"Nightmare" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... alongside him through the rapids, and now himself scrambled ashore. It was a very narrow escape. Kermit was a great comfort and help to me on the trip; but the fear of some fatal accident befalling him was always a nightmare to me. He was to be married as soon as the trip was over; and it did not seem to me that I could bear to bring bad tidings to his betrothed and to ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... afternoon. He gathered together his few personal belongings—his books, his manuscripts, opera innumerable. There was room in his portmanteau for everything—now he had no clothes. On the Monday the long nightmare would be over. He would go down to some obscure seaside nook and live very quietly for a few weeks, and gain strength and calm in the soft spring airs, and watch hand-in-hand with Mary Ann the rippling scarlet trail of the setting sun fade across the green ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... itself to support me meanwhile. Just then the ship gave another sudden jerk, and, head-foremost, I pitched from the yard. I knew where I was, from the rush of the air by my ears, but all else was a nightmare. A bloody film was before my eyes, through which, ghost-like, passed and repassed my father, mother, and sisters. An utterable nausea oppressed me; I was conscious of gasping; there seemed no breath in my body. It was over one hundred feet that I fell—down, down, with lungs ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... to the sound the underbrush crackled, and through it and upon the scene there crashed a vegetable-animal nightmare—the parent of the relatively tiny thing whose ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... sense of, and desire for, wonder were violently stirred by the new surroundings. She was painfully affected. She began to feel almost desperate. That terrible sensation, known perhaps in its frightening nightmare fulness only to youth, "My life is done, all real life is at an end for me, because I cannot be linked with my other half, because I have found it, but it has not found me!" besieged, assailed her. It shook her, as neurasthenia shakes its ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... forgetfulness of his Texas speculation, succeeding pauses of silence would come roars of laughter. The remembrance of the humorous tale banished sleep, and, even after slumber had fallen on us all, fun still held possession of our dreams. For Dick, starting from sleep in a nightmare of hilarity, roared out: "Luff her up, luff her up, or ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... to the hospitable cares of yourself and Francisca," said Clara, answering for both; "my sister had something like the nightmare, but otherwise ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... glad to get back to the Villa Montmorency—from the distorted shadows of a nightmare to ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... could surpass the cruelty of the Cossacks. This ukase more than any other, it is claimed, embittered Lilienthal against Russia, and caused him to flee to where he could say as one awakening from a nightmare: "The horrible hatred against the Jews in Russia is nothing more to me than a hazy remembrance. My soul is no longer oppressed by frightful pictures of tyranny and persecution."[13] He was in the land ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... a printer's nightmare, it strikes me that Grosart is far too severe in his strictures against Hiren, which was quite attractively and reasonably accurately printed, probably by Nicholas Okes,[43] who also printed The Scourge. Indeed Grosart has "corrected" a number of details of ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... him. He remembered that during the Commune he was nearly killed in the Rue Saint-Antoine by the explosion of a shell, thrown by the insurgents from the heights of Pere-Lachaise. He thought that had he died then, Micheline would have wept for him. Then, as in a nightmare, it seemed to him that this hypothesis was realized. He saw the church hung with black, he heard the funeral chants. A catafalque contained his coffin, and slowly his betrothed came, with a trembling hand, to throw holy water on the cloth ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... of the religion of Odin are found in the usages and languages of the descendants of those who worshipped him. These descendants all retain, in the names of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, the recollections of the chief gods of this mythology. Mara (the nightmare) still torments the sleep of the English-speaking people; and the Evil One, Nokke (so says Laing), is ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... but long discipline and a curious pride in the prowess of their masters kept them at their lowly but important tasks. They boasted that their masters could "whip the world in arms." Of insurrections and the massacre of the whites, which at one time had been a nightmare to the ruling classes of the South, there was no rumor. And throughout the four years of war the slaves remained faithful and produced by their steady, if slow, toil the food supplies both for the people at home and for the armies at ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... be accepted as Ilam Carve. I was leading a placid and agreeable existence in a place called Putney, an ideal existence with a pearl among women, when my tranquillity was disturbed and my life transformed into a perfect nightmare by a quarrel between a retail trades-man (indicating EBAG) and a wholesale ink-dealer (indicating TEXEL) about one of my pictures. It does not concern me. My role is and will be passive. If I am forced into the witness-box I shall answer questions to the worst of ...
— The Great Adventure • Arnold Bennett
... insolence that made no account of personalities. They adventured in no move against that obstacle in their path, either by concerted attack or individual effort to pass. They looked like wakened sleepers who were struggling with the problems proposed in a nightmare. It was a situation which seemed beyond solution by the ordinary ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... possibility of existence to this girl. To leave Haworth for a strange town beyond the seas, to see strange faces all round, to hear and speak a strange language, Charlotte's welcome prospect of adventure must have taken a nightmare shape to Emily. And for this she must hope; this she must desire, plead for if necessary, and at least uphold. For Charlotte said the thing was essential to their future; and in all details of management, ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... he shared her doubt, because he, too, had wondered whether he alone would be shot at dawn, while she, his companion in this horrible nightmare, were reserved for some far more ghastly fate, because of his wonder and his doubt Anstice rejoiced in the fact that he had it in his power to save her from the ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... after closely scrutinizing Mr. Stafford's features, he said, "Confound it, am I in a nightmare? I thought for a minute—but no, it can't be neither, for you've got too thunderin' black ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... have run to some one for protection had she known to whom to go, or, indeed, had she not been too terrified to do more than hide her head under the counterpane again. From that time it became a perpetual nightmare to her. By day its terrors were less apparent, though even then, with her innate love for all things bright, and joyous, and pleasant, it was a positive grief to her to have such a grim object before her eyes whenever she came into the room; but at night no sooner was she in bed, and the light ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... some terrible nightmare, and as he struggled against it he threw out his arms, half fancying that he was fighting to save himself from being suffocated in a flood that was not liquid but solid and hard. Then one hand came in contact with something ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... also thought that Mr. Courtney was "too d——d superior" in private life. Sir Timothy had the lowest possible opinion of the progress made by civilization in his own time. The Civilization of the Future, about which Mr. Courtney talked a great deal, seemed to Sir Timothy a nasty kind of nightmare. ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... before the eyes of the people in this weird and midnight shape of a Ku Klux Klan." Ryland Randolph, an Alabama editor who was also an official of the Klan, stated in his paper that "the origin of Ku Klux Klan is in the galling despotism that broods like a nightmare over these Southern States—a fungus growth of military tyranny superinduced by the fostering of Loyal Leagues, the abrogation of our civil laws, the habitual violation of our national Constitution, and a persistent prostitution of all government, all resources ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... Marian with loathing. Her aspect conveyed the same painful suggestion as her voice had done before, but more definitely; for it struck Marian, with a shock, that Conolly, in the grotesque metamorphosis of a nightmare, might appear in some such likeness. The lamp did not seem to attract her attention at first; but when she came within a few steps, she saw some one before her, and, dazzled by the light, peered at Marian, who lost her presence of mind, and stood motionless. Gradually the woman's expression changed ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... last in that black fog of rain, wind, and water when his bow eased into comparatively quiet water. He had crossed the main current; now was the time to head upstream. Grimly he did, to begin a struggle which was to take on all the more horrible properties of a nightmare. For this was many times worse than ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... You never see a man so shook up by the nightmare as he was by that one. He kept goin' over it and tellin' how natural old Kelly looked and how many times ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... carried off by some horrified spectators, and died a few hours later. A photograph of his body lies before me as I write. I showed the photograph one evening to two or three men in New York City. Next day I met the men again. "We had nightmare all night long, because of that ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... felt as if he had been oppressed by a terrible nightmare; he opened his eyes and experienced an indescribable sensation of mental comfort, whilst a soft and most beautiful sensation of warmth pervaded his body. He lay on his own bed in his own room at home; Clara was bending over him, and ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... blood in his veins was cold. His eyes, fixed upon the flying landscape, were set in a fixed, unseeing stare—surely the fields were peopled with evil memories, and faces in the trees were mocking him. So he remained for several moments as though in the grip of a nightmare, and the lady watched him. There was ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... economy of our cultured classes art has become a spurious or ignominious and undignified need—a nonentity or a something evil. The superior and more uncommon artist must be in the throes of a bewildering nightmare in order to be blind to all this, and like a ghost, diffidently and in a quavering voice, he goes on repeating beautiful words which he declares descend to him from higher spheres, but whose sound he can hear only very indistinctly. The artist who happens to be moulded according ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... I was coming up the Bay, and sank just before they reached her. I shall never forget her looks as she came up the last time, turned her white, despairing, death-stricken face towards us, screamed a wild nightmare scream, and went down. Clarian's face was just like hers. Depend upon it, there's something wrong. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... the dew of anguish which his own hand wiped from his forehead and throat. Yet, what was his dream? Was it merely some subconscious stringing together of suggestions and desires and events vivified in sleep to a coherent story (all but that recognition of Mr. Taynton, which was nightmare pure and simple), or ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... exposition of the world's meaninglessness, in English poetry, is doubtless Thomson's City of Dreadful Night. Why does the author give such a ghastly thing to the world? In order, he says, that some other clear-eyed spectator of the nightmare of existence may gain a forlorn comfort from it, since he will know that a comrade before him has likewise seen things at their blackest and worst. But would Plato accept this as a justification for realistic poetry? It is doubtful. No one could be comforted by a merely ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... strain of constant watching, and the long hours of solitude, and the nightmare of her girl's damnation hanging over her yearning heart, the poor mother's condition verged on madness, until at last she summoned courage to ask Mr. Penrose to call and drop some crumbs of his Gospel of comfort and love at the bedside of her child; for, as she said to Mrs. Lord, ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... Flibbertigibbet: he begins at curfew, and walks till the first cock; he gives the web and the pin, squints the eye, and makes the harelip; mildews the white wheat, and hurts the poor creature of earth. Swithold footed thrice the old; He met the nightmare, and her nine-fold; Bid her alight And her troth plight, And ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... condition. And that agonized cry touched his heart so deeply, he would hear it so distinctly, so realistically: "Papa, my dear papa," that he would himself utter it aloud in the street, to the great astonishment of the passers-by, in a hoarse voice which would wake him from his fictitious nightmare. ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... world within a world—a valley of leagues where the high hills were fashioned of a mere rubble and refuse from off the knees of the mountains. Here one day's march carried them no farther, it seemed, than a dreamer's clogged pace bears him in a nightmare. They skirted a shoulder painfully for hours, and, behold, it was but an outlying boss in an outlying buttress of the main pile! A rounded meadow revealed itself, when they had reached it, for a vast tableland running far into the valley. Three days later, it was a dim fold ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... agitation still wearing their hats, while above them in the pulpit a young man in lay dress had apparently been addressing them when he and they had been overwhelmed by the same fate. He lay now, like Punch in his booth, with his head and two limp arms hanging over the ledge of the pulpit. It was a nightmare, the grey, dusty church, the rows of agonized figures, the dimness and silence of it all. We moved about with hushed ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... like the passing of a nightmare; and with a start, a little shiver and a sigh, Lanyard roused and went on to do the bidding of his ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... she rejoined. "But I was so unprepared for this—I cannot say why, excepting that I trusted so entirely in Dr. Thorndyke—and it is so horrible and, above all, so dreadfully suggestive of what may happen. Up to now the whole thing has seemed like a nightmare—terrifying, but yet unreal. But now that he is actually in prison, it has suddenly become a dreadful reality and I am overwhelmed with terror. Oh! poor boy! What will become of him? For pity's sake, Dr. Jervis, tell me ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... had one or two of those tunnel-like dormer windows built in the curving roof of all French houses. Henry found a place where he could look out. He saw his countrymen slaughtered without being able to help them, and it was like a frightful nightmare from which there was to be no awakening. Presently ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... of his squad over dark, barren space and through deep, narrow, winding lanes in the ground had been a nightmare ending to the long journey. France had not yet become clear to him; he was a stranger in a strange land; in spite of his tremendous interest and excitement, all seemed abstract matters of his feeling, the plague of himself made actuality the substance of dreams. That last ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... to shake off her fright. "That was a sure enough nightmare. If I'd a dream like that I'd wake up the whole house yapping like ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... Slowly, very slowly, sense and memory returned to me, and with them a more vivid intensity of mental anguish, as detail by detail I recalled the weird horror of the night. Had it really happened,—was the thing still there,—or was it all a ghastly nightmare? It was some minutes before I dared either to move or look up, and then fearfully I raised my head. Before me stretched the smooth white coverlet, faintly bright with yellow sunshine. Weak and giddy, I struggled to my feet, and, steadying myself ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... announced 'Mr. Peak', she did not at once rise, and with a feeling akin to terror she heard the footstep slowly approaching. It stopped at some distance from her; then, overcoming a weakness which threatened to clog her as in a nightmare, she stood up and ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... it. There is some satisfaction too in playing the vagabond in the streets of a big town till the sky pales above the ridges of the roofs. I have done that repeatedly for pleasure—of a sort. But to tramp the slumbering country-side in the dark is for me a wearisome nightmare of exertion. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... was altogether beside itself on one point, in especial; it created a nightmare of its own, and gave it the shape of Abraham Lincoln. Behind this it placed another demon, if possible more devilish, and called it Mr. Seward. In regard to these two men English society seemed demented. Defense ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... you're right. It is best so. She is as well off there as she could be anywhere. When I think of how she used to go about here casting gloom over every attempt at happiness, how her fate weighed us down like a nightmare, then I am tempted to feel almost glad about it. I believe the greatest misfortune that could happen would be to see her cross this threshold. ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... domain of art) and apparent good faith with which he managed the evocation and exhibition of his strange and spectral and revolting creations—gave him an astonishing mastery over his readers, so that his books were closed as one would lay aside the nightmare or the spells of opium. The analytical subtlety evinced in his works has frequently been overestimated, as I have before observed, because it has not been sufficiently considered that his mysteries were composed with the express design of being dissolved. When Poe attempted the illustration ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... And—thank God, too—she was rich. And it was obvious that he was poor. She had much to share with him. And she was still attractive. Other men still wished to marry her. She was pretty, still. All that she had, all that she still was, she would give him. And this long nightmare of the last ten years would pass at last, as that other nightmare of her youth had passed—her wretched home, with a drunken father and a heartbroken mother. That had passed, though at the time it had seemed as if it would endure for ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... Jan ran these needless errands, the faint voice under the spruce branches rang in his ears. The voice was not so imperative now, but it begged and implored him to hasten. "I'm coming, I'm coming!" Jan whispered back. He had the sensation of one in a nightmare who tries to run but who cannot ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... the two volumes of his trial, printed at Amiens in 1795, may be counted as a nightmare. During twenty sessions the survivors of the hecatombs of Arras and Cambrai passed through the ancient hall of the bailiwick at Amiens, where the ex-member of the Convention was tried. What these phantoms ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... Nightmare.—In serious cases of this trouble, the patient awakes some time before he gains any power whatever to move, feeling held as in a vice. But in common instances, the attack is entirely during sleep, and accompanied by frightful dreams. A heavily-loaded stomach, pressing on the solar plexus ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... to break that frightful nightmare.... Suddenly everything grew dark round about ... and the woman returned ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... long, beneath the blackened roof of the cafe where the hashish was smoked. She was exhausted, yet she felt feverishly, almost crazily alive. She drank coffee after coffee. She watched the dreaming smokers, the dreaming dancers, till she seemed to be living in a nightmare, to be detached from earth and all things she had ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... whither the roads directed him. All he desired was to be at a distance from that house, with its hideous silence and the faint cry that could scarcely be called a sound. The necessity of returning, of spending days there, was an Oppression which held him like a nightmare. ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... been suffering from a nightmare, Bert," said Mrs. Bobbsey kindly. "You should not have eaten those ...
— The Bobbsey Twins - Or, Merry Days Indoors and Out • Laura Lee Hope
... Policeman Gall, two days before. In the sunshine of John's young personality, fears grew small and hope grew big. The ideas which had passed through Mr. Juxon's brain on the previous evening, just after Mr. Ambrose had warned him of Goddard's intentions, seemed now like the evil shadows of a nightmare. All apprehension lest the convict should attempt to execute his threats disappeared like darkness before daylight, and in the course of an hour or two the squire found himself laughing and chatting with his guest as though there ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... They had concealed themselves as best they could in ditches and narrow tunnels made with corrugated iron or planks. The 'Huns,' indeed, had been meeting with their deserts. Their life in the Lys salient must have been a nightmare. One required only to read a few of the notices displayed to realise the difference of life behind their line and ours. Everywhere appeared in big letters the word 'Fliegerdeckung!' i.e. cover from aircraft. No testimony more eloquent of British superiority ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... the courage and heroism necessary to bear the terrible hardships of fighting under such conditions. All the German soldiers made prisoners by the French describe life in the Argonne as a hideous nightmare. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... of the night I'd kept saying, in a sort of drink nightmare, "I'll go for Peter M'Laughlan in the morning. I'll go for Peter as soon as I can stand!" and repeating Clara Barnes's words, "Ride for Peter if anything happens. Ride for ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... he cried. "A servant has had a nightmare, that is all, and has taken a fit with fright. Now I must see you all back to your rooms." And so by dint of coaxing and commanding he contrived to get them ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks—an existence of soft ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... thro' his tears, And would have spoken, but he found not word; Then took with care, and kneeling on one knee, O'er both his shoulders drew the languid hands, And rising bore him thro' the place of tombs. But, as he walk'd, King Arthur panted hard, Like one that feels a nightmare on his bed When all the house is mute. So sigh'd the King, Muttering and murmuring at his ear, "Quick, quick! I fear it is too late, and I shall die." But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge, Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walk'd, Larger than ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... man, at least a changing one. Sombre his face would always be; Fate had bitten too deep for the scars ever to be smoothed away. But with the haunting fear removed that his name and fortune should fall into unworthy hands, he seemed to have shaken off ten years of nightmare trouble. His voice began to lose its bitter harshness; for the first time his slaves no longer trembled at his glance. His attitude toward Marius was curious—also, in view of his nature, touching. On Marius he lavished all ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... now!" said he. "These last few days have been too much for me. I am convinced that I could not stand it any longer. It is a nightmare—a horrible nightmare—that I should be arrested as a burglar in what has been for so long my own museum. And yet I cannot blame you. You could not have done otherwise. My hope always was that I should get it all over before I was detected. ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... are few incentives to early rising. What charm is there in roof-tops and chimney-stacks to induce one to escape even from a nightmare? What is more depressing than a city street before the shop-windows have lifted an eyelid, when "the very houses seem asleep," as Wordsworth says, and nobody is astir but the belated burglar or the milk-and-water man or Mary washing ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to sleep. I lay awake thinking weak aimless stuff, going over the experiment over and over again, or dreaming feverishly of things growing misty and vanishing about me, until everything, the ground I stood on, vanished, and so I came to that sickly falling nightmare one gets. About two, the cat began miaowing about the room. I tried to hush it by talking to it, and then I decided to turn it out. I remember the shock I had when striking a light—there were just the round eyes shining green—and nothing round them. I would have ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... inherited from her respectable, lower middle-class forbears. Instead of being good substantial mahogany or walnut, it was some queerly veined light-coloured wood, and decorated with the strangest coloured rectangular designs, and painted—well, with nightmare oddities, that's what she called them! And she was not far wrong, for all down one side of the wardrobe waddled a ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... was the life she lived." The effect of these night lessons was to leave the child's brain both tired and excited and in no condition to sleep. It was considered singular that she was never ready for bed. She was hustled off to toss on her pillow, to see horrid visions, to have nightmare, and sometimes to walk in her sleep. Terrible morning headaches followed, and Margaret was considered a delicate child. One would like to know what Latin at six would have done for her, ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... still it is the fact that that increase in breadth of vision has so far applied to every known thing but man himself. The old belief that gave the world 6000 years of life, at least put thinking man at its beginning; the modern nightmare gives us a world for hundreds of millions of years without thought, and makes human civilization an ephemeral episode of a few seconds of universal duration. Disregarding, one is forced to say wilfully, the fact that every single one of their own arguments in ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... throat. Yes, it's all coming back now. I crept on till all at once the water falling sounded loud, and the next moment I was sinking down sidewise into a deep place where I was hanging across a stone to get at the water in the dark, and couldn't. It was just like a nightmare, sergeant, that it was, and I felt my head go down and my legs hanging till my back was ready to break, but I couldn't get away, and I lay and lay, till all at once I was snatched up, and that hurt me so that I yelled for help, and then the nightmare seemed ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... Bobolink, as he rubbed his eyes, "wake me up, somebody, won't you? I've got the nightmare, sure; I'm seein' things I ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... not how long I remained in a sort of painful drowsiness. My heart suffered as much as my flesh. Warm tears ran slowly down my cheeks. Amidst the nightmare that accompanied the fever, I heard a moan similar to the continuous plaintive cry of a child in suffering. At times, I awoke and stared ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... evening star in the early twilight, and underfoot the earth was half frozen. It was Christmas Eve. Also the War was over, and there was a sense of relief that was almost a new menace. A man felt the violence of the nightmare released now into the general air. Also there had been another wrangle among the men on ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... illusion, vagary, wild conceit, revery, fancy, fantasy. Antonyms: fact, actuality, reality, substance, realization. Associated Words: Morpheus, Morphean, oneiroscopy, oneiroscopist, oneirocritic, oneiromancy, oneirology, oneirocriticism, nightmare. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... long voyage, and that it was happier and freer and finer than ever. And I wanted to go there. I dreamed that America had got itself in such trouble that thousands of people were leaving to live in Atlantis. This part of my dream was a nightmare, and not at all clear, but my recollection is that we'd elected Amy Lowell as President. And she said her understanding was that she'd been elected for life; and when any one disagreed with her, she sent a porter around to cut off his ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... report of street-fighting with the same detachment as before, so vivid are they, so haunting. In the end, however, as I say, we find a happier atmosphere. The adventures of Billy and Saxon, tramping it in search of a home, soon make their urban terrors seem to them and the reader a kind of nightmare. Here Mr. LONDON is at his delightful best, and his word-pictures of country scenes are as fresh and fine as anything he has yet done. The Valley of the Moon, in short, is really two stories—one grim, one pleasant, and both ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... a scene that reminds me to this day of some broken, fantastic dream, a fragment from some bewildering nightmare. ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... the previous energetic five months over and over again. I had little time before to think of anything but my job and its best possibilities, but the quietness of the hospital at Aix la Chapelle made the previous period of activity seem a nightmare of incident. ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... pay for it," said Mary Hope, finding her voice faint and husky. She had an odd sensation that this was a nightmare. She had dreamed so often of the dance and of ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... of nightmare and usually seek its cause in a poor digestion and the doctors talk a great deal about improper circulation and suggest all kinds of remedies. But throughout a long life I have been a close observer and ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... or three-quarters of the burden of sustaining those degenerates who, through no fault of their own, are congenitally incompetent to maintain themselves in decent comfort, and is to render the life-pilgrimage of these unfortunates tolerable instead of a dreary nightmare, if it is to assume paternal charge of all the tens or hundreds of thousands of children whose parents cannot or will not provide adequately for them and is to guarantee to all such children as much education as they are capable of receiving, and a really fair start in life: then ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... adhesive, spongy feet over places which would have been impossible for horses. Among the broken rocks those behind could sometimes only see the long, undulating, darting necks of the creatures in front, as if it were some nightmare procession of serpents. Indeed, it had much the effect of a dream upon the prisoners, for there was no sound, save the soft, dull padding and shuffling of the feet. The strange, wild frieze moved slowly and silently onwards amid a setting of black ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... of unhappiness and then the door moved open; Vic found himself looking up to the face with the golden hair which he remembered out of his nightmare. She nodded ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... in the lubricating heat of the fire. "For what we have received, the Lord make us truly thankful," said the admiral. "Go downstairs, my good girl, and get your supper. A light meal, Lucy, if you take my advice—a light meal, or you will have the nightmare. Early to bed, my dear, and early to rise, makes a parlor-maid healthy and wealthy and wise. That's the wisdom of your ancestors—you mustn't laugh at it. Good-night." In those words Magdalen was dismissed; and so her first day's experience ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... a Dominican church, whose black and white inlaid marbles are amazing in their elaborateness, astounding in their preposterously bad taste. They transcend description, and can be faintly imagined only by such as know a huge marble nightmare of waves and clouds in the south aisle of Westminster Abbey. This church contains one good painting of a triumphant experiment conducted by some Dominican friars in the presence of sundry Ulemas and Muftis: a Koran and Bible have been thrown into a blazing ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Seldom does one recognise his own repressed thoughts or unattained wishes. The dream really is the guardian of sleep to satisfy the activity of the unconscious and repressed mental processes that would otherwise disturb sleep by keeping the censor busy. In the case of a nightmare the watchman or censor is aroused, finds himself overpowered, so to speak, and ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... it a moment longer, Sister Nightmare," answered Scarecrow "I thought I had a glimpse of something behind that ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... in a very peculiar predicament. He had gone to her house with the avowed intention of offering her three thousand dollars and the studio in exchange for a half interest in the drug store. Now his long cherished dream seemed to be turning into a nightmare. ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... years had been audible at home, to all who had ears to hear.[232] Yet if any such thoughts at times did cross their imagination, they were thrust aside as an uneasy dream, to be shaken off like a nightmare, or with the coward's consolation, "It will last my time." If the bishops ever felt an uneasy moment, there is no trace of uneasiness in the answer which they sent in to the king, and which now, when we read it with the light which is thrown back out of the succeeding years, seems ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... nicknames were terrible. She respected no one: Lord Stratford, Lord Raglan, Lady Stratford, Dr. Andrew Smith, Dr. Hall, the Commissary-General, the Purveyor—she fulminated against them all. The intolerable futility of mankind obsessed her like a nightmare, and she gnashed her teeth against it. 'I do well to be angry,' was the burden of her cry. 'How many just men were there at Scutari? How many who cared at all for the sick, or had done anything for their relief? Were ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... day's adventure! I was too young for it, and again and again, when thrusting one of the creatures through with my javeline, I had experienced a horrible disgust and shrinking at the spectacle. Now in my wakeful hours, with that tremendous chanting in my ears, it all came back to me and was like a nightmare. ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... Perhaps without that fear upon us we might have reached the house, but as it was we felt as one feels in a nightmare, unable to run though in an agony of terror. Getting over the wall was the worst, for there Hugh stumbled badly, and I had to turn and help him, watching the man bounding ever nearer, signing to us to stay for him. A minute later, as we slipped and stumbled through the scrub of the wood, we heard ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... dozen yards or so. It was like a scene in some impossible play, or in some ghastly and oppressive nightmare from which I should presently awake to find the blankets all heaped ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... was suddenly in a room where six hundred billing-machines were being clicked at once by six hundred young women, a fantastic aural nightmare, though none of the young women appeared to be conscious that anything bizarre was going on.... And then I was in a printing-shop, where several lightning machines spent their whole time every day in printing the most popular work of reference in the ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... it is for a mother to have her children by her side at night! It is not for a nurse, however careful she may be, to take them up, comfort them, and hush them to sleep again, when some horrid nightmare has disturbed them. For they have their dreams, and the task of explaining away one of those dread visions of the night is the more arduous because the child is scared, stupid, and only half awake. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... experience with him, this self-dissatisfaction and sensitiveness to criticism, which at any other time he would have regarded with a sort of insolent indifference. He remembered his walk westward yesterday with a shudder, as though indeed it had been a sort of nightmare, and wondered whether she too had regarded him with the eyes of those loungers on the pavement—whether she too was one of those who looked for a man to conform to the one arbitrary and universal type. Finally he tied his necktie ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... usually say at such times, and Mary submitted dumbly, as if it were a part of a bewildering dream. At times she was sure that she must wake up presently and find that she had been in the grip of a dreadful nightmare. It was that certainty which helped her through ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... happening of the World War has removed from us the old fictional scares, novels of German super-spies, and unsuspecting islanders taken unprepared. But to think this is to reckon without the ingenuity of such writers as Mr. RIDGWELL CULLUM. He, for example, has but to postulate that worst nightmare of all, an inconclusive peace, and we are back in the former terrors, blacker than ever. Suppose the Polish inventor of German undersea craft to have been so stricken with remorse at the frightful results thereof that he determines to hand all his secrets to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... had been the abomination of desolation to me. After wrestling with my thoughts, if the acute consciousness of a woman's existence may be called a thought, I had apparently dropped off to sleep only to go on wrestling with a nightmare, a senseless and terrifying dream of being in bonds which, even after waking, made me feel powerless in all my limbs. I lay still, suffering acutely from a renewed sense of existence, unable to lift an arm, and wondering why I was not at sea, how long I had slept, ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... Him with His own? For pain, I tell thee I need more pain than mine own will inflicts, Pain which shall break that will.—Yet spare them, Lord! Go to—I am a fool to wish them life— And greater fool to miscall life, this headache— This nightmare of our gross and crude digestion— This fog which steams up from our freezing clay— While waking heaven's beyond. No! slay them, traitors! Cut through the channels of those innocent breaths Whose music charmed my lone nights, ere they learn To love the world, and hate the ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... to the window of my apartment to collect nickels for the vilest hand-organ music a man ever heard, even in a nightmare." ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... the "Clarion" office embalms "the evening the typhus story broke" as a nightmare out of which was born history. Chronologically, according to the veracious records of Bim the Guardian of Portals, the tumult began at exactly 10.47, with the arrival of Mr. McGuire Ellis, traveling up the ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... shuddered. For now, like a dream-horde of hideous creatures seen in a nightmare, the torch-bearers had spread all through the forest at the ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... juncture, no happier man than Colonel and State Senator Joseph Woods can be found. His mines are unfailing in their yield; his bachelor bungalow, in its splendor, will extinguish certain ambitious rivals, and he is freed from the nightmare of investigating the tangled web of the mysterious struggle for the millions of Lagunitas. He is confirmed in his resolve ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... disease, and by this is meant the fungoid Hemileia vastatrix, which as told in chapter XV, destroyed Ceylon's once prosperous coffee industry. As it has since been found in nearly all coffee-producing countries, it has become a nightmare in the dreams of all coffee planters. The microscope shows how the spores of this dreaded fungus, carried by the winds upon a leaf of the coffee tree, proceed to germinate at the expense of the leaf; robbing it of its nourishment, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... agreed Dunn, with a long-drawn sigh. "Ugh! it's all been such a nightmare. It's been pretty awful, knowing there was some one—not able to guess who. Ever since you discovered that first attempt, ever since we became certain there was a plot going on to clear out every one in succession ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... that afternoon and of course wondered where I was. Everything seemed to be aching and throbbing at once. I tried to move, but I felt as if I was clamped to the bed. "This is terrible," I thought, "I must be having a nightmare." Then I saw the cradle covering my legs. "What could it be?" I wondered, and then in a flash the scenes of that morning (or was it a week ago?) came back to me. I wondered if my back was all right ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... the kitchen, and Carroll dropped into the nearest chair. He felt dazed and happy, with the happiness of a man waking to consciousness from an awful incubus of nightmare, and yet a deadly sense of guilt and shame was beginning to steal over him. That bottle of chloroform in his pocket stung his soul like the worm, which gnaweth the conscience unceasingly, of the Scriptures. He thought vaguely of removing it, of concealing ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... plague-stricken city, and the stupor of stillness broken at intervals by distant bursts of wailing, marking the passing of funerals, here and there and yonder, but I suppose it is not possible for us to realize to ourselves the nightmare of dread and fear that possesses the living who are present in such a place and cannot get away. That half million fled from Bombay in a wild panic suggests to us something of what they were feeling, but perhaps not even they could realize what the half ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "This means nightmare, and physic in the morning," said the worthy woman. "Now, don't you fret and worry your dear head, Miss Helen, pet. Oh, yes, I know all about it, and it was a naughty thing to do, only children will be children. ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... copies of other larger printed sheets, headed by two crossed flags. "It has come; it is now a fact!". . . It was the order for general mobilization. All France was about to take up arms, and chests seemed to expand with a sigh of relief. Eyes were sparkling with excitement. The nightmare was at last over! . . . Cruel reality was preferable to the uncertainty of days and days, each as long ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... creatures into one another, and (if I am not presumptuous in anticipating what I think will be the verdict of posterity) the Witch in Coleridge's Christabel, may rank even with the creations of Shakespeare. It may be doubted, indeed, whether Shakespeare had bile and nightmare enough in him to have thought of such detestable horrors as those of the interchanging adversaries (now serpent, now man), or even of the huge, half-blockish enormity of Nimrod,—in Scripture, the 'mighty hunter' and builder of the tower ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... so easily and lightly by this man and woman, had a nightmare quality for Henrietta. It had the confusion, the exaggerated horror of an evil dream, without the far-away consciousness of its unreality. Here she was, in the presence of the man she loved and it was wicked to love him. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... and France would simply have been the humble slave of Germany to this hour. What a condition for a country! And now France is fighting not so much to recover her lost provinces, she is fighting to recover her self-respect and her national independence; she is fighting to shake off this nightmare that has been on her soul for over a generation, [cheers,] a France with Germany constantly meddling, bullying, and interfering. And that is what would happen if Russia were trampled upon, France broken, Britain disarmed. We should be left without any means to defend ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... baseness and treachery. Now that it is all over, that Froude's biography has taken its place in classical literature, and that Mrs. Carlyle's letters are acknowledged to be among the best in the language, the whole story appears like a nightmare. But it was real enough twenty years ago, when people who never read books of any kind thought that Froude was the name of the man that whitewashed Henry VIII. and blackened Carlyle. Froude would probably have been happier if he had turned ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... pretty soon we were in the presence of the dying man. Oh! Mother Roberts, it was like a horrible nightmare. I was dazed with the shock and the fright of it all. I could hardly get my voice when some one asked me where I had spent the evening, and at what time I had left that saloon. He must have been murdered right after I left. They tried to rouse him to ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... boy could not have told her; he was nowhere near an understanding of himself. The more he was educated, the less he understood. Slavery struck him in the face; it was a nightmare; a horror; a crime; the sum of all wickedness! Contact made it only more repulsive. He wanted to escape, like the negroes, to free soil. Slave States were dirty, unkempt, poverty-stricken, ignorant, vicious! He had not a thought but repulsion for it; and yet the picture had another ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... masses the work of arming went forward languidly. The nation was heavy at heart, and it was in vain that the noblemen and gentlemen endeavoured to raise men's spirits; the black incubus of the priesthood sat upon them like a nightmare. The burnings had been suspended while parliament was in session. On the 28th of March the work began again, and Cuthbert Simson, the minister of a protestant congregation, was put to death in Smithfield, having been first racked to extort from him the names of his supporters;[644] ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... by a horrible black shadow. She kept Parker's letter in her pocket, and the remembrance of it never left her. Gwen generally enjoyed Sundays, but this particular day was like a nightmare. How to get out of her scrape she could not imagine. The debt felt like a heavy millstone tied round her neck. In the afternoon, when the others sat reading and chatting under the trees in the garden, she mooned about the orchard by herself, too miserable even to be interested in a book. ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... tale, told dramatically in the dark, I had next morning blamed the weird waking nightmare that I had suffered after her visit. The horror of the night could not endure the strong sun and wind of the March morning that followed. Like Scrooge, I analyzed my ghost as a bit of undigested beef or a blot of mustard. Certainly the thing had been actual enough while it lasted, ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... had the tobacco an' the balance o' the trimmin's picked up an' got back to the street again I found the rest o' the population gathered together to see who was holdin' the celebration; an' from that on my stay in the city was a nightmare. The passengers in the car gave me gold watches an' champagne suppers, the Jew doctor wore himself to a bone tryin' to find out whether it was me, the lumber company, or the tobacco firm which had to pay the piper; while the newspaper reporters pumped me as dry as the desert. The tobacco company ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... and aimless, through his mind, he wondered if a nightmare were upon him; he, the darling of Belgravia, the Guards' champion, the lover of Lady Guenevere, to be here outlawed and friendless; wearily racking his brains to solve whether he had seamanship enough to be taken before the mast, or ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... heliotrope which, with her own fingers, she had arranged in his button hole, as they had strolled down the garden together just before the start; and the faint perfume which reached her where she stood, helped her to realize that she was in the thrall of no nightmare, but that this thing had really happened. She had never loved him, she had never even pretended to love him, and it was less any sense of personal loss than the hideous sin of it which swept in upon her as she stood there looking down upon him. She recognized, ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in his mind for some matter that would change the subject. Extraordinary how hard it was to find a new topic when some other infernal thing hung in the air. It was like, in a nightmare, trying with leaden limbs to crawl away ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... were an assembly of strange things, Of horrors such as nightmare only brings. Asps, and spread eagles without beak or feet, Sirens and mermaids here and dragons meet, And antlered stags and fabled unicorn, And fearful things of monstrous fancy born. Upon the rigid form of morion's sheen Winged lions and the Cerberus are seen, And serpents winged and ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... Mrs Morgan had finished her speech, out and away, scudding along the road, thought-lost in the breathless rapidity of her motion. Though her heart and head beat almost to bursting, what did it signify if she could but overtake the carriage? It was a nightmare, constantly evading the most passionate wishes and endeavours, and constantly gaining ground. Every time it was visible it was in fact more distant, but Ruth would not believe it. If she could but gain the summit of that weary, everlasting hill, she believed that she ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... and heretics of Turkey and Prussia, still retained something of the old Catholic comfort for the soul. Priests still bore witness to that mighty mediaeval institution which even its enemies concede to be a noble nightmare. All their hoary political iniquities had not deprived them of that dignity. If they darkened the sun in heaven, they clothed it with the strong colours of sunrise in garment or gloriole; if they had given men stones for bread, the stones were carved with kindly ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... the young man's arm with hands that clutched. He dragged at him. His nightmare held him yet; Tembarom saw it, but flashes of light ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... followed were like some horrible nightmare to Dan, whose nerves had been wrought up to the top notch of excitement by the scenes in the courtyard and the church. From a distance he heard calls and groans and an occasional shot. The Alamo had fallen and now Santa Anna was himself upon the scene, to make certain that not one of ...
— For the Liberty of Texas • Edward Stratemeyer
... connect such fragrant, well-tended flowers with the whistling horror out in the darkness. More, it was absurd, impossible. The girl decided that the whole thing was a bad nightmare which she must shake off. The explanation of it could only be that, half asleep, she had dreamed she heard the tapping and the whispers, and smelled the evil odour. Why should a Thing come and tell her to mind the children? "Mind the boy." He was already ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... the affair of the previous night had been less odious than Caroline had feared. Still it had been rather like an ugly nightmare, all the same—Uncle Creddle banging on the door until one startled woman opened it while the other peered over the banisters. They had thanked Mr. Creddle, saying Caroline ought to be more careful: ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... the steps with his lamp in one hand and a stick of wood in the other, and then—he never knew how it happened, but in some way he stumbled and fell. Never in all his life, not even when his wildest nightmare came and sat on him in the wee, sma' hours, had he come so near screaming out in terror as he did at that moment. He thought he was going to sit down on the Porcupine. Fortunately for both of them, but especially ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... the "scientific" spirit, gave rise to and was nourished by this and similar societies of learned men. As a consequence the absurdities and the cruel and injurious beliefs in witchcraft, astrology, and baseless legend, melted away like clouds before the rising sun. In the place of the mad nightmare of fantastic ignorance, there grew up the solid body of unassailable knowledge of Nature and of man which we call "science"—a growth which made such prodigious strides in the last century that we now may truly be ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... night the gathering shadows creep Along the dusk and hollow halls, And the slumber-broken palace calls With stifled moans from its nightmare sleep; And then the ghostly moonlight falls Athwart the darkness brown ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... their Theism was free from the defects that had revolted me in Christianity, and they opened up to me new views of religion. I read Theodore Parker's "Discourse on Religion," Francis Newman's works, those of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, and of others; the anguish of the tension relaxed; the nightmare of an Almighty Evil passed away; my belief in God, not yet touched, was cleared from all the dark spots that had sullied it, and I no longer doubted whether the dogmas that had shocked my conscience were true or false. I shook them off, once for all, with all their pain and horror and darkness, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... to herself:—"Is this a feverish dream?" and wavered on the answer. The tale her mother told of the black medicine-man was nightmare-like. All this, fifty years ago! Her head swam too much for speech, reading apart. She ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... disease and death, and thus his whole mentality becomes cramped, limited, and depressed, and his body follows its shrunken pattern and specification ... Think of the millions of sensitive and responsive souls among our ancestors who have been under the dominion of such a perpetual nightmare! Is it not surprising that health exists at all? Nothing but the boundless divine love? exuberance, and vitality, constantly poured in, even though unconsciously to us, could in some degree neutralize such an ocean ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... boy would have died, if it hadn't been for the old Doctor's galloping over as fast as he could gallop and burning the places right out of his arm. Then came the story of that other incident, sufficiently alluded to already, which had produced such an ecstasy of fright and left such a nightmare of apprehension in the household. And so the old woman came down to this present time. That boy she never loved nor trusted was grown to a dark, dangerous-looking man, and he was under their roof. He wanted to marry our poor Elsie, and Elsie hated him, and sometimes she would look at ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to trouble you," he said, "but I should like to know if you have any other lodgers. You see, I am rather a bad sleeper, suffering a great deal from nightmare, and I should not like to alarm your other lodgers in the middle ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... Of kinds of misery one did not guess Existed in the world. Those lepers, beggars, Cripples, fanatics, reptiles—all the swarms Of loathsome creatures we have passed—will haunt My dreams forever with new vivid masks Of nightmare. Recompense? ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... that Drusilla had been left a fortune and was going away. Some of the ladies were plainly envious and said spiteful, catty things, while others were glad that at least one of their number would be able to leave behind the "home"—the living on charity—that nightmare of the old. Drusilla had endeared most of them to her by her many kindly acts, prompted by a loving heart that even years of poverty and unappreciated labor for ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper
... The colour was mounting in his cheek. Every moment his situation was becoming more intolerable. We are afraid that he would soon have committed something very absurd—have broken from his moorings with a shout—or dispelled the sort of nightmare that was stifling him by some violent gesture, perhaps by dealing a blow at that bust which stood there so placidly before him, just as the poor youth did at the British Museum, who threw a stone at the Portland vase, to prove that he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... battle of reason, that tyrant of oppression, that ruler of ignorance, that demon of superstition, in whose decree there is no mercy, in whose judgment there is no justice, will be driven from his throne, and relegated beyond the portals of a universal peace, to be remembered only as a horrible nightmare of an unholy and an ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... third time before I could get there. And yet do you know, Toby, it seemed to me right then and there as if I had a ton of lead fastened to me. Why, I felt as though something was holding me back, just as you know the nightmare grips you usually. But when I was within striking distance, I knew I could save Joel. He made a gallant fight, and deserves ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... taxing every power of crafty, defensive vigilance, yawns a new pursuing vortex. From such menacing depths may not the eye withdraw nor step recede. This fearful presence is neither chimera of transient nightmare nor creation of evanescent day-dream. Like ever-present sprite, its boding menace pose shifts in accord with each changing view and ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... A nightmare seemed to weigh upon the palace and its occupants; for in addition to grief for their beloved prince, which saddened many a heart, the dread of death and the desert wind paralyzed alike the energy ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers |
