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Grisly   /grˈɪzli/   Listen
Grisly

adjective
1.
Shockingly repellent; inspiring horror.  Synonyms: ghastly, grim, gruesome, macabre, sick.  "The grim aftermath of the bombing" , "The grim task of burying the victims" , "A grisly murder" , "Gruesome evidence of human sacrifice" , "Macabre tales of war and plague in the Middle ages" , "Macabre tortures conceived by madmen"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Grisly" Quotes from Famous Books



... that gather round the throne. When war dismays my barons bold, 'tis time for war to cease; When Heaven forsakes my pious monks the will of Heaven is peace. Go forth, my monks, with mass and rood the Norman camp unto, And to the fold, with shepherd crook, entice this grisly Rou. ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... Sullen and grisly gleams the light, Now red, now green, now blue; Whilst o'er the gulf the fiendish train Their ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis

... "Fight on! fight on!" Tho' his vessel was all but a wreck; And it chanced that, when half of the short summer night was gone, 65 With a grisly wound to be drest ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty

... gloom, a gaunt white specter waiting for him—waiting to get him, its arms spread wide out in menace. He was of our breed, though, this boy. He did not turn and run. With God knows what terror knocking at his ribs, he trudged ahead to meet his fate, and lo! the grisly specter proved to be a friendly guide-post to show the way that he should walk in. Brother (for you are my kin that went with me to public school), in the life that you have lived since you first read the story of Harry and the ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood

... the signs of the times in literature, not of one country but of all, is a grim change in its attitude towards war. The era of pomp and circumstance, as of genial make-believe, is gone by; more and more are our writers beginning to give us militarism stripped of romance, a grisly but (I suppose) useful picture. I have nowhere found it more horrible than in a story called The Secret Battle (METHUEN), written by Mr. A.P. HERBERT, whose initials are familiar to Punch readers under work of a lighter texture. This is an intimate study, inspired throughout ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various

... the elephants and leopards and lynxes and all beasts of the land ranged themselves in espalier on either side of the way, after their several kinds, and similarly the Jinn drew out in two ranks, appearing all to mortal eyes without concealment, in divers forms grisly and gruesome. So they lined the road on either hand, and the birds bespread their wings over the host of creatures to shade them, warbling one to other in all manner of voices and tongues. Now when the people of Egypt came to this terrible array, they dreaded it and durst not proceed; but ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... fear of tigers. And elephants with the juice trickling down from rent temples, plunging in the stream, sported with the she-elephants and made the entire region resound with their roars. And the place also echoed with the loud roars of lions and tigers, while at intervals might be seen those grisly monarchs of the forest lying stretched in caves and glens and beautifying them with their presence. And such was the asylum, like unto heaven itself, of Dadhicha, that the gods entered. And there they beheld Dadhicha looking like the sun himself ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... a rock, which had fell from the roof and pinned him down amidships. Must of squashed him like a beetle, I guess. But he'd still kep' his hold on the bags." I turned aside, for fear that any one should see how white I was. Much too white to be accounted for even by this grisly story. To the rest, these poor bones might indeed bear mute witness to a tragedy, but a tragedy lacking outlines, vague, impersonal, without poignancy. To me, they told with dreadful clearness the last sad chapter of the tale of Peter, Peter who had made me so intimately his confidante, ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon

... By grisly Pluto he doth swear, He rent his clothes and tore his hair, And as he runneth here and there An acorn cup he greeteth, Which soon he taketh by the stalk, About his head he lets it walk, Nor doth he any creature balk, But lays ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

... was going to cut off his ears and nose and stuff them into the vast slit he had made in his throat; then he would dig his heart out with a machete; then, one by one, he would expertly amputate his legs, arms and tongue; afterwards he would go through the grisly process of disemboweling him; and, then, in the end, he would build a nice, roaring fire and destroy what remained of Sebastian. Inasmuch as either of these sanguinary and successive measures might reasonably be expected to produce the desired result, it will be seen ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... forward, lance in rest, against the waiting foe he dashed, And at the shock an English knight from out the saddle crashed; Anon he swung his sword and struck a grim and grisly blow, And on the ground beneath his feet an ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... sentence given upon him to die, and that verily die he shall. And though he hope for long respite of his execution, yet can he not tell how soon it will be. And therefore, unless he be a fool, he can never be without fear that, either on the morrow or on the selfsame day, the grisly cruel hangman Death, who from his first coming in hath ever hoved aloof and looked toward him, and ever lain in wait for him, shall amid all his royalty and all his main strength neither kneel before him nor make him any reverence, ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More

... shaking shoulders and stared down to where the train imparted to the body a grisly suggestion of motion. "Good Lord," I gasped. ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... Chrimhild, the queen, gave him kisses fifty-two, With his rough and grisly beard full sore he made her rue, That from her lovely cheek 'gan flow the rosy blood: The queen was full of sorrow, but the monk it thought him good." Heldenbuch ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber

... disproportioned to the eyes that had an hour or two before opened in such admiration at the first view. But there is no time for architectural criticism. They are moving down the avenue toward the White House, toward the home of that patient, kindly, sorely-tried ruler—the Democritus of his grisly epoch. The Caribees excite none of the sensation here they have been accustomed to. The streets are not crowded, and the few civilians passing hardly turn their heads. Mounted orderlies dash hurriedly, with hideous clatter of sabre ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... his side they stand with drooping mane, The grisly, gaping jaws from blood refrain And with rough tongues their whilom prey caress: But when in prayer he raised his hands to heaven And called the God, from Whom such help was given, Close-prisoned, ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius

... straightway amongst them his grisly form cast, And breathed on each puffing red face as he pass'd; And the eyes of the feasters wax'd deadly and chill, And their stomachs once heaved, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... a girl who still had to understand that fear is an overt argument only for her own sex. I thought too of those grisly lank brutes straining at their chains and the chorus they could make of a night when they heard belated footsteps along the edge of the Killing Wood, and the thought banished my wish to please her. Like most imaginative natures I was acutely capable of dreads and retreats, and constantly occupied ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... the storm of fighting had passed on, and when the scavengers had done their work, the ground was still rather thickly strewn with odds and ends that interested me vastly. I might have picked up much more than I did. But I could not carry so very much, and, too, so many of the things brought grisly thoughts to my mind! God knows I needed no reminders of the war! I had a reminder in my heart, that never left me. Still, I took some few things, more for the sake of the hame folks, who might not see, and would, surely, be interested. I gathered some bayonets for my ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder

... of the pair of horsemen, who so little suspected the treasure existing behind the small inn's narrow window did homage in Aminta's mind to her protector's adroitness. Their eyes met without a smile, though they perceived the grisly comic of the incident. Their thoughts were ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... replaced one of the weapons and patted the other with grisly affection. In the excess of my admiration I made bold to reach for it. He relinquished it to me with a mother's yearning. And all too legible in the polished butt of the thing were notches! Nine sinister notches I counted—not fresh notches, but emphatic, eloquent, chilling. I thrust the ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... Some other pleasures: these to me are none. Why do I prate Of women, that are things against my fate! I never mean to wed That torture to my bed: My Muse is she My love shall be. Let clowns get wealth and heirs: when I am gone And that great bugbear, grisly Death, Shall take this idle breath, If I a poem leave, that ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various

... to me a blank has show'd. Still with fond search each well-known spot I pace Where once I saw her: Love, who grieves me so, My only guide, directs me where to go. I find her not: her every sainted trace Seeks, in bright realms above, her parent star From grisly Styx ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... change Self-fed and self-consumed. If this fail, The pillared firmament is rottenness, And earth's base built on stubble. But come, let's on! Against the opposing will and arm of heaven May never this just sword be lifted up; But, for that damned magician, let him be girt With all the grisly legions that troop Under the sooty flag of Acheron, Harpies and Hydras, or all the monstrous forms 'Twixt Africa and Ind, I'll find him out, And force him to return his purchase back, Or drag him by the curls to a foul death, Cursed as ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton

... worms, writhing in slime Forth from skull-holes and scalps and tumbled bones. A burning forest shut the roadside in On either hand, and 'mid its crackling boughs Perched ghastly birds, or flapped amongst the flames,— Vultures and kites and crows,—with brazen plumes And beaks of iron; and these grisly fowl Screamed to the shrieks of Prets, lean, famished ghosts, Featureless, eyeless, having pin-point mouths, Hungering, but hard to fill,—all swooping down To gorge upon the meat of wicked ones; Whereof the limbs disparted, trunks and heads, ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold

... Breed knew this grisly apparition for Cripp. The scent was there, and the warped foreleg. Cripp did not recognize his friend. His mind was clouded and the light of insanity gleamed in his sunken eyes. Breed whirled and fled, and a weird cry sounded behind him,—the ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts

... and their comrades of St. Michael's Fort. The worn remnant of the garrison, all told, was scarcely six hundred strong, and hardly a man was without a wound. The Grand Master and his few surviving Knights looked like phantoms from another world, so pale and grisly were they, faint from their wounds, their hair and beard unkempt, their armour stained, and neglected, as men must look who had hardly slept without their weapons for more than three memorable months. As they saw these gaunt heroes the rescuers burst into tears; strangers ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole

... Viking old, My deeds, though manifold, No Skald in song has told No Saga taught thee!... Far in the Northern Land By the wild Baltic's strand I with my childish hand Tamed the ger-falcon. Oft to his frozen lair Tracked I the grisly bear, While from my path the hare Fled ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson

... find out Johnie Mortsheugh," said the elder sibyl, and still her withered cheek bore a grisly smile; "he dwells near the Tod's Hole, an house of entertainment where there has been mony a blythe birling, for death and drink-draining are near ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... of bloodshed in Corsica even during this century. In one period of thirty years (between 1821 and 1850) there were 4319 murders in the island. Almost every man was watching for his neighbour's life, or seeking how to save his own; and agriculture and commerce were neglected for this grisly game of hide-and-seek. In 1853 the French began to take strong measures, and, under the Prefect Thuillier, they hunted the bandits from the macchi, killing between 200 and 300 of them. At the same time an edict was promulgated against bearing arms. It is forbidden ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... afternoon of that same grisly day, her father and herself had journeyed in a little old ramshackle vehicle, open to all the winds; passing, with the falling night, through dull villages, under ghostly trees, black-pearled with ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... indulgence? that fearful picture of a deliberate effort to shut out the thought of debts and duels, deceit and evil luck? In that music Mozart disputes the palm with Moliere. The terrific finale, with its glow, its power, its despair and laughter, its grisly spectres and elfish women, centres about the prodigal's last effort made in the after-supper heat of wine, the frantic struggle which ends the drama. Victurnien was living through this infernal poem, and alone. He saw visions of himself—a friendless, ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac

... She listened with a blush and sigh, His suit was warm, his hopes were high. He sought her yielded hand to clasp, And a cold gauntlet met his grasp; The phantom's sex was changed and gone, 700 Upon its head a helmet shone; Slowly enlarged to giant size, With darkened cheek and threatening eyes, The grisly visage, stern and hoar, To Ellen still a likeness bore. 705 He woke, and, panting with affright, Recalled the vision of the night. The hearth's decaying brands were red. And deep and dusky luster shed, Half showing, half ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... pressed closer and closer together in their flight, half of them seemed to go insane. They raced to and fro, laughing and screaming, flinging their arms aloft in extravagant gestures. One young fellow, rushing across the ground, hurled himself like a bolt from a catapult into the heart of the grisly mass, which ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... whomsoever told the Evangelist the story. They cry out with a shriek of terror—because Jesus Christ is coming to them in so strange a fashion! Have we never shrieked and groaned, and passionately wept aloud for the same reason; and mistaken the Lord of love and consolation for some grisly spectre? When He comes it is with the old word on His ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... be worse yet. They could feel the cold as it crept in through the cracks, reaching out for them with its icy, death-dealing fingers; and they would crouch and cower, and try to hide from it, all in vain. It would come, and it would come; a grisly thing, a specter born in the black caverns of terror; a power primeval, cosmic, shadowing the tortures of the lost souls flung out to chaos and destruction. It was cruel iron-hard; and hour after hour they would cringe in its grasp, alone, alone. There would be no one to hear them if ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... of deciding that any one form of scene is predestined by the laws of dramatic effect is illustrated in Tolstoy's grisly drama, The Power of Darkness. The scene in which Nikita kills Akoulina's child was felt to be too horrible for representation; whereupon the author wrote an alternative scene between Mitritch and Anna, which passes simultaneously with the murder scene, in an adjoining room. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... to the conviction that she had never loved him as he had loved her—as he still loved her. Then began a change for the worse. The doubt of her love begot other doubts—a grisly brood of them—doubt of truth, doubt of generosity and courage, doubt of disinterestedness, doubt of womanhood. Thorne was getting in a bad way. Over the smoldering fires of his heart a crust of cynicism began to form ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland

... floor a broken spear, the barbed head of which was dyed the same reddish yellow as the blood still seeping from the torn body. Swinging the weapon so close to Raf that the Terran was forced to retreat a step or two to escape contact with the grisly relic, the officer burst into an impassioned speech. Then he went back to the gestures which were easier for ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton

... that stares me in the face every waking hour, like a grisly spectre with bloody fang and claw, is the extermination of species. To me, that is a horrible thing. It is wholesale murder, no less. It is capital crime, and a black disgrace to the races of civilized mankind. I say "civilized mankind," because ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... a long silence. Home! what did not that word mean for them? To leave all this hideous, grisly waste of ice behind, to have done with fighting, to rest, to forget responsibility, to have no more anxiety, to be warm once more—warm and well fed and dry—to see a tree again, to rub elbows with one's fellows, to know the meaning ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris

... contorted horror of this shrivelled thing that once had lived and laughed, Beltane let fall his staff and, being suddenly sick and faint, sank upon his knees and, covering his eyes, crouched there in the grass the while that grisly, silent thing swayed to and fro above him in the gentle wind of morning and the cord whereby it hung ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol

... paper with him, and went back into the deeper woods, moving warily and watchfully. As he went his mind, trained to take hold of problems and wring the essence out of them, was busy. Of the charred, grisly thing in the improvised morgue at Westfield, wherever that might be, Mr. Trimm took no heed nor wasted any pity. All his life he had used live men to work his will, with no thought of what might come to them afterward. The living had served him, ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... BACK THE CLOCK? is another work which I especially covet. Poor Gideon Forsyth! He was abominably treated, as Stevenson relates, in the matter of that grand but grisly piano; and I have always hoped that perhaps, in the end, as a sort of recompense, Fate ordained that the novel he had anonymously written should be rescued from oblivion and found by discerning critics to be ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... of green, and behind these was a broad mass of lesser light. Simultaneously came from every part of the tumbling sky what may be called a shout; since, though no shout ever came near it, it was more of the nature of a shout than of anything else earthly. In the meantime one of the grisly forms had alighted upon the point of Gabriel's rod, to run invisibly down it, down the chain, and into the earth. Gabriel was almost blinded, and he could feel Bathsheba's warm arm tremble in his hand—a sensation novel and thrilling ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... when she had not the strength to break the bond. At first she had struggled; then ceased. Since then, her faculties had been in suspense, as it were. She had forgotten laughter, veiled herself from joy, and walked hand in hand with the grisly phantom of ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed

... I lost my five poor wits, I mind me of a Romish clerk, Who sang how Care, the phantom dark, Beside the belted horseman sits. Methought I saw the grisly sprite Jump up but ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray

... light. There was no snow to betray footprints. But whither would this chase lead? It seemed to be heading toward the northwest—toward Malmaison; ay, and toward the pool that lay on the borders of the estate. Richard shuddered when he thought of that pool, and of the grisly significance of his being led thither by this witless, idiotic old phantom of his dead wife's face. Stay, the face seemed to have got itself a body within the last few moments: it was a gray figure that now flitted on before him; gray and indistinct in the dim moonlight, with noiseless, ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne

... vanished; and the man, aroused from his sleep, saw nothing, although the evil smell still lingered in the sultry atmosphere. He lay down again once more, thinking that for once his steed had given a false alarm. Again the grisly dragon drew nigh, and again the courser notified its rider, and again the man could make out nothing in the darkness of the night; and again he was wellnigh stifled by the foul emanation that trailed in the ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews

... comer blenches and shivers occasionally as he contemplates the grisly, crazy scene, and thinks of all that menaces the women at home. And when, in the visiting hours, the women come and stare palely at the faces of those they love between the bars, wishing to cheer them, but appalled and made giddy by the abject and sordid horror of the solid fact, those who ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... doughty-in-battle. Then a day's-length elapsed ere He was able to see the sea at its bottom. Early she found then who fifty of winters 25 The course of the currents kept in her fury, Grisly and greedy, ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin

... could be forgotten—a long sierra of broken pinnacles and crags which had all the semblance of a weathered and dismantled castle. It stood out against the tender blue of the morning sky like the ancient stronghold of some grisly robber-baron of medieval days; towers of dark sublimity, battlements whence invaders might have been hurled a thousand feet to death, slender minarets, escarpments and rugged casements through which fleecy clouds peeped ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... north Drives his iron chariot forth! His grisly hand in icy chains Fair Tweeda's silver flood ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... round Scorrier was listening with a different motion of the hands—one rubbed them, one clenched them, another moved his closed fist, as if stabbing some one in the back. A grisly-bearded, beetle-browed, twinkling-eyed old Cornishman muttered: "A'hm not troublin' about that." It seemed almost as if Pippin's object was to get the men to kill him; they had gathered closer, crouching for a rush. Suddenly Pippin's voice dropped ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... The simple, grisly truth of the words—words that he might have spoken as well—stirred the man to the deeps of his being. He shuddered, as he turned his eyes to avoid seeing the thing that lay so very near, mercifully merged within the ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana

... octopus, Dick," he muttered, turning the light now full upon the grisly object squatting on a rock at the farther end of the water cave and glaring balefully at the boys through his blood-red eyes, like some demon of the deep, the very mention of which might send terror to the ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh

... rides beside her there, Bends low and calls her very fair, And strives, by pulling down his hair, To hide from my dear lady's ken The grisly gash I gave him, when I cut him down at Camelot; However he strives, he hides it not, That tourney will not be forgot, Besides, it is King Guilbert's lot, Whatever he says ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris

... crowd around the hearth, listening with breathless attention to some old crone of a negro, who was the oracle of the family, and who, perched like a raven in the corner of a chimney, would croak forth for a long winter afternoon a string of incredible stories about New England witches, grisly ghosts, horses without heads, and hair-breadth escapes and bloody encounters among ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... death that now we tread At every step my soul grows more serene. When I implor'd Apollo to remove The grisly band of Furies from my side, He seem'd, with hope-inspiring, godlike words, To promise aid and safety in the fane Of his lov'd sister, who o'er Tauris rules. Thus the prophetic word fulfils itself, That with my life shall terminate my woe. How easy 'tis for me, whose ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... fragments, here and there, of a stately figure are still left, which has in it the likeness of a king, perhaps indeed a king on earth, perhaps a saintly king long ago in heaven; and so higher and higher up to the great mouldering wall of rugged sculpture and confused arcades, shattered, and grey, and grisly with heads of dragons and mocking fiends, worn by the rain and swirling winds into yet unseemlier shape, and coloured on their stony scales by the deep russet-orange lichen, melancholy gold; and so, higher still, to the bleak towers, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... as primitive and comfortless in its appointments and furniture as well could be. The walls were of dressed stone and loomed up bare and grisly to a lofty ceiling that was covered with a perfect labyrinth of curiously carved beams, the work of some unknown artist of long ago. The scholars' dormitories were narrow cell-like affairs, scantily furnished, in which every light must be extinguished ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg

... propitious to her enterprise. And Aeson's son followed in fear, but the serpent, already charmed by her song, was relaxing the long ridge of his giant spine, and lengthening out his myriad coils, like a dark wave, dumb and noiseless, rolling over a sluggish sea; but still he raised aloft his grisly head, eager to enclose them both in his murderous jaws. But she with a newly cut spray of juniper, dipping and drawing untempered charms from her mystic brew, sprinkled his eyes, while she chanted her song; and all around the potent scent of the charm cast sleep; and on the very spot he ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

... a bright-winged bird like him, To hush his joyous song, And, prisoned in a coffin dim, Join Death's pale, phantom throng—My boy To join that grisly throng! ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart

... upon him. This is an awful specter, which is ever ready to appear before the man who has embarked his all in one venture. A disastrous season, two or three unlucky ventures, a succession of bad debts, and the grisly specter stands before them. He had no terror for the old man so long as he thought that Iris was ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant

... there at the foot of that ghostly staircase—sat, because my knees wouldn't hold me—and wondered where it would all end. Louise was still unconscious, but she was breathing better, and I suggested that we get her back to bed before she came to. There was something grisly and horrible to me, seeing her there in almost the same attitude and in the same place where we had found her brother's body. And to add to the similarity, just then the hall clock, far off, struck faintly ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... roused a grisly bear, and Siegfried, seeing it, jumped from his charger, chased it, and having at length caught it with his strong right hand, bound it without receiving even a scratch from its claws or a bite from ...
— Stories of Siegfried - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor

... sit and thinke, And cast her eyen dounward fro the brinke; But whan she saw the grisly rockes blake, For veray fere so wold hire herte quake That on hire feet she might hire not sustene Than wold she sit adoun upon the grene, And pitously into the see behold, And say right thus, with careful sighes cold. 'Eterne God, that thurgh thy purveance Ledest this world ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin

... place was so suggestive of murder that my soul sickened within me; and so much so, in fact, that when I saw several grisly forms gliding down the gloomy staircases and along the sombre, narrow passages, where X——'s immaterial personality was halting, apparently to greet it, I could look no longer, but shut my eyes. For some seconds I kept them closed, and, on re-opening them, found the tableau had changed—the ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... was known as the River Drive, where the Nye accomplishes a broad sweep to the south. There an ambitious imported architect, glad of such an opportunity to speculate in artistic effects, had built for him a conglomeration of a feudal castle and an old colonial mansion in all the grisly bulk ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant

... look anew: the beauteous form of fight Is changed, and war appears a grisly sight; Two troops in fair array one moment showed— The next, a field with fallen bodies strowed; Not half the number in their seats are found, But men and steeds lie grovelling on the ground. The points of spears are stuck ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... grisly beard, His race it clearly shows, He sticks no fork in ham or pork— Observe, my friends, ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert

... all; and I am not attacking him. I can excuse his dread of Republicanism. I can fancy that there is reason for him just now to fear Republicanism worse than Austria. Paris and Milan are two grisly phantoms before him. These red spectres are born of earthquake, and are more given to shaking thrones than are hostile cannonshot. Earthquakes are dreadfuller than common maladies to all of us. Fortune may help him, but he has not the look ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... felt the beads of cold perspiration start out upon his forehead as the dreadful indefinable haunting fear at length took shape and presented itself before his mind in all its grisly horror. He had faced Death often enough to look him in the face now or at any time without fear; but to meet him thus—to wander on and on in the thick darkness, to grope blindly along the walls of this huge grave until exhaustion came and compelled ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood

... They were grisly rumours. In the neat wards of the Farm Hospital, with its freshly swept and sprinkled floors, its cots in rows, its detailed soldier nurses and the two nurses from Sainte Ursula's Sisterhood, its sick-diet department, its medical stores, its two excellent ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... many a passer-by with more marksmanship than respect had used it for a casual target. The empty sockets seemed to glare spitefully, and the shattered upper jaw grinned in mockery at the singer. It was as if the grisly relic had heard the song and laughed. Kid Wolf's smile flashed white against the copper of his face. Then his smile disappeared and his eyes, blue-gray, ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens

... faltered at the grisly word, not so much in mercy to the father, seated there before him, as because the old-time love for that father's son seemed to rise up and catch him by the throat ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... the general tenor of this Preface, have compelled me to strip this tale of the literary robe of indignant scorn it has cost me so much to fit on it decently, years ago. I have been forced, so to speak, to look upon its bare bones. I confess that it makes a grisly skeleton. But still I will submit that telling Winnie Verloc's story to its anarchistic end of utter desolation, madness and despair, and telling it as I have told it here, I have not intended to commit gratuitous outrage on ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad

... of such is ever present and ever seeking. Those in power who know and measure men soon sought him out, and their messenger was the grisly old ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton

... Savoyard playing on a hurdy-gurdy, grisly, dejected, dirty, with a look upon him as though the iron had long since entered into his soul. It is a frosty morning but he has very little clothing, and there is a dumb despairing look about him which is surely genuine. There passes him a young butcher boy with ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... not prepared for a scene so affecting; it moved me to the quick. My eyes wistfully followed the children so soon to be orphans, as one after one went out into the dark chill shadow, and amidst the bloodless forms of the dumb brute nature, ranged in grisly vista beyond the death-room of man. And when the last infant shape had vanished, and the door closed with a jarring click, my sight wandered loiteringly around the chamber before I could bring myself to fix it on the broken form, beside which I now stood in all that ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... human creature as pathetic as themselves should come and feebly vitalize them into a spurious transient homeliness; and she saw George Cannon's bedroom—the harsh bedroom of the bachelor who had never had a home; and the bedrooms of those fearsome mummies, the Watchetts, each bed with its grisly face on the pillow in the dark; and the kennels of the unclean servants; and so, descending through the floors, to Sarah Gailey's bedroom in the very earth, and the sleepless form on that bed, beneath the whole! And the organism of the boarding-house seemed absolutely tragic ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... common personification of death is as a skeleton brandishing a dart; and then he is called the grisly king of terrors; and people tremble at the thought of him, as children do at the name of a bugbear in the dark. What sophistry this is! It is as if we should identify the trophy with the conqueror, the vestiges left in the track of ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... It is composed of two old-fashioned, brownstone-front residences welded into one. The parlor floor of one side is gay with the wraps and head-gear of a modiste; the other is lugubrious with the sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless dentist. You may have a room there for two dollars a week or you may have one for twenty dollars. Among the Vallambrosa's roomers are stenographers, musicians, brokers, shop-girls, space-rate writers, art students, wire-tappers, ...
— Options • O. Henry

... the arms can be either above or below it in flight, and are always above it when closed. This last rib, when shut, flaps under the upper one, and also falls down with it before to the waist, but is not joined to the ribs below. Along the whole spine-bone runs a strong, flat, broad, grisly cartilage, to which are joined several other of these ribs; all which open horizontally, and are filled in the interstices with the above membrane, and are jointed to the ribs of the person just where ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock

... deliberation. Some wound up their worldly affairs with businesslike precision before embarking on their timeless voyage, others jumped into the black gulf without, apparently, any premeditated intention, as if at the beckoning summons of some grisly invisible hand which they dared not disobey. Barrant recalled the strange case of a wealthy merchant who had cut his throat on a Bank holiday and confessed before death that he had felt the same impulse on that day for years past. He had whispered that the day marked to him ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees

... nights spent in the howlin' forest," he quavered, in the squeaky tone which invariably came to him when he was excited. "I'm not goin' to speak of myself. If you expect me to tell you how I trailed the jolly old leopard to his grisly lair an' fought with him ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace

... by. Fan, occupied in her shop and happy enough, except once when she encountered the grisly manager's terrible eyes on her: then she trembled and glanced down at her dress, fearing that it had looked rusty or out of shape to him; for in that establishment a heavy fine or else dismissal would be the lot ...
— Fan • Henry Harford

... understood. The grave of her past life was closed again. She had opened it because she wished me to know the truth concerning the old garbled stories about herself and Dicky. Having told me everything, she had pushed the grisly thing back into its sepulchre again and had sealed it. She would not ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison

... drug-born dream of Poe could equal it for grisly fascination. Frankenstein, de Maupassant's "Horla," all the fantastic literary monsters of the past faded to tawdry, childish bogeys beside the actual observations of Stern, the engineer, the man of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... sad cause to remember the man of the 13th January. The results of the vast crime of the 13th January have been in just proportion to the magnitude of the act itself. But for it there had been no 30th November—sorrowful spectacle! The grisly deed of the 16th June had not been done but for it, nor had the man of the 16th June known existence; to it alone the 3d September was due, also the fatal 12th October. Shall we, then, be grateful for the 13th January, with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... manful strivings of Alan Macdonald to make a home in that land, not so much for himself—for it was plain that he would grace a different world to far better advantage—but for the disinherited of the earth. To Mrs. Chadron he was a thing apart from her species, a horrible, low, grisly monster, to whom the earth should afford no refuge and man no hiding-place. There was no virtue in Alan Macdonald; his fences had killed ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden

... to New York I was at first amused and then somewhat staggered, by the cautions and the grisly tales that went the round. You would have thought we were to land upon a cannibal island. You must speak to no one in the streets, as they would not leave you till you were rooked and beaten. You must enter a hotel with military precautions; for the least you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... well pleased on high 650 The Father has beheld you, while the might Of that stern foe with bitter trial proved Your equal doings: then for ever spake The high decree, that thou, celestial maid! Howe'er that grisly phantom on thy steps May sometimes dare intrude, yet never more Shalt thou, descending to the abode of man, Alone endure the rancour of his arm, Or leave thy ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside

... now each good that I possess, Rooted in truth and faithfulness, Imparts delight to every sense; For erst they were a mere pretense, And long before enjoyed they were, They changed their smiles to grisly care. Now pleasures please; love being single, Evils with ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... along slick through it. But I'll tell you wa'at I can do Marm:—I can send him a draft as will certainly put him into a most etarnal Fit, and I am almighty smart at Fits, and we might git round Old Grisly that way.'" ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... a common belief in Scotland that the devil appeared as a black man. This appears in several witch trials and I think in Law's Memorials, that delightful storehouse of the quaint and grisly. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various

... of death,— That phantom of grisly bone? I hardly fear his terrible shape, It seems so like my own,— It seems so like my own Because of the fasts I keep; O God! that bread should be so dear, And ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... the bandits gayly drink, Upon the haunted highway, sharp hoof-beats loudly clink? Yea; past scant-buried victims, hard-spurring sturdy steed, A mute and grisly rider is trampling grass and weed, And by the black-sealed warrant which in his grasp shines clear, I known it is the Future—God's Justicer ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... them to return, adding that, since the Queen had commended them to his especial care, he could not, in conscience, lose sight of them. The indignant fathers excommunicated him. On this, the sagamore Louis, son of the grisly convert Membertou, begged leave to kill them; but Biencourt would not countenance this summary mode of relieving his embarrassment. He again, in the King's name, ordered the clerical mutineers to return to the fort. Biard declared that he would not, threatened to excommunicate any who should ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... Suddenly a grisly silence fell upon the house. For the Kid, battered, but obviously content, was standing in the middle of the ring, while on the ropes the Cyclone, drooping like a wet sock, was sliding slowly ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse

... over them the drowning man relaxed his hold a little, and Tristram, breaking free, rose to the surface coughing and spouting like a whale. Another moment, and a hand appeared above the water, its fingers hooked like a bird's talons. This grisly appeal determined Tristram to make another attempt. He kicked out, seized the uplifted arm just around the wrist, and with half a dozen fierce strokes managed to gain the bank at the feet of his enemies. While he dug a hand ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... hideous dwarf, Before Lord Richard stands, 60 And, as he crossed and blessed himself, "I fear not sign," quoth the grisly[13] elf, "That is made with ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson

... oak, that flings Its grisly arms athwart the sky, A sudden, startling image brings To the lone ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... town on the south frontier of France, two sentinels walked lethargically, crossing and recrossing before the governor's house. Suddenly their official drowsiness burst into energy; for a pale, grisly man, in rusty, defaced, dirty, and torn regimentals, was walking into the courtyard as if it belonged to him. The sentinels lowered their muskets, and crossed them with ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade

... house with business names printed on the lifeless windows of the first and second floors; with dark curtained windows on the ground floor, or was there just a slink of light in one corner? Which way had Larry turned? Which way under that grisly burden? Fifty paces of this squalid street-narrow, and dark, and empty, thank heaven! Glove Lane! Here it was! A tiny runlet of a street. And here—! He had run right on to the arch, a brick bridge connecting two portions of a warehouse, and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... suppress you," he explained. "Sir Thomas More with his head under his arm, bloody old Bluebeard, grim Queen Bess, snarling old Swift, Pope, Addison, Carlyle—the whole grisly crowd of them! I could see you holding your own against them all, explaining things to them, getting ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome

... was feeling more and more as though the past week had been a grisly burden that was slipping off him like a bad dream, acquiesced in a rush of eager thankfulness. The complications of life were beginning to unfold in front of him, and both by training and heredity he turned to the things that bore relation ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... that noble lady, it must be owned, was secretly not a little glad to have her advances thus firmly, though gently, repulsed. For she was alarmed at Lady Calmady's reported acquaintance with foreign lands and with books; added to which her simple mind harboured much grisly though vague terror concerning the Roman Church. Picture all her brood of little Quayles incontinently converted into little monks and nuns with shaven heads! How such sudden conversion could be accomplished ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet



Words linked to "Grisly" :   gruesome, grim, ghastly, alarming



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