"Monstrosity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bore any resemblance to her monkish portraiture, excite the envy or the admiration of the present age, or bear comparison with her fair posterity. Her physiognomy is anything but fascinating, and her figure is a repulsive monstrosity, adorned with a profusion of luxurious hair ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... been the brain that lit thy dull concavity! The human race Invest MY face With thine expression of unchecked depravity, Invested with a ghastly reciprocity, I'VE been responsible for thy monstrosity, I, for thy wanton, blundering ferocity— ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... assumed that the spores of smut travel from the manure and seed of the previous crop in the circulation of the plant to the capsule, and thus convert the grain into a puff-ball, so also the ears of corn, the oats, and rye. This monstrosity on the rye grains is called ergot, or spurred rye, and when it is eaten by chickens or other fowls their feet and legs shrivel or perish with dry gangrene, not because the spores of the fungus which produced the spurred rye circulate ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... representative of a civilized Chartered Company, dueling to the death with swords with a barbarian king for a throne he had promised to another barbarian, or of what could happen on Uller if he allowed this four-armed monstrosity to kill him. ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... them now dead, and the story was that before his birth his mother was frightened by one of the big fish, so that the child came into the world most hideously marked. Anyhow, Fishhead was a human monstrosity, the veritable embodiment of nightmare. He had the body of a man—a short, stocky, sinewy body—but his face was as near to being the face of a great fish as any face could be and yet retain some trace of human aspect. His ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... certainly not one of them. It would be much nearer the truth to put the thing in the bold and bald terms of the old Irish song, and to call him "The anti-Irish Irishman." But it is only fair to say that the description is far less of a monstrosity than the anti-English Englishman would be; because the Irish are so much stronger in self-criticism. Compared with the constant self-flattery of the English, nearly every Irishman is an anti-Irish Irishman. But here again popular ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... variation which approaches the nature of a monstrosity can strive thus forcibly to reproduce itself, it is not wonderful that less aberrant modifications should tend to be preserved even more strongly; and the history of the Ancon sheep is, in this respect, particularly instructive. With the "'cuteness" characteristic of their nation, the neighbours ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... grafted one part of the body of an insect on the body of another. He tried it both on the chrysalis and on an insect too. I understood that he took the pupa of a spider and by very careful work grafted upon it the pupa of a fly. Think of what that monstrosity must have been when it passed out from the chrysalis and became a full-fledged living being. One part of it trying to get away from the other. One wanting to fly and the other to hide. One part wanting to feed on flies and the other part in mortal ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... and Intellect thronged the house. Nothing could have been more cordial than the temper of the gallery. All were eager to applaud the new Romeo. Presently, when the varlets of Verona had brawled, there stepped into the square—what!—a mountebank, a monstrosity. Hurrah died upon every lip. The house was thunderstruck. Whose legs were in those scarlet pantaloons? Whose face grinned over that bolster-cravat, and under that Charles II. wig and opera-hat? From whose shoulders hung that spangled sky-blue ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... With dimples on his chin and cheeks, a childish smile on his lips, frank, beautiful, pale violet-blue eyes, he had a most winsome countenance. But behind the angelic front was hidden a very demon. Jackson was a monstrosity if you will, a whited sepulchre, and one of the unaccountable freaks of nature. To those not knowing his habits, a handsome, affable, pleasing man of fine form and features; to those who knew him truly, a villain of the deepest dye, a very demon ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... exercising his imagination in the sky chamber where he slept—a capital situation from which to observe the world. There could not have been an uglier view created—a shapeless mass of brick and stone and painted wood, a collected, towering monstrosity of rectangular and inharmonious lines, a realized dream of hideousness—but for the splendid sky, always changing and doing all that was possible in the gleams and shadows and the glowing colors of morning and evening to soften the ambitious work ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... mother took him at his mother's valuation, and both she and my father have expressed admiration of the whole Browning tribe in their published journals. Mrs. Browning seemed to me a sort of miniature monstrosity; there was no body to her, only a mass of dark curls and queer, dark eyes, and an enormous mouth with thick lips; no portrait of her has dared to show the half of it. Her hand was like a bird's claw. Browning was a lusty, active, energetic person, dashing and plunging this way and ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... Jimmie Dale's lips parted in a smile that seemed almost apologetic, as he viewed the helpless iron monstrosity that was little more than an insult to a trained cracksman. Then from the belt came the thin metal case and a pair of tweezers. He opened the case, and with the tweezers lifted out one of the gray-coloured, diamond-shaped seals. Holding the seal with the tweezers, he moistened the gummed side ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... Savonarola on every side was a civilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that leads to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow old with confounding rapidity, but in which no old things ever grow new. The monstrosity of the crimes of the Renaissance was not a mark of imagination; it was a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss of imagination. It is only when a man has really ceased to see a horse as it is, that he invents a centaur, only when he can no longer ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... Tempo di Minuetto is universally served up as a refreshing "Landler," which passes the ear without leaving any distinct impression. Generally, however, one is glad when the tortures of the Trio are over. This loveliest of idylls is turned into a veritable monstrosity by the passage in triplets for the violoncello; which, if taken at the usual quick pace, is the despair of violoncellists, who are worried with the hasty staccato across the strings and back again, and find it impossible to produce anything but a painful series of scratches. ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... a feeling more than brotherly; He knows a handsaw from a hawk whenever winds are southerly. He pats her pretty cheeks, but looks on you as a monstrosity; Your wrinkles and your yellow teeth ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... The monstrosity of imposing Anglican Protestantism upon a people who had not reached the stage of development which is essential for even the understanding of Protestant dogma, and who if left to themselves would have adhered ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... and after his involuntary immersion was so remarkable and great that his most intimate friend would have failed to recognise him. He went down into the slimy liquid an ill-favoured Portuguese, clad in white duck; he came up a worse-favoured monstrosity, clothed in mud! Even his own rascally comrades grinned at him for a moment, but their grins changed into a scowl of anger when they heard the peals of laughter that burst from the throats of their enemies. As for Briant, he absolutely hugged ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... our burden of flesh and circumstance we were too torpid to utter. The great man is a spontaneous variation in humanity; but not in any direction. A spontaneous variation might be a mere madness or mutilation or monstrosity; in finding the variation admirable we evidently invoke some principle of order to which it conforms. Perhaps it makes explicit what was preformed in us also; as when a poet finds the absolutely right phrase for a feeling, or when nature suddenly astonishes ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... short, and squat, Asie bore a likeness to the grotesque figures the Chinese love to paint on screens, or, more exactly, to the Hindoo idols which seem to be imitated from some non-existent type, found, nevertheless, now and again by travelers. Esther shuddered as she looked at this monstrosity, dressed out in a white apron ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... Chippendale bookcase; and on its shelves stood books that had formed a bond between us, and copies of old reviews containing my fugitive contributions. A spurious Japanese dragon in faence, an inartistic monstrosity dear to her heart, at which I had often railed, grinned forgivingly at me from the mantel-piece. I have never realised how closely bound up with my habits was this drawing-room of Judith's. I stopped once more by ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... and abet her in creating that monstrosity. It's participation in crime. It's worse than eating apples up a tree. Do you always have such a crowd ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... of itti immer nakie which yields no sense. Langdon's rendering, even on the basis of his reading of the line, is a grammatical monstrosity. ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... hideous disfigurement to the charming spot on which it was erected. Across the way stood the other cottage, with the same number of rooms as its vis-a-vis, but really exquisite in its simple beauty. And the latter, I was told, though equally spacious, cost less than the monstrosity across the way! Into the one, there was put thought; into the other none. Can we resist an opinion as to which ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... beyond the Cornish border, on the northern slope of the largest and loveliest of those combes of which I spoke in the last chapter. Eighty years after Sir Richard's time there arose there a huge Palladian pile, bedizened with every monstrosity of bad taste, which was built, so the story runs, by Charles the Second, for Sir Richard's great-grandson, the heir of that famous Sir Bevil who defeated the Parliamentary troops at Stratton, and died soon after, fighting valiantly at Lansdowne over Bath. But, like most other things which owed their ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... way than my hands," replied Richard. "Only some of my fingers have got the web between them. My mother made me promise to put up with the monstrosity till I came of age. She seemed to think some ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... President Arthur's Administration. The National Museum was completed and opened to visitors, the northern wing of the stupendous pile, the State, War, and Navy Department Building, was occupied, and that hideous architectural monstrosity, the Pension Office, was built. At the West End scores of elegant private houses were erected, varying in size from the palatial mansion built by Mr. Blaine to the rustic cabin of Joaquin Miller, and the small Queen Anne cottages, now so popular, and some of ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... of the case, and all these artificial clouds will roll away at once. We have an evil heredity behind us in this matter, for we have inherited all kinds of funereal horrors from our forefathers, and so we are used to them, and we do not see the absurdity and the monstrosity of them. The ancients were in this respect wiser than we, for they did not associate all this phantasmagoria of gloom with the death of the body—partly perhaps because they had a much more rational ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... little cupola—I hardly know how properly to call it—that squats, as though in derision, above the crossing; whilst even the natural meeting and intersection at this point of high roofs, which in itself would rise to dignity, is wantonly neglected to make way for this monstrosity. The church, in fact, looks, when viewed externally, more like four separate churches than one; and when we step inside, with all the best will in the world to make the best of it, it is hard to find, much to admire, and anything at all to love, in these ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... monstrosity observed by M. Dareste has been that of the head protruding from the navel, and the heart or hearts above the head. This is a most extraordinary and new monster, and, if it persist, a chicken with its heart on its back, like a hump, ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... 50-100 such organs 7 grams and those with a bright crown 10 grams, the appendices being removed before the weighing. Corresponding results have been reached by the comparison of the height of the capsules with their abnormal surroundings. The degree of development of the monstrosity is shown by this observation to be directly dependent on, and in a sense proportionate to the ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... pinch-faced, lean and haggard, from insufficient nutriment, and are old and decrepit while yet in the bud of youth; the tenements are crowded to suffocation, breeding pestilence and death; while the wages paid to labor hardly serve to satisfy the exactions of the landlord—a monstrosity in the midst of civilization, whose very existence is a crying protest against ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... reason came out. The king and queen had both had exactly the same curious dream, and this strange occurrence had upset their majesties very much. They both dreamt that one of the princesses, as they believed them to be, had six toes on each foot; and as no monstrosity could ever share the throne of Silverland they demanded to see the princesses' little feet with their own eyes, so as to be quite sure they all had only the ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... young sir. It served his purpose for the moment, I grant you. I was unhinged. The indignity, the very monstrosity of it, the baselessness, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pursued in all ways, and, in case of success, the moment will soon arrive when many States will see themselves placed, as is the case already with South Carolina, in presence of a number of slaves exceeding that of free men. Such a social monstrosity never existed under the sun; even in Greece, even in Rome, even among the Mussulmans, the total number of free men remained superior; the colonies alone, through the effect of the slave trade, presented an inverse phenomenon, ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... on the pronunciation of Hebrew in England is discussed by Dr. S.A. Hirsch, in his "Book of Essays" (London, 1905), p. 60. Roger Bacon, at a far earlier date, must have pronounced Hebrew in much the same way, but he was not guilty of the monstrosity of turning the Ayin into a nasal. Bacon (as may be seen from the facsimile printed by Dr. Hirsch) left the letter Ayin unpronounced, which is by far the best course for ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... end of the third day the incident of the eccentric lady and Evgenie Pavlovitch had attained enormous and mysterious proportions in his mind. He sorrowfully asked himself whether he had been the cause of this new "monstrosity," or was it... but he refrained from saying who else might be in fault. As for the letters N.P.B., he looked on that as a harmless joke, a mere childish piece of mischief—so childish that he felt it would be shameful, almost dishonourable, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a new scheme to try now. He would see what persuasion could do—argument, eloquence, poured out upon the incorrigible captive from the mouth of a trained expert. That was his plan. But the reading of the Twelve Articles to her was not a part of it. No, even Cauchon was ashamed to lay that monstrosity before her; even he had a remnant of shame in him, away down deep, a million fathoms deep, and that remnant asserted itself now ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... or androgyne. These impostors, after a careful consultation of all attending circumstances, gave it as their opinion that the occurrence was an unfortunate impurity, and that it could only result to the disadvantage of Rome, unless she at once took steps to purify herself of such a monstrosity, with the conclusion that the androgyne should be first exiled from Roman soil, and then drowned in the depths of the sea. The unfortunate being was accordingly inclosed in a chest and put on board a galley, which put immediately ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... the flames lazily lighted up the big room occasionally, he lay there watching them play upon the wall. So he allowed himself to figure what strange scenes these same rooms must have witnessed in those bygone days when the old judge and his young prisoner wife occupied the monstrosity ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... by this criticism by Hanslick: "Perhaps in a few years Ibsen's Peer Gynt will live only through Grieg's music, which, to my taste, has more poetry and artistic intelligence in every number than the whole five-act monstrosity of Ibsen." Among other notable orchestral and chamber music numbers may be mentioned a setting of Bjoernson's Sigurd the Crusader, Bergliot, based upon the sagas of the Norse kings, a suite composed for the two hundredth anniversary of Ludwig Holberg, and ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... in fear and wonder. It was like nothing he had ever seen. What was it that Agnes had said, of machine-monsters, of human brains in mechanical bodies? His brain reeled. He strained his eyes to distinguish the monstrosity more clearly. It was veiled in crimson flame; he could not ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson
... from the lovely campanile to the hotel, I stumbled over a scattering of artificial hillocks surrounding two mud-puddles connected by a gutter. This monstrosity turned out to be a relief-map of Palestine. Little children, with uncultivated voices, shouted at each other as they lightly leaped from Jerusalem to Jericho; and waste-paper soaked itself to dingy brown in the ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... distinction is found in the drama and in fictitious narrative. Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue, stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature, endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity. The characters of which he has given us an impression, as vivid as that which we receive from the characters of our own associates, are to be reckoned by scores. Yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be found which deviates ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... adjacent shores. As I remember Jersey City and Hoboken in my boyhood, they were only small clusters of buildings, with a ferry-house at the water's edge. Now they have crept along from the Palisades to the Kill van Kull, overflowed the Bergen Hills, reared giant structures which rival New York's in monstrosity, and extended their railroad-wharves and steamship-piers over the Arcadian haunts of the Elysian Fields and the primitive meadows of Communipaw and Paulus Hook. And on the East River Brooklyn, joined to New York by its Siamese ligament of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... sense have under the stress of conventionalism been compelled to wear. Let us compare Miss Anderson's Grecian costume with the dress of a society belle in the seventies, which required from twenty to thirty yards of material, and when completed and fitted transformed the wearer into a monstrosity with an unsightly hump on the back, and a street cleaner of immense dimensions trailing for several feet in ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... have never been heard to bark, where birds are found covered with hair, and where mammals jump about like frogs! If these are shown to be literal facts, the mind is thereby well prepared for any animal monstrosity: and it staggers not in unbelief (on evidence of honest travellers) even when informed of a creature with a duck's bill and a beaver's body: it really amounted in ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... savagery. She does rule it as a queen. In her soul there are thoughts, wild thoughts which you and I can never understand, because we are white, and all white. Delphine is neither white nor black, neither red, nor white, nor black. She is a product of race amalgamation, a monstrosity, a horror, the germ of a national destruction. She is a queen—a ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... of that evening is destined to live as long as the body of James Conlan inhabits this mortal coil. When he gave the servant his hat and stick and the footman his card, and heard that powdered monstrosity bawl "Mr. James Conlan" to a room filled with shimmering gowns and glistening shirt-fronts, Jim's flesh went cold. But the vigilant Claude helped him through. Claude was like a streak of greased lightning, bouncing Jim here and ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... Staked Plains of New Mexico the Mexicans approach them by dressing themselves up in any ridiculous sort of fashion, so as least to resemble a human being. In this way they would not approach the antelope, but the antelope would approach them, curious to find out the nature of such an unusual monstrosity. Antelope, there, were still very plentiful, and even in my own little pasture there was a band of some 300 head. Only at certain times of the year did they bunch up together; at other times they, though still ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... wore the aboriginal costume almost in full, moccasins and all, her gloves and hat alone remaining to distinguish her in appearance at a distance from a native woman of the Plains. The voluminous and beruffled skirts of the period, and that feminine monstrosity of the day, the wide spreading crinoline, she had left far behind her at the Missouri River. Again the long curls, which civilization at that time decreed, had been forgotten. Her hair at the front and ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... order to win a battle. The woman of fashion ceases to be a woman; she is neither mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex in the brain. And your Marquise, too, has all the characteristics of her monstrosity, the beak of a bird of prey, the clear, cold eye, the gentle voice—she is as polished as the steel of a machine, she ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... disbelieve all rational explanations of thoroughly proved experiences (only) which appear supernatural, derived from the average experience and study of the visible world. They must disbelieve the speciality of the Master and the Disciples, and that it is a monstrosity to test the wonders of show-folk by the same touchstone. Lastly, they must disbelieve that one of the best accredited chapters in the history of mankind is the chapter that records the astonishing deceits ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... provided for in foundling hospitals, by cooking and eating them. This was an extravaganza, though really bolder and more coarsely practical than mine, which did not provoke any reproaches even to a dignitary of the supreme Irish church; its own monstrosity was its excuse; mere extravagance was felt to license and accredit the little jeu d'esprit, precisely as the blank impossibilities of Lilliput, of Laputa, of the Yahoos, &c., had licensed those. If, therefore, any man thinks it worth his while ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... of a clerk and accountant in the smaller commercial houses of a seaport. He thought the rural Featherstones very simple absurd people, and they in their turn regarded his "bringing up" in a seaport town as an exaggeration of the monstrosity that their brother Peter, and still more Peter's property, should ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... went to inspect the hideous monstrosity and found it in leash and straining. It was ready to be used to lead the way back ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... mealy, meekly, mercifully, merchant-like, memorial, mercenary, mention, memorandums, mercurial, metropolis, miserably, mindful, meridian, medal, metaphysics, ministration, mimic, misapply, misgovernment, misquote, misconstruction, monstrously, monster-like, monstrosity, mutable, moneyed, monopoly, mortise, mortised, muniments, to moderate, and mother-wit These words, and five thousand more equally excellent, which have remained part of the language of the English-speaking world for three centuries since Shakespeare, and will no doubt continue ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... notices another gent steppin' up for a squint at the monstrosity, and I can't help lingerin' to see if he gets the same kind of a shock. He's sort of a queer party, too,—short, stoop shouldered, thin faced, wrinkled old chap, with a sandy mustache mixed some with gray, and a pair of shrewd little eyes peerin' out under bushy ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... from six to eight feet in height, she has a woman's body, exquisitely slim and young, with the breasts of a virgin. Very chaste in attitude, she holds in her hand a long-stemmed lotus flower, but by a contrast that nonplusses and paralyses you the delicate shoulders support the monstrosity of a huge lioness' head. The lappets of her bonnet fall on either side of her ears almost down to her breast, and surmounting the bonnet, by way of addition to the mysterious pomp, is a large moon disc. Her dead stare gives to the ferocity of her visage something unreasoning and fatal; ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... of trees, burnt and ground, common charcoal, deer tallow, and spruce gum are used for this purpose. Labrets—pieces of wood, bone or shell, from 1.5 to 2.5 inches in length—are worn by a few old females, but this hideous, monstrosity is now never found upon the young women. Many of the middle-aged, however, pierce the centre of the lower lip and insert a small silver tube, which projects about a quarter of an inch. Both sexes perforate the septum ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... This monstrosity emanated from the brain of Ivan Hrosnoj, "the Terrible John." When he saw the architect's work complete he was delighted, loaded him with praise, embraced him, and then ordered his eyes to be put ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... similarities—nay, identities. Thus only can I account for many statements about New York, occurring in the pages of recent and reputable travellers, both French and English, which I find to be exaggerated almost to the point of monstrosity. What should we say of an American who should criticise the Commercial Road from the point of view of Fifth Avenue? After a week's experience of New York, I cannot but fancy that certain travellers I could mention have been guilty of similar errors ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... you did not dislike my asking questions on general points, you of course answering or not as time or inclination might serve. I find in the animal kingdom that the proposition that any part or organ developed normally (i.e., not a monstrosity) in a species in any HIGH or UNUSUAL degree, compared with the same part or organ in allied species, tends to be HIGHLY VARIABLE. I cannot doubt this from my mass of collected facts. To give an instance, the Cross-bill is very abnormal in the structure of its bill compared with other allied Fringillidae, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... unrhymed scenes is just like that of the weaker portions of Titus Andronicus and the First Part of King Henry the Sixth—the opening scene, for example, of either play. With Andronicus it has also in common the quality of exceptional monstrosity, a delight in the parade of mutilation as well as of massacre. It seems to me possible that the same hand may have been at work on all three plays; for that Marlowe's is traceable in those parts of the two retouched by Shakespeare which bear no traces of his touch is a theory to the full ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... said already, get away,' replied Hannah, quite angrily. 'You won't get anything out of me by your games, you monstrosity.' ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... as he sat cogitating in his bedroom over his lucklessness, his eye fell on a vegetable monstrosity from Queensland, presented to him by one of the hands on board the You Yangs. It was a huge, dried bean-pod, about four feet long, and contained about a dozen large black beans, each about the size of a watch. He had seen these beans, ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... can express the countess's sensations at the dropping of such a "monstrosity" into the midst of her family circle,—she was appalled! Never had any one ventured to address her with such freedom; never before had she been treated by any one as though she were mere flesh and blood. She had not believed it possible that any one could have the temerity to ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... ruined. The cabbages gave him some consolation. One of them especially excited his hopes. It expanded and shut up quickly, but ended by becoming prodigious and absolutely uneatable. No matter—Pecuchet was content with being the possessor of a monstrosity! ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... not inform my readers how soundly our hero slept in his shelter tent that night, nor how his slumbers were disturbed by a horrid rebel with a bowie-knife, and a horrid feminine monstrosity which seemed to be called Sue by her attendant demons; but he slept as a tired boy ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... of which are not in tune individually, and with each other, is a monstrosity; the conductor, therefore, should take the greatest care that the musicians tune accurately. But this operation should not be performed in presence of the public; and, moreover, every instrumental noise—every kind of preluding between the acts—constitutes a real offence to all ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... is a little ceremony. The babe is brought and laid upon the hearth or floor before the household gods for the father to inspect it. As has been said already, if it is a monstrosity, he may order it to be made away with. Otherwise it is still open to him either to acknowledge the infant or to refuse to have anything to do with it. The act of acknowledgment consists in stooping down and lifting up the child from the ground. For this reason the expression used ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... of the archaic village state of "culture," more ancient, more savage, than literary narrative. Very frequently the local legends were subjected to the process of allegorical interpretation, as men became alive to the monstrosity of their unsophisticated meaning. Often they proved too savage for our authorities, who merely remark, "Concerning this a certain holy chapter is told," but decline to record the legend. In the same way missionaries, with mistaken delicacy, often refuse to repeat ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... And yet, so far as my stunned senses would allow me to perceive, the people were not wrathful or even curious; they were just silent and collected as people generally are at some solemn ceremonial. Nobody but me seemed to realize the outrageousness and monstrosity of the vulgar-looking, insignificant Barber there on the platform, holding up the show, stopping the excellent music we had ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of Chicago, and the last, is of an unfinished monstrosity. It might be a vast railway station, built for men and women twenty feet high. The sky-scrapers, in which it cherishes an inordinate pride, shut out the few rays of sunlight which penetrate its dusky atmosphere. ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... patriotism to her side by advising that no notice be taken of this harebrained suggestion. Japan's advice received the secret blessing of both French and English who knew the situation, though in our case we had to admit that the British Premier had stood sponsor for this international monstrosity. This gave Japanese diplomacy its first clear hold upon Russian patriotism and enabled her to appear as a ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... a strike for a moment. If a Trade Union attempted such a thing, the old Capitalist law against Trade Unions as conspiracies would be re-enacted within twenty-four hours and put ruthlessly into execution. Such a monstrosity as the recent coal strike, during which the coal-miners spent all their savings in damaging their neighbours and wrecking the national industries, would be impossible under Socialism. It was miserably defeated, as it ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... did not know what to make of it. Was it some terrible monstrosity that had escaped from a show, or something that was peculiar to the forest itself, something generated by the giant trees and dark, silent road? In their sublime terror they shrieked aloud, beat the air with their hands to ward it off, and finally left their ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... of getting a belly-god burgess through a needle's eye! Oh, let him stick, by all means; and let his polity tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of man! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness there can be no salvation; and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the fool who ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... while they seem to be freely abandoning themselves to their wildest fantasies, the outcome is rarely extravagant (Flaubert in his Tentation is a great Norman architect), and at the best attains a ravishing beauty of flowing and interwoven lines. At its worst, as in St. Sauveur, which is a monstrosity like the Siamese twins, a church with two naves and no aisles, the general result still has its interest, even apart from the exquisite beauty of the details. It is here in Gothic, and not in Romanesque, that the Normans attained full scope. We miss the superb repose, the majestic strength, ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... the only faculty which remains to the children of that same Father who cares for the falling sparrow. The Deity has often been pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no doubt, frequently repudiated him as a monstrosity. ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... are allied to greyhounds; at the later of these periods a dog resembling a hound is figured, with drooping ears, but with a longer back and more pointed head than in our hounds. There is, also, a turnspit, with short and crooked legs, closely resembling the existing variety; but this kind of monstrosity is so common with various animals, as with the ancon sheep, and even, according to Rengger, with jaguars in Paraguay, that it would be rash to look at the monumental animal as the parent of all our turnspits: ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... spiritual flame. Where perception is adequate, expression is so too, and if a man will only grow sensitive to the various solicitations which anything monstrous combines, he will thereby perceive its monstrosity. Let him but enact his sensations, let him pause to make explicit the confused hints that threaten to stupefy him; he will find that he can follow out each of them only by rejecting and forgetting the others. To free his imagination in any direction he must disengage it from the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... productions in this way was the ponderous monstrosity invented by one Dr. Nicholson (Fig. 43). This hideous and unwieldy weapon was put forth by its inventor as the only correct form for a violin bow! It had to be haired with precisely 150 horse hairs dyed red. The reasons for this and the eccentric ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... are," he said, supporting the bony hand upon his palm, so that all its fingers were spread out and Cleek might get a clear view of the monstrosity. "What a trial he must have been to the glove trade, mustn't he?" laughing gaily. "Fancy the confusion and dismay, Mr. Rickaby, if a fellow like this walked into a Bond Street shop in a hurry and asked ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... day for his freak, By a Narrabri beak, He was jawed with a deal of verbosity; For his only appeal Was 'professional zeal' — He wanted another monstrosity. ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... homes torn and trampled under foot and burned!" the Duchess almost cried out. "And worse things than that—worse things! And the whole monstrosity growing more huge and throwing out new and ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... monstrosity of appearances silenced Anthony after the first exclamation; and young Powell felt himself pierced through and through by the overshadowed glance of his captain. Anthony advanced quietly. The first impulse of Mr. Powell, when discovered, ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... day's ride of the suburbs. The very idea seems preposterous, for one cannot but associate the charms of a "find" with the horrors of "going to ground" in an omnibus, or the fox being headed by a great Dr. Eady placard, or some such monstrosity. Mr. Mayne,[6] to be sure, has brought racing home to every man's door, but fox-hunting is not quite so tractable a ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... his mighty powers, and in Die Walkuere he is like a man trying to break away from the path which he has laid down for himself, to get rid of the cumbersome spectacular element and let the action develop itself naturally from within. With all its unrivalled beauties the Ring as a drama is a monstrosity. It turns upon motives which are not apparent from the actions and have to be explained in dreary and most undramatic length. Its very foundation is wrong; its central figure, the prime author of the new and more blessed world which is to ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... thought of the one mangled monstrosity—that to have been so lately loveliness and charm, with deep fire in its eyes and perhaps deep tenderness and passion in its heart. He dismissed the thought as being against the evidence and entered the initials in ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... immolation of individuals, in behalf of society; hence the true explanation of war, eternal law of mankind, interpreted by the liberal-democratic doctrines as a degenerate absurdity or as a maddened monstrosity. ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... the man was hideous, though his ugliness was not unpleasant, being due chiefly to a great development of his tribal feature, the nose, and in body he was misshapen to the verge of monstrosity. In fact Otter was a dwarf, measuring little more than four feet in height. But what he lacked in height he made up in breadth; it almost seemed as though, intended by nature to be a man of many inches, he had been compressed to his present dimensions by art. ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... china ornaments in our drawing-room. At any other time I should have been glad to see him flying off with the whole thing, handle included. But now I felt the theft of that one feather as an added injury. Mrs. Sparrow chirped with delight at sight of the gaudy monstrosity. Having got the house cheap, they were going to spend their small amount of energy upon internal decoration. That was their idea clearly, a "Liberty interior." She looked more like a Cockney sparrow than a country one—had been born and bred in ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... Inn in the main valley far away—got to be Boy there—got to be Ostler—got to be Waiter—got to be Cook—got to be Landlord. As Landlord, he took me (could he take the idiot beggar his brother, or the spinning monstrosity his sister?) to put as pupil to the famous watchmaker, his neighbour and friend. His wife dies when Miss Marguerite is born. What is his will, and what are his words to me, when he dies, she being between girl and woman? ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... future held this: that my name would disappear from the papers as suddenly as it had arrived there. People would want to know why I had given up writing. "Written himself out," "No staying power," "As short-lived as a Barnum monstrosity": these would be the remarks which would herald ridicule ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... straight lines, so a parallelepiped is a solid figure bounded by three pairs of parallel planes (παραλληλος {parallêlos}, parallel, and επιπεδος {epipedos}, plane); incidentally, in the latter case, he will be saved from writing 'parallelopiped', a monstrosity which has disfigured not a few textbooks of geometry. Another good example is the word hypotenuse; it comes from the verb ὑποτεινειν {hypoteinein} (c. ὑπο {hypo} and acc. or simple acc.), to stretch under, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... a reddish glow, flickered, flickered faster and faster, fluttered between light and extinction, ceased to flicker and became mere fading specks of glowing red in a vast obscurity. In ten seconds the extinction was accomplished, and there was only this roaring darkness, a black monstrosity that had suddenly swallowed up ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... father's cowboys who, for reasons of his own, heartily hated and a little feared the old man. Since then the girl's lively imagination had created a most unseemly brute out of the enemy of her house, a beetle-browed, ugly-mouthed, facially-hideous being little short of a monstrosity. ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... composer. For, as has been said, while a modern composer writes two or three different operas, Hasse wrote one hundred versions of one. This also had its effect on instrumental music, and, in a way, is also the direct cause of that monstrosity known as "variations" (Haendel wrote sixty-six on one theme.) In our days we often hear the bitter complaint that opera singers are no longer what they used to be, and that the great art of singing has been lost. If we look back to the period under consideration, ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... were all carried hence; and those that were far away, watching and waiting for the loved and absent adventurers, watched and waited in vain. A change come o'er the spirit of the place. The site is now marked by the New City Hall—in all probability the most costly architectural monstrosity on this continent. ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... historic fact. Before B.C. 580 there were probably no statues in Greece save those of deities. But of what form? We all know that the usual tendency of man has been to represent his gods as more or less monstrous. Their monstrosity may have been meant, as it was certainly with the Mexican idols, and probably those of the Semitic races of Syria and Palestine, to symbolise the ferocious passions which they attributed to those objects of their dread, appeasable alone by human sacrifice. ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... abandoned, and the principle which recognizes the right of the people to decide for themselves has been submitted in its place," he proceeded to vindicate his position throughout; declared that he opposed "the Lecompton monstrosity solely on the ground than it was a violation of the fundamental principles of free government; on the ground that it was not the act and deed of the people of Kansas; that it did not embody their will; that they were averse to it;" and hence he "denied the right of Congress ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... Le Breton,' she said, with an open smile upon her frank face. 'I was dreadfully afraid you wouldn't care for our proposition. Dunbude's the dullest hole in England, and we want somebody here to brighten it up, sadly. Did you ever see such an ugly monstrosity before, anywhere?' ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... world has worshipped, and of all the varieties of monstrosity, not the less monstrous because sometimes beautiful, before which men have bowed. Cruel, lustful, rapacious, capricious, selfish, indifferent deities they have adored. And then, 'God hath established,' proved, demonstrated 'His ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... you, you stolid and flesh-fettered ox, you monstrosity of over-weening and perennial health and joy, what do you ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... night, and he must have been asleep when Antonia screamed. When I turned, he was lying in long loose waves, like a letter 'W.' He twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big snake, I thought—he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity, his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my leg, and looked as if millstones couldn't crush the disgusting vitality out of him. He lifted his hideous little head, and rattled. I didn't run because I ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... real wholesome weariness would come; he could sleep at ease in some pleasant wayside inn, without once meeting the eyes that stood as it were like a window between himself and a shrewd incredulous scoffing world that would turn him into a monstrosity and his story into a fable. And in a little while, perhaps in three days, he would awaken out of this engrossing nightmare, and know he was free, this black dog gone from his back, and (as the old saying expressed it without any one dreaming ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... solids. We are all aware that a short line is not a point, a narrow surface is not a line, and a thin solid is not a mere surface. A door so thin as to have only one side would be repudiated by every man of sense as a monstrosity. When the geometrician defines for us the point, the line, the surface, and the solid, and when he sets before us an array of axioms, or self-evident truths, we follow him with confidence because he seems to be telling us things that we can directly ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... was appalled by the monstrosity he had created, for it was a loathsome, repulsive creature. Its head was flat and broad and sat upon its sloping shoulders without a connecting neck. Its legs were short, but its arms were long, ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... Sir Robert Aylward, for he halted to stare at it, then stretched out his hand and switched on another lamp, in the hard brilliance of which the thing upon the pedestal suddenly declared itself, leaping out of the darkness into light. It was a terrible object, a monstrosity of indeterminate sex and nature, but surmounted by a woman's head and face of extraordinary, if devilish loveliness, sunk back between high but grotesquely small shoulders, like to those of a lizard, so ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... hands too were large, common, and ill-kept, and the wrists laden with bracelets. She was adorned indeed with a great deal of jewellery, including some startling earrings of a bright green stone. The hat, which she had carefully placed on a chair beside her, was truly a monstrosity!—but, as Doris guessed, an expensive monstrosity, such as the Rue de la Paix provides, at anything from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty francs, for those of its cosmopolitan customers whom it pillages and despises. How did the lady afford it? The rest of ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... talk about that idiot! An idiot born and bred! I won't have him about me! He is a monstrosity! I tell his grandmother that every day when she comes to comb me. What a farce—what a ridiculous farce comfortable existence has become with us! Fresh mushrooms in market, and ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... extraordinary phenomena are presented here. You have an accidental variation arising from what you may call a monstrosity; you have that monstrosity tendency or variation diluted in the first instance by an admixture with a female of normal construction, and you would naturally expect that, in the results of such an union, the monstrosity, if repeated, would be in equal proportion with the normal type; that is to ...
— The Perpetuation Of Living Beings, Hereditary Transmission And Variation • Thomas H. Huxley
... first," said Jean, "there was no thought of pleasing either you or me when she was christened—or rather when the late Mr. Duff-Whalley was christened. And I pointed out the house to you the other day. You asked what the monstrosity was, and I told you ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... approached nearer, that they might share in the excitement of the departure for "meeting." Gay clamored to go, but was pacified by the gift of a rag-doll that Samantha had made for her the evening before. It was a monstrosity, but Gay dipped it instantly in the alembic of her imagination, and it became a beautiful, responsive little daughter, which she clasped close in her arms, and on which she showered the tenderest tokens of ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... unfortunate culminations of almost unceasing financial discomfort, which has been most forcibly exemplified during the last two months. Even now the financial fabric is in unstable equilibrium, and this latest monstrosity—the McKinley Bill—imposing the highest tariff we have ever exacted—an average duty of 60 per cent., and coming when a panic was due, bids fair to hurry us into another and a terrible financial panic. If it does not do so, it will be because our crops are too bountiful to allow ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... all kind consideration, because I know, as we all must, that any heart which could really toughen its affections and sympathies against those dear little people must be wanting in so many humanising experiences of innocence and tenderness, as to be quite an unsafe monstrosity among men. Therefore I set the assertion down, whenever I happen to meet with it—which is sometimes, though not often—as an idle word, originating possibly in the genteel languor of the hour, and meaning about as much as that knowing social lassitude, ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... ancient times, we toil steeply up here, with the dead upon his bier; for not often in Tiverton do we depend on that uncouth monstrosity, the hearse. It is not that we do not own one,—a rigid box of that name has belonged to us now for many a year; and when Sudleigh came out with a new one, plumes, trappings, and all, we broached the idea of emulating her. But the project fell through after Brad Freeman's contented remark ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... large cities, each mote in the misery lighter, as an individual soul, than a dead leaf, but becoming oppressive and infectious each to his neighbor, in the smoking mass of decay. The resulting modes of mental ruin and distress are continually new; and in a certain sense, worth study in their monstrosity: they have accordingly developed a corresponding science of fiction, concerned mainly with the description of such forms of disease, like ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... what they sang and said in the private gatherings of the Methodist Societies could only deepen and intensify the feeling of monstrosity. ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... don't think you are, but it is only my duty to put the case plainly before you. That man who was buried this afternoon was simply unspeakable. He was a monstrosity of perverted morality. I cannot even bring myself to tell you what I know of him. I cannot even bring myself to give you the least hint of what my poor young sister, Clemency's mother, suffered in her brief life with him. ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... reached its real height of monstrosity when, concealing its identity under an assumed name, it entitled itself capital. Then its action was not limited to individual incitation to theft and murder but extended to the entire human race. With one ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... could not help looking upon her as a poor, wild, foolish girl, unworthy of consideration. She magnified her faults and crudities, she paraded before her inner vision her fecent improprieties, as they had been disclosed to her, until she saw herself a sort of monstrosity at which all mankind was gazing with disgust. Life seemed dry and shriveled, a mere jaundiced shadow, while her love for Beverley took on a new growth, luxuriant, all-embracing, uncontrollable. The ferment of spirit going on in her breast was the inevitable process of self-recognition ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... for Madrid. Farther on, Moorish houses with lofty miradors and beautiful capped windows were tucked between ugly new buildings, and across the shaded avenue of a green park was flung an extraordinary, four-winged spiral staircase of iron. I groaned at the monstrosity, saying that Pedro himself had never perpetrated an act more cruel; and the Cherub excused it sadly, by saying that it was convenient for the crowds to pass from one side of the street to the other, as I should see if I stayed beyond the ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... hands invoking the aid of the Sangre de Cristo, of the Virgin of Lluch, patron saint of the island, and of the powerful San Vicente Ferrer, who had wrought so many miracles when he ministered in Majorca—a final and prodigious saint, who might avert the monstrosity her master contemplated! Let a rock from the mountains fall and forever close the way to Valldemosa; let the carriage upset, and let Don Jaime be carried home on a stretcher by four men—anything rather ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... that seems almost a departure from natural laws. But the form alone does not produce the full effect, which is only experienced when you see the creature in motion. The true horror of the centipede, perhaps, must be due to the monstrosity of its movement,— multiple and complex, as of a chain of pursuing and inter- devouring lives: there is something about it that makes you recoil, as from a sudden corrupt swarming-out. It is confusing, —a series of contractings and lengthenings ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... parrot's, the mouth a gaping crescent; the eyeless sockets seemed to sparkle and blink with inner eyes set in the back of the skull; murderous scalp locks streamed over the ill-shapen brow; and from the depths of this monstrosity some one, or something, said, "Boo!" I sprang backward, only to hear the gurgle of baby laughter, and see the wee face of a half-Indian cherub peering from behind the mask. Well, that mask is mine now; and whenever I look at it I think of the ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... form of life there is a weed; a hideous monstrosity, shaped something like an octopus, and capable of the most horrible—" He stopped abruptly, remembering that one of his hearers was a woman. ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... a happy one. The elements in some of the Hindoo myths specially repulsive to European taste are their monstrosity, their inartistic and hideous exaggeration, their accumulation of sanguinary horrors, and their childish triviality. Few of the classical myths exhibit these characteristics. The vanity or policy ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... the full maturity of his powers, a debater and campaigner, a soldier in the War of 1812, and a respected character, was to lay the adventurer, the interloper, low! He was elected to the task. Was Douglas a youth? No. He was a monstrosity. He had always been a man. He had never grown up. He had simply appeared in this part of the world, a creature of mature powers. Yet Wyatt would ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... effect. It was all of course the last thing that could have seemed on the cards, a change by which he was completely free with this lady; and it wouldn't indeed have come about if—for another monstrosity—he hadn't ceased to be free with Kate. Thus it was that on the third time in especial of being alone with her he found himself uttering to the elder woman what had been impossible of utterance to the younger. Mrs. Lowder gave him in fact, on the ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... not be so? What should such a monstrosity produce but miseries and crimes? What is monarchy? It has been finely disguised, and the people familiarized with the odious title: in its real sense the word signifies the absolute power of one single individual, who may with impunity be stupid, treacherous, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine |
