"Weird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... knowing it rendered it, as we shall see, so great a service. But the body of Theodoric did not long remain in the enormous silence of that sepulchre. Even in the time of Agnellus (ninth century) the body was no longer in the mausoleum and what had become of it will always remain a mystery. A weird and awful legend, in keeping with the tremendous tragedy that was played out in his time and in which he had filled the main role, relates how a holy hermit upon the island of Lipari on the day ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... the women of those days? Viewed in its larger aspects this was an objective, not a subjective religion. It could but make the sensitive soul super-sensitive, introspective, morbidly alive to uncanny and weird suggestions, and strangely afraid of the temptation of enjoying earthly pleasures. Its followers dared not allow themselves to become deeply attached to anything temporal; for such an emotion was the device of the devil, and God would surely remove the object of ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... night, and the long procession of big bullocks looked weird and strange in the gloom, for at times they seemed to be drawing nothing, so closely did the tilt of the great lightly-loaded wagon assimilate with the drab dusty tint of the parched earth and the dusky-coloured scrub which the ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... when they returned, and in the calm of a wonderful evening, with the comforting peace of the mountains smiling down at them, Olaf believed the time had come to speak what was in his mind. He spoke first of the weird tricks of the Alaskan waters, and of strange forces deep down under the surface which he had never had explained to him, and of how he had lost a cask once upon a time, and a week later had run upon it well upon its way to Japan. He emphasized the hide-and-seek playfulness of the undertows and ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... the meaning of these apertures there came a repetition of the weird cry, but this time the lad was so startled that he almost lost his balance ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... which the moon converted into a bright mirror, rippled at her approach like a silver-broidered cloth; eddies widened and lost themselves amid the shadows of the banks, under the hanging willow branches, whence issued weird, plashing sounds. At every stroke she perceived recesses full of sound; dark cavities which she hastened to pass by; clusters and rows of trees, whose sombre masses were continually changing form, stretching forward and apparently ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... a legitimate enough continuation of the nightmare in which he had so long been wandering. And when Michael, with his brand-new bushy whiskers, broke from the grasp of the stranger and turned to run, and the weird little shaven creature in the low-necked shirt followed his example with a bird-like screech, and the stranger (finding the rest of his prey escape him) pounced with a rude grasp on Morris himself, that gentleman's frame ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... appear surprised at that demand—the Medic of a Free Trading spacer was never surprised at anything. He had his surfeit of shocks during his first years of service and after that accepted any occurrence, no matter how weird, as matter-of-fact. In addition Tau's hobby was "magic," the hidden knowledge possessed and used by witch doctors and medicine men on alien worlds. He had a library of recordings, odd scraps of information, of certified results of certain very peculiar experiments. Now ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... up as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... with a creamy, waxen whiteness of skin that was yet warm and peach-downy. And I wish to insist from the outset upon the plain fact that there was nothing uncanny about her. In spite of her singular faculty of insight, which sometimes seemed to illogical people almost weird or eerie, she was in the main a bright, well-educated, sensible, winsome, lawn-tennis-playing English girl. Her vivacious spirits rose superior to her surroundings, which were often sad enough. But she was above all things wholesome, unaffected, and sparkling—a gleam of sunshine. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... the pipal was surrounded by thousands of Mahratta sepoys, for word had gone forth,—the mysterious rumour of India that is like a weird static whispering to the four corners of the land a message,—had flashed through the tented city that the men from Karowlee were to take the ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... court, he lived in terror of the strong-willed, strong-drinking Czarina. His kennel must be kept a secret, and was accordingly located in his wife's bedroom. He would spend hours indoors cracking whips or emitting weird sounds on musical instruments. At night, after Madame Tchoglokoff, who was charged with the surveillance of the grand-ducal menage, had retired, under the impression that she had locked everyone up safely, he would call for lights again, like a schoolboy, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... The weird spell of the tale rested on us for some moments after the Story Girl had finished. We had walked with her in the place of death and grown cold with the horror that chilled the heart of the poor princess. Dan ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... A weird imprisoned panic seized upon the men with cries inarticulate and gestures stillborn. They writhed upon the spot. But little shelter as the incipient trench afforded, no one dared leave the ditch that saved us ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... the actor named it to his wife at their pilot-house point of view—and the "for-true" pair in sight below them took frank advantage of its conditions to appropriate and accept each other as simply and completely as if these weird conditions—with their Devil's Elbow, Race-ground, Island, Tea-table, and Back-oven—were a veritable Eden as Eden was before the devil got in. Without a note of courtship or coquetry love ran ever more and more smoothly, growing hourly and receiving each accession as ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad at La Junta, Colorado,—fascinated as he becomes by the beauty as well as by the novelty of the landscape, while running parallel with the great Sierra Madre, after he has traversed the Ratonis at daybreak,—enters a still more weird country in the afternoon. The Rio Pecos is crossed just beyond Bernal, and thence on he speeds towards the west and north: to the left, the towering Mesa de Pecos, dark pines clambering up its steep sides; to the right, the broad valley, scooped out, so to say, between the mesa and the Tecolote ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... weird and mysterious about the robbery, Kennedy. They took the very thing I treasure most of all, ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... ALL. The weird sisters, hand in hand, Posters of the sea and land, Thus do go about, about: Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine, And thrice again, to make up nine:— Peace!—the charm's ...
— Macbeth • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... through the murk; then you begin to perceive that the air is heavy with the smoke of extinguished camp-fires and suspended particles of dust; the ground, heaving, gives birth to dusky shapes; there are weird groans and gurglings of silhouetted apparitions; and still you cannot clearly distinguish earth from air—it is as if one watched the creation of a new ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... water running over the edge of the tank had frozen into huge icicles that hung like a great white shroud over the bier of the two dead heroes. It was a gas-fixture factory, and the hundreds of pipes, twisted into all manner of fantastic shapes of glittering ice, lent a most weird effect to the sorrowful scene. I can still see Chief Gicquel, all smoke-begrimed, and with the tears streaming down his big, manly face,—poor Gicquel! he went to join his brothers in so many a hard fight ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... him at a sudden dip. The bramble bushes shot out long prickly vines, amongst which he was entangled, and lower he was held back by wet bubbling earth. He had descended into a dark and shady valley, beset and tapestried with gloomy thickets; the weird wood noises were the only sounds, strange, unutterable mutterings, dismal, inarticulate. He pushed on in what he hoped was the right direction, stumbling from stile to gate, peering through mist and shadow, and still vainly seeking for any known landmark. Presently another sound broke ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... itself shown with regard to garden design—the exaggeration of an undeniable grace by an affected mannerism. All the rococco details which had been applied to architecture now began to find their duplication in the garden rockeries—weird fantasies built of plaster and even ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... the most thrilling poem in the English language. Each reperusal fascinates me more and more. It requires a dozen readings to initiate you fully into its weird, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... rosebush as they approached her. Her eyes were wide open, and her dark hair floated over her shoulders. In her white nightdress, the moonlight full upon her, she looked very pretty and yet so weird that Betty could not ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... ship in the process of coaling, every porthole and doorway closed, and heavy canvas hung to protect as far as possible the clean decks. Two barges were moored alongside. Two blazing braziers lighted them with weird red and flickering flames. In their depths, cast in black and red shadows, toiled half-guessed figures; from their depths, mounting a single steep plank, came an unbroken procession of natives, naked save for a wisp of cloth around the loins. They trod closely on each other's heels, carrying ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... undistinguishable in the hazy atmosphere; with the village church looming brown and dingy through the uncertain light; with every winding path and cottage door, every gable end and gray old chimney, every village child and straggling cur seeming strange and weird of aspect in the semi-darkness, Phoebe Marks and her Cousin Luke made their way through the churchyard of Audley, and presented themselves before a shivering curate, whose surplice hung in damp folds, soddened by the morning mist, and whose temper was not improved by his having waited ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... below, "he has got the money! Glad to hear it. But," he added, as he glanced at sundry weird and astrological symbols with which he had been diverting himself, "that's not it. The true horary question, is, WHAT WILL ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... result; that is, neither component will be distinguishable and a steady yellow or a yellow of flickering brightness will be seen. The hues blend at a lower frequency than the brightness components of colors; hence there may be a blend of color which still flickers in brightness. Many weird results may be obtained by varying the rate of succession of colors. If this rate is so low that the colors do not tend to merge, they are much enriched by successive contrast. It is known that juxtaposed colors generally enrich one another and ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... Nor the rosied light of Morn, Nor the banners of the sunset On the wintry hills forlorn, Could unclasp the starry yearning From my mortal, weary breast, Nor interpret the weird meaning Of ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... spy. The ghastly effect produced by the purple lights, the utter blackness of the canals, the deathly silence, broken only by the sound of water lapping the walls of the empty palazzos, combine to give the city a peculiarly weird and sepulchral appearance. ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... bold relief by the weird glow from the sputtering candles, a number of darting figures could be seen leaping to cover behind the rocks. From the shadows came bright jets of flame. Bullets whined through the cavern, clipping the walls and rattling the pebbles to the ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... on the Jersey shore Tremble like drops of wind-stirred dew. The strident noises of the city Floating up to us Are hallowed into whispers. Ferries cross thru the darkness Weaving a golden thread into the night, Their whistles weird shadows of sound. ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... choked in a tangle of vines and bushes, within which the bell was dimly visible through a crust of spiders' webs and birds' nests. Patches of moss and vegetable mold relieved the blackness of the stones, and a venerable ivy plant clung like a rotten fish-net to the wall. It was a weird, yet fascinating picture; for the house, like a rocky cliff, looked as if it had grown where it stood. Parts of the building were crumbling, and decay had laid its hand more or less heavily upon the greater part of the structure. All this in the mellow light of the moon, and under the ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... was letting his curiosity have free rein again; he remembered the weird cry that had come floating to the ears of himself and Bluff, giving them such a ...
— The Outdoor Chums at Cabin Point - or The Golden Cup Mystery • Quincy Allen
... she thought. She knew there was some weird old legend associated with it, some old Indian folklore. But that left no impression of awe upon her ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... the five who were completely psychotic. The weird babblings of fifty-year-old Barry Miles disconcerted him. They sounded like little Charlie O'Neill's strange semi-connected jabber, but Westinghouse's Dr. O'Connor said that it seemed to represent another ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Even I could tell that the gale had gone down, the night was clear, and between the scudding of black clouds with silver linings, the moon and stars shone very beautifully, though it made one giddy to look at them from the weird way in which the masts and yards seemed to whip ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... deeps it is for ever dark, and freezing cold, There is no day or night, summer or winter. No plants can live there. Yet in that strange, still world there are numbers of living things, though we know very little about them. There are weird Crabs, blind Lobsters, and fish terrors such as ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... remembered this in after-days as the weird prophecy of what was to come, at the time those burning beds of flowers simply pleased her with their brilliant coloring; and she sat in her accustomed place on the garden-chair, under the cut-leaved hornbeam, and looked at the garden stretching before her with the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... look quite so bad with a cheery blaze, eh, Jimmie?" asked the skipper of the marooned Tramp, as he glanced around at the weird picture that met ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... remarked Lady Vayne. "There is something weird in the idea of her living there all alone; though, of course, her maid, Jessie, will take ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... 'Shecase,' or fire-brigade, passing silently along the streets, lighted by its weird red-and-black distinguishing lanterns, is a strange sight. Some of its members wear armour, with helmets and black-lacquered iron visors, and carry 'martoe,' or 'fire-charms,' and various necessary implements; others are clad in head-and-shoulder pieces and gauntlets of ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver
... of the four towers of the chateau. Sitting down, he looked out through an open window upon the peace of the night-world. There were the gardens, quiet, lovely and ghostly, the weird water, the stately grove beyond it. He sat by the window more than two hours, while the events just over ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... was: how does she dress? Does she know how to do her hair? Because, you know, most of the girls in our particular set have the most weird notions as regards hair-dressing ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... before the chill moon rose above the black line of the distant hills and flooded a transformed land with magical light, touching a parched and arid earth to a vibrant and mysterious beauty of whispering yucca and fantastic cactus and weird ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... top, that the pale, glimmering moonlight might stream in; and as the soft silvery beams stole silently into the room and laid their tremulous light on the young forms and awestruck faces, the flames leaping and crackling joined in enhancing the effect of the story by throwing on the walls weird shadows ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... York at once!" sobbed Miss Dixon. "Make that train come back!" she cried to the lone station agent, who, with a set grin on his face, was looking alternately from the group of picture players to the approaching dust cloud that concealed so many weird noises. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... out from among the trees, now swaying in the grip of the wind, their leafy boughs rustling sibilantly; as though the weird sisters whispered in the nodding branches that here was another thread full-spun and ready for the keen shears. Soberly we swung to the saddle and rode slowly away, lest the quick beat of hoofs should bring a sudden pang of loneliness to the intrepid soul calmly awaiting death ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... eddies round the weird dame Plays the light gas, or kindles into flame. If rests the traveller his weary head, Grim MANCINELLA haunts the mossy bed, Brews her black hebenon, and, stealing near, 190 Pours the curst venom in his tortured ear.— Wide o'er the mad'ning throng URTICA flings Her barbed ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... To them Elizabeth was 'Honey,' and I, 'Marse Livingstone'; and over at the quarters the little darkies gave rare exhibitions of dancing for our benefit, while solemn, gray-haired Uncle Ashby picked a greasy banjo. The men sang in nasal, but not unmelodious tones, weird, crooning songs, with occasionally an up-to-date composition which found its way, no doubt, from nearby Richmond. I shall never forget those happy evenings at Raven Hill; and in my dreams I often see and hear the negroes as they danced and sang in ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... sighed the Countess, at length, and like as if awakening from some weird dream, its impress still upon her face. "To think of it; and fearful it is to think of. I understand things better now. My Ruperto is indeed in danger—more than I this morning believed. And your Florencio too. I could read his death in the eyes of Don Carlos Santander; ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... commercial and social barques of men; it was a miasma of misinterpretation where the ills of life festered, and also a place where the accidentally wounded were ground between the upper and the nether millstones of force or chance; it was a strange, weird, interesting, and yet futile battle of wits where the ignorant and the incompetent and the shrewd and the angry and the weak were made pawns and shuttlecocks for men—lawyers, who were playing upon their moods, their vanities, their desires, and their necessities. It was an unholy ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... finding his sitting-room transformed into an atelier strewed with miscellaneous drawings and with the contents of two chests from Rome, the lower half of the windows darkened with baize, and the blonde Hans in his weird youth as the presiding genius of the littered place—his hair longer than of old, his face more whimsically creased, and his high voice as usual getting higher under the excitement of rapid talk. The friendship ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... their toys; Nor ever is its stillness stirred By purr of cat, or chirp of bird, Or mother's twilight legend, told Of Horner's pie, or Tiddler's gold, Or fairy hobbling to the door, Red-cloaked and weird, banned and poor, To bless the good child's gracious eyes, The good child's wistful charities, And crippled changeling's hunch to make Dance on his crutch, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... tapped the carpet, biting her under lip and seeming to be listening. Nothing stirred. Not even an echo of busy Bond Street penetrated to the place. Mrs. Irvin unfastened her cloak and allowed it to fall back upon the settee. Her bare shoulders looked waxen and unnatural in the weird light which shone down upon them. She ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... dying. All the men of the tribe who were not actually guarding the prisoner were sitting in a circle with the women, making noisy lamentation. They beat their naked thighs with their open palms, and mournful chants rose from low weird mutterings to high shrill screams as they tried to frighten the evil spirits out of the dying man. A big fire was blazing and sending sparks and smoke high into the darkness, and lightening up the excited faces of the men and women ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... have seen at times hundreds of squaws and children wading about in Yaquina Bay taking crabs in this manner, and the reflection by the water of the light from the many torches, with the movements of the Indians while at work, formed a weird and diverting picture of ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... remains to-day nearly one-eleventh of the whole area still unexplored. And yet it is one of the three old continents that appear on every old chart of the world in ancient days, with its many-mouthed Nile rising in weird spots and flowing in sundry impossible directions. Sometimes it joins the mysterious Niger, and together they flow through country labelled "Unknown" or "Desert" or "Negroland," or an enterprising cartographer fills up vacant spaces with wild animals stalking through ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... me: that would be bad, but not the worst. It would be disloyal to her—distinctly so. That I've never been yet, and I'm too old to begin now. There may be cases in which the end justifies the means, but this is not one of them. No: I must dree this weird (if that is the expression), and hoe this row, all by myself. If I had been bred in the east, I should be tempted to say it was a contumelious responsibility. The next time you want to get into difficulties ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... timorous lease of human life Warns me to hedge in my diplomacy. The sooner, then, the safer! Ay, this eve, This very night, will I take steps to rid My morrows of the weird contingencies That vision round and make one hollow-eyed.... The unexpected, lurid death of Lannes— Rigid as iron, reaped down like a straw— Tiptoed Assassination haunting round In unthought thoroughfares, the near success Of Staps the madman, argue to forbid The ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... scene was ordinary enough. There was a long bar, against which were lounging half-a-dozen typical Mexican cowpunchers. There was a small space cleared for dancing, at the further end of which two performers were making weird but vehement music. Three girls were dancing with cowboys, not ungracefully considering the state of the floor and the frequent discords in the music. One of them—the prettiest—stopped abruptly and pushed ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... either side into unknown distances, dully glistening like gray ice, unbroken save in this place. The gray strand on which I stood was a narrow strip following the foot of the wall. Behind me lay a vast, unmoving ocean banked over with an all-concealing mist. Not a ripple stirred along that weird beach, or a ray changed the fixed gray twilight. And I was afraid, for my danger was not of the common dangers of mankind, but that which freezes the blood of man when he draws near the supernatural; the ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... the glowing pillar of smoke above the Peak, which was reflected on to us from the mighty mantle of its snows. Forward we toiled, whilst a few paces ahead of us walked our unwearying guide. If she had seemed weird and inhuman before, now she appeared a very ghost, as, clad in her graveyard white, upon which the faint light shimmered, never speaking, never looking back, she glided on noiselessly between the black rocks and the twisted, dark-green ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... that brought me back I pondered much upon the strange things I had sensed in the weird archipelago of the yellow-brown people. The manoeuvres and skirmishings of the petty war interested me not: I was spellbound by the outlandish and unreadable countenance of that race that had turned its expressionless gaze upon us out of an ...
— Options • O. Henry
... sure you never will, because the less I talk or think about that person the better for me. That part of the story has nothing to do with the case. There's only this queer impression of mine. And I had a weird feeling as if it were my bounden duty to see that this little girl wasn't victimized by an unscrupulous woman. So I did ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... his yet published gives a better illustration of his genius, and of the weird charm which has given his stories ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... swans and geese heard, and a magnificent chorus rose from the water. Then, far away as fairyland, faintly out of the sky, came a new murmur—not the martial clangor of wild geese, but something wilder, more exquisitely unearthly—nearer, nearer, enrapturing its weird, celestial beauty. And now, through the blue, with great, snowy wings slowly beating, the swans passed over like angels; and like angels passing, hailing each other as they winged their way, drifting on broad, white pinions, they called, each to the other in their ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... news telephoned from Jersey City, by the fleeting magic voice on the wire. Even his iron composure was stirred by this weird complication. ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... true, here at the very top of the tower wuz an air-ship on which we took flight through the boundless fields of air. Paris died on our vision, then we floated over many cities and harbors, up the English Channel, anon the lights of London are passed and we are high up above the ocean. Weird and wild is the seen, the moon comes up, black clouds rise, and the voice of the winds is heard, then the rumbling of thunder and the forked lightning darts its baleful ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... mouse, but lo! a monk, array'd In cowl and beads and dusky garb, appear'd, Now in the moonlight, and now lapsed in shade, With steps that trod as heavy, yet unheard; His garments only a slight murmur made; He moved as shadowy as the sisters weird, But slowly; and as he pass'd Juan by, Glanced, without pausing, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... scraped along our side, dancing about amid foam, or some grotesque branch, reaching out gaunt arms, swept by. The stars overhead reflected their dim light from off the surface, rendering everything more weird and desolate. The intense loneliness of the scene seemed to clutch my soul. Far off to the left a few winking lights appeared, barely perceptible, and I touched the negro, pointing them out to him and whispering my question so as not to disturb ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... a thing about him. He inspired you. When he looked at you with those weird eyes, you just knew ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... news to Haliburton on Monday night. Tuesday night he was at Skowhegan. Thursday night he was at No. 9. Friday he and Rob. stretched their cambric. Meanwhile, every day I slept. Every night I was glued to the eye-piece. Fifteen minutes before the eclipse every night this weird dance of leaps two hundred feet high, followed by hops of twenty feet high, mingled always in the steady order I have described, spelt out the ghastly message: "Show 'I understand' on the ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... platform hovered and began to settle nearby, and there was Van Artevelde leaning over its rail and fiddling frantically with whatever it was that stuck up on it—a weird, angled contraption of pipes and belts topped by a whirring blade. A boy stood at his shoulder and tried to help him. As the platform descended to a few meters above ground, the Dutchman slashed at the contraption, the cut ends of belts whipped out wildly and the platform slid to the ground ...
— Wind • Charles Louis Fontenay
... the sweetness of their voices, occupied a large box right under the pulpit, and thence led the congregation by a whole bar at least, in the rendering of Tate and Brady's metrical version of the Psalms. Very weird and sorrowful were many of the tunes. None were bright and inspiring like those Bert was wont to hear at home, and as choir and congregation vied with one another in the vigour of their singing, the little fellow was sometimes half-frightened at ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... crowd of students, townspeople, and visitors, the long line of freshmen in the parade and their grotesque appearance, the stirring music of a brass band at the head of the line, the march to the lower campus where the huge bonfire was kindled, the weird songs and dancing as in dual lines the two lower classes with joined hands leaped and danced about the blazing fire, and then the final consignment to the flames of the huge wooden hatchet that had been carried in the parade, were all incidents that ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... supper, and evening prayers; after which we slung our hammocks to the trees, in which we rested well. It was a strangely weird- looking sight, and the noises were of a strange kind—wallabies leaping past, and strange birds overhead. Mr. Goldie's Mare men joined with their countrymen, the teachers, in singing some of Sankey's hymns in English. Soon sleep ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... blazing their way to the palace steps. Weird figures sprang up from the muck, and ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... distant date. The work is invariably of spontaneously graceful rhythm and universally pleasing in sentiment, having frequently an elusive suggestion of the unreal. A few of Mrs. Jordan's poems are of the grimly weird and powerful variety. "The Song of the North Wind" is a remarkable contribution to amateur letters, and has won the enthusiastic admiration of the United's poetical element. Professional success has recently crowned ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... low, sweet music of Cummins and the little Melisse that he played now, but a wild, wailing song that he had found in the autumn winds. It burst above the crackling fire and the tumult of man and dog in a weird and savage beauty that hushed all sound; and life about him became like life struck suddenly dead. With his head bowed Jan saw nothing—saw nothing of the wonder in the faces of the half- cringing little black men who were squatted ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... sweet and clean since his filthy self had been forced to vacate it, he calls other spirits more wicked than himself, and they take possession of the man, and make his state worse than it was at first.[606] In this weird example is typified the condition of those who have received the truth, and thereby have been freed from the unclean influences of error and sin, so that in mind and spirit and body they are as ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... in his glory. Weird, nerve-racking screeches came from his throat. Presently the uproar ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... infinite view thence? It was like an outpost of some far-off fancy land, a pledge of the reality of such. Above Cassel, the airy hills curved in one black outline against a glowing sky, pregnant, one could fancy, with weird forms, which might be at their old diableries again on those remote places ere night was quite come there. At last in the streets, the hundred churches, of Cologne, he feels something of a "Gothic" enthusiasm, and all a German's enthusiasm for ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... ignorance, supposed to be extinct, that while she rose before me I was almost as much startled as if I had seen a ghost. I afterwards concluded that Miss Ambient wasn't incapable of deriving pleasure from this weird effect, and I now believe that reflexion concerned in her having sunk again to her seat with her long lean but not ungraceful arms locked together in an archaic manner on her knees and her mournful eyes addressing me a message of intentness which foreshadowed ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... smiles, like a collection of photographs gathered together during long years of life. Constance had an astonishing menagerie of unknown cousins and their connections, and of townspeople; she had Cyril at all ages; she had weird daguerreotypes of her parents and their parents. The strangest of all was a portrait of Samuel Povey as an infant in arms. Sophia checked an impulse to laugh at it. But when Constance said: "Isn't it funny?" she did allow herself to laugh. A photograph of Samuel in the year before his death ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... before we finally broke through into open water was beautifully still, and a low cloud settled down in the form of a thick fog—it was a change from the fine, clear weather—frost rime settled everywhere, and for a time we had to stop. There was a weird stillness over all, and whenever the ship was moved amongst the ice-floes a curious hiss was heard; this sound is well known to all ice navigators: it is the sear of the floe against the greenheart sheathing which protects the little ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... again, as Thone's curt sentence told,—"Tonkunst und Arzenei"; and to these might be added Race, in defiance of Mr. Buckle. Assuredly the Hebrew owes acknowledgment to her, and not George Borrow, with all his weird learning, enters more deeply into the Burden of Egypt; Browning's appreciation of the gypsy standing alone beside hers,—Browning, between whose writings and her own a rich sympathy exists, both being so possessed of fulness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... The weird imaginings and romantic theories of our great story-teller, Hawthorne, must not be taken as veritable and indisputable history. Some of the Boston newspapers have recently run riot in this respect. Hawthorne, in his "Drowne's Wooden Image," in "Mosses from an Old ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... his tracks. His yell for all hands sounded high above the clamor of the boarders. Then some one jabbed the butt of a spear into my back and, realizing that mine was not to be a spectator's part in that weird battle, I scrambled up the ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... boundaries of this limited ampitheatre, spring upward to the clouds, lose yourself among the rocks where the seals are lying and even then your thought cannot compass the wealth of beauty nor the poetry of this Norwegian coast. Can your thought be as vast as the ocean that bounds it? as weird as the fantastic forms drawn by these forests, these clouds, these ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... with the little passion peculiar to it—the mark of its peculiar spirit. The mouths, especially, betrayed the souls within. Somewhere Mr. Neal had once read weird stories of souls seen to escape from the bodies of dying persons, and always they had been seen to issue from the open mouths of the corpses. There was a singular appropriateness in this phenomenon, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the matter with the sun—the earth do move, is round, do roll over, and does not spill off the sea in doing so. At last came shrill head winds, and as we added fifteen miles an hour to this speed, the harp strings in the rigging were touched with weird music, and we filled our lungs consciously and conscientiously with American air, experiencing one of the old sensations, ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... quick! Away! That soon the sweet young creature may The wish and purpose of your heart obey; Yet stand you there As would you to the lecture-room repair, As if before you stood, Arrayed in flesh and blood, Physics and metaphysics weird ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... wind and stringed instruments, ringing superbly out across the water. The fantastic impression of the scene was so strong that it seemed as if the visible brilliance of the shining lights had entered into the voice itself, giving it a weird and uncanny splendour. The vast floating audience listened, motionless and silent, until the last note went out like a light suddenly extinguished. Then, after a gust of hand-clapping had subsided, the glittering barge moved forward once more, the dip ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... hunters, who were returning from the savage scene in the market-place. Presently they arrived, headed by Sammy, a very different Sammy from the wailing creature who had gone out to execution an hour or two before. Now he was the gayest of the gay, and about his neck were strung certain weird ornaments which I identified as the ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... seize Clara between us, one by each arm, and to rush forth to his assistance, ere anything further had taken place. But scarce had we passed the threshold when there came near a dozen reports and flashes from every direction among the hollows of the links. Mr. Huddlestone staggered, uttered a weird and freezing cry, threw up his arms over his head, and fell ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a weird and threatening world. And it was there that Ben Sessions found the evil daughters ...
— Daughters of Doom • Herbert B. Livingston
... singing bird that called to singing bird. Heard but the savage tongue Of my brown savage children, that among The hills and valleys chased the buck and doe, And round the wigwam fires Chanted wild songs of their wild savage sires, And danced their wild, weird dances to and fro, And wrought their beaded robes of buffalo. Day following upon day, Saw but the panther crouched upon the limb, Smooth serpents, swift and slim, Slip through the reeds and grasses, and the bear Crush through his tangled lair Of chaparral, upon ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... has the rugged severity of an old chronicle with all that the imagination of the poet can engraft upon traditional belief. The castle of Macbeth, round which "the air smells wooingly," and where "the temple-haunting martlet builds," has a real subsistence in the mind; the Weird Sisters meet us in person on "the blasted heath;" the "air-drawn dagger" moves slowly before our eyes; the "gracious Duncan," the "blood-boultered Banquo" stand before us; all that passed through the mind of Macbeth passes, without the loss of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... bleak and cold, I grant you; all this upland plateau about the Lizard promontory seems bleak and cold everywhere; but to my mind it has a certain wild and weird picturesqueness of its own for all that. It aims at gloominess. I confess in its own ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... with bark. The two to four eggs are of a grayish white color, marked with chestnut, brown and stone gray; size 1.90 x 1.55. Data.—Worcester, Mass., May 16, 1895. Nest about 20 feet up in a large chestnut tree. The birds continually circled overhead, their weird cries sounding like the creaking of branches. Collector, ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... powers of endurance. Men or women, or both, go through fatiguing motions for hours and even days in succession, astounding spectators by their disregard of the traditions of their race, so far as idleness is concerned. Other dances are grotesque and brutal. On special occasions weird ceremonies are indulged in, and the proceedings are sensational ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... know what purpose they may serve," she said. In after days a weird significance was attached ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... a witch costume, which was greatly admired. A red skirt, a yellow shawl folded cornerwise, and a very tall peaked hat of black with red and yellow ribbons, made the child look like some weird creature. ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... canyon; and my first sight of Monument Valley came with a dazzling flash of lightning. It revealed a vast valley, a strange world of colossal shafts and buttes of rock, magnificently sculptored, standing isolated and aloof, dark, weird, lonely. When the sheet lightning flared across the sky showing the monuments silhouetted black against that strange horizon the effect was marvelously beautiful. I watched ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... emotion in my breast, but upon this occasion I yielded to a force too great for me to resist. I have read the tales of Hoffmann and of Poe, the wondrous romances of De La Motte Fouque, the unfortunately little-known tales of the lamented Fitz-James O'Brien, the weird tales of writers of all tongues have been thoroughly sifted by me in the course of my reading, and I say to you now that in the whole of my life I never read one story, one paragraph, one line, that could approach in vivid delineation, in weirdness of conception, in anything, in any ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... emerged from the pass a wolf cry, long and weird, came from a distant mountainside and broke the wilderness stillness, which had become almost insufferable, and to the lad even this wild cry held a note of companionship that was pleasant to hear after the long and ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... over as if about to impart a secret. "Ghosts!" he whispered. I laughed at the discomfiture of the giant, but Ump went on counterfeiting a deep and weird seriousness which, next to his singing, was about the most ludicrous thing in the world. "Ghosts, my laddiebuck. But not the white-sheeted lady that comes an' says, 'Foller me,' nor the spook that carries his head under his arm tied up in a tablecloth, but ghosts, my laddiebuck, that make tracks ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... their time. Not that she wanted the vivacity of her age, but that it was tempered by periods of serious musing, when all kinds of what the Scotch call "auld farrant" (far yont) thoughts come to be where they should not be, the consequence being a weird-like kind of wisdom, very like that of the aged; so the effect on a creature so constituted was just equal to the cause. Annie ran out of the room with her face concealed in her hands, and got into a small bedroom darkened by ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... the good brethren of the congregation might have felt inclined to hold up their hands in dismay could they have looked in there just at that moment, and seen all the weird goings-on that were taking place. Still, an investigation would have proven that the scouts were not responsible for the scrimmage; since they had a perfect right to protect their possessions ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... is bad enough, I know; but there is something more than an "only" round us here. Had it not been that I took a definite precaution I might have been like the Nurse there." She turned her eyes swiftly on the weird figure, sitting grimly upright like a painted statue; and then her face softened. With the action of habitual courtesy ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... afraid we should," he said. "But that's nothing. I did all manner of weird things when I first started to drive. Take the wheel again and have ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... his throat, "within the past year or two we have made a most weird and startling discovery in typhoid fever. We have found what we now call 'typhoid carriers'—persons who do not have the disease themselves, perhaps never have had it, but who are literally living ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... and kill; they liked to be right on the spot every time and up to everything that was it from the very beginning and they rendered their conception of Socialists and all reformers by the words "positively frightening" and "weird." Well, it was beyond dispute that these words did convey a certain quality of the Movements in general amid which Miss Miniver disported herself. They WERE weird. And yet ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... hours of the day were spent in fruitless cogitation of this weird and disagreeable experience which far transcended metaphysician's normal ken. Nor is it surprising to find him naively admitting that "this unexpected event hastened my return home." Imagination can easily round out ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... was softly brushing the Foot-Board and the Motor was purring consistently beneath, Mr. Pallzey looked over into a close-cropped Pasture and became the alert Eye-Witness of some very weird Doings. ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... shores of the Mediterranean. The door leading to the drawing-room was open, exposing to view a harp from which Laura had just risen. Before them lay the boundless expanse of the ocean, blue with reflected azure from heaven; and, like some soft, weird melody to their ears, was the murmuring of the waves, that kissed the smooth, white beach before them. Elsewhere all was silent, for Nature seemed to listen—unwilling, by a sound of stirring leaf, to break the ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... rattling drops. In the silences that came between the gusts she heard the soft, steady pouring of the rain on the garden paths below, mingled with a faint murmur that came up from the creek beyond the barns where the pine boughs were thrashing in the storm. Emily suddenly thought of a weird story she had once read years before and long forgotten—a story of a soul that went out in a night of storm and blackness and lost its way between earth and heaven. She shuddered and drew the counterpane over ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... yet too material and thoroughly, solidly English to entertain it, or any other subtle mental emotion for more than a minute. But he undoubtedly felt strange to-night; different from what he had ever done before. He would have said "weird" if he could have thought of the word. The woman and her sinuous, sensuous black shape filled the space of his mental vision. Black hair, black hat, black dress—and of course black eyes. Ah! if he could ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... are offered every hour of the day and night to the twin idols. When men and women away back in the dim past laid their children in the hands of Baal they made their weird music, sang their wild songs and shouted aloud that they might drown the appeal of the sacrifice. The dark ages have passed. It is the enlightened age—and yet with music and shoutings, weird dancings and songs men and women today drown the appeal ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... Huddled quietly at the stern, one after another they were springing over the rail into the small boat that was dragging behind, and even as I looked the last man disappeared with the painter in his hand. At the same moment I became aware of a strange noise. Down in the bowels of the lorcha a weird, gentle commotion was going on, a multitudinous 'gluck-gluck' as of many bottles being emptied. A breath of hot, musty air was sighing out of the hatch. Then the sea about the poop began to rise,—to rise slowly, calmly, steadily, like ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various |
