"Grotesqueness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were fast nearing the conception of a God who was both personal and material, but who could not be made to square with pantheistic notions inasmuch as no provision was made for the inorganic world; and, indeed, they seem to have become alarmed at the grotesqueness of the position in which they must ere long have found themselves, for in the autumn of 1879 the boom collapsed, and thenceforth the leading reviews and magazines have known protoplasm no more. About the same time bathybius, which at one time ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... irrespective of propaganda, express the spirit of Christ, is as old as Christianity itself. We have no proof from the records themselves that the early Roman Christians, who strained their simple art to the point of grotesqueness in their eagerness to record a "good news" on the walls of the catacombs, considered this good news a religion. Jesus had no set of truths labeled Religious. On the contrary, his doctrine was that all truth is one, that the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... for the horrors of the scene and of the statues, to mitigate the grotesqueness of the inn-servants, who had beards like sappers and clothes like little boys—the caps, and holland blouses with belts, and shiny black breeches, like cast iron, of the children at the Saint Nicolas school in Paris—extraordinary characters, souls of divine simplicity ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... invention, skill, and precious material. But its chief interest centres in the sculptures executed by Giovanni and Andrea, sons and pupils of Nicola Pisano. The names of these three men mark an era in the history of art. They first rescued Italian sculpture from the grotesqueness of the Lombard and the wooden monotony of the Byzantine styles. Sculpture takes the lead of all the arts. And Nicola Pisano, before Cimabue, before Duccio, even before Dante, opened the gates of beauty, which for a thousand years ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... amusement, at the fierce-looking effigy of a daimio in armor. There is not the slightest hint of a mercenary thought about his actions; plainly enough, he hasn't the remotest wish to sell me anything—he merely wants to call my attention to the grotesqueness of this particular figure. He is only playing curio-dealer; he doesn't try to sell anything, but would do so out of the abundance of his good-nature if requested to, no doubt. A pair of little old-fashioned fire-engines repose carelessly against the side of a municipal building. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... struck, but no one was permitted to strike back, for behind them were the prison cells and the clubs of the stupid policemen—paid and professional fighters and beaters-up of men. Yet he was not bitter. The grossness and the sliminess of it was forgotten in the simple grotesqueness of it, and he had the saving ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... of the Carolinas, during the twenty years or so from 1660 to 1680, presented features of singular grotesqueness. There was, on one side, a vast wilderness covering the region now occupied by North and South Carolina, and westward to the Pacific. It had been nibbled at, for a hundred years, by Spaniards, French and English, but no permanent hold had been got upon it. Here were thousands upon thousands of square ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... Madame; it is all exceedingly painful to me, but I cannot help realizing the grotesqueness of the ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... to interpret the meaning of these prejudices. Landor hates and despises the romantic and the mystic. He has not the least feeling for the art which owes its powers to suggestions of the infinite, or to symbols forced into grotesqueness by the effort to express that for which no thought can be adequate. He refuses to bother himself with allegory or dreamy speculation, and, unlike Sir T. Browne, hates to lose himself in an 'O Altitudo!' He cares nothing ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... small birdlike face, framed by the silk quilling of her old lady's bonnet, broke into a hundred cheerful wrinkles at the sight of Gabriella. Even the grotesqueness of her appearance—of her fantastic mantle trimmed with bugles, made from her best wrap in the 'seventies, of her full alpaca skirt, with its wide hem stiffened by buckram, of her black cotton gloves, and her enormous black broadcloth bag—even these things ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... first struck with the singularity of Caleb's appearance, and later by the expression of his eyes. A very tall, big-boned, lean, round-shouldered man, he was uncouth almost to the verge of grotesqueness, and walked painfully with the aid of a stick, dragging his shrunken and shortened bad leg. His head was long and narrow, and his high forehead, long nose, long chin, and long, coarse, grey whiskers, worn like a beard on his throat, produced a goat-like effect. This was heightened by the ears ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... gave to all things a strange nightmare grotesqueness: and a blinding, stifling shroud of smoke whirled and billowed ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... and practical unpleasantness; ... direct the attention to the features 'objectively' constituting the phenomena—the veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outlines of things and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness; observe the carrying power of the air, producing the impression as if you could touch some far-off siren by merely putting out your hand and letting it lose itself behind that white wall; note the curious creamy smoothness of the water, hypercritically denying as it were, any suggestion ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... unhurt, I laughed and laughed at myself, at the grotesqueness and irony of life, at everything ... but mostly ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... men who are not stupid, who are rather refined and somewhat superior, love is such a complicated instrument, that the merest trifle puts it out of order. You women never perceive the ridiculous side of certain things when you love, and you fail to see the grotesqueness of some expressions. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... has done for the dog and the deer, remains to be done by art for nearly all other animals of high organisation. There are few birds or beasts that have not a range of character which, if not equal to that of the horse or dog, is yet as interesting within narrower limits, and often in grotesqueness, intensity, or wild and timid pathos, more singular and mysterious. Whatever love of humour you have,—whatever sympathy with imperfect, but most subtle, feeling,—whatever perception of sublimity in conditions of fatal power, ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... buzz circulated round the house: the singers, the orchestra,—electrically sensitive to the impression of the audience,—grew, themselves, agitated and dismayed, and failed in the energy and precision which could alone carry off the grotesqueness ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... immortality for all eternity. And it amused Broechner that they, who in this life did not know how to kill so much as one Sunday evening, should be so passionately anxious to have a whole eternity to fill up. His pupil then caught a glimpse himself of the grotesqueness of wishing to endure for millions of centuries, which time even then was nothing ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... by polemical rancour, is no doubt honest in his quotations, and tells you that the persons who preached the passages quoted by him uttered them in all religious sincerity. Yet wide as the Christian world stretches beyond our corner of it, by so far does the Frenchman's book in grotesqueness and profanity out-shadow the attempts of the ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton |
