"Appallingly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... our work. A huge fish, weighing twenty pounds, which after much trouble we had succeeded in boiling whole, was considered the crowning success of our labour and art. We rightly anticipated that this magnificent fish, prepared with an appallingly highly seasoned and salted sauce, would move the hardest hearts. Also, we did not forget a small Christmas tree, and decorated it as best we could ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... revealing to men in wonderfully convincing form the ideas which they felt within them but could not utter—this had deserted him. Explain the psychology of it any way you will, there is the fact! The speeches Lincoln made on the way to Washington during the latter part of February were appallingly unlike himself. His mind had suddenly fallen dumb. He had nothing to say. The gloom, the desolation that had penetrated his soul, somehow, for the moment, made him commonplace. When he talked—as convention required him to do at all his stopping places—his words were ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... separated newspaper cuttings relating to deaths in the shunned house—one from the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal of April 12, 1815, and the other from the Daily Transcript and Chronicle of October 27, 1845—each of which detailed an appallingly grisly circumstance whose duplication was remarkable. It seems that in both instances the dying person, in 1815 a gentle old lady named Stafford and in 1845 a schoolteacher of middle age named Eleazar Durfee, ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... would father say when he found out? For he was bound to find out sooner or later. He always did. "Buried. You two girls had me buried!" She heard his stick thumping. Oh, what would they say? What possible excuse could they make? It sounded such an appallingly heartless thing to do. Such a wicked advantage to take of a person because he happened to be helpless at the moment. The other people seemed to treat it all as a matter of course. They were strangers; they couldn't be expected to ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... nostrils appeared, which would, for size, have excited the envy of the best bred Arab that was ever foaled; and the division between them was nearly equal to that of the horse. I longed to hear her sneeze; it must have been something quite appallingly grand. Continuing my examination, I was forced to the conclusion that the poor delicate creature was bilious; for the dark eyes gleamed from their round yellow beds like pieces of cannel-coal set in a gum-cistus. The forehead was a splendid ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... Company Sergeants, some odd orderlies, and a forlorn little man in a neat drab uniform with light blue facings,—the regimental interpreter. The party have descended, with the delicate care of those who essay to perform acrobatic feats in kilts, from bicycles—serviceable but appallingly heavy machines of Government manufacture, the property of the "Buzzers," but commandeered for the occasion. The Quartermaster-Sergeant, who is not accustomed to strenuous exercise, mops his brow and glances expectantly round the place. His eye comes ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... "Evil," he answered briefly, "appallingly evil, and yet mingled with the sheer wickedness of it was also a certain perverseness—the perversity of ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... the mines were fired and then ensued the most appallingly magnificent sight I have ever witnessed. There was little noise but the very earth appeared to writhe and tremble in agony. Then, slowly, it seemed in the dim light, the ground heaved up and up until, finally, bursting all bonds, earth, trees, ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... in their editorials they hid their class-interests under pretenses of principle. And how easy it would have been for Darrell to get what he wanted without losing his reputation—if only he had been willing to follow the example of these eminent citizens! Thyrsis knew one man, the editor of an appallingly respectable journal, who had invited a young girl to his wife's home and there attempted to seduce her. He knew the proprietor of another, whose cheerful custom it was to go about among his newly-married women-friends and suggest that, inasmuch as he was ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Rubaiyat. It is erude, but subtile. It is brutal in its anti-theism, and yet it has a certain tender grace of melancholy, deeper than Omar's own. It is devoid of Omar's mysticism and epicureanism, and appallingly synthetic. It will not capture the sentimentalists, like the Rubaiyat, but, when it shall be known, it will divide honors with the now universally popular Persian poem. Burton's "Kasidah" is miserably printed in his "Life," but Mr. Thomas Mosher, of Portland, Maine, has issued ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Pillenger. She was the last of a long line of unprotected English girlhood which had been compelled by straitened circumstances to listen for hire to the appallingly dreary nonsense which Mr Meggs had to impart on the subject of British Butterflies. Girls had come, and girls had gone, blondes, ex-blondes, brunettes, ex-brunettes, near-blondes, near-brunettes; they had come buoyant, full of hope and life, tempted by the lavish salary which ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... astronomer's mind had so exasperated his wife. She and the sick child were now sleeping, and the other children, warned by the threatening finger of the father, played quietly in a corner. It was an odd place to conjure up images of whirling storms of fire so appallingly vast that the great earth, if dropped into one of them, would be fused instantly like a lump of ore in a blast furnace; but the grotesque little man was so earnest, so uncouth, yet forcible, in his suggestions as he whirled his arms ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... masses of the other bergs, which, in their turn, rolled slowly over one after the other, to the accompaniment of one long loud echoing roar of rending ice as their dismemberment thus became accelerated. The resulting ocean disturbance was, as may easily be imagined, appallingly grand and utterly indescribable; and it no doubt contributed in no inconsiderable degree to the total destruction of the bergs, which, once started, continued to roll over and over, every lurch causing a further dismemberment until the fragments became so small as to be ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... "I've been quite shocked to find how appallingly ignorant our Maids of Honour are. Fancy, they've never heard of Shakespeare, or Ibsen, or Bernard ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... It has managed to remove the sights and sounds of battlefields away from our doorsteps. But it cannot be expected to achieve the feat always and under every variety of circumstance. Some day it must fail, and we shall have then a wealth of appallingly unpleasant sensations brought home to us with painful intimacy. It is not absurd to suppose that whatever war comes to us next it will not be a distant war waged by Russia either beyond the Amur or ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... wondered that a man so gifted should remain in Coombe, but the explanation is simple. He suited Coombe; the larger churches of the larger cities he did not suit. Lax opinions, heretical doctrines, outlooks appallingly wide were creeping in everywhere. It is safe to say that in most of the churches of his own faith he would have seemed bravely but hopelessly behind the times. But in Coombe he had found his place. Coombe ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... son?" he said, pausing to look me over, as though I had suddenly become a new man. "My poor orphan boy!" He caused me to recount the incident in every detail. In doing so I made it as appallingly vivid as I knew how. He was so absorbed and moved that he repeatedly made me stop in the middle of the sidewalk so as to look me in the face ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Joint Select Committee risked my producing a revolver and shooting them when they admitted me to the room without having me handcuffed. And these risks are no unreal ones. Every day some child is maimed or drowned and some young man infected with disease; and political assassinations have been appallingly frequent of late years. Railway travelling has its risks; motoring has its risks; aeroplaning has its risks; every advance we make costs us a risk of some sort. And though these are only risks to the individual, to the community they are certainties. It ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... of letters, it is worth mentioning that he still contributes from time to time to the leading magazines of the day. As a rule, his articles receive the place of honour. They may not be so profoundly metaphysical as the contributions of Professor Maurice, neither are they so appallingly scientific as the propaganda of Huxley; but they are at least as entertaining, as instructive, as able as the best literary efforts of our most popular writers. One of the Duke's most recent contributions, which appeared ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... despair, the emperor made proposals for a secret and separate accommodation with France. Louis XV. promptly listened, and offered terms, appallingly definite, and cruel enough to extort the last drop of blood from the emperor's sinking heart. "Give me," said the French king, "the duchy of Lorraine, and I will withdraw my armies, and leave Austria to make the best ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... assisted by Bella, who has ruined two of my best handkerchiefs in the process. The damaged G. has just departed, and I do hope won't be much the worse. Such awful things happen here. You meet people well and strong one day and hear of their death the next. Death seems appallingly near. One isn't given time to be ill. Either you are quite well or ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... charred trees had been felled and removed, and the great fire-swept area had begun to deck itself with green along the edges, where it skirted the healthy forest. However, the larger part of the top was still barren and appallingly desolate. Charred stumps, standing sentinel-like between the rock ledges, bore witness that once there had been a fine forest here; but no fresh ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... slowly, ominously, appallingly, over Washington with the clouds and mists of the storm which swept up the Potomac and shrouded the city in a grey mantle of mourning. The White House was still. The dead were walking through its great rooms of state. The anguished heart who watched ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... unlikely to alter his precise position, or do anything unexpected, as the Pyramids of Egypt. I do not know any topic upon which he was not absolutely uninformed, and his contributions to conversation, delivered in that ringing baritone of his, were appallingly dull. Often I have seen him utterly flatten some cheerful clever person of the Crichton type with one of his simple garden-roller remarks—plain, solid, and heavy, which there was no possibility either of meeting or avoiding. He was very successful in argument, and ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... this, as the Prophet thought, appallingly appropriate exclamation, Mrs. Fancy hurried feverishly from ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... He was appallingly dressed: his clothes torn and dirty, soaked with a night's rain. His face was almost distorted from fatigue, exposure, the inward conflict that had lasted for twenty-four hours. He had spent all the previous night alone, God knows where. But anyway ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... home, the complexity of our problem. I came, in fact, to a lamppost. It was casting a peculiar shadow. And then—you know how such thoughts seize us, my dear—like a sudden inspiration, I realised how tenuous, how appallingly tenuous a hold we every one of us have on our mere personality. But that,' he continued rapidly, 'that's only for ourselves—and after the event. Ours, just now, is to act. ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... across the enchanting scene. To the far south the snow-crowned San Francisco peaks rear their lofty heights. To the north and east the sandy desert stretches away in heart-breaking desolation, relieved only by the tiny green patches of peach trees and corn fields. The blazing sun beats down appallingly. A purple haze quivers over the world. But evening comes, and as the sun drops out of sight a pink glow spreads over the eastern sky, giving a soft radiance to the landscape below. Soon this desert glow fades, and shadows creep nearer and ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... arrangement of this conference is, in my opinion, the least objectionable, and at the same time it is the most promising help that in the present appallingly entangled situation America can give Europe. The Old World is poisoned. The virus of the most irrational hatred of its component sections against each other, inoculated into them by all sorts of false leaders of opinion, eats deeper and deeper and threatens to mortify all the roots ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... a truce and quiet my apprehensions; for I dreamed last night that, on sight, we flew at each other's throats, and renewed the sanguinary scuffles of our juvenile acquaintance. Most appallingly vivid is my recollection of a certain scar here on my left arm, where you set your ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Gorham Palfrey, which affords in many points, the most careful and faithful picture on record of the time, personal facts, unfortunately, being of the most meager nature. They have been sought for chiefly, however, in the old records themselves; musty with age and appallingly diffuse as well as numerous, but the only source from which the true flavor of a forgotten time can be extracted. Barren of personal detail as they too often are, the writer of the present imperfect sketch ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... as she had shuddered then with the bewilderment, the sense of unreality, that took possession of her at that moment. It was all so unlike what she had expected, so appallingly unlike the gracious, well-ordered life of the stately Bluegrass homes she ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... no, ordinary learning, but she was positive that he had an almost appallingly intimate knowledge of many chapters in the ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... once more brought into play the dreadful eye-to-eye scowl as practised "up at the Third," and, sometimes, also by young leading men upon the stage. Frowning appallingly, and thrusting forward his underlip, he placed his nose almost in contact with the nose of Penrod, whose eyes ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... delightedly amused hands to heaven. "The Recording Angel domiciled in the house!" he cried. "It had never occurred to me before how appallingly discerning the eye of the modern offspring must be. ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... and from Lakla and O'Keefe, were nimbuses of flickering scarlet flames. And always the steady hurling forward—appallingly mechanical. ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... sleeves. The sun came in through the windows, a tired and ancient sun, yellow as parchment and stretched out of shape in transit. It tried to enter in triumphant squares and produced only warped splotches—but it was appallingly steady; so much so that it disturbed Anthony not to be the pivot of all the inconsequential sawmills and trees and telegraph poles that were turning around him so fast. Outside it played its heavy tremolo over olive roads ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... briefly, went on. "It is a sobering reflection that this plan—an attack by a comparatively minor race with one specialized skill on the greatest human civilization in history—might very well have been appallingly successful. But the Great Satogs failed, in part because of the very perfection of ...
— The Other Likeness • James H. Schmitz
... my youth I was the victim of a hopeless passion and meditated suicide. A seafaring friend of mine suggested my accompanying him on his cargo steamer from the Port of London to Bordeaux. It was blazing summer. But I was appallingly sea-sick all the way, and when I set foot on land I was cleansed of all human emotion save that of utter thankfulness that I existed as an entity with an un-queasy stomach. I was cured ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... the switch; suppose there had been some silly mistake in making the connections; suppose the battery wouldn't work. There were a score of things to go wrong. Thank goodness he had overhauled and examined everything himself; although that again would only make it more appallingly awful if things didn't work. No time now, no chance to go back and put things right. Perhaps he ought to have stayed back there and made the contact. A quick end if it worked right, and a last chance to refix it if it didn't; yes, he . . . ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... the bridle of Lee's horse close to the bit. They were almost to the bars. A dark shadow slid up and over them. It was Black Bart, with his head turned to look back even as he jumped, as if he were setting an example which he bid them follow. Appallingly high the bars rose directly in front ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... deadly in her utter disregard of him, while her fingers moved swiftly about her dark, shining hair—something so appallingly sudden in this hostility that Summerhay felt a peculiar sensation in his head, as if he must knock it against something. He sat down on the side of the bed. Was it that letter? But how? It had not ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 'Appallingly so, some people say,' returned Jane, with a peculiar look; 'but, I know her well, though she was more my sister's ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... starving dog. They joined a conspicuous party whose principal members were a fat woman massaged to the teeth, a dark girl who had evidently a sharp eye to the main chance as well as to the picturesque, and a hook-nosed, appallingly pompous man who would strut on the ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... The black hair, associated with deep-blue eyes and a skin of extreme whiteness, found abundantly in Ireland, and amongst the offspring of Irish emigrants, are, in all probability, tokens of descent from this appallingly ancient people. The type appears occasionally in the Basque provinces, and on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, but nowhere else. Few civilised races inhabit the land where the fossil relics of their own lineal ancestors mark the furthest point of human occupancy; yet it would seem to be ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... in bed, not only curious to know what it is Ethelinda was afraid to ask, but wondering at her hesitancy. Heretofore she had stopped at nothing; the most cutting allusions to Mary's appearance, behaviour and friends. They had both been appallingly frank at times. Their growing friendship seemed to ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... The facts are amazingly opposite. The Puritans admitted incessantly that they were exceedingly bad. The records sustain them.... The Puritans wallowed in every known form of wickedness to a disgusting degree. Considering the extremely meagre population of the early colonies, they were appallingly busy in evil. I do not refer to the doctrinal crimes that they artificially construed and dreaded and persecuted with such severity that England had to intervene: the crimes of being a Quaker, a Presbyterian, which they punished with ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... loss of bodily energy ensues a more than corresponding loss of mental activity and strength. The whole range of thought diminishes, contracts,—shrinks to that narrowest of circles which surrounds the physical sell, the inner ring of merely material sensation: the memory weakens appallingly;—the mind operates faintly, slowly, incoherently,—almost as in dreams. Serious reading, vigorous thinking, become impossible. You doze over the most important project;—you fall fast asleep over the most fascinating ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... not rouse the woman and learned that the slaves had been gone more than a full day, Agathemer and I went to save the bellowing and bleating stock. We found in the shed two fine young cows with udders appallingly distended. But our attention was momentarily distracted from them by the sight of eight full-sized bronze pails, finer than those at any public well in Reate or Consentia, which hung on pegs by the door, four on each side of it. They were flat-bottomed, bulged, but narrowed at the rim so that ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... instincts. I was sure that my ancestors had lived on plains, and now I was dragging them into dangers that they knew nothing of. Nevertheless, I told the guides to go on. I spoke with a kind of eager interest and desperation. For, indeed, it was most appallingly interesting. We came to the slabs where the ropes made the Matterhorn so easy, as I had been told. I wished that some of those who ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... pleasure-seeking crowd, such persons pass from this world, and the most their friends have to say is that they have gone to a better one. But have they? For the mere fact of shedding the flesh does not bring us any nearer to God. On the contrary, the shedding of the flesh increases appallingly the difficulty of the soul in finding God. This world is the very place in which we can most easily and quickly get into communication with God. To think that the mere act of dying improves our character and takes us to heaven is a delusion ...
— The Romance of the Soul • Lilian Staveley
... had done once before, almost dizzy. She could not say anything more. She submitted to his examination, and answered his questions. It was an ordeal, and she watched his serious face with its cold eyes, and felt his chilly hand, and guessed at what he would say. The doctor seemed appallingly slow, appallingly deliberate and immovable and ruthless in his perceptions. She was terrified. The room wavered before her; and her fright grew greater and greater. He was very patient. She felt strange trust ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... her first really bad stretch of road. She was frightened. Then she was too appallingly busy to be frightened, or to be Miss Claire Boltwood, or to comfort her uneasy father. She had to drive. Her frail graceful arms put into it a vicious vigor ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... she began to laugh helplessly. His hands were wetly, pinkly, unnaturally clean, but his round, rosy, sunny little face was appallingly streaked and black. ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... and she would have been glad to be let alone until October first, which date now seemed appallingly close. On the afternoon of Jack's third day of absence from the ranch Columbine rode out for some needed exercise. Pronto not being available, she rode another mustang and one that kept her busy. On the way back to the ranch she avoided the customary ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... became both armor and flail; in defense it was as active as a fencing-master's foil, in offense as deadly as the kick of a mule. Beneath his formless bulk were the muscles of a gladiator; his eye had all the quickness of a prize-fighter. There was something primeval, appallingly ferocious about the fat man, too: he fought with a magnificent enthusiasm, a splendid abandon. And yet, in spite of his rage, he was clear-headed, and his ears were sensitively strained for the sound of the first ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... girl was bewildering, overpowering, as she made her way through this underground world. The things she had glimpses of were very sparely illuminated, nay scarcely discernible, and yet appallingly real; what mysteries, what spells might not be hidden in all she did not see! She felt as if the end of life, which she was looking for, had already begun, as if she had already gone ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sort of hand rail. Across such a bridge as this the hill children walk as easily as an English child does over a great brick span; but Head-nurse resolutely refused to set foot over it herself, much less to allow the Heir-to-Empire to risk his neck on such an appallingly dangerous structure. In vain Foster-father, in order to set a good example, allowed himself to be led over by the shepherd with his eyes carefully bandaged lest he should get giddy in the middle by looking down. As a matter of fact, ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... ceiling, till they seemed to pertain to the world of spirits. The snoring of the men on the relief guard was like the groans of a dying man, the tread of those on duty like the march of a mighty army. Then would come intense stillness, suddenly broken by a volley from the enemy sounding appallingly near—in reality about a mile off—and provoked, doubtless, by some very innocent cause. Many of these volleys were often fired during the night, sometimes for ten minutes together, at other times singly, at intervals; anon the boom of a cannon would vary the entertainment. ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... of the Tuileries, both by night and day, were now grown appallingly beyond description. Almost unendurable as they had been before, they were aggravated by the insults of the national guard to every passenger to and from the palace. I was myself in so much peril, that the Princess ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... Montagu had such a shock. An eternally lost soul, a damned thing staring at paradise, seemed to gaze at him out of the boy's eyes. He thought he was seeing all the sins of the world in them, yet the look was appallingly innocent. He seemed to be discovering those sins in the dark, ravening eyes, but to be feeling them in himself as if the forgotten, ignored innermost of his own life were quaking with guilt under the spell of this staring presence. In the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... The rain came down in a solid cataract. The thunder was a steady bombardment, and the frolic powers above, that had toyed and practised with soundless flashes in the afternoon, had grown wanton at their sport, and hurled their electric shots at earth in appallingly accurate marksmanship. Between the flashes from the sky, the steady glare of a burning barn here and there reddened the blackness. The village dead, under the pelted sod, must have shuddered at the din. Even the moments of lull were saturate with terrors. In them rose ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... filled Robert Johnson as he gazed at this man who could think about his dinner at such a moment. He had not imagination enough to realise that the experience which seemed so appallingly important to him, was the merest everyday matter of business to the medical man who could not have lived for a year had he not, amid the rush of work, remembered what was due to his own health. To Johnson he seemed little better than a monster. His thoughts were bitter as he sped ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... horror, listened to Chauvelin's directions to his underling, the whole of the plan for the capture of the Scarlet Pimpernel became appallingly clear to her. Chauvelin wished that the fugitives should be left in false security waiting in their hidden retreat until Percy joined them. Then the daring plotter was to be surrounded and caught red-handed, in the very act of aiding and abetting royalists, who were traitors ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... a place where the path forked. A very narrow, appallingly deep gorge split the mountain at this point, each path skirting a side ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... wantonly squandered, trodden in the mire, and, instead of being recognised as a kingdom, treated only as a weakness, and traded upon to enslave women. I turned with a sigh, and we walked round a corner of the garden where, in one recent instance, appallingly common, a poor frail woman had crept out in the dead of night to pay alone the penalty of a crime incurred by two—one foolish and weak, the other ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... occasion. How can people,—I could not help saying to myself,—how can people endure such proximity in such a sweltering heat? For, as I said, there was no illusion,—not a particle. It was no Vale of Tempe, with Nymphs and Apollos. The boys were boys, appallingly young, full of healthful promise, but too much in the husk for exhibition, and not entirely at ease in their situation,—indeed, very much not at ease,—unmistakably warm, nervous, and uncomfortable. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... two later he took her to the Bronx Zoo. Here he caught a glimpse of Nancy Simms that made him prick up his ears and pull his mustache, thoughtfully. He had discovered how appallingly ignorant she was, how untrained, how undisciplined. To-day he saw how really young she was. She ran from cage to cage. Her laughter made the corners of his mouth turn ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... trite things he had said during the day, a ghost, moreover, that towered and swelled at every hackneyed phrase, till finally he filled the room and burst after the young man proposed to his admired one, and made subsequent remarks. Ghosts not only have appallingly long memories, but they possess a mean advantage over the living in that they have once been mortal, while the men and women they haunt haven't yet been ghosts. Suppose each one of us were to be haunted by his own inane utterances? True, we're told that we'll have ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... cook and the nurse could tell her just about what they pleased. She had no means of checking them up, for Amy had never talked of such things. It had all been pretty clothes and shops, in those brief exciting weeks, and shrewd counsel about men and what it was they wanted of women. How appallingly shallow and meaningless those conversations now appeared. They gave no comfort or support. The remembrance of the terror in Amy's eyes at the thought of death rose vividly in Ethel's mind, and she got up and ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... London, where he spent some years in certain vague employments, and having contracted as much debt as his creditors would permit, and more than his father would pay, he had gone through the Bankruptcy Court, and returned home to drag through life wearily, through days and weeks so appallingly idle, that he often feared to get out of bed in the morning. At first his father had tried to make use of him in his agency business, and it was principally owing to Mr. Fred's bullying and insolent manners that Mr. Scully was now unable to ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... and mothers, you young men, you maidens, you children that lisp blasphemy! Nor did Savonarola deal in generalities. He described in plain language every vice; he laid bare every abuse; so that a mirror was held up to the souls of his hearers, in which they saw their most secret faults appallingly portrayed and ringed around with fire. He entered with particularity into the details of the coming woes. One by one he enumerated the bloodshed, the ruin of cities, the trampling down of provinces, the passage ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... has been, the jaded body craves for such faint warmth as it afforded, and further rest, the brain is dull and heavy, and the aching limbs appear incapable of supporting the weight on them. Difficulties loom appallingly large in the faint creeping light, courage fails, and the will grows feeble. Wyllard and his companions felt all this, but it was clear to them that they could not dally, with their provisions running out, and staggering out of camp after a very scanty meal they hauled the sled through ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... struggle when the strange event of the day happened. I chanced to look up from the book I had been trying to read, and I saw a remarkable object upon the leads outside my window. It was the figure of a man with a collapsible neck, a wonderful neck, which expanded appallingly, and again was withdrawn into a narrow and herring-like chest. The fellow might have been thirty years of age; he might have been fifty; there was no hair on his face, no colour in his hollow cheeks; only a nervous movement of the bony-fingers, and that awful craning of the collapsible neck. I ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... the cavalry and some of Longstreet's artillery. In short, as I well remember, it was a fact, accepted among us, that General Lee was pushing, as hard as he could go, for Grant's 150,000 with about 35,000 men; and yet, knowing all this, these lunatics were sweeping along to that appallingly unequal fight, cracking jokes, laughing, and with not the least idea in the world of anything else but victory. I did not hear a despondent word, nor see a dejected face among the thousands I saw and heard that ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... She had earned fourteen shillings her last week at tailoring, but the feat had exhausted her so much that he had been obliged to insist on two or three days respite before moving on to shirts. Shirts were now brisk, and the hours appallingly long ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... or scratch to start them, but they broke out themselves as a small blister on any part of the body. In the case of a good many men it took the form of impetigo, an extremely uncomfortable sore rash on the face, and both officers and men appeared day after day on parade with appallingly unshaven sore chins, and bandages visible on arms ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... with the regularity of a clock. In living there are gaps and silences when the soul stands still in its flight through abysses-and then there come times of trial and times of struggle when we grow old without knowing it. Body and soul change appallingly. ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... him. Whatever the object of this display, it gave me a great itching to retreat behind my sister's skirts, for fear and shame. And, as it appeared, he was quick to conjecture my feeling: for at once he dropped the fantastic manner and proceeded to a quiet and appallingly lucid statement of ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... and to the end of his days the young, immaculately groomed and turned-out assistant in Hamilton's will wonder why the beautiful girl with gold-flecked eyes had suddenly frowned, and placing the trifle intended for a wedding present upon the glass counter, had left the shop with an appallingly inadequate excuse. ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... moon may contain would probably be rather in the form of fossils than of skeletons. The skeleton is of course intended as an image of death and desolation. It is a matter of taste: but a skeleton, it seems to me, speaks too recently of life to be as appallingly weird and desolate as a blank stone or ice landscape, unshaded by atmosphere or by any trace of animal or plant life, ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... believe it. Some of them declared that Pilate and his spies best knew what had become of the corpse. Others, on the contrary, were stirred by an unparalleled exaltation of spirit, by some divine energy which filled their minds with appallingly clear visions of ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... source of her success was her robust and abounding, though sometimes rather broad and cheap, fun. In her time decent novels were apt to be appallingly serious in tone, and not infrequently stupid; humor in spite of Addison still connoted much coarseness and obtrusive sexuality, and in fiction had to be sought in the novels written for men only. As humor is the deadly foe to sentimentalism and hysterics, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... pay off her debts in one social lump sum, Eileen got "a Sunday out," and Nelly gave a lunch at a riverside hotel to a motley company of popular favourites. It was expensive; for the profession, even in those days, expected champagne. It was appallingly protracted; for the party, having no work to do that evening, showed no disposition to break up, and brandies-and-sodas succeeded one another in an aroma of masculine cigars and feminine cigarettes. It was noisy and hilarious, and gradually it became rowdy. The Singing Sisters sang, but not ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... own part, it seemed to me as unreal as a nightmare that Captain Joseph Whidden actually had been shot dead by a band of Arab pirates. I was bewildered—indeed, stunned—by the incredible suddenness of the calamity. It was so complete, so appallingly final! To me, a boy still in his 'teens, that first intimate association with violent death would have been in itself terrible, and I keenly felt the loss of our chief mate. But Captain Whidden ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... more intelligible and palpable cause (p. 204) offers itself to the mind on the slightest reflection upon the circumstances in which he was placed.[154] He had not the means ready for invading France. His forces were diminished by a number of men appallingly great, in proportion to the body with which he had landed at Harfleur; and his treasury was exhausted. For his first expedition he had borrowed the utmost which his subjects and friends either would or could supply; and the grants made to him by his parliament had been anticipated ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive. It must be that, and only that, beyond the faintest suspicion of any other object. You anarchists should make it clear that you are perfectly determined to make a clean sweep of the whole social creation. But how to get that appallingly absurd notion into the heads of the middle classes so that there should be no mistake? That's the question. By directing your blows at something outside the ordinary passions of humanity is the answer. Of course, there is art. A bomb in the National Gallery would make some ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... and shiny spots leaped up magically and appallingly into men. German soldiers! Boches! Huns on a charge! They were many, but wide apart. They ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... in love is that handsome young Monsieur!" thought the Mademoiselle of the shop, with a little sigh for some of the wonders of the world which she had missed, and must always miss. Her heels were appallingly high, and her waist was incredibly small; but she had a heart; and there was no heart which would not have softened to Hugh, and wished him the best of ...
— Rosemary - A Christmas story • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Ida shivered as she glanced about her. She could no longer see the shelter she had left, and she stood alone in the midst of a tremendous desolation of rock and snow, with the valley yawning, a vast dusky pit, beneath her feet. It was appallingly lonely, and she was numb with cold, while, since she was sure that she could not climb back to her companions unassisted, there was only one person on whom she could rely, and that was the packer, who had insisted ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... not be thought that the under-exposed halo is a recent creation. By no means. All are old, appallingly old; and in the same rock all are, probably, of the same, or neatly the same, age. The under-exposure is simply due to a lesser quantity of the radioactive elements in the nucleus. They are under-exposed, in short, not because of lesser duration of exposure, but because ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... States. The men, unless they could spend their earnings immediately, would start a game of craps and in a few days all the available cash would have found its way into the pocket of the luckiest man. They would throw for appallingly high stakes. On this particular pay-day we knew that the supply of wine and beer in the village was not sufficient to cause any serious trouble, and orders were given that no cognac or hard liquor should be sold. A few always managed to get it—all precautions ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... remedial measures usually enumerated in Christian programmes, and ordinarily employed by Christian philanthropy, to be lamentably inadequate for any effectual dealing with the despairing miseries of the outcast classes. The rescued are appallingly few, a ghastly minority compared with the multitudes who struggle and sink in the open-mouthed abyss. Alike, therefore, my humanity and my Christianity, if I may speak of them as in any way separate from each other, have cried out for ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... Hicks, Jr., crouched on the side line; as he gazed at the Yale banner, he could see his father, with his athletic figure, his strong face that could be appallingly stern or wonderfully tender and kind. Like the sunny Senior, Mr. Hicks, despite his wealth, was thoroughly democratic and already the Bannister ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... of their little wits by the fury of their enemies below, and afraid to go down and bolt across the open, even after the cessation of hostilities, past those appallingly still, crouched bodies, who, for all they had guarantee to the contrary, might be in fiendish, alliance crouched there, waiting for them to descend, the two voles explored gradually, in their own dainty, little, deprecating, creeping way, branch after branch ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... me all afternoon, with a pucker of perplexity about her lapis-lazuli eyes. We are busy, getting things to rights. And I've made an appallingly long list of what I must buy in Buckhorn to-morrow. Even Struthers has perked up a bit, and is making furtive preparations for a sage-tea ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... were, according to my estimation, a little better than half-way to the brig, another flash of lightning, vivid and blinding, blazed forth, this time from almost overhead, only the very smallest perceptible interval of time elapsing between it and the accompanying thunder-crash, which was so appallingly loud and startling that for a moment I felt fairly deaf and stunned with it, and before I had fairly recovered my dazed senses the rain came pelting down in drops as large as crown-pieces. The rain lasted for only three or four seconds, however, and then ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... with the Bororos the steps of their dances had been suggested by the rhythm of the music, and not the other way round. They preferred music to dancing, for which latter exercise they showed little aptitude. Although their melodies would appear appallingly melancholy to European ears, it did not follow that they were so to them. On the contrary, some which had a most depressing effect on me—and I felt like throwing at them anything handy but heavy ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... joy to "Lily," who was not unfamiliar with this facial phenomenon on the part of Mr. Rae. "Oh, I say!" he cried to Dunn in a gale of smothered laughter, "how does the dear man do it? It is really too lovely! I must learn the trick of that. I have never seen anything quite so appallingly flabbergasting." ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... his eyes over "our Southern region" that Dr. Channing concluded "that we are holding in bondage one of the best races of the human family." If he had cast them over the appallingly dark region of Africa, he would have been compelled, in spite of the wonder-working power of his imagination, to pronounce it one of the very worst and most degraded races upon earth. If, as he ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... day informed, by his aged henchman, Ranald Glas, that a second-sighted man had arrived in the glen, conducted, according to his own account, by the power of the taisch: that he was extremely old, and his visions were appallingly vivid: his thoughts were terror, and his words were fire. The revelations of things to come passed frequent and powerful across his soul, bright and living as realities; and his language was that of one who constantly held strange communication with scenes and beings not of ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... an hour to pass before keeping an appointment," he said. "And I dropped in to hear you. You put things before a man in a new way. You are appallingly vivid. I am not going to keep my appointment. It is not easy not to keep it! I shall take the train to New York and catch to-morrow's steamer to Liverpool. Don't leave me until you have seen me off. I want to put the Atlantic Ocean and a year of ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... it would be much better to go to college in Kansas than attend the University at Chicago, where, I felt, education was made an industry, just like pork-packing and the hundred other big concerns in that city. Kansas would encourage individuality more, be less appallingly machine-like. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... appallingly untidy in her habits. She was out one evening to a party—she managed to get a considerable number of parties into her dull days at home. Rosalie, come in from Field's, peeped into her bedroom to find her. She had not known that Doda was going out. ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... in it. The simulator duplicated every sight and sound and feeling—all but heavy acceleration—to be experienced in the take-off of a rocketship to space. The similitude of flight was utterly convincing. Sometimes it was appallingly so when emergencies and catastrophes and calamities were staged in horrifying detail for them to learn to respond to. In six weeks they'd learned how to handle a spaceship so far as anybody could learn on solid ground—if the simulator was correctly built. Nobody could be sure about that. But ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... blouse of singular formlessness confined at the waist by a black leather belt, and carrying, cupid-like, in his hands a bow and arrows decorated with sky-blue ribbons.—"Were my brothers and I actually such appallingly insipid-looking little idiots?" he asked himself. "In that case the years do bring compensations. We really bear fewer outward traces of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... appallingly lonely on this side of the great peak. Hunters were few and prospectors were seldom seen. These upward-looping trails led to no mine—only to abandoned prospect holes—for no mineral had ever been found on the western slope. The copses held no ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... I could not endure the place. Every day was so appallingly like the last. There was nothing for me to do but to dream; I dreamed of everything. I longed to get alone and let my fancy wander—weaving tales of which I was the hero, building castles of which ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... hall, with a table in the centre, around which were grouped the guests. These showed in their faces and disordered array that dismay and anxiety which were natural to them at sight of their king so strangely and appallingly stricken, but evidently they were entirely and happily unconscious of the THING that sat there in their midst, touching them, consorting its charnel horrors with their warm-blooded humanity,—so near, so close to them, that he fancied the smell of that trickling gore, that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... particularly of metals, have been so frequently examined, that the literature of the subject is appallingly heavy. In what follows I have endeavoured to keep clear of what might properly appear in a treatise on electricity on the one hand, and in a wiring table on the other. The most important work on the subject of the experimental resistance properties of metals has been ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... Desert, to which the disappointed widows, spiteful old maids, and snarling dyspeptic bachelors of this much-suffering generation should be relegated for domiciliation and reform. Freedom serves America much as AEsop's stork did the frogs: we are appallingly free to be devoured by envy, stabbed by calumny, strangled by slander. I believe if I were a painter, and desired to portray Cleopatra's death, I would assuredly give to the asp the baleful features and sneering smirk of Mrs. Prudence. Every Sunday when she twists those two curls on her forehead ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... might readily expect some startling effects from the development of a plot thus removed from the haven of probabilities and set afloat in a sea of the wildest romance. The Duchess Emilia's repentance, however, seems to have ended the interest of her career, and her good deeds are appallingly dull; in fact, her whole personality thins away ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... different these colossal figures looked, here in the deepest stronghold of termitedom, than as scurrying little insects viewed under an entomologist's glass! And how appallingly different was the viewpoint from which they were now being observed—here where the human observers were equal in size, and doomed at any moment perhaps to be paralyzed and piled with the helpless live things that made up the rest ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... drawing-room, and I should be ashamed to say how many shops we ransacked for the chair coverings, until at last we found the identical pattern to satisfy our demands. Certainly I should be ashamed to confess what we paid for the piece. Charmion was appallingly extravagant! That was another discovery which I had made in the last days. It seemed as if she found a positive satisfaction in paying abnormal prices, not with the purse-proud bombast of the nouveau riche, but rather with ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... that drooped from the folds upon her head; she was dressed according to the rule of the order in a gown of the colour become proverbial. Her bare feet were hidden; if the General could have seen them, he would have known how appallingly thin she had grown; and yet in spite of the thick folds of her coarse gown, a mere covering and no ornament, he could guess how tears, and prayer, and passion, and loneliness had wasted the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... endowed French painter. That M. Lhote does not want for sensibility is shown by his sketches and water-colours, that his intellect is sharp enough is proved by his writings; but the devitalized rectitude of his more ambitious pieces shows how appallingly difficult it is to bring intellect to bear on sensibility without crushing it. The failure of M. Lhote is the ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... century that they should sit and listen with reverential awe to a prehistoric edition of "Grimm's Fairy Stories," including Noah and his ark, the adventures of Samson and Delilah, the conversations between Balaam and his ass, and culminating in what if it were not so appallingly wicked an idea would be the most comical of them all: the conception of an elaborately organized Hell, into which the God of the Christians plunged his creatures for all eternity! Of what use was such a religion as that going to be to the world of ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... Lives" which might well serve as models to modern biographers; lives compressed into two pages of nervous English, adorned here and there, rather than disfigured, by quaint pedantic words and phrases, relics of the euphuism of the sixteenth century. Aubrey is credulous, appallingly frank, a strong partisan, a man of great industry and learning, by no means trustworthy, but none the less entertaining and delightful. He tells us that Wilkins had his "grammar learning from Mr Sylvester, 'the common ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... accepting a gift except from one she really loved, of course expected Lena to feel the same way, and every one of these presents given and taken was to her an assurance strong of a new bond between them. So they shopped together, and Lena modestly picked out some appallingly cheap ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... a woman of fifty or thereabouts, well dressed and yet careless of her dress, well bred and quite reckless of her breeding, well mannered and yet appallingly outspoken and indifferent to the opinion of her interlocutory, amiable and yet peremptory, arbitrary, and high-tempered to the last bearable degree, and withal a very typical managing matron of the upper class, treated as a naughty ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw |
