"Appalling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... consideration, and no less than any individual case ever yet received. But in general those women who counsel the delay of the marriage age are opposing the facts of feminine development and psychology. They are indirectly encouraging male immorality and female prostitution, with their appalling consequences for those directly concerned, for hosts of absolutely innocent women, and for the unborn. Further, those who suppose that the granting of the vote is going to effect radical and fundamental changes in the facts of biology, the development of instinct, ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... characterized all his military manoeuvres had so admirably carried out his measure that not a shot was fired, not a blow given, not a single burgher disturbed in his peaceful slumbers. When the population had taken off their nightcaps, they woke to find the awful bugbear removed which had so long been appalling them. The Waartgelders were numbered with the terrors of the past, and not a cat had mewed at ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Woloda, who had remarked that I was conversing with great animation, and probably was curious to know what excuses I was making for not dancing, approached us with Dubkoff. Seeing, however, my smiling face and the Princess's frightened mien, as well as overhearing the appalling rubbish with which I concluded my speech, he turned red in the face, and wheeled round again. The Princess also rose and left me. I continued to smile, but in such a state of agony from the consciousness ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... his thumbs into the neck of the sufferer, as he called to an assistant-supervisor to run to the hospital for Dr. Almeida, hoping to be able to close the severed jugular from which welled an appalling ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... be too certain," responded Mr. Linton gloomily. "How did you get on, Norah? Was she anything like Miss de Lisle? That's an appalling woman! She ought ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... appalling narrative and wiped his moist forehead with a silk handkerchief. Neither Harley nor I spoke. I knew not if my friend believed the Spaniard's story. For my own part I found it difficult to do so. But that the narrator was deeply moved was a ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... paid. It makes me shudder yet when I think of what I felt when I was clinging there between heaven and earth in the person of that proxy. At times the world swam around me, and I could hardly keep from letting go, so dizzying was the appalling danger. Many a person would have given up and descended, but I stuck to my task, and would not yield until I had accomplished it. I felt a just pride in my exploit, but I would not have repeated it for the wealth of the world. I shall break my neck yet with some such ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... as drunk with fear now, as they had been in the commencement of the war with France with folly and boasting. We long since began to feel the baneful effects of that war, and we are now tasting its bitter fruits, with all their appalling evils. We have now a standing army in good earnest; and now that army is kept up, in the sixth year of peace, to compel John Gull to pull out of his pocket the last shilling, to pay the interest of that debt, which, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... appalling intelligence to receive at such a time, and in such a place! But, Roswell was not unmanned by it; on the contrary, he acted coolly and with great judgment. Making a coil of the ratlin-stuff, he ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... my dear John, so now you know the sort of spirit of the age that has cast its shadow both over my home life and my official work. Ought I not to oppose this appalling, destructive, disorganising tendency with all the weapons I can lay my hands upon? Of course it is certainly my duty—and that both with my pen ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... Marguerite made her statements with a certain careless aplomb, and these were usually within measurable distance of the fact, whereas a youth her age and ten years older, if he be of a didactic turn, will hold forth upon life and human nature with an ignorance of both which is positively appalling. ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... just been listening. Resting her head upon her hand, she leaned over the volume; and stood motionless, absorbed by the interest of the tale which she read, forgetful of her young companions—of all but the appalling ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... for Ito, for whom the guide went in search. The house and its inmates were a study. The ceiling was gone, and all kinds of things, for which I could not imagine any possible use, hung from the blackened rafters. Everything was broken and decayed, and the dirt was appalling. A very ugly Aino woman, hardly human in her ugliness, was splitting bark fibre. There were several irori, Japanese fashion, and at one of them a grand-looking old man was seated apathetically contemplating the ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... presented itself; some insult needed to be avenged, or some debt to be collected. Six battleships, fourteen cruisers, and eighteen transports sailed up the mouth of the river Hippopotamus. Six hundred canoes vainly opposed the landing of the troops. Admiral Vivier des Murenes' cannons produced an appalling effect upon the blacks, who replied to them with flights of arrows, but in spite of their fanatical courage they were entirely defeated. Popular enthusiasm was kindled by the newspapers which the financiers subsidised, and burst into a blaze. Some Socialists ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... did not blow the canvas like a feather from its path; but the tent held its position, and the appalling rush and roar ceased with more suddenness than it had begun. ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... above calculations are based upon official statistics which are grossly exaggerated in favour of the Germans and Magyars. The picture would be still more appalling if we took into consideration the actual number of the Slavs. The Austrian census is not based upon the declaration of nationality or of the native language, but upon the statement of the "language of communication" ("Umgangsprache"). In mixed districts ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... the oil, caught fish, robber-crabs and turtle for the whole party, and we were a happy family indeed. We usually lived on shore, some distance from the spot where we dried the shark-fins, for the odour was appalling, especially after rain, and during a calm night. We dried them by hanging them on long lines of coir cinnet between the coco-palms of a little island half a mile ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... result would have been any better, for without padding the chains would have killed or mangled the mule, and there were no means at hand for that purpose. The destruction of this class of property, always very severe under favorable circumstances in the army, was during this mud movement simply appalling. The loss of one or more mules meant an abandonment of the wagon and its contents to the weather in many instances, and the same was true where a ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... days I have been working on a ponderous article that allows no play for the fancy. My imagination requires a judicious rein; I am afraid to let it loose, for it carries me sometimes into appalling places beyond the stars and beneath the world. No one realizes the danger more than I do. But what a foolish thing to write here—for there is no one to know, no one to realize! My mind of late has held unusual thoughts, thoughts I have never had before, about medicines and drugs and the treatment ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... her—a danger too horrible to think of—one which made his very life-blood freeze in the course of this calm narration. This was the one thing on which his thoughts turned most; that horrible, that appalling danger. So fearful was it to him that he envied Obed the privilege of having saved her. He longed to have been there in Obed's place, so as to have done this thing for her. He himself had once saved her from death, and ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... forth on their tramp up the slopes, peering right and left as they went for any indication of the absent woman. Wingate's old grief was knocking at his heart once more. A woman lost in the appalling vastness of this great Western land was entering into his life again. It took them a full hour to go that mile, although both were experts on the shoes, but as they reached the rim of the canyon ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... (could he but get near enough). Volcanic to a degree all these; nor are the Russians wanting, though they get more and more astonished: Tempelhof, who was in it, says he never, except at Torgau next Year, heard a louder cannonade. Loud exceedingly; and more or less appalling to the Russian imagination: but not destructive in proportion; the distance being too considerable,—"1,950 paces at the nearest," as Tempelhof has since ascertained by measuring. Friedrich's two batteries, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... jelly, underwent a terrible cross-examination. It was comparatively little that he had to say, and no doubt he wished most fervently he had greater revelations to make, and could thus propitiate the arbiter of the appalling fate he firmly believed might lie in store for him. Meagre as his narrative was, however, it quite sufficed for ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... the village of Rossignlo and the extermination of its entire male population took place there. Checked again by the French on the Meuse, the awful carnage of Dinant results. Held on the Sambre by the French, they burn one hundred houses at Charleroi and enact the appalling tragedy of Tamines. At Mons, the English hold them, and after that all over the Borinage there is a systematic destruction, pillage and murder. The Belgian army drive them back from Malines and Louvain is doomed. The Belgian army failing back and fighting in retreat took refuge in the forts ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... unheard of that a woman should fall away from it. Purity is the unquestioned prerogative of every Island girl or woman, and it only comes to them as a vague far-off horror in an unknown world that there are places under the sun and the stars where such is not the case. The punishment is appalling in the very few cases where sin has lifted its head amongst these austere people. The lepers' hut of old was no such living death of isolation as surrounds an Island girl who has smirched her good name. Henceforth there is an ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... before this surface sleep passed into genuine slumber, Henriot woke—with an appalling feeling that the Desert had come creeping into his room and now stared down upon him where he lay in bed. The wind was crying audibly about the walls outside. A faint, sharp tapping came ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... came the appalling message that the British were victorious, and our men in full retreat! High hopes had been built on this combat; no wonder if for a while we felt disheartened. The end of regular warfare had been reached; it was imperative that an entire change of tactics be ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... before their eyes, appalling though it be, is nought to that conjured up in their apprehensions. What they see may be but a forecast, a faint symbol, of what ere long they may ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... glad I didn't go to college. Your mind is appalling; your language is more so. May I ask whether ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... in India, leaving his wife and family to remain some time longer in Sydney; and from this period may be dated her extraordinary efforts for meliorating the condition of poor female emigrants. What fell under her notice in connection with these luckless individuals was truly appalling. Huddled into a barrack on arrival; no trouble taken to put girls in the way of earning an honest livelihood; moral pollution all around; the government authorities and everybody else too busy to mind whether emigration was rightly or wrongly ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... irresponsibility on the part of the other,—an incapacity to make use of certain truths except to his actual moral injury. And in each case all depends on the accuracy of this assumption." It is appalling to find a man like Rothe announcing a principle like this as operative in social ethics! Every man to decide for himself (taking the responsibility, of course, for his personal decision) whether he is in any sense such a guardian of ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... that so it ought to be." She read incongruously. Condillac, Voltaire, the Lives of the Fathers, Descartes, Saint Jerome, Don Quixote, Pascal, Montesquieu, Burlamaqui, and the French dramatists, were read, annotated, and commented on. She gives an appalling list of obsolete devotional books, which she borrowed of a pious abbe, and returned with marginal notes which shocked him. She read the Dictionnaire Philosophique, Diderot, D'Alembert, Raynal, Holbach, and took delight in the Epistles of Saint Paul. She was, while studying ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... future glories of the Republic are now obscured by the storm of battle. Our country, the land of so much of affection, of pride and of hope, now presents to the startled and astonished gaze of mankind an appalling, humiliating, and saddening spectacle. Treasonable menaces of other days have now ripened into treasonable deeds. Civil war holds its carnival, and reaps its bloody harvest. The nation is grappling with a gigantic conspiracy—struggling for existence—for the preservation of its menaced ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... it is a brave book, and a reassuring, as well as a wise, the author of it regarding the universe not as a dead thing but a living, and athwart the fire deluges that from time to time sweep it, and seem to threaten with ruin everything in it we hold sacred, descrying nothing more appalling than the phoenix-bird immolating herself in flames that she may the sooner rise renewed out of her ashes and soar aloft with healing in her wings. See CARLYLE, THOMAS, EXODUS FROM ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Germans. Losses, appalling though they were, did not seem to hold them in check. They were almost over the spot now. Jacques set his jaw firmly and steeled himself to do his duty. It was for France he told himself. He had selected with his eye a spot which he had determined to be one ...
— Fighting in France • Ross Kay
... up his own family tree he might have found on some distaff branch the reason of his appalling likeness to Rochester, Arthur Coningsby, Delamere, but this was a pure matter of speculation, and it did not enter the mind ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... led to valuable discoveries in chemistry, and as the search for El Dorado revealed the courses of the two largest rivers in South America, so the Admiral's heroic effort to discover a strait in the face of appalling difficulties, in advancing years and failing health, made known the coast of the continent ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that, yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... crossing of the Rappahannock. Delays and neglect, not only at the front, but on the part of the headquarters staff at Washington, permitted Lee to seize the heights of the southern bank in time. When Burnside fought his battle of Fredericksburg (q.v.) an appalling reverse was the result, the more terrible as it was ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... scaling-ladder, which they placed silently against the wall, and as silently withdrew. On another occasion, the same spirited young lady, whom Brant was satisfied would have probably imperiled her life under fire in devotion to her cause, was brought ignominiously to bay in the field by that most appalling of domestic animals, the wandering and untrammeled cow! Brant could not help smiling as he heard the quick, harsh call to "Turn out, guard," saw the men march stolidly with fixed bayonets to the vicinity of the affrighted animal, who fled, ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... must instantly repeal the treaties that pretended to abolish it, for these exacerbate the evil a hundred fold, and are ineffectual to any one purpose but putting money into the pockets of our men of war. The fact is as unquestionable, as it is appalling, that all our anxious endeavours to extinguish the Foreign Slave Trade, have ended in making it incomparably worse than it was before we pretended to put it down; that owing to our efforts, there are thrice the number of slaves yearly torn from Africa; ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... we stop to consider the fact that these sufferers are children, in the schools, and are thus handicapped in their work of education—in their efforts to fit themselves for the struggle of life—it assumes even larger proportions and becomes truly appalling. ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... than sixty-five thousand pounds! He would like to see that house; in fact, he must see it. When Easter came round would Miss Sparkes honour him with her company on a day trip to Eastbourne, that they might gaze together on the appalling mansion? ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... herself with something, and the more adorned the better. Now, on the contrary, she was perforce decked out in a way so inconsistent with her age and her figure, that her one anxiety was to contrive that the contrast between these adornments and her own exterior should not be too appalling. And as far as Alexey Alexandrovitch was concerned she succeeded, and was in his eyes attractive. For him she was the one island not only of goodwill to him, but of love in the midst of the sea of hostility and jeering ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... beside her. Still she took not the smallest notice of it; she laid one shapely hand on the small of its back, as if to make sure it was there, and continued her conversation tranquilly with Morley. How she could hear what he said I could not tell. I could hear nothing but the appalling row ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... some evil fairy had prompted the imprudent minister to act in this way, who, eager and impatient for his own ruin, had summoned his King to witness his appalling system of plunder in its entirety, ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... vengeance of the savage slumbered for the time being, it was only like some pent up fire, burning in secret, until opportunity should present for it to burst forth in a manner most appalling, carrying destruction and terror throughout its course; and in consequence of this, the year 1782 was destined to be one most signally marked by bloody deeds in the annals of Kentucky. The winter of '81 and '82 passed quietly away; but early in the ensuing spring ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... the highways were even more appalling, for here the retreating soldiery and the fugitive civilians were mixed in inextricable confusion. By mid-afternoon on Wednesday the road from Antwerp to Ghent, a distance of forty miles, was a solid mass of refugees, and the same was true of every road, every lane, every footpath leading in a westerly ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... chuckle that sounded like a magical and appalling rattle from the inner recesses of his person. He was getting brighter and brighter, as the stars appear to do when ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... an amazing rate, adjuring its hearers to kiss it on all parts of the body with a verbal frankness that was appalling, and with a distinctness which even pricked the misty senses of the slumberer, who peevishly turned in his sleep and stuttered out a curse ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the topmost stave, and holding on with one hand by the prison wall, exerted all their skill and force to cast these fire-brands on the roof, or down into the yards within. In many instances their efforts were successful; which occasioned a new and appalling addition to the horrors of the scene: for the prisoners within, seeing from between their bars that the fire caught in many places and thrived fiercely, and being all locked up in strong cells for the night, began to know that they were in danger of being burnt alive. This terrible ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... parks of the wealthy, as pictured by the sycophantic fashion magazine and cast with the people of its gallery of photographs—sublimely smart women in frocks of marvellous inspiration, and polo-playing, motor-driving, clothes-mad men of an insouciance appalling. ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... all women but one, a middle-aged man. They do not feel the occasion except so far as there is a certain solemnity connected with it. Silent and grave, they watch a process going on whose real nature they cannot understand except as a momentous and appalling change. Change is only transformation, ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... came to seek and save what is lost, is an act of traitorous wickedness. If Christ had made it His business to thunder into the ears of the outcasts, whom He preferred to the Scribes and Pharisees, this appalling message, where would His teaching be? What message of hope would it hold for the soul? Such a view of Christianity as this insults alike the soul and the mind and the heart; it deliberately insults God; the message of Christ ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... moving in darkness has always conveyed to me an impression of something horrible and deadly, be it nothing of more moment than the drip and hollow tinkle of a gutter pipe. But the crash in this echoing gorge was appalling indeed. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... uttered a word nor a moan; was he not going with his mother? Only, his tiny hands clutched the queen's neck convulsively, and throwing back his head with his fair hair hanging down, the little victim closed his eyes before the appalling ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... their way along the road in silence. Pee-wee was subdued and even Roy sobered. Warde alone seemed composed. Perhaps none of them had realized until now how much they had grown to like young Blythe. And this appalling revelation was the sequel, the end, of that merry, novel camping adventure. They were not fired by the dramatic character of their discovery; they were just cast down. This was what it had all ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... I went, I saw, I 'joy-rode,' and my verdict remains the same; There's no use having a country unless she's always to blame; For of all the appalling prospects that human life can lend The worst is to be unable to play ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, March 21, 1917 • Various
... beneath the sun The Bugbear is the most appalling one. At night he comes and hovers o'er our bed, Filling us with a nameless fear and dread. He is not half so terrible by day— Sometimes he ...
— A Phenomenal Fauna • Carolyn Wells
... by which he could take away more gold without exciting the suspicions of the people on board the English vessel, there was no plan that entered his mind that did not contain elements of danger, and the danger was an appalling one. If the crew of the Finland, or the crew of any other vessel, should, on this desert coast, get scent of a treasure mound of gold ingots, he might as well attempt to reason with wild beasts as to try to ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... watched and distrusted and who had long watched and distrusted her, one for whom she could have had few intervals of kindness, always dreading in him a dangerous and secret enemy, appeared so awful that my first thoughts were of her. How appalling to hear of such a death and be able to feel no pity! How dreadful to remember, perhaps, that she had sometimes even wished the old man away who was so swiftly hurried out ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... voice which sent across the water that ominous shout so appalling to Trent's ears. Mechanically George swam toward the place where the dark head had risen, but as he took his first stroke a second head appeared beside the other, then ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... stupendous changes in that hitherto sluggish mass of humanity. The full significance of these changes both to China and to the world cannot be comprehended now. There is something fascinating and at the same time something appalling in the spectacle of a nation numbering nearly one-third of the human race slowly and majestically rousing itself from the torpor of ages under the influence of new and powerful revolutionary forces. No other ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... seize as advance bases, from which to prosecute its future operations. The complexity of the task of planning such an expedition, taking due account, but not exaggerated account, of all the factors, favorable and adverse, is appalling; but the task must be undertaken and accomplished. The most tedious part is the logistics—the arrangements for supplying the fleet on the way and in the distant theatre of operations with the necessary provisions, equipment, and ammunition and, above all, the fuel. The average superdreadnaught ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... not ask herself these questions in exactly these words, but she felt the desolate possibility that had been suggested to her; and it was so appalling that it quite overpowered her flare of temper, and stopped her sobs and cries as effectually as Jane could have desired. But Jane herself, busy with her darning, did not notice the expression of Polly's face, and had no idea how deeply ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... for all the world beyond them. There would be no more Paris fashions! To what despair would not millions of women be reduced? How would they dress, even supposing that they should contrive to dress at all? The thought was appalling; and as one and another great couturier closed his doors, Paris began to realize that her prestige was indeed ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... then designated by the name of howling dervishes; all our religion consisted in howling like jackals or hyenas, with all our might, until we fell down in real or pretended convulsions. My howl was considered as the most appalling and unearthly that was ever heard; and, of course, my sanctity was increased in proportion. We were on our way to Scutari, where was our real place of residence, and only lodged here and there on our journey to fleece those who were piously disposed. ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... came time for him to die he would see to it that he did not do it in the night. For, despite the gay lights of the city, there were always sombre shadows for one to be jerked into by the relentless hand of death; there was something appalling about being dragged off into a darkness that was to be dissipated at ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... to postpone her return to her aunt until James was gone; for she dreaded being in the house with him lest anything should lead to the discovery of the relation between them. Soon after his departure, however, she had to encounter the appalling fact that the dread moment was on its way when she would no longer be able to conceal the change in her condition. Her first and last thought was then, how to protect the good name of her lover, and avoid involving him in the approaching ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... dark, the surface showed nothing but an appalling desolation where the rocky expanse had been still further torn and disrupted—pockmarked, as O'Malley had said, with great rings that had been ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... entered our cars and were about to start, when suddenly, with a blinding, stunning crash, a whole salvo landed in the meadow just beyond the road, we could not see where, because some houses hid the field. It was the most suddenly appalling crash ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... to reach the women somehow, you see, before you can improve the social conditions of a community. I love them, but many are overgrown children, as Mrs. Bill had put it, an' doin' nothing with singular skill an' determination an' often with appalling energy. ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... part in the war of 1862, but was now a missionary among his own people in Manitoba. The bread was broken by Artemas Ehnamane ("Walking Along"), who was condemned and pardoned, and then converted after that appalling tragedy in 1862. The wine was poured by the man whom all the Sioux lovingly call John (Dr. John P. Williamson) who led them in the burning revival scenes in the prison-camp at Fort Snelling in 1863. And as he referred to those thrilling times, their tears flowed like rain. It is said that Indians ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... rising generation—the future fathers and mothers of men—this subject of ventilation commends itself with an interest surpassing every other. Nothing can more convincingly establish the belief in the existence of something vitally wrong in the habits and circumstances of civilized life than the appalling fact that one fourth of all who are born die before reaching the fifth year, and one half the deaths of mankind occur under the twentieth year. Let those who have these things in charge answer to their own consciences how they discharge their duty in supplying to the young a pure atmosphere, ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... his cigar and reentered the hotel, and threaded his way through the appalling labyrinths of corridors till he found some one to guide him to the barber shop, where he could have his hair cut and his beard trimmed in the good old American way, money no object. For a plan had at last come to him; ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... the "potato famine." The crop that suffered so was that of 1845, and the famine began in the following year and reached its climax in 1847. It is estimated that by this calamity two hundred thousand persons perished. Many compensating features in connection with this appalling distress have been pointed out. Some writers friendly toward Ireland have declared that the famine proved one of the greatest blessings to the country; that it hastened free trade, better drainage ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... sleigh, he put his horse to his utmost speed, and when day dawned was a score of miles from the scene of his unexpected danger and appalling ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... him—it was all over in a few seconds—the baleful glare seemed to grow in intensity, till I felt as though I were enduring the mocking gaze of Albert of Cologne himself; and verily, I half expected any moment to see Ombos change into a mighty bronze demon or some appalling, ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... view Him dying, hour after hour bleeding to death; and how? in peace? no; with His arms stretched out, and His face exposed to view, and any one who pleased coming and staring at Him, mocking Him, and watching the gradual ebbing of His strength, and the approach of death. These are some of the appalling details which the Gospels contain, and surely they were not recorded for nothing, but that we ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... and time has been too strong, and in the matter of grammar we are still the slaves of the ancient world. As for spelling, the irregularities of our language seem to have driven us to one sole method, memorizing: and to memorize every word in a language is an appalling task. Our rhetoric we have inherited from the middle ages, from scholiasts, refiners, and theological logicians, a race of men who got their living by inventing distinctions and splitting hairs. The fact ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... knowledge. He knew that he had made some little progress into the confidence of both officers and men in his battalion. He had made, too, some firm friendships which had relieved, to a certain extent, the sense of isolation and loneliness that had made his first months with the battalion so appalling. But there still remained the sense of failure inasfar as his specific duty as ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... the offending sleeves I did not think they were so appalling—only two white satin puffs held in with straps of narrow black velvet ribbon. On a black corsage they could not be so dreadful, especially as the fashion now is sleeves puffed to ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... girl spying out the nakedness of the land. Yet when the little maid said, "Vary well, ma'am," and walked into the next room, Lena wondered if she had made a mistake. She heard Miss Elton's cheerful address of the appalling personage with the puffed up bit of ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... "This is appalling," said Mrs. Olston; "my husband would never forgive me if anything happened to those birds. They've been seen about the woods for the last year or two, but this is the first time they've nested. As you say, they are almost the only pair known ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... could be eloquent, too. And he asked his wife whether she remembered a passage in one of his father's last letters where Mr. Gould had expressed the conviction that "God looked wrathfully at these countries, or else He would let some ray of hope fall through a rift in the appalling darkness of intrigue, bloodshed, and crime that hung over the Queen ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... weight be heavy and the track smooth, the toboggan takes the bit between its teeth; and to steer a couple of full-sized friends in safety requires not only judgment but desperate exertion. On a very steep track, with a keen evening frost, you may have moments almost too appalling to be called enjoyment; the head goes, the world vanishes; your blind steed bounds below your weight; you reach the foot, with all the breath knocked out of your body, jarred and bewildered as though ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... all. Our moral world, even as our physical world, is a vast but hermetically sealed sphere, whence naught can issue, whence naught can fall, to be dissolved in space. All that exists, all that comes into being upon this earth remains there and bears fruit; and the most appalling wastage is but material or spiritual riches flung away for an instant, to fall to the ground again in a new form. There is no escape or leakage, no filtering through cracks, no missing the mark, not even waste or neglect. All ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... higher the slope down on either hand seemed more appalling; and once, as Saxe climbed to him, Melchior ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... when presently it came roaring and howling and screaming down upon us, with such a medley of sound as might be expected from a legion of unchained furies, our port quarter was turned towards it, with the schooner in motion and paying off before it. Yet, even so, it swooped down upon us with such appalling violence that the little vessel careened until her lee sheer-poles were buried and the water was up to the coaming of the main hatch. But with way on her, her helm hard up, no after canvas set, and the hurricane dragging at ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... the first cry of distress: an appalling sound; the wail of brave men. And they had borne it all so bravely, so cheerfully, till now. But now they knew something must go, or else the ship; the suspense was awful, but very short. Crack! crash! the fore and main topmast ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... plainly shown by the memoirs of Tanner. Tanner is a European who was carried away at the age of six by the Indians, and has remained thirty years with them in the woods. Nothing can be conceived more appalling that the miseries which he describes. He tells us of tribes without a chief, families without a nation to call their own, men in a state of isolation, wrecks of powerful tribes wandering at random amid the ice ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... as were in Munich were too callous to danger of all sorts, too accustomed to the horrors of the battlefield, to take this outpouring of women and mere civilians seriously; even in spite of the explosions, which, to be sure, denoted an appalling amount of destruction. Any attempt to sally forth on foot and ascertain the extent of the damage was met by bayonets and pistols in the hands of brigades of women whose like they had never seen in Germany. They ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... grandson of Thomas Jefferson, said that it was the dark, the appalling, the despairing future that had awakened the public mind rather than the Southampton Insurrection. He asked whether silence would restore the death-like apathy of the Negro's mind. It might be wise to let it sleep in its ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... of Representatives now assembled in Washington, humbly confessing their dependence upon Almighty God who rules all that is done for human good, make haste, at this informal meeting, to express the emotions with which they have been filled by the appalling tragedy which has deprived the Nation of its head and covered the land with mourning; and in further declaration ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... was thrown into such consternation on the eruption of the plague that the citizens destroyed themselves, as if in frenzy. When the plague ceased, men thought they were still wandering among the dead, so appalling was the livid aspect of the survivors, in consequence of the anxiety they had undergone, and the unavoidable infection of the air. Many other cities probably presented a similar appearance; and small country towns and villages, estimated at two ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... had nothing very appalling. All was not for the best; but all was tolerable. My father, the eldest son of an ancient but reduced family, left me with little, save the name of the head of the house, to the protection of his more fortunate ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... with which Dr. Clarke and a few cherished friends are favored. We sympathize in his dismay when word arrives that Dr. Guyse has forestalled his design, and we are comforted when the doctor's chariot lumbers on, and no longer stops the way. We are even glad at the appalling accident which set on fire the manuscript of the concluding volume, charring its edges, and bathing it all in molten wax: for we know how exulting would be the thanks for its deliverance. We can even fancy the pious ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... the way into the harbor, and she now headed for the centre of the Spanish fleet. Calmly watching everything in his field of vision, and knowing when the exact moment arrived for the beginning of the appalling work, Commodore Dewey, cool, alert, attired in white duck uniform and a golf cap, turned to Captain Gridley and said ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... the whole world has seemed to be rent by torturing doubts and by the menace of an approaching end. After having been preserved from destruction by Christ for two thousand years, it suddenly found itself in the throes of the most appalling upheaval yet experienced, with the majority of its inhabitants engaged in a murderous war. The dream of human brotherhood, glimpsed throughout the centuries, seemed to be irretrievably threatened, and once more arose ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... novelist's work is supposed to be mere play? Good God! don't we suffer enough? Have we not hard brain work and drudgery of desk work and tedious gathering of statistics and troublesome search into details? Have we not an appalling weight of responsibility on us?—and are we not at the mercy of a thousand ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... will admit that the Indian's love of cruelty for cruelty's sake cannot possibly be exaggerated. The young are so trained that when old they shall find their keenest pleasure in inflicting pain in its most appalling form. Among the most brutal white borderers a man would be instantly lynched if he practiced on any creature the fiendish torture which in the Indian camp either attracts no notice at all, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... less terrifying than their brothers. They had their father's fierce, hawklike profile, softened by youth, and the appalling height and robustness due to the freedom and fresh air of a nomadic existence. Their costumes might, Mary thought, have been fashioned out of gunny-sacks by the simple expedient of cutting holes for the head and arms. The description of ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... conduct was strange was surely natural. The discovery was quite as appalling to me as to you; and, knowing that somewhere among the dead man's papers my letters were preserved, I dreaded lest they should fall into the hands of the police and thereby connect me with the crime. It was fear that my final ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... for the purpose, he quickly produced a flame, and then looked to the priming of his gun to be ready in case of an attack. To sleep longer was out of the question; he therefore sat up, listening to the appalling sounds which ever and anon echoed through the forest. He had hitherto in his journeys never fallen in with a pack of wolves, though he had frequently met solitary individuals, whose savage jaws had shown what fearful foes, a number ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston
... most appalling noises with their soup. . . . Do you remember that German baron at the table d'hote ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... who renounce the possession of any property whatsoever, whether private or in common, who live wholly on alms, and in such a state of rigorous austerity, that the stronger sex would find to be quite appalling. ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... to this sound advice Angus soon began to build up a reputation. He treated war-worn veterans like Bobby Little with immense respect, and this, too, was counted to him for righteousness. He exercised his platoon with appalling vigour. Upon Company route-marches he had to be embedded in some safe place in the middle of the column; in fact, his enormous stride and pedestrian enthusiasm would have reduced his followers to pulp. At Mess he was mute: like a wise man, he was ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... indulgent, devoid of rancour and hatred, and yet he was ferocious. Remember the punishments he inflicted on the Ammonites; his vengeance was appalling. He had them sawn asunder, cut them with harrows of iron, and made ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... to books were very full. She knew French, German, Italian, and Spanish accurately. Greek and Latin, Mr. Cross tells us, she could read with thorough delight to herself; though after the appalling specimen of Mill's juvenile Latinity that Mr. Bain has disinterred, the fastidious collegian may be sceptical of the scholarship of prodigies. Hebrew was her favourite study to the end of her days. People commonly supposed that she had been inoculated with an artificial taste ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... fate of the Serbian nation, as well as on any other occasion"; and since he knew, without any telegram, that Serbia would in her turn support Montenegro—but not the tiny pro-Nikita faction—he was reduced to the appalling straits of a plot to force himself upon his own people by means of a foreign army. Now the composition of the aforementioned Yugoslav forces should be noted—after more than six years of heroic fighting against the Turks, the Bulgars, the Austro-Germans, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... memories of their angular peculiarities even to-day. They might have been of considerable interest as geological specimens to a scientific man under happier conditions. As ballast they were useful. As weights to be moved about in cramped quarters they were simply appalling. They spared no portion of our poor bodies. Another of our troubles, worth mention here, was the chafing of our legs by our wet clothes, which had not been changed now for seven months. The insides of our thighs ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... real opinion of human nature is expressed in the universal sorrow and wailing over death." It is obvious to answer that both these expressions are true utterances of human nature. It grieves over the sadness of parting, the appalling change and decay, the close locked mystery of the unseen state. It rejoices in the solace and cheer of a sublime hope springing out of the manifold powerful promises within and without. Instead of contemning the idea ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... hotel. Their appearance depressed him. The women had hard faces, the lustre was gone from their hair, they wore ill-fitting dresses without style or charm. The men were gross, heavy-limbed and plethoric. The music was appalling. It was produced out of a piano, a cello, and a violin driven by three Japanese who cared nothing for time or tune. Each dance, evidently, was timed to last ten minutes. At the end of the ten minutes the music stopped without finishing the phrase or even the bar; and ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... room, H. after me. I was just within the door when the crash came that threw me to the floor. It was the most appalling sensation I'd ever known—worse than an earthquake, which I've also experienced. Shaken and deafened, I picked myself up; H. had struck a light to find me. I lighted one, and the smoke guided us to the parlor I had fixed for ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... he said helplessly. "These English names are hard to bear in mind. Such things, ach! as I have had to remember in the last year." The burden was evidently appalling. "Yet," he added kindly, that he might do no injustice, "it might be so ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... common with him. Above all things the speech gave the impression of one who spoke from the inside—who knew the subjects of which he was talking, not merely in their general aspects, but in their dark recesses—in their latent passion—in their awful and appalling depths. It was while this fine speech was being delivered that the other and the darker side of Mr. Chamberlain's nature was to be seen. There are no such enmities as those between relatives or former friends; and so it apparently is between Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Morley—though ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... of most of our classical students in regard to the history of English literature is appalling; and yet it is impossible properly to study a given work of a given author without some knowledge of the background against which that particular writer stands. I have, therefore, sketched the politics, society, and literature of the age in which Dryden ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... disease of such common occurrence that the natives have no dread of it; the mortality from this one cause alone is appalling. This brings to mind the funeral ceremony, which, since the natives are all Catholics, is always performed by the ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... to that argument; keeping single was just a matter of lubrication; but just the same that appalling sentence which had become fixed in Pepsy's mind, haunted her, especially when she lay on her feather mattress in the yellow painted bed ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... occasionally to be met with—you rise from table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified your days. But oh! my dear Ernest, to sit next to a man who has spent his life in trying to educate others! What a dreadful experience that is! How appalling is that ignorance which is the inevitable result of the fatal habit of imparting opinions! How limited in range the creature's mind proves to be! How it wearies us, and must weary himself, with its endless repetitions and sickly reiteration! How lacking it is in any element ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... unlimited patronage. The literary arrangement of the whole does great credit to the well known talents and indefatigable research of Mr. Pinnock; and instead of the study being, as was the case some twenty years ago, dry and almost appalling, it is rendered familiar and entertaining, from its being mixed up with numerous anecdotes associated with the history of ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... It is an appalling commentary on the condition of our thoughts on this subject that the pregnant woman was but recently considered unfit to be represented in the statues placed on one of our public buildings. How convincingly ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... life, what power was kindled, and arose Within the sphere of that appalling fray! For, from the encounter of those wond'rous foes, A vapor like the sea's suspended spray Hung gathered; in the void air, far away, Floated the shattered plumes; bright scales did leap, Where'er the eagle's talons made their way, Like ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... of wood on the floor, or, what was worse, to drop it on the fire instead of laying it on. The scattering of ashes on the floor of the temple was held unseemly, that live coals should fall from the Altar was considered almost sacrilegious. Meffia, more than once, perpetrated such appalling blunders. Very tardily did she learn her duties; only after four years could she be trusted to take her regular turn in care of the fire and to stand her watch of half a night each time her turn ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... towering to heaven, and vividly reflected from every wall or spire which caught the direct light—then the clouds of smoke were seen rising in rapid succession and sailing northward upon the wind, until they disappeared in the womb of distant darkness. No one can have viewed that appalling scene with indifference, and the impression left by the representation, on those who knew the city, can scarcely have been weaker than that left on those who saw the reality. The mechanism for producing such effects is very simple; but spectators, that they may fully enjoy them, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 405, December 19, 1829 • Various
... of such a life the plain, with its sliding snow and ferocious wind, was appalling—a treeless expanse and a racing-ground for snow and wind. The man's mood grew darker while he mused. He served the meal on the rude box which took the place of table, and still his companion did not come. Ho looked at his watch. It was nearly ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... the Barberini palace to-day was solely to view the famous portrait of Beatrice Cenci. Her appalling story is still as fresh in remembrance here, and her name and fate as familiar in the mouths of every class, as if instead of two centuries, she had lived two days ago. In spite of the innumerable copies and prints I have ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... should, Mr. Daney, we should have no other alternative but to deny it." Elizabeth was speaking. She still wore her impish glacial smile. "As a usual thing, we are opposed to fibbing on the high moral ground that it is not a lady's pastime, but in view of the perfectly appalling results that would follow our failure to fib in this particular case, I'm afraid we'll have to join hands, Mr. Daney, and prove Nan Brent a liar. Naturally, we count on your help. As a result of his conversation with you, father believes you ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne |
