of joint, and then reset it properly with jerks and jumps and sudden fierce movements; they twitched, and twisted, ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... froth that oozed from the gaping mouth, and tried to compose decently the contorted figure. I covered the face. Then I started on my last mission, for now I knew the door. I had bought the knowledge dearly, and I meant to use it for my own purpose, careless of what violence might be necessary to ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... For hours his contorted and hideous features lay grinning back at those in the stern of the little boat, until Jane Porter could endure the sight no longer. "Can you not drop his ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... silent laughter—hideous laughter that contorted his visage and twisted his body in ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... His figure was drooping; his face purple and contorted, for one of the troopers had crammed his scarf into the man's mouth, half strangling him. As he was led past us, with a sudden frantic effort, fit to dislocate his jaw, he disgorged the gag to ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... always been powerfully affected by the touch of different metals, and now this phenomenon was intensified a thousand-fold. The placing of a magnet on her forehead caused her features to be contorted as though by a stroke of paralysis; contact with glass and sand made her cataleptic. Once she was found seated on a sandstone bench, unable to move hand or foot. About this time also she acquired the faculty of crystal-gazing; that is to say, by looking into a bowl of water she could correctly ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... rist aisy!' said Mickey, as he saw the hunter's face contorted with pain, as he vainly struggled in the water, 'and it's ourselves that 'll take the good ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... the living Christ the expression of infinite goodness, ready for sacrifice; so in his Crucifixions, instead of following the example of his contemporaries, who depicted Christ already dead, with marks of sorrow on His features, and contorted by the spasm of a violent death; he represented Him living, calm and serene, conscious of the sacrifice He completed, and full of joy ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... imitator of the Eclogues. But he possesses qualities which render his work far more attractive than that of Calpurnius. He is a genuine enthusiast, with a real love of the countryside and a charming affection for flowers. And as a stylist he is modest. He makes no attempt at display, no contorted striving after originality. His verse is clear and simple as his tastes. He is content to follow humbly in the footsteps of his great master, the 'starry' Vergil.[371] He imitates and even plagiarizes[372] because he loves, not because it is the fashion. He shows no ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... told you not." Without doubt, they had gained very little by their visit; but then I had gained less than nothing, and had been bitterly dispirited into the bargain. Ronald had stuck to his guns and refused me to the last. It was no news; but, on the other hand, it could not be contorted into good news. I was now certain that during my temporary absence in France, all irons would be put into the fire, and the world turned upside down, to make Flora disown the obtrusive Frenchman and accept Chevenix. Without doubt she would resist these instances: but the thought of them did ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair. Nowhere did we stop long enough to get a particularized impression, but the general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me. It was like a weary ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... to three principal groups, based upon the form of the foliage: (1) Plain varieties, in which the leaves are nearly as they are in nature; (2) moss-curled varieties in which they are curiously and pleasingly contorted; and (3) fern leaved, in which the foliage is not curled, but much divided into ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... the primeval waters. A painting on the mummy case of one Betuhamon, now in the Turin Museum, illustrates, in the graphic manner so characteristic of the Egyptians, this act of creation. As Maspero(2) points out, the struggle of Sibu resulted in contorted attitudes to which the irregularities of the earth's surface are ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... London. Although Donne is not quite free from this fault, he is much freer than either of his contemporaries, Regnier or Hall. And the rough vigour of his sketches and single lines is admirable. Yet it is as rough as it is vigorous; and the breakneck versification and contorted phrase of his satires, softened a little in Hall, roughened again and to a much greater degree in Marston, and reaching, as far as phrase goes, a rare extreme in the Transformed Metamorphosis of Cyril Tourneur, have been the subject of a great deal of discussion. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... that the servants were bringing in an array of dishes suitable for a feast. Shark's fins preceded expensive pickled eggs and followed choice bird's-nest soup. What could the change mean? Simply that his complimentary remark, maimed and contorted beyond recognition by ill-informed or mischievous persons, had travelled to Li's ears, and that he had therefore determined to treat his guest ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... lay on his bed motionless. Sound asleep? No, not merely asleep—the twisted unnatural lie of the limbs, the contorted legs, the one arm drooping listlessly but stiffly over the side of the berth, told of a deeper, ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... boys say, at the British Museum or the London Library, may coexist with a profound ignorance of all that is really worth knowing. It sounds very intellectual to chatter about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, or to scoff at St. John's "senile iterations and contorted metaphysics"; but, when a clergyman read St. Paul's eulogy on Charity, instead of an address, at the end of a fashionable wedding, one of his hearers said, "How very appropriate that was! Where did you get it from?" Everyone ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... see how on every slippery ledge the ranks of horses had broken like waves to fall in heaps like rows of seaweed, tumbled, contorted, and grinning. Their dried skins had taken on the color of the soil, so that I sometimes set foot upon them without realizing what they were. Many of them had saddles on and nearly all had lead-ropes. Some of them had even been tied to ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... fellow," Hanlon reached down and lifted the little dog onto his lap, where the latter wriggled and contorted in an ecstasy of joy, climbing all over the young man, licking at his hands and trying to reach his face. The puppy was so extremely happy and anxious to make friends that Hanlon was soon laughing almost convulsively while trying to avoid ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... The veins of minerals are about a half an inch to—in the case of druses of magnesite, which penetrate the rock in all proportions and directions—even six inches in thickness. They lie generally in a perpendicular position, but are frequently bent and contorted in every direction. They are the more abundant where the rock is soft, as veins, but included minerals are more plentiful in the harder rock. There is hardly any one point on the outcrop that may be said to be favored in abundance, but the veins of the brucites, dolomite, and magnesites are ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... utter collapse struck him. He flung himself half-around on his chair so that his arms rested on its back, cradling his face. His body was contorted by gasping sobs, and his feet tapped the floor with the rapidity of those of a ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... our way among the bath-chairs in the path. Many of the people sitting in the chairs seemed almost natural in their passive poses, but the contorted scarlet of the bandsmen was not a restful thing to see. A purple-faced little gentleman was frozen in the midst of a violent struggle to refold his newspaper against the wind; there were many evidences that all these people in their sluggish way were exposed to a considerable breeze, a breeze that ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... her deadly peril, and then you would kiss the helpless, staring, blinking, little blanket-framed face; but at first touch of those bristling moustaches a powerful spasm has convulsed the tiny features, and a vehement, plaintive, wailing protest bursts from the contorted lips, and then your son and heir is snatched away, and you stand like convicted felon, while nursey dandles and tosses and condoles and condones and cuddles. "Well, well, well, did it nearly fighten its pessus, ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... head back, my face screwed with pain, God knows, like a man whose thumbs are ground between the screws, and his body drawn out and out on the rack to tenuous length, and his flesh massacred with pincers: and I fell upon the floor of the bridge contorted with anguish: for I could not go to her. But after a time that paroxysm passed, and I rose up sullen and resentful, and resumed my place at the wheel, steering back for England: for a fixed resolve was in my breast, and I said: 'Oh no, no more. ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... forwards but backwards,—then he would evidently appear to be flying from himself, and to be putting off his manhood, and to hate his own nature. On which account, also, some ways of sitting down, and some contorted and abrupt movements, such as wanton or effeminate men at times indulge in, are contrary to nature. So that even if that should happen through any fault of the mind, still the nature of the man would seem to ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... great open eyes with a kiss. But Camille lay asleep close at hand. This poor creature, with his body twisted out of shape, displaying his lean proportions, was gently snoring. Under the hat, half concealing his face, could be seen his mouth contorted into a silly grimace in his slumber. A few short reddish hairs on a bony chin sullied his livid skin, and his head being thrown backward, his thin wrinkled neck appeared, with Adam's apple standing out prominently in brick red in the centre, ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... serves chiefly to enhance the tyranny of her triumphant rival. The main difficulty under which these scenes of rarest pathos would labour, were they brought upon the stage, is their simplicity in contrast with the ghastly and contorted horrors that envelop them. A dialogue abounding in the passages I have already quoted—a dialogue which bandies 'O you screech-owl!' and 'Thou foul black cloud!'—in which a sister's admonition to her brother ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Barclay's mind by Natalie's words, had pointed to almost any finale, however debased, however sordid. Barclay mentally invoked the face of his former friend, as he had seen it on the occasion of their last meeting, flushed, swollen-eyed, insolent, the fine patrician mouth hideously contorted ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... crumpled and disordered garments, I turned to face the formidable row of Mission staff drawn up in solemn array to greet us. As the doctor-in-charge stepped forward and with a bland smile hoped I had had a "comfortable journey," and bade me welcome to St. Antoine, with a prodigious effort I contorted my features into something resembling a grin, and limply shook his outstretched hand. To-morrow I mean to make enquiries about ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... overcoat, letting it fall upon the floor, and he strode forward almost to the trough of the footlights; and then for a space he stood there on the rounded apron of the platform, staring out into the troubled, tossing pool of contorted faces and tossing arms below him and about him. Demagogue he may have been; demigod he looked in that, his moment of supreme triumph, biding his time to play upon the passions and the prejudices of this multitude as a master organist would play upon the pipes of an organ. Here was clay, plastic ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... his face contorted by pain. "I'm thankin' you kindly; but I'm not carin' t' interfere with the ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... paragraph chatter, as makes me feel flatter than cold eggless batter upon a lead platter—as mad as a hatter, and who will relieve me? Can anyone? I tell you it's dreadful to face a whole bedful of spectres and spooks (born of papers and books) with, most horrible looks, limbs contorted in crooks, and bat-wings with big hooks, which haunt all the nooks of tester and curtain, and which, I am certain, will drive me insane if some one can't explain where the mischief we are, 'midst the jumble and jar of factions and fads, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 23, 1891 • Various
... by a narrow gulley. Here the shell-holes were less frequent. A miry path led through an abandoned camp—a chaos of riddled and shattered boards and contorted iron sheeting. Dead Frenchmen were lying everywhere. From a drab heap of mud and clothing a human arm projected. The terminal finger-joints had dropped off. The blackened skin was drawn tightly over the back of the hand which seemed to clutch ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... the professor showed clear for a moment. Like McGuire he was bleeding, and his breath came in short explosive gasps, but he was holding his own! The eyes of McGuire glimpsed a wildly gesticulating, shouting figure in the rear. The face, contorted with rage, was almost the color of the brilliant scarlet that the creature wore. The blood-stained man in khaki left his companion to fight his own battle, and plunged headlong at a leaping cluster of dull red, smashed through with a frenzied attack ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... midst there lay the body of a man sorely contorted, and still twitching. They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its back, and beheld the face of Edward Hyde. He was dressed in clothes far too large for him, clothes of the doctor's bigness; the cords ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... floundered a little, not knowing at last quite what he did mean, a great rush of mere memories, a great humming sound as of thick, thick echoes, rising now to an assault that he met with his face indeed contorted. If he didn't take care he should howl; so he more or less successfully took care—yet with his host vividly watching him while he shook the danger temporarily off. "I don't mind—though it's rather ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... where ornamentations envelop and conceal line as in late Renaissance, the Italian Rococo, the Portuguese Barrocco (baroque), the curving and contorted degenerate forms of Louis XIV and XV and the Victorian—all examples of the same thing, i.e.: perfect line achieved, acclaimed, flattered, losing its head and going to the bad ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... copper coin, was deeply lined and darkly sunburnt. His head, bald no doubt, was tied up in a crimson handkerchief that gave him the value of a rare picture by the hand of some old master. Seeing the cure, the pair stopped under an immense olive tree, a tree so twisted, so contorted that it seemed to have settled down to treehood only after the wild whirl of a maenad dance. Now in its old age, which had been youth in Caesar's day, it was more like a gray, ruined tower than an olive tree. It had divided itself into a few crumbling, leaning ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... reaches high-water mark everywhere. The three streets are all growing dark as each overflows into another. Some natives cross our path, old men or ill-shapen, contorted in their walk, stunted in the face; and even young people, too, over whom hovers the mystery of secret disorders or political connections. As for the petticoats, there are old women and many young ones—fat, with well-padded cheeks, and equal to ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... Mellon, his face contorted with a mixture of anger and hatred, was standing just behind Jakob von Liegnitz. In one hand was a heavy spanner, which he was bringing down with deadly force on ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... in a mental fog groped his way to the door opening on the river steps, bolted it, groped his way back and stood scratching his head. A grin, grotesque in the wavering light, contorted the long lower half of the face for a moment and ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... right spule-blade, to hide the wound that the silver bullet had made. He sat apart from them all, and looked at them with a melancholy, haughty countenance; while the rest hallooed, and sung, and laughed, that the room rang. But their smiles were fearfully contorted from time to time; and their laughter passed into such wild sounds, as made my gudesire's very nails grow blue, and chilled ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... was contorted,—she wept silently, exactly as a child tormented beyond endurance ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... themselves in metaphysics and moral philosophy, had mused indefatigably on the condition of man, and spent their lives on the sublime and the monotonous. Others, making a medley of crime and heroism, had conducted, through darkness and flashes of lightning, a train of contorted and terrible figures, desperate with remorse, relieved by their grandeur. Men wanted to rest after so many efforts and so much success. On the going out of the imaginative, sentimental, and Satanic school, Tennyson appeared exquisite. All the forms and ideas which had pleased them were ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... not receive the summons in an exemplary spirit. It is not certain that he did not bite it. He rolled on the floor, and contorted himself in convulsions of vexation; he 'bothered' the Dean, he 'bothered' the Precentor, he 'bothered' the Organist, he 'bothered' Shapcote's sore throat, he 'bothered' Harewood's wool- gathering wits, he 'bothered' his ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it is a great clump of dark-coloured trees. The rest of the island is now covered with hippo grass looking like a beautifully kept lawn. We lie up for a short rest at another island, also a weird spot in its way, for it is covered with a grove of only one kind of tree, which has a twisted, contorted, gray-white trunk and dull, lifeless-looking, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... see the jagged portal of the cave he had left, high above the river, though not so high as the great, tall deciduous trees waving their lofty boughs on the summit of the cliffs. Certain grim, silent, gaunt figures, grotesquely contorted in the mist, the child's wide blue eyes traced out, as the other moonshiners climbed too down the rugged face of the crag, all burdened with bundles of varying size and unimaginable contents—food, clothing, or such appliances of their craft as the hurried revenue raiders had chanced to overlook. ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... not be here. No,' he droned, 'but the Museum will still be just where it is. And the reading-room, just where it is. And people will be able to go and read there.' He inhaled sharply, and a spasm as of actual pain contorted ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... easily have discovered that the chief good some of them got from the ceremony was a perfect command of the organs of sound; for the restraint was limited to those organs; and projected tongues, deprived of their natural exercise, turned themselves, along with winking eyes, contorted features, and a wild use of hands and arms, into the means of telegraphic despatches to all parts of the room, throughout the ceremony. The master, afraid of being himself detected in the attempt to combine prayer ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... of the fiery mass was subdued and it stood congealed in the varied forms of rugged peaks, contorted ridges, and deep valleys, subsequently to be seamed and further distorted by earthquakes and piled higher by further volcanic outbursts. A ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... Mercury and Argus have all of them three or four black lines across them. What sort of leaf texture is supposed to be represented by these? The stones in the foreground of Turner's Llanthony received from the artist the powdery texture of sandstone; the engraver covered them with contorted lines and turned ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... was suddenly contorted; "but—but, dear me, how fortunate!" she cried in a voice suddenly changed. In one instant there was no trace left of her tears. She underwent an instantaneous transformation, which amazed Alyosha. Instead of a poor, insulted girl, weeping in a sort of "laceration," ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... repeatedly; she saw him go out the gate and disappear into sudden darkness. He ran through the field and came out on the road. Heaven and earth were revealed again for a dazzling white second. From horizon to horizon rolled clouds contorted like an illimitable field of inverted haystacks, and beneath them enormous volumes of pale vapor were tumbling in the west, advancing eastward with sinister swiftness. She ran to a little knoll at the corner of the house and saw him ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... contorted, was determined to get me. I was in a very vulnerable spot; more important, so was ...
— Question of Comfort • Les Collins
... fence, near Elizabethtown, I think, but I am not quite sure. There was more genius in it than in any structure of the kind I have ever seen,—each length being of a special pattern, ramified, reticulated, contorted, as the limbs of the trees had grown. I trust some friend will photograph or stereograph this fence for me, to go with the view of the spires of Frederick, already referred to, as mementos of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... pointed. Two guards were bringing a gibbering, screeching, struggling Moon man with them. Despite his strength, he seemed incapable of making any resistance, but his whole body quivered, and his hideous face was contorted ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... shuddering concave rends; Cloak'd in a tiger's hide their grim chief towers, And apes the brinded god his tribe adores. The tusky jaws grin o'er the sachem's brow, The bald eyes glare, the paws depend below, From his bored ears contorted serpents hung, And drops of gore seem'd rolling on his tongue. The northern glens pour forth the Vulture-race; Brown tufts of quills their shaded foreheads grace; The claws branch wide, the beak expands for blood, And all the armor imitates the god. The ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... wafted by imperceptible breezes on the smooth water; their motion could hardly be heard, and their white sails, stretched out on yards, fell languidly in a thousand horizontal folds like window-blinds, their strangely contorted poops, rising up castle-like in the air, reminding one of the towering ships of the Middle Ages. In the midst of the verdure of this wall of mountains, they stood ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... procession of legs walking over my skin. I brushed at it hastily, and something seemed to fall on the table. "No, the other side I mean," said he, and again I felt the same horrid tickling and went through the same exercises, with a face, I've no doubt, contorted with terror. Anyhow, it seemed to amuse them very much; Wag, in fact, was quite unable to speak, and could only point. It was dull of me not to have realized at once that these were "his" earwigs and ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James
... not, hope; in a word "the desire of the moth for the star." O great white stars of eternal marble, O shapely, colossal women, and yet not women. It is not love that we seek from them, we do not desire to see their great eyes troubled with our passions, or the great impassive members contorted by any hope or pain or pleasure; only now and again, to be conscious that they exist, to have knowledge of them far off in cloudland or feel their steady eyes shining, like quiet watchful stars, above the turmoil ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mild; one is churlish and illiberal, another exhausts itself with its free-hearted bounties. Even the shapes of apple-trees have great individuality, into such strange postures do they put themselves, and thrust their contorted branches so grotesquely in all directions. And when they have stood around a house for many years, and held converse with successive dynasties of occupants, and gladdened their hearts so often in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... English gun leaped roaring flame; the air was full of shrieks and groans and the crash of splintering wood, and through the eddying smoke I could see many of our soldiery that lay in strange, contorted attitudes while others crawled, sobbing on hands and knees; but on the scarlet-dropping rowing-benches I ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... omelette au rhum floating in flames of the blue I should like my eyes to be when angry; there's a post-office, and—nothing else that I can think of, except circling hills, a golden sweep of beach, and sea of ethereal azure creaming against contorted rocks. That's all; but ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... music, feasts, and greatest men: So Hymen look'd, that even the chastest mind He mov'd to join in joys of sacred kind; For only now his chin's first down consorted His head's rich fleece, in golden curls contorted; And as he was so lov'd, he lov'd so too: So should best beauties, bound by nuptials, do. Bright Eucharis, who was by all men said The noblest, fairest, and the richest maid Of all th' Athenian damsels, Hymen lov'd With such transmission, that his heart remov'd ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... at this craziness; and when they had finished, they and the fowls that were still alive could only lie and pant together among the contorted slain, the blood—you would never believe how a cockerel will bleed—and the carmine-tinted feathers. You might not believe me if I told you how many fowls they had killed, but it was a most disgraceful number, and ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... Sultana. She begins with revenge and rage, until she reaches the extremity of virulent resolution; and then her mind begins to waver, and she finally orders the execution of the man she loves, in a contorted ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... that the mere exertion of great muscular effort, coupled with a resolute wish and intention to succeed in some object, has a powerful tendency to brace the energies of the human mind. Ippegoo had not contorted himself and beaten his drum for many minutes when his feeling of warmth and physical power began to increase. The feeling seemed to break on his ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... woman and a young girl; the elder of the two, the mother, perhaps, was of humble birth, to judge by the size of her ears; on her finger she had only an iron ring; her left leg lifted and contorted, shows that she, too, suffered; not so much, however, as the noble lady: the poor have less to lose in dying. Near her, as though upon the same bed, lies the young girl; one at the head, and the other at the foot, and their legs are crossed. ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... were sent back at this stage of the game. Then a cry went up from a group of privates standing near the line of contorted figures. "White, Purvis, white! ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... seemed to shrink away in fetters. Her eyes filled with vaguely resentful tears, which sprang, if she could have traced them, from the fact that the man she loved was loyal to his own mistake, and the formless premonition that he might continue to be. She contorted her lip to keep her emotion back, and deliberately turned away from a matter in which she was not mistress, and which contained ugly possibilities of buffeting. She would wait a little, and though consideration for Violet Prendergast had nothing ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Friday night. In the centre, sticking into the skin of our old planet Earth like a poisoned dart, was this cylinder. But the poison was scarcely working yet. Around it was a patch of silent common, smouldering in places, and with a few dark, dimly seen objects lying in contorted attitudes here and there. Here and there was a burning bush or tree. Beyond was a fringe of excitement, and farther than that fringe the inflammation had not crept as yet. In the rest of the world the stream of life still flowed as it had flowed for immemorial years. The ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... Frank. He was in shirt and trousers only, and he sat up with braced arms. For one half second he stared at them, his face a mask of horrible contorted terror. His upper lip was drawn back so that the gums of the teeth appeared, and his eyes were focused not on the two who approached him but on something quite close to him; his nostrils were widely expanded, as if he panted for breath, and terror incarnate ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... which took out these bodies are confident that 150 bodies are lying buried in the sand and under the debris on those low-lying bottom lands. Some of the bodies were horribly mangled, and the features were twisted and contorted as if they had died in the most excrutiating agony. Others are found lying stretched out with ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... of these carbonaceous markings there occurred one of those platforms of violent death for which the Old Red Sandstone is so remarkable—a platform strewed over with fossil remains of the firstborn ganoids of creation, many of which still bore in their contorted outlines evidence of sudden ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... repeated, and his features were suddenly contorted as with a strong convulsion, and his teeth gleamed between his ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... much of a garden about the place, but there was a little lawn amongst the pines, in the midst of which stood a huge old patriarch, with red stem and grotesquely contorted branches: beneath it was a bench, and there, after their return from their two hours' ride, the ladies sat, while the sun was at its warmest, on the mornings of their first and second readings: Malcolm sat on ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... There were but two rooms and overhead a great loft with a peaked roof where the children slept. Philippe lay on the floor, his face ghastly and contorted. There were some hemlock cushions under him, and his poor ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... later, while the gentleman was giving W. his instructions, they were both horrified by a piercing shriek and the sound of a fall, and rushing out they found the child lying senseless on the floor, his face contorted with terror. The doctor was immediately summoned, and after some examination he pronounced the child to be suffering from a kind of fit, apparently produced by a sudden shock. The boy was taken to one of the bedrooms, and after some time recovered consciousness, but only to pass into a condition ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... covered with little coloured dots, which signify (as he will find at the margin) beds of volcanic ash. If he look below the little coloured squares on the margin, he will see figures marking the strike, or direction of the inclination of the beds—inclined, vertical, horizontal, contorted; that the white lines in the map signify faults, i.e. shifts in the strata; the gold lines, lodes of metal—the latter of which I should advise him strongly, in this district at least, not to meddle with: but to button up his ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... moment both boys were frightened by the effect of those words. The old seaman whirled about, his one black eye blazing weirdly and his face contorted. Then he collected ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... a corner of the sheet, disclosing the face, contorted and of a peculiar, purplish hue from the congested blood vessels. He bent over and I did so, too. There was an unmistakable odor of tobacco on him. A moment Kennedy studied the face before us, then slowly ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... later." Ransome's eyes burned into the crewman's. The latter looked away. Ransome tightened his grip, and pain contorted the gunner's features. ...
— Bride of the Dark One • Florence Verbell Brown
... at this moment as a man may laugh in hell. He reeled. His lean face momentarily contorted, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... monstrous allegories,—one divinity or demon, eternally the same in the repetition of the sculptor, universally visible as though self-multiplied. The huge pillars themselves were symbols, figures, carnalities; the orgiastic spirit of that worship lived and writhed in the contorted bronze of the lamps, the twisted gold of the cups, the chiselled marble ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... from St. Pol even around the last land of France, and so to Brest, yet never see sign of Notre Dame des Eaux; for it clings to a cliff somewhat lower than the road, and between grows a stunted thicket of harsh and ragged trees, their skeleton white branches, tortured and contorted, thrusting sorrowfully out of the hard, dark foliage that still grows below, where the rise of land below the highway gives some protection. You must leave the wood by the two cottages of yellow stone, about twenty miles beyond St. Pol, and go down to the right, around the ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... his stiffened face to relieve the feeling of cold contorted rubber and followed Kenny up the path. Light glimmered dimly through the jungle of frost upon the shack window. Fronded whitely by the sleet, the panes loomed out of the dark like an incandescent series ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... her eyes became used to the ruddy dusk, she could see better, but everywhere they lighted on shapes inexplicable, whose forms to the first questioning thought suggested instruments of torture; but cruel as some of them looked, they were almost too strange, contorted, fantastical for such. Still, the wood-cuts in a certain book she had been familiar with in childhood, commonly called Fox's Book of Martyrs, kept haunting her mind's eye—and were they not Papists into whose hands she had fallen? she said to herself, amused ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... Renaissance must form the subject of a separate chapter. For the present it is enough to observe that his immediate scholars, Raffaello da Montelupo, and Gian Angelo Montorsoli, caught little from their master but the mannerism of contorted form and agitated action. This mannerism, a blemish even in the strong work of Buonarroti, became ridiculous when adopted by men of feeble powers and passionless imagination. By straining the art of sculpture to its utmost limits, Michael Angelo expressed ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... fish bones at the entrance. The captain, the surgeon, and Congdon, the coxswain, landed. Captain Parkinson reached the spot first. Stooping, he thrust his head in at the orifice. A sharp exclamation broke from him. He rose to his feet, turning a contorted face ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... hate-contorted visage dance queerly in the close air before him. The orderly clutched for his revolver, and Lance bounded up as if spring-impelled, nailed the other with two lightninglike jabs and unleashed all his strength in an uppercut which sprawled Ranth in a limp, ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... great, will from the first have caused screams or groans to be uttered, the body to be contorted, and the teeth to be ground together. But our progenitors will not have exhibited those highly expressive movements of the features which accompany screaming and crying until their circulatory and respiratory organs, ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... me with forgetfulness. The touch of your lips is like a tide hushing, sucking my wakefulness down into depths of terrible oblivion. O, listen, you are grotesque—your limbs are like the coils of nightmare. I love you because you are so grotesque—because upon your face is stamped the contorted beauty of your mind—your mind that is surely as amazing as your face. O, Gwymplane, tell me of what you have thought, tell me ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... performances. To see a young woman or girl suddenly struck down, speechless, pallid as in death; with muscles rigid, eyeballs fixed or rolled back in their sockets; the stiffened frame either wholly prostrate or drawn up into contorted attitudes and shapes, or vehemently convulsed with racking pains, or dropping with relaxed muscles into a lifeless lump; and to hear dread shrieks of delirious ravings,—must have produced a truly ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... a slab of oriental alabaster, polished like a jewel, upheld by griffins with outthrust tongues curiously contorted and entwined. But beyond the silken curtains of the palace-windows the forest and the hills, with a wandering breath of coolness from the mountain-breeze, drew and welcomed him, with some faint, new perception of the ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... face, his proud, white face with the skin and lineaments of a proud family, stained into the likeness of a despised race; he heard his own tongue forsaking the pure English of his fathers for the soft thickness of the negro, roaring the absurd sentimental songs; he saw his own stately limbs contorted in the rollicking, barbaric dance—and awoke with a cold sweat over him. He knew all the time that that was all was left to him, but he snatched at everything. He could not obtain the floor-walker position of which he had spoken to Anderson. He thought ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... doorway stood Abogin, but he was not the same as when he had gone out. The look of sleekness and refined elegance had disappeared —his face, his hands, his attitude were contorted by a revolting expression of something between horror and agonizing physical pain. His nose, his lips, his moustache, all his features were moving and seemed trying to tear themselves from his face, his eyes looked as though they were laughing with ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... whistle of the barrage. The Division was attacking Fayet, the enemy's last stronghold beyond the city. Before they went over, grey and green coated figures were being brought down. There were many other grey and green figures grotesquely contorted in the brown ribbed fields, and those of them who had escaped from the inferno fought it out intermittently, in the woods beyond the village. But their sniping was braved for a few days more, and then one night they staggered weakly back through ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... a rock. A body came hurtling down, crashed to the cliff-ledge almost at our feet with the sickening thump of mangled flesh and broken bones—hung an instant to give me a momentary glimpse of a face contorted in death agony; then rolled over and fell ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... The contorted face of the furious beggar afforded a terrible contrast to the tranquil countenance of the penitent and unresisting object of his hatred. The opaque flesh seemed to have become transparent, and through it glowed the baleful light of hatred and revenge. The lips were ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... obliterated," for a scene of more utter and hopeless ruin I have never seen nor imagined. Over an area of many square miles, there was nothing but heaps and mounds of broken stone, charred and crumbling brick, fire-scarred timbers, and huge contorted masses of rusting steel like the decaying bones of superhuman monsters. From the great height and extent of the piles of debris, and from the occasional sight of the splintered cornice of a roof or of ...
— Flight Through Tomorrow • Stanton Arthur Coblentz
... while she stood bowing between the verses. In a few minutes the song was finished and the people were stamping, whistling, uttering screeching cat-calls, and shouting "Brayvo!" But Glory was sitting at the foot of the stage by this time with a face contorted as in physical pain. After the first thrill of success the shame of it all came over her and she saw how low she had fallen, and felt horrified and afraid. The clamour, the clapping of hands, the vulgar faces, the vulgar laughter, the vulgar song, Sunday night, her own birthday! It all passed ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... almost ripped out of their sockets, the arms of the Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords of the straining muscles. The laboured tendons of the armpits seemed ready to snap. The fingers, wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesture in which were supplication and reproach but also benediction. The trembling thighs were greasy with sweat. The ribs were like staves, or like the bars of a cage, the flesh swollen, blue, mottled with flea-bites, specked as with pin-pricks by spines broken off from the ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... smoked and gazed upon the many garments, viewing them with eyes of reverie. Garments, these, of every size and hue and shape and for either sex, garments that writhed and contorted themselves in fantastic dances when gently stirred by a small, cool wind which, wafting across the river from the green New Jersey shore, breathed faintly ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... Headley really love his trusty foreman too well to expose him to such chances, but Tibble knew too well that there were brutal young men to whom his contorted-visage would be an incitement to contempt and outrage, and that if racked with rheumatism, he would only be an incumbrance. There was nothing for it but to put Kit Smallbones at the head of the party. His imposing presence ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... out as if a cyclone had beheaded it; then comes Revigny, a town of over two thousand inhabitants, less completely levelled because its houses were more solidly built, but a spectacle of more tragic desolation, with its wide streets winding between scorched and contorted fragments of masonry, bits of shop-fronts, handsome doorways, the colonnaded court of a public building. A few miles farther lies the most piteous of the group: the village of Heiltz-le-Maurupt, once pleasantly set in ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... looks, and lips contorted into all modes and expression of indignation, the guests speedily disappeared. And while Mr Pitskiver, still panting from his exertions, related to his daughters and their enchanted partners his grounds for anger at the attempt to impose Miss Hendy on him ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... to gaze. This lane (which appeared to be a natural formation) continued for some fifty or sixty paces, and then suddenly ended in a cave, also natural, running at right angles to it. I am sure it was a natural cave, and not hollowed by the hand of man, because of its irregular and contorted shape and course, which gave it the appearance of having been blown bodily in the mountain by some frightful eruption of gas following the line of the least resistance. All the caves hollowed by the ancients of Kor, on the contrary, were cut out ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... wild little man, his face contorted with rage and the lust which finds satisfaction in a blow. He went fiercely on, butting his shoulder against every woman he met. Nobody arrested him; nobody cried "shame." "Give ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... which I, personally, am not capable. Aunt Dahlia, to my amazement, now did it apparently without an effort. She was well wedged into a deep arm-chair, but, nevertheless, she staggered like billy-o. A sort of spasm of horror and apprehension contorted ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... throat in one hand, and sought his knife with the other. A terrible struggle followed; but regardless of the tearing claws, he found and opened his knife. He had made one futile stab, and was drawing it for a surer, when, with a spring of the whole body, and one wildly contorted effort, the creature twisted its neck from his hold, and with something betwixt a scream and a howl, darted from him. Again he heard the door open; again the wind blew in upon him, and it continued blowing; a sheet of spray dashed across the floor, and over his face. He sprung ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... of the lanterns our hero could see the men's faces, and they were pale and contorted with ...
— The Dock Rats of New York • "Old Sleuth"
... pain contorted her drawn face and again her eyes closed under the agony. She re-opened them at the sound ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... paper among the card players. By and by it transpires that some one has won a box of candy. Just how this is done we know not. Speaking of card players, observe the gaze of anguish on the outpost. He dashes ahead, grabs two facing seats and sits in one with a face contorted with anxiety for fear that the others will be too late to join him. As soon as a card game is started there are always a half dozen other men who watch it, following every play with painful scrutiny. It seems that watching other people play cards is the most ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... of Vernet, (when not mere views,) we see the imitator of Salvator, or rather copyist of his lines; and these we have in all their angular nakedness, where rocks, trees, and mountains are so jagged, contorted, and tumbled about, that nothing but an explosion could account for their assemblage. They have not the relation which we sometimes find even in a random collocation, as in the accidental pictures of a discolored wall; for the careful hand of the contriver is traced through ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... the desire of liberty on the part of peoples. Some were lying calmly, as if their last moments had been as peaceful as when little children they laid themselves down to sleep; others twisted and contorted with looks of horror and anguish fixed upon their mournful faces, which bespoke agonies attending the departure of life like to the travail pains with which it had been ushered into existence. Seymour with a sad heart stooped and turned over the body of his ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... of a second brought him into another peril. The giant heaved up on his sound right leg and his sound left arm, and flung himself forward, two limbs dangling uselessly. With a hideously contorted face, Bull swung his left arm in a wide circle for a grip and scooped in Pete Reeve, as the latter sprang back with a ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... understand what the young ensign said to them, they knew the drift of his jeering words. Their faces contorted with rage, they struck at him, Dave's arms working like piston rods in his efforts to ward off ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... being a trifle higher than the other; this malicious suggestion reposed also on the fact that the quasi-hero of "Le Roi s'Amuse" (1832, a tragedy suppressed after one representation, for its reflections on royalty), was also a contorted piece of humanity. This play was followed by "Lucrezia Borgia," "Marie Tudor," and "Angelo," written in a singular poetic prose. Spite of bald translations, their action was sufficiently dramatic to make them successes, and even still enduring on our stage. They have all been arranged ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... went out, that she followed them almost immediately afterwards through the darkness and, a little later, she came running back to the hotel with that pallid face and the hand clutching her dress over her heart. It can't have been only Bagshawe. Her face was contorted with agony before ever her eyes fell upon me or upon him beside me. But I dare say Bagshawe may have been the determining influence in her suicide. Leonora says that she had that flask, apparently of nitrate of amyl, but actually of prussic ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... gazing vacantly at Duncan, with livid lips and contorted features. He had so long been accustomed to administer the bank's affairs as suited his personal convenience that he had quite forgotten this little transaction. Recovering himself, ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... older grew the documents as the lawyer's hand travelled downward; any flaw or failure must have been healed by lapse of time long and long ago; dust and grime and mildew thickened, ink became paler, and contractions more contorted; it was rather an antiquary's business now than ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... ever determined to act. All the rest had been aimless drifting. The blood sang m his ears. He fixed his eyes on the half-obliterated figures that supported the shields under the beams in the wall opposite. They seemed to be wriggling out of their contorted positions and smiling encouragement to him. He imagined them, warriors out of old tales, on their way to clay dragons in enchanted woods, clever-fingered guildsmen and artisans, cupids and satyrs and fauns, jumping from ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... railroad battalion there was an eccentric negro who was a very king of jesters. From the Sirdar and the Khalifa downwards—for he was an ex-dervish and had played pranks in Omdurman—none escaped a parodying portrayal of their mannerisms. He imitated the tones of their voice and twisted and contorted his face and body to resemble the originals. Nothing was sacred from that mimic any more than from a sapper. He showed us Osman Digna's little ways, and gave ghastly imitations of trials, mutilations and executions by hanging in the Mahdist camps. And these things were ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... and in rushed Peggy once more,— but such a Peggy, such an apparition of fear, suffering, and terror as brought a cry of consternation from every lip. Her eyes were starting from her head, her face was contorted in spasmodic gaspings for breath, her arms sawed the air like the sails of a windmill, and she flew round and round the room in a ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... of burning, pleading words, writhing prostrate upon the floor in the vehemence of his supplication, while we, poor trembling mites, huddled round our mother's skirts and gazed with terror at the contorted figure seen by the dim light of the simple oil lamp. On a sudden the clang of the new church clock told that the hour had come. My father sprang from the floor, and rushing to the casement, stared up with wild expectant eyes at the starry heavens. ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... struggled against her weakness lest it should spoil his pleasure, so now she fought down the hysteria of her mind to give him ease. Very wearily she crossed the room and stood beside him, forcing back tears with lips that were trembling and contorted. It was no show of bravado, no spurious bravery, aping self-respect, taking it well, as the phrase has it. She was not brave. She felt a coward to all of life that offered. Her heart was that of a derelict—numbed, ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... his words was instantaneous. Almost as he spoke, the creature crouched for a spring. There was wild hatred in its close-set eyes, the snarl of something fiend-like in its contorted mouth. Quest slipped quickly through ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... her hand. "I am grateful to you," he said brokenly, "believe me." His face was contorted with the agony that filled his soul. A quick rush of tears rendered her speechless and in silence they turned away from him, and for the long hour that followed they left ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... changes taking place in the nucleus of an epithelium cell, preparatory to division of the cell. (From Quain's Anatomy, after Flemming.) a, resting cell, showing the nuclear network; b, first stage of division, the chromatoplasm transformed into a skein of closely contorted filaments; c to f, further stages in the growth and looping arrangement of the filaments; g, stellate phase, or aster; h, completion of the splitting of the filaments, already begun in f and g; i, j, k, successive ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... impossible for any serious investigator to refuse to admit that Tlaloc and Chac are merely American forms of Indra. Even so fantastic a practice as the representation of the American rain-god's face as composed of contorted snakes[145] finds its analogy in Siam, where in relatively recent times this curious device was still ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... received no salutation from him. There was one small lamp on the table, dimly lighted, which threw a faint glow upon the circle of countenances round, into which came wondering the burly big Copperhead, holding fast by the shoulder of Mr. May, whose ghastly face, contorted with wild anxiety, glanced at Tozer over the lamp. But the old man was so much absorbed at first that he scarcely saw ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... later day, a native artist sought to represent it in an historical picture, which has been already referred to. Atotarho is seated in solitary and surly dignity, smoking a long pipe, his head and body encircled with contorted and angry serpents. Standing before him are two figures which cannot be mistaken. The foremost, a plumed and cinctured warrior, depicted as addressing the Onondaga chief, holds in his right hand, as a staff, his flint-headed spear,—the ensign which marks him as the representative of the ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... shrinks from vegetarianism." We went the round of all these places, not forgetting the house which bears the tablet commemorating the death of a young soldier who fell fighting against the Bourbons. From its contorted iron balcony there hangs a rope by which the inmates may have tried ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Among these faces convulsed with utter animalism I scarcely recognised my various acquaintances. The transformation produced by the planton's shout was not merely amazing; it was uncanny, and not a little thrilling. These eyes bubbling with lust, obscene grins sprouting from contorted lips, bodies unclenching and clenching in unctuous gestures of complete savagery, convinced me by a certain insane beauty. Before the arbiter of their destinies some thirty creatures, hideous and authentic, poised, cohering in a sole chaos of desire; a fluent and numerous ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... all happened, perhaps, within the space of three breaths. Now Marianne leaned out of the window and screamed her warning, for the faded chestnut was on the very heels of the Mexican. He raised his contorted face at her cry, then threw up both his arms to her in a gesture she could ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... cave shone silvery gray, with a faint moony sparkle, and out came the lovely carving of the rodent waves. All about, its sides were fretted in exquisite curves, and fantastic yet ever graceful knots and twists; as if a mass of gnarled and contorted roots, first washed of every roughness by some ethereal solvent, leaving only the soft lines of yet grotesque volutions, had been transformed into mingled silver and stone. Like a soldier crab that had found a shell to his mind, he gazed through the yawning mouth ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... are, the frequent accompaniments of a Scottish old-fashioned burial. What the funeral feast, or "dirgie," as it is called, was to the men, the gloomy preparations of the dead body for the coffin were to the women. To straight the contorted limbs upon a board used for that melancholy purpose, to array the corpse in clean linen, and over that in its woollen shroad, were operations committed always to the old matrons of the village, and in which they found ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... his suddenly contorted face. "Ah, you are the man who looked in at the window of the reception room yesterday morning when I was talking to Mr. Kent," she cried. "I recognize ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... peril or triumph. I shall not easily forget that figure, bright in the sunshine, conducting with his whole body, passionate, possessed by a demon, bounding in the frenzy of his inspiration from side to side, contorted, rhythmic, ecstatic. It seemed so wonderfully American, in its combination of entire wildness and entire regulation, with the whole just a trifle fantastic. Completely friendly and befriended as I was, I ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke |
