"Fiendish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... greater part of the diners at the restaurants are single, and seem to have no knowledge of each other. Perhaps the gill of the fiendish wine of the country, which they drink at their meals, is rather calculated to chill than warm the heart. But, in any case, a drearier set of my fellow-beings I have never seen,—no, not at evening parties,—and I conceive that their life ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... people sit up all night in lone places on the hills, with Bibles and tremulous psalms, they will be apt to hear some of the most fiendish noises in the world: the wind will beat on doors and dance upon roofs for them, and make the hills howl around their cottage with a clamour like ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you must take me away, we must get out of this fiendish city. Let us go into the wilderness as you said, and live as we can—I would rather starve to death than face these things. Let us get into the country, Thyrsis. You can work as a farm-hand, and earn a few dollars a week—surely ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... myself, But I know that such there be. And oh! the hot and horrid track Of the Ocean of the Line! There are millions of the negro men Under that burning brine. The ocean sea doth moan and moan, Like an uneasy sprite; And the waves are white with a fiendish fire That burneth all the night. 'Tis a frightful thing to sail along, Though a pleasant wind may blow, When we think what a host of misery Lies down in the sea below! Didst ever hear of a little boat, And in her there were ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... mouse, was so very small, that she could take him up, and turn him round bodily, when other means failed, or pull him half into the chair if danger threatened in front. He was a sprightly little fellow, and had not yet lost all the ardour of youth, or developed the fiendish obstinacy of his kind; so he frequently ran little races—now and then pranced, and was not quite dead to the emotion of gratitude in return for ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... they heard ferocious yells in their rear, and beheld their fiendish pursuers, now also in the canon. It was like Christian tracking the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and listening to the screams and curses of devils. At every reappearance of the Apaches they had diminished the distance between themselves and their expected ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... that I am a member, may I ask what is this object, the secret of which you guard with such fiendish zeal?" I demanded angrily. ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge. Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the Yukon, struggling along its creeks; Roaming its giant valleys, scaling its god-like peaks; Bathed in its fiery sunsets, fighting its fiendish cold — Twenty years in the Yukon... twenty years — ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... give out to the public at large certain discoveries of modern science. Chemistry had led to the invention of too terrible means of destruction in our century to allow it to fall into the hands of the profane. What man of sense—in the face of such fiendish applications of dynamite and other explosive substances as are made by those incarnations of the Destroying Power, who glory in calling themselves Anarchists and Socialists—would not agree with us in saying:—Far better for mankind that it should never have blasted ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... standing over the great kettle, dancing round it, and making sudden plunges with a stick into it, in the desperate effort to stir its boiling contents—desperate, because the fire was very fierce and large, and the flames seem to take a fiendish pleasure in leaping up suddenly just under Pierre's nose, thereby endangering his beard, or shooting out between his legs and licking round them at most unexpected moments, when the light wind ought to have been blowing them quite ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... when there are any, being conducted in that insipid dialect in which a fine woman was called an "elegant female." The following is a sample description of one of Brown's heroines, and is taken from his novel of Ormond, the leading character in which—a combination of unearthly intellect with fiendish wickedness—is thought to have been suggested by Aaron Burr: "Helena Cleves was endowed with every feminine and fascinating quality. Her features were modified by the most transient sentiments and were the seat of a softness at all times blushful and bewitching. All those graces ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... then in course of construction, a resolution which fortunately was revoked two years later. As a matter of fact trade weakened heavily until 1660, suffering reverses, not only from England's attitude, but also from France's and Sweden's fiendish acts. Although the town energetically opposed its enemies, often against the will of the Netherlands' States, it could not at once redress its internal depression, and we should not wonder at seeing the artist Rembrandt among the victims. He avows in the document ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... level of the water, they continued to descend, by a very winding and difficult road, for an hour and a half; and during the whole of this descent they were compelled to be inactive spectators of the fiendish spectacle below. The Kalmucks, reduced by this time from about six hundred thousand souls to two hundred thousand, and after enduring for two months and a half the miseries we have previously described—outrageous heat, famine, and the destroying scimitar ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... joined the Indians. He had been kindly received, adopted into the tribe, had married the daughter of a chief, and become the father of two children. With the prospect of gaining a reward for Indian scalps, all the cupidity of this man's fiendish nature was aroused, and on the approach of Bouquet's army he conceived a plan for enriching himself and at the same time escaping the punishment due him as a deserter. While meditating it he found ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... habitation, flocks of crows came down heavily from every tree. The noise they make whilst jumping about everywhere is indescribable. There seemed to be something positively human in the positions of the slyly bent heads of the drunken birds, and a fiendish light shone in their eyes while they were examining ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... of the infamous story of the brig Carl and her fiendish owner, a Dr. Murray, who with half a dozen other scoundrels committed the most awful crimes—shooting down in cold blood scores of natives who refused to be coerced into "recruiting". Some of these ruffians went to the scaffold or to long terms of imprisonment; and from ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... resolved on. The reader will understand, of course, that this enemy was Ali Pacha. Their ninth war was with him; and he, like all before him, was beaten; but not like all before him did Ali sit down in resignation under his defeat. His hatred was now become fiendish; no other prosperity or success had any grace in his eyes, so long as Suli stood, by which he had been overthrown, trampled on, and signally humbled. Life itself was odious to him, if he must continue to witness the triumphant existence of the abhorred little mountain village which ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... come and settle down. From there, still accompanied by Cammerhof, Zeisberger went on to the Senecas. He was welcomed to a Pandemonium of revelry. The whole village was drunk. As he lay in his tent he could hear fiendish yells rend the air; he went out with a kettle, to get some water for Cammerhof, and the savages knocked the kettle out of his hand; and later, when the shades of evening fell, he had to defend himself with his fists ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... He sent forth a fiendish whistle, fit to pierce a hole in the door. Jeanne clapped her hands. The piano and the violoncello attacked ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... sinners. They are only content when they have done harm, and delight in making others as bad as themselves. But, diabolical as such a disposition is, one sees it only too often in full operation. How many a drunkard or impure man finds a fiendish pleasure in getting hold of some innocent lad, and 'putting him up to a thing or two,' which means teaching him the vices from which the teacher has ceased to get much pleasure, and which he has to spice with the condiment of seeing an unaccustomed sinner's eagerness! Such people infest our streets, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... obscured the significance of the episcopal city of Jaro and detracted from the social importance of the rich Chinese half-caste residential town of Molo. [220] Chiefly from these towns came the advocates of anarchy, whose hearts swelled with fiendish delight at the prospect of witnessing the utter ruin and humiliation of their rivals in municipal prestige. Yloilo, from that moment, was abandoned to the armed rabble, who raided the small shops for petroleum to throw on to the woodwork ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... Lincoln's election. The same leaders went to Washington last December with the deliberate intention to quarrel with the President, who up to that day and hour had followed in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor. Their denunciations have been systematic and fiendish. If, under a keen sense of injustice, he has since erred in judgment or temper, none will deny the sufficiency of the provocation. That it would have been wiser, though less manly, to forbear, I admit. But no nature, merely human, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... faced the fact. The portrait was literally in rags: They hung from the top of the frame and swung over the bottom of it Hardly enough of the canvas remained unriddled to show that it had represented anything human. Its destruction was absolute—fiendish, it ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... terrible stranger; one at the gate, another through the crevices of the wooden fence, another over it. Khabar, with his arms haughtily a-kimbo, gazed with stern pride from the other gate. Now for the frightful face with mouse's ears, winking owlish eyes streaming with fiendish fire! now for the beak! They beheld a young man, tall, graceful, of noble deportment, overflowing with fresh vigorous life. In his blue eyes shone the light of goodness and benevolence through the moisture called up by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... den affair, And other stories rich and rare, Were writ to make old doctrine wear Something of a romantic air: That the Nain widow's only heir, And Lazarus with cadaverous glare (As done in oils by Piombo's care) Did not return from Sheol's lair: That Jael set a fiendish snare, That Pontius Pilate acted square, That never a sword cut Malchus' ear And (but for shame I must forbear) That — — did not reappear! . . . - Since thus they hint, nor turn a hair, All churchgoing will I forswear, And sit on ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... the mountains, I had found burned-over forests; ancient trees that had stood for centuries, had endured drought, flood, storm and pestilence, only to be burned at last by a fiendish flash and left, charred skeletons of ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... commands to the firing squad with fiendish deliberation and delay. He seemed to enjoy dragging out the agony that the condemned man suffered. But it was this very cruelty that caused Maenck's undoing and saved the life of Leopold of Lutha. Just ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... given without marking, and that in the strongest lines, this tendency to corporeal degradation; which, in the time of Dante, could be done frankly, but cannot now. And, therefore, I think the twenty-first and twenty-second books of the "Inferno" the most perfect portraitures of fiendish nature which we possess; and at the same time, in their mingling of the extreme of horror (for it seems to me that the silent swiftness of the first demon, "con l'ali aperte e sovra i pie leggiero," cannot be surpassed in dreadfulness) ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... still was heard above the confusion the hymning voice of the smoke-hid victim. But louder and higher than all, it is coming, ringing from far like the blast of a trumpet—a voice so stern, abrupt, and imperious that forthwith ceases the fiendish fandango. Up dashes a warrior mounted on horseback, leaps to the ground, and now at the death-pile seizes the fagots and scatters them broadcast, stamping upon them with moccasined feet to smother the flames ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... the dreams. They are horrible enough, but I have faith that you will help me get rid of them. There's something else, something more serious, more uncanny. It terrifies me. I feel that I'm in the power of some supernatural being who takes a fiendish delight in torturing me. I'm not a coward, Dr. Owen," Penelope lifted her head proudly, "for I truly have no fear of real danger that I can see and face squarely, but the unseen, the unknown——" She ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... respect will be simply, that, though not beyond the prime of life, there were ages of guilt, of vexed and vexatious strife, unregulated pride, without aim or elevation, a lurking malignity, and hopeless discontent—all embodied in the fiendish and fierce expression which that single glimpse developed to the ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... horror falls. Look! a serpent lank and cold Hugs his spirit fold on fold; From his heart, all day and night, It doth suck God's blessed light. Drink it will, and drink it must, Till the cup holds naught but dust; All day long he hears it hiss, Writhing in its fiendish bliss; 110 All night long he sees its eyes Flicker with foul ecstasies, As the spirit ebbs away Into the absorbing clay. Who is he that skulks, afraid Of the trust he has betrayed, Shuddering if perchance a gleam Of old nobleness should stream Through ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... of a despairing maniac. Suddenly ceasing, he would dart down upon some hapless lizard, too early astir for its own safety, and, with his writhing prey in his bill, would fly to some other branch, and after swallowing his captive, burst forth into a yell of self-gratulation even-more fiendish than before. The delicate little "paddy melon," a small species of kangaroo, turned his gracefully-formed little head, beautiful as a fawn's, and, startled at the strange figure in the verandah, stood hesitatingly for a few seconds, ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... surprise and indignation, he looked up into the face that was bending over him, and recognized Pierre Costello, whose features wore a fiendish expression, the effect of which was heightened by a murderous-looking knife which he carried between his teeth. Scowling fiercely, as if he were trying to strike terror to the boy's heart by his very appearance, he loosened his grasp on Frank's throat, and the latter, ...
— Frank Among The Rancheros • Harry Castlemon
... unfortunate victim had no idea. Perhaps to some lonely spot where Ignacio could torture him to his fiendish heart's content! But there was no use in ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... nothing more. Mind you come back to-morrow. If you are my brother's daughter (though it is no recommendation!) I'll do something for you. If you are not, I'd—I'd like to give you a piece of my mind." He laughed a fiendish, spiteful ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... Ortega heard us. He was exerting then his utmost strength of lung against the infamous plot to expose him to the derision of the fiendish associates of that obscene woman! . . . Then he began another interlude upon the door, so sustained and strong that I had the thought that this was growing absurdly impossible, that either the plaster would begin to fall off the ceiling or he would ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... fancy I see him fly, the wood, and the rock, and the water, gleaming back the dark-red furnace-light, that is shed on them by his dragon wings! By my soul, I can hardly suppose it fancy—I can hardly think but that I was under the influence of an evil spirit—under an act of fiendish possession! But gone as he is, gone let him be—and thou, too ready implement of evil, be thou gone after him!" He drew from his pocket his right hand, which had all this time held his hunting-knife, and threw the implement into the court-yard as he spoke, then, with a sad quietness, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... when we are angry. He is like me: he has my fiendish temper. No matter what I say or do, keep us apart till I am calm. By God's grace I will never touch his flesh again ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... produced white men so savage as to be men in name only. These outcasts and renegades lived among the savages, and during thirty years harassed the border, perpetrating all manner of fiendish cruelties upon the settlers. They were no less cruel to the redmen whom they ruled, and at the height of their bloody careers made futile the Moravian missionaries' long labors, and destroyed the beautiful hamlet of the Christian Indians, ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... between Sir Edward Grey and Prince Lichnowsky is recorded in the famous No. 123. With the rather childish subsequent attempt to minimize No. 123 on the ground that the Prince was merely an amiable nincompoop who did not really represent his fiendish sovereign, neither I nor any other serious person need be concerned. What is beyond all controversy is that after that conversation Prince Lichnowsky could do nothing but tell the Kaiser that the Entente, having at last got his imperial head ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... eight thousand and some in his breast pocket," she said with fiendish accuracy. "Every penny he ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... looked at me with a fiendish grin. "None of your insolence," said he, with a dreadful oath. "I never saw a Virginia nigger that I couldn't manage, proud as they are. Your master has left you in my hands, and you must obey my orders. If you don't, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... still pursued by this fiendish spirit, the reader will see by the following paragraph of a letter received from ...
— The American Prejudice Against Color - An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily The Nation Got - Into An Uproar. • William G. Allen
... it seemed incomprehensible that it should just be like this: the bottles emptied, refilled, rewrapped, and replaced. A sort of plot, a sinister attempt to deceive, a thing resembling sly vengeance, but for what? Or else a fiendish joke. But Mr. Burns was in possession of a theory. It was simple, and he uttered it ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... was wise in her fiendish wickedness, and knew that as they had been seen last together she must account for McKay's disappearance. At the end of an interval long enough to make rescue impossible she startled the whole yacht with ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... the coast now began to change: the shores were sandy, while further inland lay dense forests, from whose gloomy depths I could ever and anon hear the fierce roar of beasts of prey, the yell of apes, the fiendish laugh of the hyena, or the despairing death cry of a hapless deer. Seldom have I experienced a greater feeling of solitude than while listening to these strange sounds, and knowing that I, in this frail canoe, was the only human being near. Giving myself up to contemplation, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... while, with fiendish eagerness, they both turned to perform the foul deed. With a firm grasp they first laid hold on Azariah, and he was thrown into the midst of the flames. The same was done to Mishael; and, finally, as Hananiah dropped to the burning depth below, the ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... deprived of the accumulations of centuries, forced, like Noah after the deluge, but without his means, to start again from the very beginning. Indeed, as Levinsohn remarks, the wonder is that, despite the fiendish persecution they endured, these unfortunates should have preserved a spark of love of knowledge. Yet a little later it was to burst into flame again and bring light and warmth to hearts crushed by "man's ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... up to the breastwork, looked over until he could see a redcoat, and then taking aim blazed away. After each shot he paused to write in his book. Lieutenant Ashby, who had had a brother killed at the River Raisin, seemed frantic with rage and fiendish glee. He ran up and down the ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... one: yet her kind destiny, Which seem'd to us so terrible, betimes Removed an elder sister from the woe That dogs the race of Pelops. Cease, oh cease Thy questions, maiden, nor thus league thyself With the Eumenides, who blow away, With fiendish joy, the ashes from my soul, Lest the last spark of horror's fiery brand Should be extinguish'd there. Must then the fire, Deliberately kindl'd and supplied With hellish sulphur, never cease to ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... upon the offending man, but upon the community of which he was a part. Even as man developed in knowledge and civilization, this sort of crime continued to furnish the greater proportion of victims and the most cruel punishments. Torture of the most fiendish sort was evoked to catch offenders and extort confessions. Difference of religious opinions was the worst crime. The inquisition became an established thing. Sometimes a nation was almost wiped out that heretics should be killed and heresies destroyed. ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... of knowing how you are torturing him and how he loathes you; and you give yourself unnecessary pains to annoy him with furtive tricks and spiteful doing of forbidden things. No wonder he is sometimes provoked to fiendish outbursts of wrath. No wonder men of downright sense, like Dr Johnson, admit that under such circumstances children will not learn anything unless they are so cruelly beaten that they make desperate efforts ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... this was my first experience with huskies. I thought it was going to be hard work for the dogs, but they frolicked about in the snow with their pink tongues out, showing all their teeth as though they were laughing in fiendish glee and enjoying every ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... your abominable chuckling and laughing, and your confused talk, I rather turn away from you with disgust, and am even inclined to believe that you possess some execrable power for attracting me to you." "O God! God! God!" whined the old dame, a prey to unspeakable pain, "what fiendish spirit of darkness has put such fearful thoughts into your head? O Tonino, my darling Tonino, the woman who took such tender loving care of you when a child, and who saved your life from the most threatening danger on that ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... big dogs more than occupied the wolf's attention and took all the punishing, while in a trice one of the greyhounds, having seized him by the hind-leg, stretched him out, and the others were biting his undefended belly. The snarling and yelling of the worry made a noise so fiendish that it was fairly bloodcurdling; then it gradually died down, and the second wolf lay limp on the plains, killed by the dogs, unassisted. This wolf was rather heavier and decidedly taller than either of the big dogs, with more ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... the story of its doom, The fiendish mob, the prostrate law, The fiery jet through midnight's gloom, Our ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... spectators! The father, however, after some agonising moments of deliberation, brings him down with his rifle; and the cougar, falling among the eager crowd below, is torn to pieces in a moment. But this does not get rid of the peccaries, who set up their fiendish screams anew as they discover two other victims in the tree. The father fires again and again, dropping his peccary each time, till five lie dead upon the ground; but the rage of the rest only becomes more and more furious—and the marksman is ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... smiling at Margaret, walking or riding with Margaret, was enough to send her writhing upon her bed in the darkness of a wakeful night. She would clench her pretty hands until the nails dug into the flesh and brought the blood. She would bite the pillow or the blankets with an almost fiendish clenching of her teeth upon them and mutter, as she did so: "I hate her! I hate her! I could ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... fair. Some were bartering, gambling, or eating horrible-looking refreshment, and altogether thoroughly enjoying themselves; rows and rows squatted motionless on the ground in front of the stage; of course, sleep, with such a fiendish commotion, was out of the question, and so my uncle was obliged to get up and wander about among the masses until daybreak; he said he never could make head or tail of the play, but one of his brother officers loved it; he engaged an interpreter and squatted for hours in front ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... silver forks have been recognized as not less indispensable appendages to any elegant dinner table than silver spoons; and, along with silver forks, came in the explosion of that anti-Queensberry brutalism which forks first superseded—viz., the fiendish practice of introducing the knife between the lips. But, in defiance of all these facts, certain select hacks of the daily press, who never had an opportunity of seeing a civilized dinner, and fancying that their own obscene modes of feeding prevailed ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... alley and into this blind passage-way that the unwilling victims of White Slavers (the same syndicate now operating with Chicago as headquarters) were carried into this little solitary cell to be "broken in" by fiendish, brute force to a ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... their work accomplished, and the two whom they had tracked so far actually in their hands, made the forest ring with their exultant shouts. A few closed in around the devoted pair, directing at them fiendish cries and no less fiendish laughter, and menacing them with knife and tomahawk, but the majority streamed down the steep and into ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... of horror, their painted faces and blood-stained garments looking ghastly in the moonlight. One man threw an ornament, torn from the person of a white woman, to his squaw, who had brought his supper; and another, with a fiendish laugh, tossed a scalp to Millicent, calling out in coarse tones, "Here little white-skin, take that for a ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... blackest pages, or Fielding's fiercest irony. The man who wrote the story had something diabolical about him: the terrible verses which Pope wrote respecting Hervey, in one of his own moods of almost fiendish malignity, I fear are true. I am frightened as I look back into the past, and fancy I behold that ghastly, beautiful face; as I think of the queen writhing on her death-bed, and crying out, "Pray!—pray!"—of the royal old sinner by her side, who ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... while boys and young men stopped long enough to go behind the bench and give vent to sudden and fiendish shouts. This always jerked the man and woman abruptly from their sleep; and at sight of the startled woe upon their faces the crowd would roar with ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... A foolish member of the Interrogation family whose most fiendish offspring is "How old ...
— The Silly Syclopedia • Noah Lott
... countenance he took advantage of the fiendish power which fate and the too sensitive feeling of honor of a lofty soul had given into his hand; and then shrugged his shoulders, clasped his hands, turned his eyes to heaven, and said 'there is no room ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... is a true bill that Torture was in the bad old days indiscriminately used towards both gentle and simple in some gloomy underground places in this said Tower. I have heard of a Sworn Tormentor and his assistants, whose fiendish task it was to torture poor creatures' souls out of their miserable bodies, and of a Chirurgeon who had to watch lest the agonies used upon 'em should be too much for human endurance, and so, putting 'em out of their misery, rob the headsman of his due, the scaffold ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... came down to meet the faces of his companions. As they did so, the black cat, having finished its meal, sprang on to his shoulder to crouch there, watching the three men through the curling smoke drift with its green blinking, fiendish eyes. Dr. Nikola smiled as he noticed the effect the animal ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... him, and he reeled heavily against the sturdy form of one of the warders who held him—his lips were flecked with blood and foam. Shocked and appalled, no less at his words, than at the fiendish contortion of his features, the King ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... under them. It seemed that the omen was an unpropitious one, for, as the rather untoward commencement of Oak's overtures, just as he arrived by the garden gate, he saw a cat inside, going into various arched shapes and fiendish convulsions at the sight of his dog George. The dog took no notice, for he had arrived at an age at which all superfluous barking was cynically avoided as a waste of breath—in fact, he never barked even at the sheep except to order, when it was done with an absolutely neutral countenance, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... curious figures erected by the roadside. These were posts, one side of which was roughly planed. On the upper part of each of these posts was a rude carving of a hideous human face with prominent teeth. The cheeks and teeth were slightly coloured. A most fiendish appearance was presented by these figures, called by the Koreans syou-sal-mak-i, and if looks counted for anything, they ought well to serve their purpose,—the scaring away of evil spirits from the village near which the figures always stood. The mile-posts, ...
— Our Little Korean Cousin • H. Lee M. Pike
... only well repaid if we permitted Captain Barry to fix the payment," he murmured to them. "Such fiendish barbarity deserves payment in kind; and if it were only an official matter, gentlemen, I would gladly send you and your men away and stand by while settlement was made. As it is, I cannot permit these men to rob me ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... for a moment, and without a word surrendered the gun, the fiendish rage fading out of his face, the aboriginal blood lust dying in his eyes like the snuffing out of a candle. In a few brief moments he became once more a civilized man, subject to the restraint of a thousand years ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... looking as though they were modeling something, while in actuality they were carefully holding his own entrails—even that hideous recollection faded before the sight of this Janus head, all peace, all gentle humanity on one side; all war, all distorted, puffed-up image of fiendish ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... modesty Gave it new charms, and made him gloat the more. She loath'd the man, for Hamuel's eye was bold, And the strong workings of brute selfishness Had moulded his broad features; and she fear'd The bitterness of wounded vanity That with a fiendish hue would overcast His faint and lying smile. Nor vain her fear, For Hamuel vowed revenge and laid a plot Against her virgin fame. He spread abroad Whispers that travel fast, and ill reports That soon obtain belief; that Zillah's eye When ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... the devil lives here, as he must live, when there's such failures in the way of soil, and such climates, and such fiendish diseases, and ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... misfortune to stand in the path of Don Frederic on his way from Zutphen, where not a citizen had been left alive, to Amsterdam. The story of the surrender of the city to Don Romero under the pledge that life and property should be respected, and of the dastardly and fiendish disregard of this pledge by the Spaniards, is the most ghastly in the whole war. From Motley I take the ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... company, hurried on by my own example, lost their heads and got, so to speak, out of hand. We rushed tumultuously forward and fell on the Vivisector and two assistants, who stood motionless and perhaps unconscious, but with glittering knives just ready for their fiendish work. Before Esmo could interpose, these executioners were cut down with the "crimson blade" (cold steel); and we bore off our friend with more of eagerness and triumph than at all befitted our own consciousness of power, or suited the temper ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... off And cast them from me that I might be clean— For washing would not cleanse them, even if I dipped them in thy blood. Away! Away! So stood'st thou not to deal the deadly blow, Thy wolfish eyes fixed on him steadily, With fiendish grin disclosing thy intent Before the time! But slyly didst thou creep Behind him, ever shrinking from his gaze, As wild beasts do that fear the human eye, And peered to find the spot, that I—Thou dog, What was ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... at which any are amused. We can sometimes laugh at a person, although we feel for him, where the incentive to mirth is much stronger than the call for sympathy. Still we confess that some of the old malice lingers among us, some skulking cruelty peeps out at intervals. Fiendish laughter has departed with the Middle Ages, but what delights the schoolboy more than the red-hot poker ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... sea, Like panthers when a fire weakens their hearts; Ay, this huge sin of nature, the salt sea, Shall be afraid of me, and of the mind Within me, that with gesture, speech and eyes Of the Messiah flames. What element Dare snarl against my going, what incubus dare Remember to be fiendish, when I light My whole being with memory of Him? The malice of the sea will slink from me, And the air be harmless as a muzzled wolf; For I am a torch, and the flame ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... illustrated papers which can be bought and are bought by youth are crammed to overflowing with details of vice and barbarity. They have columns headed "A Melange of Murder," "Fillicide, or a Son killing a Father," "Lust and Blood," "Fiendish Assassination," "Particulars of the Hanging of John C. Kelly," "Carving a Darky," "An Interesting Divorce Case in Boston," "A Band of Juvenile Jack Sheppards." And the pictures match the reading,—a jealous lover shooting a half-naked girl; ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... about an automatic machine into which you might drop a Latin exercise and get it back faultlessly construed and written out. I had, in fact, got to the point of attempting nefariously to avail myself of its services. I had folded up the fiendish exercise on the passive subjunctive which Plummer had set us overnight, and was in the very act of consigning it to the mechanical crib, when the shot and the yell projected me, all of a heap, out of dreamland into ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... all points tempted, like as we are, yet without sin,' and, through my shame and tears, I saw a vision of the Holy One, standing serene and kingly on the pinnacle of the temple, where, though the devil dared to whisper the fiendish suggestion: 'Cast Thyself down,' He stood His ground without ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... commotion overhead. I learnt from her that an unusual and almost fatal event had just occurred. The man at the wheel, suddenly seized with a suicidal mania, had rushed from his post, possessed himself of two mops, which were lying on the deck, and putting one under each arm, with a wild and fiendish shriek had jumped overboard. The captain immediately stopped the ship and ordered a boat to be lowered; but owing to the high sea running, some time elapsed before this could be accomplished, and in the meantime the man had drifted some way from ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... almost amiable, but it was with a fiendish glee caused by the belief that the American prisoners were to be hanged on ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... but beware of touching by a thousand miles the things for which the Son of God laid down His life. Thrust yourself in, if you must, anywhere else, but do not thrust yourself and your brutish stupidity and your fiendish tempers into the things of the house of God. Let all parish ministers take for their text that day 2 Samuel vi. 6, 7:—And when they came to Nachon's threshing-floor, Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it; for the oxen shook it. And the anger of the ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... filled with imagery and comparisons, drawn from moral and actual life. Here, for instance, is a tyrant, in the unrestrained exercise of his power—he now has his enemy in his grip, and hear how he exults; listen to the mirthful and crackling laughter with which the fiendish despot rejoices, as he gains the victory; mark the diabolical gambols with which he sports, and the demon glee with which he performs his capricious but frightful exultations. But the tyrant, after all, will become exhausted—his strength and power will fail ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... himself a sandwich. "You see, I live the simple life out here. I've got an old couple to look after the place—Mr. and Mrs. Hargis. Mrs. Hargis is an excellent cook—but to ask her to stay awake till midnight would be fiendish cruelty. So she leaves me a lunch in the ice-box, and goes quietly off to bed. I'll give you some berries for breakfast such as you don't often get in New York—and the cream—wait till you ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... breeze; the high mast bends with hideous creak, and every separate rib in the huge fabric quivers. Yet the ship on the unmoved waters motionless struggles, as one, who in a feverish dream nervelessly fleeing o'er a haunted waste, strives horribly to shun some fiendish shape, with straining sinews, and convulsive gasp, and faint limbs, magic-stricken. There is rest, dismal and dreary, on the silent sea: most dismal quiet: for the viewless might of the keen frost-wind[14] crisps the curling waves, binding their motion with ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... brethren, if this story were a single one, it were worthy to be had in remembrance; but Walter Raymond is not the only noble-hearted boy or man that has been slowly tortured and starved and done to death, by the fiendish policy of Jefferson Davis and Robert Edmund Lee. No,—wherever this simple history shall be read, there will arise hundreds of men and women who will testify, "Just so died my son!" "So died my brother!" ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... I?" he shrieked. "Yes, and you are a liar, a coward, a villain! You are engaged in a fiendish plot; you are deceiving an innocent lady. Ah, I spurn you, ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... we are shocked at the utter absence of the sentiment relating to the sanctity of human life. But our horror at this fiendish indifference to murder is doubled when we find that the victims are not strangers but members of the same family. I must defer to the chapter on Sympathy a brief reference to the savage custom of slaughtering sick relatives and aged parents; here I will confine myself to a few words ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... was under the command of Balthazar de Gallegos. He reached his point of destination in safety. But the chief, deeming it not prudent to trust himself in the hands of the Spaniards, whose renown for fiendish deeds had filled the land, had retired from his capital, and nearly all the inhabitants had fled with him. He left for his uninvited guests no message either of welcome or defiance. Gallegos found all ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... it profits by its situation to steal the handkerchief from her bosom, are well imagined, and beautifully told; and the circumstance of Iago employing his own innocent child as the instrument of his infernal villany, adds a deeper, and, in truth an unnecessary touch of the fiend, to his fiendish character. ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... Here is the letter I bear to the king.' The wicked Donegild said, 'You must be already tired; here are refreshments.' And while the simple man drank ale and wine, she forged a letter, saying that the queen had been delivered of a creature so fiendish and horrible that no one in the castle could bear to look upon it. This letter the messenger gave to the king; and who can tell his grief! But he wrote in reply, 'Welcome be the child that Christ sends! Welcome, O Lord, be thy pleasure! Be careful ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... miss an inch of the good times which we knew would riot there. But virtue was its own reward, for as we were looking into the depths of the first real oubliette which I ever had seen, and I was just shivering with the vision of that fiendish Catharine de' Medici who used to drop people into these holes every morning before breakfast, just as an appetizer, we heard a most blood-curdling shriek, and there stood that wretched Jimmie watching us from an open door, waving his Baedeker at us, with Mrs. Jimmie's lovely ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... said: "The Spaniards had sown desolation, havoc, and misery in and around their track. They had depopulated some of the best peopled of the islands and renewed them with victims deported from others. They had inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of the natives all the forms and agonies of fiendish cruelty, driving them to self-starvation and suicide, as a way of mercy and release from an utterly wretched existence. They had come to be viewed by their victims as fiends of hate, malignity, and all dark and cruel desperation and mercilessness in passion. The ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... ports. He is a desperate character, and in other lands might be dangerous; but he is safe enough here, for the bastinado is a terrible instrument of torture, and the man is now not only desperate in wrath, but is sometimes desperately frightened. His driver takes a fiendish pleasure in giving him an extra cut of the whip, just to make him apparently a willing horse, whether he will or not. The poor youth beside him is a very different character. His training has been more gentle, and his constitution less robust, for he has broken down ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... who had heard it once before. A second or two, during which the officers and chiefs kept their eyes intently fixed on one another, passed anxiously away; and then nearer to the gate, apparently on the very drawbridge itself, was pealed forth the wild and deafening yell of a legion of fiendish voices. At that sound, the Ottawa and the other chiefs sprang to their feet, and their own fierce cry responded to that yet vibrating on the ears of all. Already were their gleaming tomahawks brandished wildly over ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... because it was a good one, but because the firm was well thought of, and because he wished to lose no time, but to have the book published at once. I happened to be there when his first 'proofs' arrived. The Major had had an attack of jaundice, and was in a fiendish humour. We had a miserable time of it at dinner, for he badgered Derrick almost past bearing, and I think the poor old fellow minded it more when there was a third person present. Somehow through all ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... came a voice in his ear,—not the voice of his attending friend, but one of which he accurately knew the lisping, fiendish sound: "Ah, Captain Scarborough, I thought it vas posshible you might be here. Dis ish a very nice place." Our friend looked round and glared at the man, and felt that it was impossible that this occupation should ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... they had put him down amongst sick people, red and hot with fever, and that he feared their sickness was upon him. I am ashamed to say that these Sandal-wood and other Traders were our own degraded countrymen; and that they deliberately gloried in thus destroying the poor Heathen. A more fiendish spirit could scarcely be imagined; but most of them were horrible drunkards, and their traffic of every kind amongst these islands was, generally ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... freedom of the pupil is the ultimate object to be kept in view, but a too early use of freedom may work injury to the pupil. To remove a pupil from all temptation would be to remove possibilities of growth in strength to resist it; on the other hand, to expose him needlessly to temptation is fiendish. ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... no use, I was soon in a hansom bound for the City, intending by hook or by crook to bring back with me the much-needed catalogues, or the body of the printer dead or alive. Upon arriving in the City, however, to my chagrin I found his place of business closed, though the caretaker, with a touch of fiendish malignity, showed me through a window whole piles of my non-delivered catalogues. Not to be beaten, I hastened back to the West End and despatched a very long and explicit telegram to the printer at his private house (of course he would not be back in the City until Monday), requiring ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... pedestrians in their line of flight to skip like young unicorns. Then, recovering, the startled wayfarers would hurl their choicest blessings after the cab. To these, the madcap driver would reply with a shrill and fiendish yell, belabouring his frantic cattle with a view to attempting fresh feats. They succeeded. It only wanted a bullock-waggon coming down the street to afford them the opportunity. The bullock-waggon came. Then a dead, dull scrunch—an awful shock—and the cab ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... this fiendish work goes on, the poor mangled brutes are brought out from the ring, their gaping wounds are plugged with straw, or anything that is at hand, and then they are thrust back on to the ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... words with a fiendish kind of elation, Montignac leaped from the bed after me, releasing his dagger by pulling the curtain from its fastening, while at the same time his sword-point, directed at my ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... there not pain, and sorrow, and evil enough in this fallen world of ours, that meddling gossips must needs poison the few pure springs of enjoyment and peace? Not the hatred of the Theban brothers could more thoroughly accomplish this fiendish design than the whisper of detraction, the sneer of malice, or the fatal innuendo of envious, low-bred tattlers. Human life is shielded by the bulwark of legal provisions, and most earthly possessions are similarly protected; but there are ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... you from whence you came," he said; "but this I can tell you—if we do not get out of this horrible place we shall both be slain upon this bloody altar. The woman was about to plunge her knife into my heart when the lion interrupted the fiendish ritual. Come! Before they recover from their fright and reassemble, let us find a way out of ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... pursuit was swifter still, and were overtaken and struck down, while the whole island rung with mocking laughter. One only escaped, plunging all torn and bruised into the river and swimming to the farther shore. When he looked back, the island was covered with moving lights, and the shrill echo of fiendish mirth came to him across the water. His companions were never seen again. A little while afterward the dogs barked all night around his lodge, and in the morning he was found lying dead upon his couch, his face ghastly and drawn with fear, as if at ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... the richest collection of imperfect books in the world. One hugs oneself on one's Lucasta (very rare), or one's Elzevir Caesar of the right date, or one's first edition of MOLIERE, and then comes, with fiendish glee, the regular collector, and shows you that Lucasta has not the portrait of LOVELACE, that Caesar has not his pagination all wrong (as he ought to have), that the Molieres are Lyons piracies, that half of GILBERT's Gentleman's Diversion ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 13, 1892 • Various
... they wreathe and twine and dance, And wealth and splendor shrivel up before their swift advance. Before their devastating breath the stricken people flee. "Mine, mine your treasures are!" cried Death, and laughs in fiendish glee. Into that vortex of red hell sink church and theatre, store, hotel. With thunderous roar and hissing yell on sweeps ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various |
