"Distorted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with a sarcastic grin, and went on reading a little volume of Poe that he carried in his pocket. At another time I cornered him in the Funny Man's room and succeeded in getting a little out of him. We were taught literature by an exceedingly analytical method at the University, and we probably distorted the method, and I was busy trying to find the least common multiple of Hamlet and the greatest common divisor of Macbeth, and I began asking him whether stories were constructed by cabalistic formulae. At length he sighed wearily and shook ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... view the city itself becomes degraded to an unintelligible mass of distorted buildings and impossible perspectives; the revered ocean is a duck pond; the earth itself a lost golf ball. All the minutiae of life are gone. The philosopher gazes into the infinite heavens above him, and allows his soul to expand to ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... been to Mr. Osmond, it must be admitted that she found them sufficient to lead her to put to Ralph sundry questions about him. She thought Ralph's judgements distorted by his trials, but she flattered herself she had learned to make allowance ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... him!" Foster burst out raucously. He had removed the green abat-jour, for the candle-shades (as they sometimes will) were performing their office. In the low but clear light his face seemed distorted. ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... was weird and full of distorted shadows. Through the long windows of stained glass which lit the great staircase the moon shone, its rays striking straight across the upper landing. Several of the doors were closed. They ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... simple enough. Of the mirage the dictionary says it is "an optical illusion arising from an unequal refraction in the lower strata of the atmosphere, causing images of remote objects to be seen double, distorted or inverted as if reflected in a mirror, or to appear as if suspended ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... of your psychical existence—the inner life. Your mind would not be permanently affected here and now, in this world; but in the existence after the body is left behind, you might wake up with your spirit so twisted, so distorted, so befouled, that you would be spiritually insane—a far more radical condition than merely ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... most lovely things that Heaven has made, and only degraded and distorted by any human interference; the swollen varieties of it produced by cultivation being all gross in outline and coarse ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... was provincial, local, distorted. His Christ is the Christ of morbid Seminarists and ascetic undergraduates; not the Christ that Leonardo da Vinci saw breaking bread with his disciples; not the Christ that Paolo Veronese saw moving among the crowds of the street ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... heart stopped beating, his face could not have become more distorted and livid. He moved close to me, and, glaring into my eyes, ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... Maxime a suspicious glance as she came into the money-lender's damp, dark room. So beautiful she was, that in spite of her faults I felt sorry for her. There was a terrible storm of anguish in her heart; her haughty, proud features were drawn and distorted with pain which she strove in vain to disguise. The young man had come to be her evil genius. I admired Gobseck, whose perspicacity had foreseen their future four years ago at the first bill ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... wine with the slayer of souls?" Then, pallid face horribly distorted, he stretched out a shaking arm. "Not that you ever could succeed in getting near enough to murder hers! But you've killed mine. I know now what died in me. It was that! . . . And I know now, as I stand here excommunicated by you from all who have been born within the law, that there ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... that impression which now revived in my mind. But by a process strictly in accordance with Darwin's theory, the Eden Musee gorilla had become a man—in appearance not unlike the beast that had inspired my distorted thought. This man held a bloody dagger which he repeatedly plunged into the woman's breast. The apparition did not terrify me at all. In fact I found it interesting, for I looked upon it as a contrivance of the detectives. Its purpose I could not divine, ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... the door and did not see what I saw at the little window on the other side. I saw the face of the old Indian, distorted with a grimace of ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... dead,' said Hammond. 'Neither you nor your sisters can be the worse for this ancient slander. No doubt every part of the story has been distorted and exaggerated in the telling; and a great deal of it may be pure invention, evolved from the inner consciousness of the slanderer. God forbid that any whisper of scandal should ever reach ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... there is no peaceful coexistence with those who do not subscribe to their distorted and violent view of the world. They accept no dissent and tolerate no alternative points of view. Ultimately, the terrorist enemy we face threatens global peace, international security and prosperity, the rising tide of democracy, and the right ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - September 2006 • United States
... on occasion with shambling step, bent backs and sagging shoulders; with faces lined and interlined; with eyes dulled and dim, and sunken cheeks; with hands misshapen, knotted and bent by toil: if image indeed of God, strangely distorted—or a strange God. ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... his blood was up, and he held on to wear the beast down. He forgot his breakfast; he took no more than a casual notice of the direction he was following; he simply braced his knees in a closer grip, while the distorted shadows of himself and the horse lengthened and thinned along the ground as the sun rose ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... Reposing on the greatness of his cause, and the providence of the omnipotent Protector, he was ready to defy all the arts, and theories, and malice of man. His weapon was truth. For truth he fought, and for truth he was ready to die. The sophistries of the schools he despised; they had distorted and mystified the truth. And he knew them well, for he had been trained in the severest dialectics of his time, and, though he despised them, he knew how to use them. The simple word of God, directed to the reason and conscience of men, seemed ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... and cries and fierce imprecations Rang through the house of prayer; and high o'er the heads of the others Rose, with his arms uplifted, the figure of Basil the blacksmith, As, on a stormy sea, a spar is tossed by the billows. Flushed was his face and distorted with passion; and wildly he shouted,— "Down with the tyrants of England! we never have sworn them allegiance! Death to these foreign soldiers, who seize on our homes and our harvests!" More he fain would have said, but the merciless hand of a soldier Smote him upon the mouth, and dragged ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... vibration is independent of the velocity of either source or receiver. However, that relationship fails at velocities far below that of fifth-order rays. At only a very small fraction of that speed the tracers I am following are so badly distorted that they disappear altogether, and I have to distort them backwards. That wouldn't be too bad, but when I get up to about one per cent of the velocity I want to use, I can't calculate a force that will operate to distort them back into recognizable wave-forms. That's ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... friends the Federals. At the head of the bed a portrait of Rochefort; Rochefort is the favoured one of this lady, it seems. Were I he, I should persuade her to dress a little more decently. Three black men, in brigands' hats, their limbs dragging, and their faces distorted, approach the bed, singing like the robbers in Fra Diavolo: "Ad.... vance ... ad ... vance ... with ... pru ... dence ...!" The first, Monsieur Thiers, carries a heavy club and a dark lantern; Jules Favre, the second, brandishes ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... unusually long; the mode in which he grasped his bow, and the tremendous length to which he drew it; and, climax of all, his sudden manner of placing both bow and instrument under his arm, while he threw his hands behind him, elevated his head, his features almost distorted with a smile of ecstasy, and his very hair instinct with life, at the conclusion of an unparalleled fantasia! And there he stood, immovable and triumphant, while the theatre rang again with peals ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... windowless room on the second floor. As the door opened, Shirley beheld a pitiful sight. Attired in the finery of the Rialto, she lay prone upon a couch in the center of the dingy room, sobbing hysterically. Her blonde hair was disheveled, her features wan and distorted from her paroxysms of fear and grief. Like a frightened animal, she sprang to her feet as they entered the room, retreating to the wall, her trembling hands spread as though to brace ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... Thibaut d'Aussigny wanted to marry, this girl whom the king coveted, this girl whom the mad poet worshipped, what part would she play in the fantastic comedy which was gradually shaping itself in the distorted mind of Louis? Katherine de Vaucelles saw the king, and ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... earthquake stops a clock. The fierce blow of battle paralyzed the mind. Their speech was a vocabulary of war, their loyalties were loyalties, not to living ideas or duties, but to old commanders and to distorted traditions. They were dead men, most of them, moving among the living as ghosts; and yet, as ghosts in a play, they held the stage." In another passage the writer names the "ghosts" which are chiefly responsible for preventing Southern progress. They are three: ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... this, when there is a great original abundance of quartz, that great branching contemporaneous veins of segregation (as sometimes called) of quartz would be formed. I can only thus understand the relation which exists between the distorted foliation (not appearing due to injection) and the presence of ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... seen with his eyes the alternate rending anarchy and moaning paralysis of Italy. He had seen what Agricola had long before been spared the sight of. And what he saw, he saw not through a glass darkly or distorted, but in the whitest, driest light, without flinching and face to face. 'We are much beholden,' writes Bacon, 'to Machiavelli and others that wrote what men do, and not what they ought to do.' He did not despair of Italy, he did not despair even of Italian unity. But ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... to her words and watching her beautiful face distorted out of all loveliness, secretly congratulated himself upon the fact that he was not her prospective bridegroom. He wondered how Sir Frank, who was a mild, good-tempered man himself, could dare to make such ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... through her linsey dress, and pictured her, grotesquely foreshortened, upon the nail-drawn, warped, and beaten floor. Her hands, nursing her cheeks, chin pivoted in their palms, were large and toil-distorted, great-jointed like a man's, and all the feminine softness with which nature had endowed her seemed to have been overcome by the masculine cast of frame and face which the hardships ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... economy. Lacking monetary or fiscal stability, the economy suffers from serious macroeconomic imbalances - including rising inflation, fiscal deficits, multiple official exchange rates that overvalue the Burmese kyat, a distorted interest rate regime, unreliable statistics, and an inability to reconcile national accounts to determine a realistic GDP figure. Most overseas development assistance ceased after the junta began to suppress the democracy movement in 1988 and subsequently refused to honor the results of the ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... her barely concealed dislike, and the distant reticence which made her appear to him as remote as a star. Gerty had whispered of his affairs—perhaps of Madame Alta, and in Laura's unworldly vision his delinquencies had showed strangely distorted and out of drawing. His anger blazed up within him, yet he knew that the attraction of the woman beside him was increased rather than diminished ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... not doomed to see her tortured by pain, or raving in delirious agony,—to see those exquisite features distorted by frenzy,—or to hear that low, sweet voice untuned, the key-note ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... as a rule,—the inflammation extending to the hand and often into the arm. The condition affects the palmar surface of the fingers. If the felon results in the "death" of the bone, the last joint will have to be taken off and the hand may be distorted, crippled, and rendered permanently disabled. Blood poison may set in and death is possible as ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... with false sympathy and unwholesome concessions to the selfish weaknesses of her foster-mother. Dr. Winton advised many comfortable and diverting variations in treatment, but life in the Evanson home became increasingly distorted. At last John realized he was losing out badly-he must have a change. Through some subconscious inspiration he took Dr. Winton with him. They spent two weeks hunting and fishing in the Maine woods. John sought to get in touch with ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... light I got up quietly, glad to find the street again and the air. I stood in the crypt of the cathedral to hear the Ambrosian Mass, and it was (as I had expected) like any other, save for a kind of second lavabo before the Elevation. To read the distorted stupidity of the north one might have imagined that in the Ambrosian ritual the priest put a non before the credo, and nec's at each clause of it, and renounced his baptismal vows at the kyrie; but the Milanese are Catholics like any others, and the northern historians ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... through the garrison. Mrs. Rayner never meant that it should have any such significance, but inside of twenty-four hours, in course of which her language had been repeated some dozens of times and distorted quite as many, the generally accepted version of the story was that Mrs. Rayner, so far from expressing the faintest sympathy or sorrow for Mr. Hayne's misfortune, so far from expressing the natural gratification which a lady should feel that ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... outside; inside—I do not know. Where is that distorted fellow that bounded away from me in the darkness ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... frequent use of any of these substances is, however, injurious to the healthy growth, strength, and permanent beauty of the nails. The common practice of scraping the surface of the nails cannot be too strongly censured, as it causes them to become weak and distorted. Blows on the nails, and, indeed, violence to them in any form, also distorts ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... transient, and equally liable to dejection; but as paint leaves the countenance yet more withered and ghastly, the passions burst out with move violence after restraint, the features become more distorted and ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... long, before D'Effernay was called away. One of his people had something important, something urgent to communicate to him, which admitted of no delay. A look of fierce anger almost distorted his features; in an instant his thin lips moved rapidly, and Edward thought he muttered some curses between his teeth. He left the room, but in so doing, he cast a glance of mistrust and ill-temper on the handsome stranger with whom he was compelled to leave his wife alone. Edward observed ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... perfect,—far more grrand,—far more original! Ze acid may burn ze finger,—ze vire vill become rrusty,—ze isolation subject always to ze atmosphere. Ah, bah! Vat make you in zat event? As ze pure lustre of ze diamant of Golconde to ze distorted rays of a morsel of bottle-glass, so my grrand invention to ze modes of ze telegraph ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... might, for there hung at the window a man—or the body of one—his hands convulsively grasping the magnetized rod, the distorted face pressed against the glass, the lack-lustre eyes wide open, the jaw drooping. In that ghastly visage I recognized the features of ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... tongue "salt chuck," which means fish-eaters, or eaters of food from the salt water. Many of the young men and women were handsome in feature below the forehead, having fine eyes, aquiline noses and good mouths, but, in conformity with a long-standing custom, all had flat heads, which gave them a distorted and hideous appearance, particularly some of the women, who went to the extreme of fashion and flattened the head to the rear in a sharp horizontal ridge by confining it between two boards, one running back from the forehead at an angle of about forty degrees, ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... cried the other hotly,—"when you have promised to lay no further snare for that maid at your gates, whose name you have blasted, whose heart you have wrung, whose nature you have darkened and distorted"— ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... select fascinating Bible biographies and stories, and tactfully to supervise the reading, is at least as wisely expended as that used in training a grape vine or sewing a lace edge on a ruffle. Is it not strange that there is such distorted perspective and false balance of values in regard to what is worth while? The cares of this world crowd out so many supreme things. Many a temptation in later life would have its antidote if the Holy Spirit ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... the phrase "the Lamb of God." One old lady in my audience must have felt that the good Brethren were tampering unjustifiably with Holy Writ, for the following summer, from the barrels of clothing sent out to the Labrador, was extracted a dirty, distorted, and much-mangled and wholly sorry-looking woolly toy lamb. Its raison d'etre was a mystery until we read the legend carefully pinned to one dislocated leg, "Sent in order that the ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... confusion; that fortitude, while it gives confidence, may not make us rash; lest knowledge, while it knows and yet loves not, may swell the mind; lest piety, while it swerves from the right line, may become distorted; and lest fear, while it is unduly alarmed, may plunge us into the pit of despair." Therefore the virtues are more excellent than the gifts of the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... "A Singhalusi would have wasted an hour telling me half-truths—distorted enough to confuse, but not sufficiently inaccurate to anger me if I had a spy-cell on him all ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... there with his arm still rigidly extended, but altering his position now. Then, taking a step or two forward, he bent over, gazing fixedly at his cousin's distorted face, and taking aim once more as he stooped. He was about to draw the trigger, when the sharp barking of a dog arose from two or three ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... this specimen of Pope's propensity to falsehood is far from being the worst. Here were facts scandalously distorted. Falsehoods they were; but, if it had pleased God, they might have been truths. Next, however, comes a fiction so maniacally gross, so incoherent, and so rife with internal contradictions, as to involve its own exposure, literally shrinking ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... completely confused... Provocative!... delicate... dream-like... recesses, heavy doors And broad shadows, which lead to blue corners... And somewhere a sound that clinks like a Champagne glass. On a fragile rug lies a wide picture book, Distorted and exaggerated by a green ceiling light. How—soft little cats—piously white girls make love! In the background an old man and ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... trouble dawned in the breast of O Sana San. Running back to the field, she gathered a handful of wild flowers and returned to the soldier. The tears no longer fell, but his lips quivered and his face was distorted with pain. She looked about her in dismay. The coolies were down by the river, drinking from their hands and calling to one another; the only person to whom she could appeal was the foreigner with the red cross on his arm who was adjusting a bandage for a patient at the end ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... had no more warmth than a piece of cold, volcanic rock, which it resembled. Madeline appreciated how monstrous Dorothy found this burned and distorted visage, how deformed the little man looked to a woman of refined sensibilities. It was difficult for Madeline to look into his face. But she saw behind the blackened mask. And now she saw in Monty's deep eyes a spirit ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... together with the many things he had suffered at Andy's hands, was too much for our hero. He drew back his fist, and a moment later Andy Foger was stretched out on the grass. He lay there for a moment, and then rose up slowly to his knees, his face distorted with rage. ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton
... have become resolved into the same sort of protoplasm as the Earth Giants. He lay, a little heap, incredibly small, incredibly distorted. Flesh without bones, shapeless lumps of flesh where arms and legs and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... it. I was too horrified to hear all, when they told me. What struck me as being most shocking was my distorted explanation about the letters. It now set forth that I was not allowed to write myself, but would be happy to have him write to me; then there was an earnest assurance that my feelings toward him had not changed in ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... to the accident ward, and beheld a senseless figure, with bloated and discoloured features, distorted by the effects of the injury, a blow upon the temple, which had caused a fall backwards on the sharp edge of a stove, occasioning fatal injury to the spine. Albeit well accustomed to gaze critically upon the tokens of mortal ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of wisdom, science, and knowledge, and are characterised by folly. By what particular acts does a person become possessed of wisdom? By what acts, again, does one become possessed of little wisdom and distorted vision? Do thou dispel this doubt of mine, O thou that art the foremost of all beings conversant with duties. Others there are, O god, that are blind from the moment of their birth. Others there are that are diseased ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... souls of the dead, partake of a religious repast, in the persuasion that those beloved shades taste of the same food and are present at the sympathetic banquet. Is there not in this superstition a distorted tradition of the dogma by which we are commanded not to forget the souls of our brethren beyond the grave?— Annals of the Propagation of the ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... finally retiring, to continue his command, under cover of a powerful battery on shore. His roundly asserting, that we had two ships for one, and that he was told two English ships had struck; his ungenerous and distorted application of Lord Nelson's noble acknowledgment of the general bravery of the Danes; and the low source of solace that he finds in disingenuously limiting the advantage gained by the victory to the possession of a few wretched wrecks, without at all appreciating the grand political ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... hour we had reached the extremity of the "Salt Mountain," with all its distorted, sometimes even perpendicular stratification. By this time we were convinced that the whole of the mountain is not salt, but that a good deal of the upper length of it is a mixture of salt and marl or sand. Between ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... facts removes all mystery respecting the greatest political phenomenon of all history, and makes of it an essential outcome of previous conditions. The French people were grossly ignorant of government. The long period of misrule had distorted every form of legitimate government. One school of political philosophers gave their attention to pointing out the evils of the system; another to presenting bright pictures of ideal systems of government which had never been ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... sudden Lanyard's face was violently distorted in a grimace of terror. He lurched his shoulders forward, openly struggling ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... modern Scaliger, 'are scarcely more than a promise of excellence; the precursors of an advent; shadows cast before, and, like most shadows, they are too vague and ill-defined, too fluctuating and easily distorted into grotesque forms, to enable us to discriminate accurately the shape from which they are flung.... The truth is, that American literature, apart from that of England, has no separate existence.... The United States have yet to sign their ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... already corrected so many times, smoothing away the marks of fatigue, and the tiny wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, visible in too strong a light—her face suddenly seemed to her that of another woman, a new face that was distorted and ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... from the point where the dipping road lifted itself into the first view of the house, did not contain its usual note of cheerfulness. Catherine, wiping her hands on her checked apron, ran out to wave a welcome; and Waite, his squat body looking more distorted than ever, his huge shoulders lurching as he walked, came fairly plunging ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... that's your name, will you come with me?" the Englishman said lightly. He knew the tongue well that her brothers spoke, not in any of its refinement and subtlety, but in the ordinary distorted way an Englishman usually speaks a ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... the only representation. It was modelled in the solid stone of the roof, and depicted in flaming colours on hangings which here and there were hung against the walls. Wherever the eye turned it rested on a scarab. The effect was bewildering. It was as though one saw things through the distorted glamour of a nightmare. I asked myself if I were not still dreaming; if my appearance of consciousness were not after all a mere delusion; if I had really regained ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... aspiration, to trace which he has made it his labor and joy to essay. Through all his pages he is following out the tradition of this Quest, in its myriad aspects, especially since the Christian era, disfigured though it has been at times by superstition, and distorted at others by bigotry, but still, in what guise soever, containing as its secret the meaning of the life of man from his birth to his reunion with God who is his Goal. And the result is a series of volumes noble in form, united in aim, unique in ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... that quality generally possessed by the dullest sort of people, and is, in common language, called discretion."—SWIFT: Blair's Rhet., p. 113. "Which to allow, is just as reasonable as to own, that 'tis the greatest ill of a body to be in the utmost manner maimed or distorted; but that to lose the use only of one limb, or to be impaired in some single organ or member, is no ill worthy the least notice."— SHAFTESBURY: ib., p. 115; Murray's Gram., p. 322. "If the singular nouns and pronouns, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... and a frightful blasphemy were Mordaunt's reply; and then, his features distorted by rage and disappointed hate rather than by fear, he hurled his torch into the sea, and precipitated himself after it. At the same moment, and before Groslow had reached the powder barrels, the ship opened like ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... is the world to us. The most familiar objects change their aspect with every change of the soul. When you worry, everything is distorted, everything appears unnatural, the world looks dark, our friends seem far off. The jokes we hear fall flat. We indulge ourselves ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... his sorb—it was violet. The second man was standing erect before the other, a few feet away from him. He was short and muscular, his face was broad, bearded, and rather commonplace, but there was something terrible about his appearance. The features were distorted by a deep-seated look ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... together. In other places the vegetation which clothed both sides of the river was rich and beautiful in the extreme. Sometimes we found ourselves sweeping by the edge of a cypress swamp, huge trunks, or "knees," as the distorted stems are called, projecting far into the water, and we had to keep a bright look-out not ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... conceal from myself, that the men, who, from principle, see nothing but a hateful conspiracy in the revolution of the 20th of March, will accuse me of having embellished facts, and designedly distorted the truth. No matter: I have depicted this revolution as I saw it, as I felt it. How many others are pleased, to tarnish the honour of the nation, to represent their countrymen as composed of rebels or cowards! For ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... the 210one hand, and some little discussion upon the other; the angry feelings of the commander in chief and his pals overbalancing the mirthful by their solemnly protesting against the exposure of the secrets of the prison house, which, in this instance, they contended, were violently distorted by some enemy to the modern accomplishment of pugilism. In a few moments all was chaos, and the stormy confusion of tongues, prophetk: of the affair ending in a grand display and milling catastrophe; the apprehensions of which induced John ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... mind there rose the picture of her grim apprenticeship on Cape Cod. She could see the querulous invalid in the sick chair, her face distorted with pain and impatience; she could feel the sticky dough in her fingers, and the heat from the stove rising ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... hallucination peculiar to the clear atmosphere of these regions. Objects are not only magnified, but frequently distorted in their outlines, and it is only an old hunter that knows a buffalo when he sees one. Brothers a bush is often taken for a wild bull, and with us a brace of carrion crows, seated upon the crest of a ridge, were actually thought to be buffaloes, until they ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... windows at back, and there is no door save an opening in the floor. The delicately distorted rail of a spiral staircase winds up from below. CLAIRE is seen through the huge ominous window as if shut into the tower. She is lying on a seat at the back looking at a book of drawings. To do this ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... play we come down from the clouds; the poetry is gone, taste is shocked, fancy uncharmed, the improbabilities become grotesque, and the whole is distorted and tedious. Madame Sand's personages are never weary of analyzing their sentiments. Her flowing style, so pleasant to read, carries us swiftly and easily through her dissertations in print, before we have time to tire of them. On the stage such colloquies soon appear ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... of the mender of nets, flung face upwards across the rude table, the head hanging over the edge, and the face, which but a few short hours before had looked upon Landless with such a bright and patient serenity, blackened and distorted. Upon the throat were dark marks, the print ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... may not be improper to annex here Mrs. Piozzi's account of this transaction, in her own words, as a specimen of the extreme inaccuracy with which all her anecdotes of Dr. Johnson are related, or rather discoloured and distorted:—'I have forgotten the year, but it could scarcely, I think, be later than 1765 or 1766 that he was called abruptly from our house after dinner, and returning in about three hours, said he had been with an enraged authour, whose landlady pressed ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... dilated. Face somewhat distorted. Pupillary reflexes normal; although limbs would remain in a fixed attitude when so placed, he did not evidence the typical flexibilitas cerea. It seems as though he anticipated the passive movements, and there was present a certain amount of voluntary intent. All superficial reflexes ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... delight in luring into its pools, or overpowering in its fords, the benighted traveller. Its goblin, the "water-wraith," used to appear as a tall woman dressed in green, but distinguished chiefly by her withered, meagre countenance, ever distorted by a malignant scowl. I knew all the various fords—always dangerous ones—where of old she used to start, it was said, out of the river, before the terrified traveller, to point at him, as in derision, with her skinny finger, or to beckon him invitingly on; and I was shown the very tree ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... vitality of actions, derives its colour from what is no ways contributed to from any external source. Like the plant which while it derives the accident of its size and shape from the soil in which it springs, and is cankered, or distorted, or inflated, yet retains those qualities which essentially divide it from all others; so that hemlock continues to be poison, and the violet does not cease to emit its odour in ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... a purely imaginative explanation of phenomena; a legend rests on facts, but the facts are distorted. The two terms are often confused the one ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... connected themselves with the image of Carwin. Where is the proof, said I, that daemons may not be subjected to the controul of men? This truth may be distorted and debased in the minds of the ignorant. The dogmas of the vulgar, with regard to this subject, are glaringly absurd; but though these may justly be neglected by the wise, we are scarcely justified in totally ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... Ireland, perhaps not quite so distant? It is undoubted that the Canary Islands were never really altogether forgotten, and the same is probably true of the Madeiras and all three groups of Azores, though the knowledge that lingered in Ireland was a distorted glimmering tradition of old voyages, occasionally inciting to new ventures in ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... be doubly difficult, because you have so long watched its unpleasant manifestations in a distorted form. You are exposed to danger from that which has perverted many notions of right and wrong; you have so long heard things called by false names that you are inclined to turn away in disgust from a noble ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... a sort of haze seemed forming. Her heart beat thick and heavy. Stern's counting sounded very far away and strange; she hardly recognized his voice. To her came wild, disjointed, confused impressions—now a bony and distorted back, now a simian head; again a group that crouched and cowered in its ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... face livid and distorted by passion, Charles made a rush at his enemy—to be brought up short by the sight of his master, wringing the rascal's hand ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... next care was the poor maid: she lay all along upon the deck, hard by her mistress, and just like one that had fallen down in a fit of apoplexy, and struggled for life. Her limbs were distorted; one of her hands was clasped round the frame of the chair, and she gripped it so hard that we could not easily make her let it go; her other arm lay over her head, and her feet lay both together, set fast against the frame of the cabin table: in short, she lay just like one in the agonies of ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... of the historian should resemble a looking-glass, shining clear and exactly true, representing everything as it really is, and nothing distorted, or of a different form or colour. He writes not to the masters of eloquence, but simply relates what is done. It is not his to consider what he shall say, but only how it is to be said. He may be compared to Phidias, Praxiteles, Alcamenus, or other eminent ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... Universe itself is the Deity; or that the Deity is the animating Spirit of the Universe; and that the popular mythology, which gives one god to the Earth, one to the Sea, one to Fire, and so on, is in fact a distorted version of this truth. The very form of the universe—the sphere—is the most perfect of all forms, and therefore suited to ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... cheerless, sullen, and glum, His hand hanging idly by, His voice is an echo of woe, His face distorted, awry. ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... and awful face it was!—what a thing of distorted passion and pain! What an agony was expressed in every line of the features!—agony in which the traces of a divine beauty lingered only to render the whole countenance more repellent and terrific! A kind of sentient solemnity, mingled with wrath and terror, ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... have less inclination to the marvellous than many atheists, but I cannot help thinking that the stories of miracles, prophecies, charms, etc., are but distorted accounts of the extraordinary effects produced by certain latent forces, or, as was formerly said, by occult powers. Our science is still so brutal and unfair; our professors exhibit so much impertinence ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... with a venomous elixir, and rouged with a deadly dust of outward good; and all this done, as such things only can be done, in a boundless ignorance of all natural veracity; the faces falsely drawn—the lights falsely cast—the forms effaced or distorted, and all common human wit and sense extinguished in the vicious scum ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... solemnly. Then he leant back in his chair and drew his hand across his brow. I could see now why I hadn't recognised that delicate hand before: white as it was by nature, hard work on the farm had long bronzed and distorted it. But I saw also, for the first time, that the palm was scarred with cuts and rents—exactly like Minnie ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... mine manager, his bronzed face was distorted with rage. The veins near his forehead were swelling. With a sudden roar, Pedro Gato sprang forward, aiming a blow with his open right hand ...
— The Young Engineers in Mexico • H. Irving Hancock
... arrived the men were just removing the casket from the vehicle to carry it up-stairs. I stopped that procedure, for I did not want my mother to see the dead face, because one side of it was drawn and distorted by the effects of the opium. When I went up-stairs, there stood the two chairs—placed to receive the coffin—just as I had seen them in my dream; and if I had arrived two or three minutes later, the casket would have been resting upon them, precisely ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... now began to give way to anger. If they were going to do anything, why didn't they do it? He watched the forest so much and so intently that he began to create images there for himself. A tall stump was distorted into the figure of an Indian warrior, a clump of bushes took the shape of an entire group of Shawnees, and many savage, black eyes looked from the leaves. Paul's reason told him that he beheld nothing, but his fancy put them there, nevertheless. He saw presently ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... is known to occur only in Florida, where it is sometimes common enough to require remedial treatment. The affected portions of the foliage are more or less distorted and covered with an ashy white fuzz. The general vigor and fruitfulness of the plants are greatly reduced. The name applied to this trouble denotes its cause, an extremely small mite (Phytoptus calacladophora Nal.), which by its presence ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... the exchange, in the coffeehouses, nay even at the church doors, but Torrington. Parties ran high; wagers to an immense amount were depending; rumours were hourly arriving by land and water, and every rumour was exaggerated and distorted by the way. From the day on which the news of the ignominious battle arrived, down to the very eve of the trial, public opinion had been very unfavourable to the prisoner. His name, we are told by contemporary ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a woman who had been savagely mangled by her murderers. The upturned and distorted face proved it to be Yohama, the grandmother of little Obo. Near to her lay the body of a grey-haired negro, who might to judge from his position, have fallen in ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... individualism, a constant slipping over into the grotesque is inevitable. And so it comes to be that the conscious or unconscious aim of their art is rather self-expression than beauty. Their image of reality is sharp and clear, but distorted. Burlesque and satire are never far away in their most serious moments. Not even the calmest and best ordered of Spanish minds can resist a tendency to excess of all sorts, to over-elaboration, to grotesquerie, to deadening mannerism. All that is greatest in ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... nowadays to give an accurate description of this bare reality in a novel it would look like the most exaggerated caricature. The Rococo, however, can bear the strongest laying on of color and the most distorted forms. It was not without some reason that, in those days, they loved to chisel or carve on every house door and on the neck of every violin a hideous face which is making grimaces and sticking out ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... constantly tormented by whole processions and crowds of visionary figures, of the origin and nature of which she was perfectly aware, but which she often described as exceedingly annoying by their grotesque and distorted appearance, and wearisome from their continual recurrence and thronging succession. With the recovery of her general health she obtained a release from ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... has to use introspection to report what he sees. The astronomer who has bad eyes can not observe the stars well or discover the facts about them, because his introspection in reporting what he sees proceeds on the imperfect and distorted images coming in from his defective eyesight. So a man given to exaggeration, who is not able to report truthfully what he remembers, can not be a good botanist, since this defect in introspection will render his observation of the ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... whilst a smile of scorn distorted her lip,—"so you will demean yourself now to look upon me; and you would like to know what I ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... short flat noses, their eyes black and inconstant, having large eyebrows, extending down to the nose; long sharp chins, their upper jaws low and declining, their teeth long and thin, their countenances distorted, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... to select a spot for our bivouac. Moss and lichens here covered the rocks with a variegated carpet, and, in proportion as we ascended the mountain, the cooler air relieved our lungs. At length our ascent came to an end, and we found ourselves on a plateau dotted over with stunted shrubs, distorted and twisted with the winds and storms. Fresh summits rose in front of us, but they were too far off to cause us any fear. Sumichrast halted near three gigantic stones, placed so as to leave a space between them, in which we could encamp, ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... elongated head markedly prognathous, but he exercised over some of his companions a passionate, if unnatural, fascination which, I have been told by one who was present at the trial, betrayed itself shamelessly in their attitude and the glances they exchanged with him during the proceedings. Distorted pride of race and of caste combined with neuroticism and eroticism appear to have co-operated here in producing as complete a type of moral perversion as the records of ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... tears defied the primitive process of winking. Not so cheaply could she rid herself of their smart and the blurred distorted vision they occasioned. She pulled out her handkerchief petulantly and wiped them. Then schooled herself to a colder, more ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... tanks as the ornament of drawing-rooms and gardens. Not only an infinite variety of spotted, striped, variegated colors has been produced in these Fishes, but, especially among the Chinese, so famous for their morbid love of whatever is distorted and warped from its natural shape and appearance, all sorts of changes have been brought about in this single Species. A book of Chinese paintings showing the Golden Carp in its varieties represents some as short and stout, others long and slender,—some with the ventral side swollen, others hunch-backed,—some ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... stayed all day. The mist was so dense that it gave the effect of a solid mass enclosing the house. No wind stirred it, no cheering beam of sun pierced it. Through it sounds reached the ear distorted and magnified. All day I sat ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... "Triumphant Democracy,"[70] had its origin in realizing how little the best-informed foreigner, or even Briton, knew of America, and how distorted that little was. It was prodigious what these eminent Englishmen did not then know about the Republic. My first talk with Mr. Gladstone in 1882 can never be forgotten. When I had occasion to say that the majority of the English-speaking ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... an exaggerated statement of the circumstances attending the capture of Fort Pillow, relying solely upon the evidence of those who would naturally give a distorted ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... heard it said that a man or woman should give up either because of its effect upon the appearance. Why, then, should women abandon athletic exercises, which they enjoy so much, and which do them so much good, merely because, just for a moment or two perhaps, their appearance is distorted? ...
— Lawn Tennis for Ladies • Mrs. Lambert Chambers
... Joseph had his wish. Moreover he had it given to him even as he desired, which does not usually happen. We are given a part, or the whole, so distorted that we fail ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... and followed the circuit which would bring him down to where the man lay. Whilst still a few yards off, he checked himself. If the man slept, his body was strangely distorted; one arm seemed to be beneath him, the other was extended stiffly; the face looked at the sky. A few steps, and Dagworthy, gazing upon ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... dramatist were to eschew all crises that could not be made to resolve themselves with specifically dramatic crispness and decisiveness, he would very seriously limit the domain of his art. Many excellent themes would be distorted and ruined by having an emphatic ending forced upon them. It is surely much better that they should be brought to their natural unemphatic ending, than that they should ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... that a concave speculum hung slantingly high over his head; a movement in this caught my attention sharply, and I looked up to see, distorted and made fantastic but bright and beautifully colored, the magnified, reflected, evasive rendering of a palace, of a terrace, of the vista of a great roadway with many people, people exaggerated, impossible-looking because ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... to me in dreams a stammering woman, Squint in her eyes, and in her feet distorted, With hands dissevered ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... gold, until the strictest integrity, the most self-sacrificing honesty, are beginning to be looked upon as marvels, and we have won for ourselves among the nations of the world the unenviable title of worshippers of the 'almighty dollar.' Religion itself is twisted and distorted into every imaginable shape to bring it into harmony with our all-absorbing pursuit: all our ideas of public policy and of social progress are made to depend upon and modified by this unworthy motive. We mean not to include those individuals who, with loftier motives and a true appreciation ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... I do not understand you. You surely do not think that I had any other object in doing what I did than to serve Comrade Bickersdyke? It's terrible how one's motives get distorted ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... everything had let themselves be taken by surprise." The police possessed no foresight or faculty of prevention. Every silly thing that transpired was reported either from malice or stupidity. What was heard was misunderstood or distorted in the recital, so that the only result of the plan was ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... ran ahead of us, our ethon lamps making strange and distorted shadows on the curving walls of the tunnel. Correy and I herded the unwilling Tipene just ahead of us, and the five picked men ...
— The Death-Traps of FX-31 • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... cure handed him the flask, which he emptied at a draught. His distorted face took on an expression of awful calm. He seemed absorbed, stunned, incapable of resistance. But as soon as they were engaged in binding his feet, he snatched a pistol from the belt of one of the gendarmes ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... much like to meet him," continued Philippa. "I should so like to ask him why he wrote The Millstone, for, although I won't let any one say a word against him, I do think in my heart that he made a mistake—that his point of view was a little distorted, I mean. It was so ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... orient as they moan through the shell-riven wrecks at Cavite, the booming waves of the Caribbean as fathoms deep it sweeps over Pluton and Furor and breaks into spray on the shapeless and fire-distorted steel of Vizcaya and Oquendo, tell how the navy has paid our debt to Spain. Nor is the renown which crowns the standards of our army one whit less glorious. Nothing in the lucid page of Thucydides nor in the terse commentaries of Caesar, nothing in the vivid narrative of Napier ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... find one of those innumerous instances of a lost or anticipated power which make us suspect that mankind has forestalled or forgotten all that we believe ourselves to be discovering. Remember that there is almost always some distorted, misapprehended or dimly—seen truth at the bottom of the most eccentric and wildest creeds, superstitions and legends. All this new science of metaphysics or of the investigation of our subconsciousness and of unknown powers, ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... air with changing old-time philosophies, while Monna Beatrice and her maidens sang or danced or luted or played ball. Messer Folco was a man that cherished the domesticities, and had no desire to see his home distorted into a house of call where all had a right to take him by the hand, and he held that the family life flourished best, like certain plants, in seclusion. But as there is a time for all things, so Messer Folco found a time for opening his doors to his friends and acquaintances, and ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... capable of expansion" is the central Marxian doctrine of historical inevitability. It is surely less than honest to claim the prestige and authority of Marx's teachings upon the slender basis of a distorted version of his early thought, while completely ignoring the matured body of his doctrines. It may not matter much to the world to-day what Marx thought, or how far Lenine follows his teachings, but it is of importance ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... good atmospheric and instrumental conditions it becomes inconspicuous. The "Beads" must always appear when the projected lunar edge is serrated with mountains. In Baily's observation, they were exaggerated and distorted by an irradiative clinging together of the limbs of ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... danger, of course, here as everywhere, that one may go too far; and it is entirely conceivable that both soloist and conductor might go to such extremes in their display of emotion that the music would be entirely distorted, losing what is after all its main raison d'etre, viz., the element of beauty. But there seems at present to be no especial danger that such an event will occur; the tendency seems rather to be toward overemphasizing intellectualism ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... a large and imposing structure, now so utterly wrecked and shivered that one wonders how the crumbling reddish-gray walls are kept erect. The veranda was battered down and much of the front of the building lies bodily open, the structure being supported on the battered and distorted pillars assisted by great balks of wood. Entering by the left wing I pass down a winding stair into the bowels of the earth till I reach the spacious and lofty vaults or tykhana under the building. Here, the place affording comparative safety, ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... lantern slide, and if the right hand side is a little further away than the left, the top further away than the bottom, you can print a fraudulent high speed ahead picture. True, everything else in the picture, even if motionless, is distorted, and the difference between this faking and the distortion of the shutter can be seen by an expert. But it will pass. In this case, however, the faker was so sure of that that he was careless. Instead ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... had it, you would not take so gloomy a view of things. Like him from whom I have derived some of my sentiments, I have found that they tend to make me a happier man. The Christian, like yourself, looks upon every thing with a jaundiced or distorted eye, and is apt to underrate the claims and pleasures of this present scene of our existence. I can truly say that I now enter into them much more keenly than I could when I was an orthodox Christian. I can say with Mr. Newman, I now, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... order that he may partake with the gods in the drollery of this scene, should observe that the crippled and distorted Vulcan had thrust himself into an office at all other times administered either by Hebe ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... their own pack-saddle. None of the villagers who stood around could give any explanation of the presence of the hide. None of them had ever seen it before; and the features of all were painfully distorted into expressions of astonishment ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... Next, out of a lair not fifteen yards from the distorted dummy, rose a figure that shone white as snow under the moon. Mark Brendon approached the snare that he himself had set, shook the grass out of his coat, lifted his hat from the ball of leaves it covered, ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... little lower, "Ball Costumer," and in the two first floor windows of which, over a basement set apart for the use of persons in need of bad servants and servants in search of worse places—appeared such a collection of distorted human faces that a general execution by the guillotine seemed to have been going on, with all the heads hung up against the glass to dry. The ghastly faces were, in fact, those of papier-mache masks, waiting for customers desirous of a certain amount of personal disfigurement, whether ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... pp. of desencajar, disfigured, with distorted features: (with eyes) unnaturally wide open, projecting, ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... descent to the brink of the fall, is separated into half a dozen distorted channels which have zig-zagged their passage through the cement formation, working it into spires, pinnacles, towers and many other capricious objects. Many of these are of faultless symmetry, resembling the minaret of a mosque; others are so grotesque as ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford |
