"Ghastly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... saw Pros Passmore standing at the foot of the steps—the moving speck come to full size. The old man was a wilder-looking figure than usual. He had no hat on, and a bloody cloth bound around his head confined the straggling gray locks quaintly. The face was ghastly, the clothing in tatters, and his hands trembled as they clutched a bandanna evidently full of some small articles that rattled together in his ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... law. Not merely the English state trials and the French causes celebres are there, but the criminal trials of Scotland and of America, and detached publications of remarkable cases, Newgate Calendars, Malefactors' Register, Chronicles of Crime, with ghastly prints of Newgate and Old Bailey, with their executions. The Chancellor is not responsible for this part of the library, which owes its completeness to the morbid taste of his successor, who defends the collection as best illustrating the popular ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... to the other of us, with the expression of a madman. His face was ghastly white, and the scar on his cheek stood out livid, in contrast with the white skin. I thought for a moment he was about to draw his revolver, but suddenly he turned and ran toward the crowd, and in a moment was lost ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... the country,—where neighbors take care of each other, and where every symptom is talked over, and the history of every fatal disorder turns into a tradition,—learn about sickness and the meanings of it; on its ghastly and ominous side, at ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... scored. But both Zalu Zako and Marufa regarded him as one who, having had dealings with the devil and yet had emerged safely, was to be suspected of some ghastly pact. After a calculated pause Sakamata ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... opens, that the villages get scantier, and that at last a great giant iceberg walls up the way in front, and we feast our eyes on the long-desired sight till after that the setting sun has tinged it purple (a sure sign of a fine day), its ghastly pallor shows us that the night is upon us. It is cold, and we are not sorry at half-past nine to find ourselves at Bourg d'Oisans, where there is a very fair inn kept by one Martin; we get a comfortable supper of eggs and go ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... it is true, also interest Andreyev. "The Red Laugh" is an attack on war through a portrayal of the ghastly horrors of the Russo-Japanese War; "Savva," one of the plays of this volume, is taken bodily (with a poet's license, of course) from the actual revolutionary life of Russia; "King Hunger" is the tragedy of the uprising of the ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... The rope that yoked them together was exchanged for a longer one; the party were secured, Marguerite second, and the Cellarman last; and they set out for the Refuges. The actual distance of those places was nothing: the whole five, and the next Hospice to boot, being within two miles; but the ghastly way was whitened ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... deadly white, surrounded me. The hard varnished bedstead (the mattress felt as if it were varnished) nearly filled the little room. Two stiff chairs, and a yellow window-shade which looked as if it were made of varnished wood, glittered in the feeble light of a glass lamp, while the ghastly grayish pallor of the ewer and basin on the wash-stand was thrown into bold relief by the intenser whiteness of the ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... when both with all their power and force, like a giant, fasten on them; as God saith, "Can thine heart endure, or can thine hands be strong, in the days that I shall deal with thee?" (Eze 22:14). Now will the ghastly jaws of despair gape upon thee, and now will condemnings of conscience, like thunder-claps, continually batter against thy weary spirit. It is the godly that have boldness in the day of judgment (1 John 4:17); but the wicked ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... was no easy task; all men are so like when the bones are bared; yet with pains and long scrutiny we could make them out. They lay pell-mell in undistinguished heaps, with none of their earthly beauties left. With all those anatomies piled together as like as could be, eyes glaring ghastly and vacant, teeth gleaming bare, I knew not how to tell Thersites[117] from Nireus the beauty, beggar Irus from the Phaeacian king, or cook Pyrrhias from Agamemnon's self. Their ancient marks were gone, and their bones ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... deep. The white trader would then stretch out enough calico to cover them. The strip was their price. The Maoris loved the higgling of the market, and would enjoy nothing better than to spend half a day over bartering away a single pig. Moreover, a peculiar and profitable, if ghastly, trade sprang up in tattooed heads. A well-preserved specimen fetched as much as twenty pounds, and a man "with a good head on his shoulders" was consequently worth that sum to any one who could kill him. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... peaks. But this flood of glory is soon followed by the pure whiteness of death. "Like a gigantic ghost shrouded in sepulchral sheets, the mountain now hovers in the background of the landscape, towering ghastly through the twilight until darkness ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... nephews, by four nobles. The one preferred was obliged to have distinguished himself in war, and his coronation did not take place until a successful campaign had provided enough captives to grace his triumphal entry into the capital, and enough victims for the ghastly sacrifices which formed an important part of all their religious ceremonies. Communication was held with the remotest parts of the country by means of couriers, who, trained to it from childhood, travelled with amazing swiftness. Post-houses were established on the great roads, and the messenger ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... to try the block?" Lord Kenmure, in reply, laid down his head on the block, and spread forth his hands. The headsman instantly performed his office. The usual words, "This is the head of a traitor!" were heard as the executioner displayed the streaming and ghastly ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... holes and a shallow sunken lane. In spite of the difficulties of darkness and fog, relief was complete before dawn when the 1st Division moved forward towards Wassigny, and we were able to look round our new sector. We found a ghastly relic in the sunken lane where a German cooks' wagon had been hit by one of our shells as it tried to escape, and now, in the early morning light, the scattered remains of wagon, horses and cooks, all smashed ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... said, when they questioned him on the morrow; "watch and pray." In a few days more a solitary fugitive escaped from the slaughter told that the Picts had turned desperately to bay as the English army entered Fife; and that Ecgfrith and the flower of his nobles lay, a ghastly ring of corpses, on the far-off moorland ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... more," was the quick reply. "When you find it in a woman like Ardea Dabney, it raises her to the seventh power angelic. It is only when you find it, or some ghastly imitation of it, in such people as the Farleys...." He changed the subject abruptly. "You said the Dabneys had gone up on the mountain for the summer, ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... thou not speak? hast thou seen a ghost?—As I live, she signs horns! that must be for my husband: he's returned. [JUDITH looks ghastly, and ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... his work, cutting of him down, hewing both bark and heart, both body and soul asunder. The man groans, but death hears him not; he looks ghastly, carefully, dejectedly; he sighs, he sweats, he trembles, but ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... tempests of grief, or anger, or excitement—she was always being chided for not restraining her feelings—she was always being gently lectured for using too strong expressions. What did Primrose mean by throwing down this kind though somewhat mysterious, letter, and by making use of so ghastly a word as "separation?" Who was going to divide them? Certainly not ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... had been horribly cut to pieces. Mount Gilboa was ghastly with the dead. On the morrow the stragglers came on to the field, and they lifted the latchet of the helmet from under the chin of the dead, and they picked up the swords and bent them on their knee to test the temper of the metal, and they opened the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... he usurped my property, but by a still faithful domestic we were admitted, and I, knowing every secret passage in my house, came shoeless from behind some arras, and stood before them as they sat at supper. I was a ghastly sight. I had not shaved for a fortnight, and my uniform hung in tatters from my body; round my head was the same bloody white handkerchief with which I had bound up my head at Jena. I was deadly pale from hunger, too; and from my entering so silently they believed ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... fight with Indians near Walla Walla some years before, in which a Methodist missionary had been killed; but his revolting personal appearance was now worse than ever, and the sacrilegious use of Father Pandoza's vestments, coupled with the ghastly scalp that hung from his bridle, so turned opinion against him that he was soon captured, dismounted, and his parade brought to an abrupt close, and I doubt whether he ever after quite reinstated himself in the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... sportive they seem! The pale gaslight throws a spectre-like hue over their paler features; the artificial crimson with which they would adorn the withered cheek refuses to lend a charm to features wan and ghastly. The very air is sickly with the odor of their cosmetics. And with flaunting cambrics they bend over carriage sides, salute each and every pedestrian, and receive in return answers unsuited to refined ears. They pass into the dim ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... years, lacking the graces of buoyancy and abounding youth. They are bent, gnarled, shriveled, faded, weak, and wizened. Their faces reveal the absence of the looks that betoken hope, courage, aspiration, and high purpose. Their lineaments and their gait show forth a ghastly forlornness that excites pity and despair. They seem the veriest derelicts, tossed to and fro by the currents of life without hope ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... there was a mirror, to throw the light down upon him. Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been reflected in it, and had passed from its surface and this earth's together. Haunted in a most ghastly manner that abominable place would have been, if the glass could ever have rendered back its reflections, as the ocean is one day to give up its dead. Some passing thought of the infamy and disgrace for which it ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... would be the society which he would meet in such a reproduction of a famous Parisian haunt. He thought of a Cafe chantant at Port Said, and said to himself, "It can't be worse than that." He was right then. The world had no shambles of ghastly frivolity and debauchery like ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Leonard with a shudder, for the dead man's face was ghastly to behold. Then turning to him as if ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... 9th, after a short march, the column entered the village of Appomattox Court House by what seemed to be the main road. Several dead men, dressed in the uniform of United States regular artillery, were lying on the roadside, their faces turned up to the blaze of the sun. One had a ghastly wound in the breast, which must have been made by grape ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... chair. Now that the ghastly moment had come, he felt too petrified with fear even to act the little part in which he had been diligently rehearsed by the obliging Mr. Teal. He ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... the foul streets, to drop their horrid burdens into the great pit at Aldgate; the bells of London tolled all day and all night for the passing of human souls. Hundreds of homes, isolated because of a victim of the plague found therein, became ghastly breeding-places of the disease, and then silent, disgusting graves. If a man shivered in fear, or staggered from weakness, or for very hunger turned sick, he was marked as a victim, and despite his protests was huddled ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... about the trenches—the mud, the odours, the inhumanity of compelling men to live under such foul conditions. Nothing that they have said can be too strong. Under the best conditions the life is ghastly, horrible, impossible. ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... it was rather a burning curiosity and a deep sense of duty that urged me on, than anything I could properly call affection—still less, revenge or malice. I didn't remember my father as alive at all: the one thing I could recollect about him was the ghastly look of that dead body, stretched at full length on the library floor, with its white beard all dabbled in the red blood that clotted it. It was abstract zeal for the discovery of the truth that alone pushed me on. This search became to me henceforth an end and aim in itself. It stood out, ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... to such an extent, Petrie—and I don't wonder at it; the sight was a ghastly one—that probably you don't remember what occurred when you struck out ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... mourn'd. Then towards the palace of the Destinies, Laden with languishment and grief, he flies, And to those stern nymphs humbly made request, Both might enjoy each other, and be blest. 380 But with a ghastly dreadful countenance, Threatening a thousand deaths at every glance, They answer'd Love, nor would vouchsafe so much As one poor word, their hate to him was such: Hearken awhile, and I will tell you why. Heaven's ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... deformed, bowed legs, bent backs and shrivelled little, old faces—such faces as we find in cripples aged by pain. Our hearts have been almost stilled as we have listened to the terrible stories of the hundreds of little girls in the ghastly fleshmarkets of India and China who, by the knife and the insertion into their tender bodies of wedges of expanding wood, are thus made ready, through months of torture, for the use of some inhuman Hindu or Chinese monster who for the sum of a few dollars ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... feverish brightness of her eyes, she would have looked like a corpse. Her wrinkled forehead, her hollow cheeks, her white lips told their terrible tale of the suffering of years. The ghastly appearance of her face was heightened by the furnishing of the room. This doomed woman, dying slowly day by day, delighted in bright colors and sumptuous materials. The paper on the walls, the curtains, the carpet presented the hues ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... voice. After that he became restless and increasingly snappish; his face darkened at "Fallen Leaves," and he began to look positively dangerous when a young man who was a railway porter in town, now home for a holiday, made a ghastly attempt at merriment by singing a low-class music-hall catch. What he would have done or said I do not know, for at that moment the announcement was made which the reader has been expecting—that Mrs. Abel would give ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... the woman was ghastly pale, and her sleep must have been very light, for suddenly she opened her eyes, and seeing the officers, uttered the cry, which at first only caused her lord and master to growl out an oath and turn over; whereupon she clutched at him wildly and cried to the men to leave them; they ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... it seemed to her that if life were really what she had believed it to be last night, these men and women could not walk so buoyantly, could not smile so gaily, could not spend so much thought and time on the way they looked and the things they wore. "No, it must have been a mistake, a ghastly mistake," she insisted almost passionately. "Some day we shall laugh over it together as we laughed over my jealousy of Abby. He never loved Abby, not for a minute, and yet I imagined that he did and suffered agony because of it." And her taxicab went on merrily between the ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... l'univers!' In words of imperishable intensity, he dwells upon the omnipotence of Death: 'Nous sommes plaisants de nous reposer dans la societe de nos semblables. Miserables comme nous, impuissants comme nous, ils ne nous aideront pas; on mourra seul.' Or he summons up in one ghastly sentence the vision of the inevitable end: 'Le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque belle que soit la comedie en tout le reste. On jette enfin de la terre sur la tete, et en voila pour jamais.' And so follows the conclusion of the whole: 'Connaissez donc, superbe, quel paradoxe vous ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... thee, to thousands, of whom each And one as all a ghastly gap did make In his own kind and kindred, whom to teach Forgetfulness were mercy for their sake; The Archangel's trump, not Glory's, must awake Those whom they thirst for; though the sound of Fame May for a moment soothe, it cannot slake The fever of vain longing, and the name So honoured ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... blown so chilling over the lake and through the thin shells of tenements in the neighborhood of the Settlement. Never had the pressure for food and fuel and clothes been so urgently thrust up against the people of the city in their most importunate and ghastly form. Night after night the Bishop and Dr. Bruce with their helpers went out and helped save men and women and children from the torture of physical privation. Vast quantities of food and clothing and large ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... Bible text that came into my head—the heart that is humble, which is the case with me, may look for it here. And with that I shut my eyes and let fly at it, though every knock brought my heart into my mouth. Now guess: who d'ye think answered the door? Why, that ghastly boy of hers! There he stood, all freckles and pimples; ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... remain impart a more living sense of the past than such wisely ordered accumulations; for it is the Pompeian paradox that in the image of death it can best recall life. It is a grave which has been laid bare, and it were best to leave its ghastly memories unhindered by other companionship. One feels that one ought to be there alone in order to see it aright. One ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... heard now was a new one, and one that caused her flesh to tingle. It was the sound of a stealthy hand upon her door. The knob turned noiselessly, the hinges gave a faint whine, and there on the threshold stood a white-robed figure, ghastly and spectral in the pallid light that fell upon it from the cloud-freed moon outside. Miss Blake did not utter a sound and the apparition glided forward with slow, measured steps until it stood beside her bed. Its eyes were staring and wide ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... puzzled, took his leave, but had not gone ten yards when the housekeeper flew screaming after him. It seemed she had heard a fall, and when she had gone into the Professor's bedroom she had found him lying there dead upon the hearthrug. There was a razor in his hand, and there was a ghastly gash across ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... as one in dead of night From forth dull sleep by dreadful fancy waking, That thinks she hath beheld some ghastly sprite, Whose grim aspect sets every joint a shaking: What terror 'tis! but she, in worser taking, From sleep disturbed, heedfully doth view The sight which makes ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Ulysses' griefs renew, Tears bathe his cheeks, and tears the ground bedew As some fond matron views in mortal fight Her husband falling in his country's right; Frantic through clashing swords she runs, she flies, As ghastly pale he groans, and faints and dies; Close to his breast she grovels on the ground, And bathes with floods of tears the gaping wound; She cries, she shrieks: the fierce insulting foe Relentless mocks her violence of woe: To chains condemn'd, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... had "stuck," but he had gone under early. He lay prone in the foreground, his face ghastly with a smear of blood across the cheek. The fellow who had done it was still standing there, looking down ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... suddenly dead. Another was sick of the plague with conceit. One seeing his fellow let blood falls down in a swoon. Another (saith [1619]Cardan out of Aristotle), fell down dead (which is familiar to women at any ghastly sight), seeing but a man hanged. A Jew in France (saith [1620]Lodovicus Vives), came by chance over a dangerous passage or plank, that lay over a brook in the dark, without harm, the next day perceiving what danger he was in, fell down ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue; Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm; Till the war-drum ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... useless. No remonstrances shook the iron resolution of the man who had hewed his way through the rank and file of political humanity to his own high place apart from the rest. Helpless, ghastly, snatched out of the very jaws of death, there he lay, steadily distilling the clear common-sense which had won him all his worldly rewards into the mind of his son. Not a hint was missed, not a caution was forgotten, that could guide ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... inadequate. When I came back from Chatalja to Kirk Kilisse, King Ferdinand sent his private secretary for me as an independent witness of the state of things at the front. I took the occasion to acquaint His Majesty frankly with the ghastly consequences that had followed from the absence of all precautions to ensure a wholesome water supply, from the neglect of latrine regulations in the camps and other failures in the medical and sanitary service. I ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... places where they lived and moved and died, and the buildings and monuments they erected, become like the men of yesterday. Art has made them our contemporaries. They are as near to us as Pius VII. and Napoleon. I never drive out of the old Nomentan Gate without remembering the ghastly flight of Nero,—his recognition there by an old centurion,—his damp, drear hiding-place underground, where, shuddering and quoting Greek, he waited for his executioners,—and his subsequent terrible and cowardly death, as narrated by Tacitus and Suetonius; and it seems nearer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... the lamp above his head. As the light swept them, there leaped out from the walls a collection of Tibetan devil-dance masks, hanging above the fiend-embroidered draperies of those ghastly functions—horned masks, scowling masks, and masks of idiotic terror. In a corner, a Japanese warrior, mailed and plumed, menaced him with a halberd, and a score of lances and khandas and kuttars ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... I live, you see, Go through the world, try, prove, reject, Prefer, still struggling to effect My warfare; happy that I can Be crossed and thwarted as a man, Not left in God's contempt apart, With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart, Tame in earth's paddock as her prize. ... ... ... ... ... Thank God, no paradise stands barred To entry, and I find it hard To be a Christian, as ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... to receive Maieddine in the room where she had entertained the Roumia girl last night. Being a near relation, Si Maieddine was allowed to see Lella M'Barka unveiled; and even in the pink and gold light of the hanging lamps, she was ghastly under her paint. The young man was struck with her martyred look, and pitied her; but stronger than his pity was the fear that she might fail him—if not to-day, before the journey's end. She would have to undergo a strain terrible for an invalid, and he could spare her much of this if ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... achieve the first of these great purposes, he used to twist the lad's arms and administer a certain number of hard blows upon them. This he did every day so long as the whim lasted. As for the smoking, poor Brokenribs had to smoke a certain number of pipes every day. A single pipe made him look ghastly, and the whole series made him dreadfully ill. I remember his white face at such times; but he attained his reward in becoming ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... desires, wrath, dishonesty, malice and bad conduct". The Sh[u][d.]ra servant is to be "regarded as a younger son"; a slave is to be looked on "as one's shadow," and if a man is offended by him he "must bear it without resentment"; yet the most ghastly punishments are ordered to be inflicted on Sh[u][d.]ras for ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant
... talking about. You may care for me as a child cares. You don't care as a woman does. No woman who cared for a man would write the letters you do. I ask you to tell me about yourself—what you're feeling and thinking—and you send me some ghastly screed about Spinoza or Kant. Do you suppose any man wants to hear what his sweetheart thinks about Space and Time and ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... lifeboats. Like the "Zulu," however, when day dawned it was found she was able to come into Boulogne under her own steam. After driving some cases over there, I went to see the remains in dry dock. It was a ghastly sight, made all the more poignant as one could see trunks and clothes lying about in many of the cabins, which were open to the day as if a transverse section had been made. The only humorous incident that occurred was ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... drawn from widely separated parts of Saladin's dominions. Here were Nubians from the Nile, tall and powerful men, jet black in skin, with lines of red and white paint on their faces, giving a ghastly and wild appearance to them. On their shoulders were skins of lions and other wild animals. They carried short bows, and heavy clubs studded with iron. By them were the Bedouin cavalry, light, sinewy men, brown as berries, ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... noblest Felt their hearts sink to see On the earth the bloody corpses, In the path the dauntless Three: And, from the ghastly entrance Where those bold Romans stood, All shrank, like boys who unaware, Ranging the woods to start a hare, Come to the mouth of the dark lair Where, growling low, a fierce old bear Lies amidst ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... cry of horror from the young folks that ended in a sigh of relief. David and Tom Gray quickly raised Mabel to her feet and turned to Grace, whose face was ghastly, while she trembled like a leaf. The reaction had set in the moment she realized that Mabel was safe. Jessica and Nora had both begun to cry, while the faces of the others fully expressed ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... any of you!" And almost as if it were a real mother's heart, Christian felt hers yearn over the poor pale face, growing every minute more ghastly. ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... will, Nor ever have we happy fortune tried; Then why should hope with our rent state abide? Nay, let us run unto the baseful cave, Pight in the hollow ribs of craggy cliff, Where dreary owls do shriek the live-long night, Chasing away the birds of cheerful light; Where yawning ghosts do howl in ghastly wise, Where that dull, hollow-eyed, that staring sire, Yclep'd Despair, hath his sad mansion: Him let us find, and by his counsel we Will end ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... burst open, and Caterina, ghastly and panting, her eyes distended with terror, rushed in, threw her arms round Sir Christopher's neck, and gasping out—'Anthony ... the Rookery ... dead ... in the Rookery', fell ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... stone, and it ceases to be a stream; it becomes what Charles Lamb calls "a mockery of a river—a liquid artifice—a wretched conduit." But take away the water from the most beautiful river-banks, and what is left? An ugly road with none to travel it; a long, ghastly scar on ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... intervals, lapsing back into a death-like sleep after each awakening. During one of these periods of unconsciousness Wabi cut short the tangled beard and hair, and for the first time they saw in all its emaciation the thin, ghastly face of the man who, half a century before, had drawn the map that led them to the gold. There was little change in his condition during the night that followed, except that now and then he muttered incoherently, and at these times Rod always caught in his ravings the name that he ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... thee, caitiff, far beyond the seas, To the grim tyrant Echetus, who mars All he encounters; bane of human kind. Thine ears he'll lop, and pare the nose away From thy pale ghastly visage: dire to tell! The very parts, which modesty conceals, He'll tear relentless from the seat of life, To feed his ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... back into the boat, staggering down upon their seats. One alone remained standing, and with an expression upon his face as if he was desirous of again beholding the sight. It was not a look that betrayed pleasure, but one grim and ghastly, yet strong and steady, as if it penetrated the profoundest depths of the ocean. It was the look of the ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... feast here!" Soon some lighted brands were flying In the hut of Fridolinus; And they sprang rejoicing through the Flames in singing, "Praised be Woden!" From the distance gazed with pleasure The old grandam, and her face shone Ghastly in the lurid light. ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... forward: the thicket was full of smoke and quick flashes of flame: then the woods took fire, and the scene of carnage had a new and ghastly feature added to it. Dense clouds of smoke rose, blinding and choking the combatants: the flames crackled, soared aloft, and were blown in the men's faces; and still, in the midst of this frightful array of horrors, the carnival of destruction ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... raise his heart in thankfulness to the Power that protects him; it was no doubt a pious spirit that placed them there; but the people appear to pay the reverence to the picture which they should give to its spiritual image, and the pictures themselves are so shocking and ghastly, they seem better calculated to excite horror than reverence. It was really repulsive to look on images of the Saviour covered with blood, and generally with swords sticking in different parts of the body. The Almighty is represented as an ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... running, so that it took a painful grip upon my inflamed imagination, I dreamt of my uncle's face, only that it was ghastly white like a clown's, and the throat was cut from ear to ear—a long ochreous cut. "Too late," ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... Campus Martius and there massacred to the last man, so that the clatter of arms and the groans of the dying were distinctly heard in the neighbouring temple of Bellona, where Sulla was just holding a meeting of the senate. It was a ghastly execution, and it ought not to be excused; but it is not right to forget that those very men who perished there had fallen like a band of robbers on the capital and the burgesses, and, had they found time, would have destroyed them as far as fire and sword ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... who, near allied, O'er Nature's wounds, and wrecks, preside; Whilst Vengeance, in the lurid air, 20 Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare: On whom that ravening[15] brood of Fate, Who lap the blood of sorrow, wait: Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see, And look not madly ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... aid-post. The latter helped nobly with the wounded, so I had a note sent down with them, that they had earned good treatment. The officer had a friend from the same military college in Stamboul, which friend had a ghastly shell-wound in his back. What happened, I think, was this. When his friend was knocked out, the unwounded officer—they were both boys, well under twenty—brought up a medical orderly. All three were then overwhelmed by our rush, and in ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... of indirect questions which led me to believe that neither Hargrib nor his master knew of the thing I had been conscious of from the start—that we had aboard the ship an amount of high explosive sufficient to do ghastly damage not only to this section of the coast but to the whole planet of Orcon. I gathered, however, that Leider suspected we were armed against him in some way, and would ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... among you, keep your beautiful nature unspoiled, or, where change is absolutely necessary, try to imitate nature's own methods by using the glorious trees around you, instead of iron and tin shaped by man's hand; pause before you have murdered your natural loveliness by ghastly modernity, or you will ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... one at the foot, on little tables. I entered the room and looked long at the dead old man. I thought it strange that there should be no one to watch him, but I am not afraid of dead men after the first shudder is past. It was a ghastly sight enough, however, and the candles shed a glaring yellowish light ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... and which the tyranny of nature or of man has condemned to disease through arrested growth. And where neither Christianity, nor any other religion conveying some moral help, has reached, the animal energy of such races necessarily flames into ghastly conditions of evil, and the grotesque or frightful forms assumed by their art are precisely indicative of ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... gossip and revealed the places where crimes had been committed or treasure buried. More often, perhaps, ghosts have walked the night without any ostensible or useful purpose, apparently in obedience to some ghastly compulsion that crept over them in death, as if a hesitating sickle had left them still hanging to ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... said George. His voice was very unpleasant, and so was the fire of his eyes and the ghastly rage of his scarred face. "The old man has endeavoured in his anger to rob me of everything because I would not obey him in his wickedness when I was here with him a short while before he died. Such a will as ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... says Hume, 'anarchy is the shortest lived.' The one may 'break out like a wild overthrow'; but the other from its secret, sacred stand, operates unseen, and undermines the happiness of kingdoms for ages, lurks in the hollow cheek, and stares you in the face in the ghastly eye of want and agony and woe. It is dreadful to hear the noise and uproar of an infuriated multitude stung by the sense of wrong and maddened by sympathy; it is more appalling to think of the smile answered by other gracious smiles, of ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... reflected on the ghastly situation created by the collusion of German and Austro-Hungarian diplomacy, the more certain did I feel that the key to that situation (as M. Sazonoff said later) lay in Berlin, and that there was no need to look further for the solution of the problem. ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... then, Jacksonville were to-day in ashes, and the ghastly spirit visions of 'The World' materialized into terrible realities, the negro haters would have no, cause to be disappointed. 'The World' hailed the alleged repulse and massacre of the negroes ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... excused, we knew, in the light of subsequent events. So we headed for the great labor-ghetto on the South Side in the hope of getting in contact with some of the comrades. Too late! We knew it. But we could not stand still and do nothing in those ghastly, silent streets. Where was Ernest? I was wondering. What was happening in the cities of the labor castes and Mercenaries? ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... window came the stench of this hideous parody, as if in mockery. I removed it, and another appeared in the same place shortly afterward. The earthman was rampant and insulting. Pan is not dead yet. At least he still makes a ghastly sign ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... their flags on the parapets, and, while the Federals converged from every point to this, exploding powder burned the faces of these contending hosts, who, hand to hand, fought each other to death, while far-away widows and orphans multiplied to mourn through the coming years over this ghastly folly ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... blood and choked with the bodies of the slain. Here and there the ground, deep dinted with the tramp of man and steed and plashed and slippery with gore, showed where had been some fierce and mortal conflict, while the bodies of Moors and Christians, ghastly in death, lay half concealed among the matted and trampled shrubs and ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... answered Sidney: and a sudden flash of lightning showed his countenance, ghastly, as if with the damps of Death. What could the brother do?—stay there, and see the boy perish before his eyes? leave him on the road and fly to the friendly light? The last plan was the sole one left, yet he shrank from ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that must be given in the home, in the schools and from the pulpit and from the public press. I have become convinced from long labor in this reform that the ordinary license system is only a poultice to the dram seller's conscience, and for restraining intemperance it is a ghastly failure. Institutions and patent medicines to cure drinkers have only had a partial success. The only sure cure for drunkenness is to stop before you begin. Entire legal suppression of the dram shop ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... with some strange tempest of riot and turmoil, should not be unmarked in Australia, two of the most disastrous expeditions in the annals of exploration started during its course. One, Leichhardt's, as we have just seen, vanished, and all must have perished. Of the other, under Kennedy, two ghastly famished spectres, that had once been white men, and a naked blackfellow, alone were rescued out ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... vacant caverns, whence the sons of Mohammed Bahadur were once dragged forth to die by daring Hodson's smoking pistols, their slaughtered shades grinned over the ghastly vengeance of the ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... This ghastly jest, if such it may be considered, proceeded for some time before the nobles still waiting learned what was going on. When at length a whisper of the frightful mystery of the red tent was borne to their ears, there were no longer ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... o'er his face the grave's dark hue Was in fixed shadow cast; His spasm-drawn lips more fearful grew In the ghastly shade of their lurid blue; With a shudder that ran that cold form through, The murderer's ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... the agony— Dread pain that sees the future all too well With ghastly preludes whirls and racks my soul. Behold ye—yonder on the palace roof The spectre-children sitting—look, such things As dreams are made on, phantoms as of babes, Horrible shadows, that a kinsman's hand ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... slouching gait disturbed the grim peace of the lonely bluff. Arizona shuffled slowly off the road. He reached the edge of the bush; but he went no further. For he reeled, and his hands clasped his body somewhere about his chest. His eyes were half closed, and his face looked ghastly in the wintry light. By a great effort he steadied himself and abruptly sat down in the snow. He was just off the track and his back ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... scenes to whose realization he looked forward, or of spirits whose presence he invoked. And the man must be little capable of receiving a religious impression of any kind, who, to this day, does not acknowledge some feeling of awe, as he looks up at the pale countenances and ghastly forms which haunt the dark roofs of the Baptisteries of Parma and Florence, or remains altogether untouched by the majesty of the colossal images of apostles, and of Him who sent apostles, that look down from the darkening gold of the domes of ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... relation had any sacredness in his eyes—that he was unfit to move among human relations who had violated one so sacred and tender. Therefore, the Mosaic law uplifted his bleeding corpse, and brandished the ghastly terror around the parental relation to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... sound as of footsteps coming from the direction of the drawing-room window, across the wet slate flags which surrounded the cottage, and a moment afterwards, peering through the darkness, Mrs. Goddard saw a man with a ghastly face standing ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... rejection and death and the consequent destruction of Jerusalem and he pronounced his pathetic lament, "If thou hadst known in this day, even thou, the things which belong unto peace!" He predicted the ghastly horrors of the coming siege and the desolation of Zion and declared that it was due to inability to see that he had come as a Saviour and that his ministry had been a gracious visitation which might have resulted in repentance ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... whiter and more deathlike. She quite forgot the words she was saying, all remembrance of them faded from her mind. She came to a sudden stop. Her father's promptings were all in vain, she could hear nothing he said, she could see nothing but her mother's sorrowful and ghastly face. ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... he was compelled to submit to conditions galling alike to the sovereign and the man. He found, on his accession, the terrible penal laws against the Papists in full force; the hangman's knife was yet warm with its ghastly butcher-work of quartering and disembowelling suspected Jesuits and victims of the lie of Titus Oates; the Tower of London had scarcely ceased to echo the groans of Catholic confessors stretched on the rack by Protestant inquisitors. He was torn by conflicting interests ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... ancient rooms. Modern paper-hangings are too superficial and wishy-washy for the purpose. Tapestry, it is true, there is now, completely covering the walls of several of the rooms, but all faded into ghastliness; nor could some of it have been otherwise than ghastly, even in its newness, for it represented persons suffering various kinds of torture, with crowds of monks and nuns looking on. In another room there was the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and other subjects not to be readily ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... up to the cabin-table with an assumption of firmness which was completely belied by the ghastly pallor of his countenance and the convulsive twitching of his white lips. Grasping the table with both hands, he said in a voice which he in ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... only keep this from her for a few days, till my own control of her has strengthened. I must keep it from her. She must not see to-morrow's papers with their ghastly story." He chilled with a fuller sense of the suicide's power to torture her. "She must leave the city to-night. She will be called before the coroner, her mediumship and Clarke's control of her will be howled through the street—" He groaned with the shame ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... dreadfully, and did almost as much harm to their masters as the deadly bullets of the whites; and when the fire ceased, not more than half of them regained their seats and galloped off, leaving the rest, men and horses, in a ghastly heap. Seeing them in full retreat, the occupants of the tower descended to receive Mr. Hardy and Fitzgerald, Terence much delighted at having at last had his share in ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... said Jackson. He saw the priest reel and turn pale to the lips. "I should say a—a Brownhill," he added hastily. The other man gulped, steadied himself with an effort, and gave a ghastly smile. If you had walked into a temple at Thibet and planked down sixpence and asked for an idol wrapped up in brown paper you could not have done a more dreadful thing than Jackson had done; but the priest forgave him and produced in silence a trayful of Brownhills. Then was Jackson like unto ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... present who had known him as Mr. Underwood's partner. Walcott, taking advantage of the situation, began to protest his innocence. Mr. Britton, unmoved, at once beckoned Darrell to his side. Upon seeing him Walcott's face took on a ghastly hue and he seemed for a moment on the verge of collapse, but he quickly pulled himself together, regarding Darrell meanwhile with a venomous malignity seldom seen on a human face. Not the least surprised man in the ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... a check for the balance to his credit and demanded currency, but the cashier had become alarmed by the investigations made by the General and had temporized—said he must consult the president, and asked the major to call two hours later, whereat Burleigh had taken alarm. He was looking ghastly, said the cashier. It was apparent to every one that mentally, bodily, or both, the lately debonair and successful man of the world had ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... were closely and loyally attached to Ragnar. Then Ragnar attacked him with his fleet, but, by the just visitation of the Omnipotent, was openly punished for disparaging religion. For when he had been taken and cast into prison, his guilty limbs were given to serpents to devour, and adders found ghastly substance in the fibres of his entrails. His liver was eaten away, and a snake, like a deadly executioner, beset his very heart. Then in a courageous voice he recounted all his deeds in order, and at the end of his recital added the following sentence: "If the porkers knew the punishment ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... I should slow diverge, and listless stray Into some thought, feeling, or dream unright, O Watcher, my backsliding soul affray; Let me not perish of the ghastly blight. Be thou, O Life eternal, in me light; Then merest approach of selfish or impure Shall start ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... a ghastly smile, and, at his command, the Indians, seizing their white victims, bound them to four trees. Stakes of glowing wood were prepared for their torture. Once more Magua offered the alternative of dishonour or death. Cora wavered, but ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... bed, with the 'day of great importance' tingling in his ears. He could not go to sleep for reflections on the subject, and even after shutting his eyes it hovered over him in ghastly dreams. There was an immense table in an immense hall, with ten thousand parsons on the one side, and ten thousand old maids on the other. At the head presided Mrs. Marsh, with the bishop in waiting ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... "Fort of London" had been drenched with the "ghastly dew" of aerial navies barely three hours before Parliament met on June 13, Members showed themselves uncommon calm. They were at their best a few days earlier in paying homage to Major Willie Redmond. It had been his ambition to be Father of ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... gnashing their teeth with mutual and unchangeable hatred. Kalilah and his sister made reciprocal gestures of imprecation, whilst the two other princes testified their horror for each other by the most ghastly convulsions, and screams that could not be smothered. All severally plunged themselves into the accursed multitude, there to wander in an ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... going to try and show off," said Lalage, "by using ghastly long words which nobody could possibly understand you'd better go and do it to the Cat. She'll like it. I'm not going to sit here all day listening to you. Either read the magazine or don't, whichever you like. ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... of a human being, flocks of hideous galanasas and great droves of condors would rise lazily, too heavy from their ghastly feast, ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... that the effect would be tremendous upon nerves so highly strung and sensitive as those of Andre. But he need not have been alarmed on this point. As the young painter mastered the contents of the letter his features became ghastly pale, and a shudder convulsed every nerve and muscle of his frame. With a mechanical gesture he extended the paper to M. de Breulh, uttering the one ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... ceiling, the walls, the floor, were all covered with portraits, staring sternly and fixedly at him with living eyes. The room extended and stretched out to a vast and interminable gallery, to afford room for millions of repetitions of the ghastly picture. In vain did numerous physicians seek to discover, with a view to the alleviation of the poor wretch's sufferings, some secret connexion between the incidents of his past life and the strange phantom that thus eternally haunted him. No explanation or clue could be obtained from the patient, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... had not clearly seen the villainy of Rochester. The woman showed it. Rochester had picked up a stranger, because of the mutual likeness, and sent him home to play his part, hoping, no doubt, to have a ghastly hit at his family. What about his wife? He had either never thought of her, or ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... dawn was just sufficient to give a ghostly appearance to what may be truly termed the ghastly ruins around them, and to reveal in undefined solemnity the neighbouring mountains. Smoke still issued from the half-smothered fires, and here and there a spectral figure might be seen flitting silently to and fro. But all was profoundly still ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... being laid in a chamber, where, when about one o'clock, I heard a voice that awakened me. I drew the curtain, and in the casement of the window I saw, by the light of the moon, a woman leaning through the casement into the room, in white, with red hair and pale and ghastly complexion. She spoke loud, and in a tone I had never heard, thrice. "A horse;" and then, with a sigh more like the wind than breath, she vanished, and to me her body looked more like a thick cloud than substance. I was so much frightened, that my hair stood on end, and my night- clothes fell ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... grew ghastly pale in the uncertain light of the half-veiled moon. She moved a step and caught the ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... round table, and in order that the ladies and gentlemen should alternate themselves properly, Mr Musselboro was opposite to the host. Next to him on his right was old Mrs Van Siever, the widow of a Dutch merchant, who was very rich. She was a ghastly thing to look at, as well from the quantity as from the nature of the wiggeries which she wore. She had not only a false front, but long false curls, as to which it cannot be conceived that she would suppose that any one would be ignorant ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope |
