"Gruesome" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... He spoke quite openly of his illness, and declared himself to have completely recovered from it. "Even Jim has ceased his gruesome threats," he said cheerily. "There will be no more lopping of branches this season. Just as well, for I chance to have developed an affection ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... I help it, Joan?" he pleaded. "You saw how it was?" As she grew quieter, he talked. "I heard you scream like a person being tortured to death—twice—a gruesome enough sound, let me tell you, to hear in the dead of a white, still night. I didn't altogether want to break into your house. I've heard some ugly stories about men venturing to disturb the work of murderers. But, you see, Joan, I've a fear of myself. I've a cruel brain. I can use ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... don't think he felt much. What a gruesome little woman it is this evening! You're shivering. Put ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... got back as well as he could to his captain, and said, "Oh dear! in that house there is a gruesome witch, and I felt her breath and her long nails in my face; and by the door there stands a man who stabbed me in the leg with a knife, and in the yard there lies a black spectre, who beat me with his wooden club; ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... and Thorneycroft here crowded themselves into the room and, on seeing what had happened, added to the general buzz of excited exclamations; but Holmes took command of the situation, like the old hand that he was, entirely used to such gruesome sights, and stepped to the telephone on a small table in one ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... disturb your night's rest. It is a gruesome, ghastly, blood-curdling, hair-erecting, sleep-murdering piece of work, with a thrill on ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... are 'The Bad Monarchs', a poetic castigation (without mention of names) of the type of ruler perfectly exemplified by Duke Karl of Wuerttemberg, up to about the year 1770; 'In a Battle', a powerful description of the rage of combat, with all its sickening and inspiring details; 'The Pestilence', a gruesome tribute to the power of God as manifested in the horrors of the plague, and 'Count Eberhard the Quarreler', a patriotic battle-ballad in honor of a locally renowned Suabian fighter. Better than any of these, however, from a poetic point of view, is the ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... they listed, as if it were a giant canopy, beneath which they might shelter from the noontide heat their new-born love. They reigned everywhere, even among the rocks and the springs, even over that gruesome stretch of ground that teemed with such hideous growth, and which had seemed to sink and give way beneath their feet, but which they loved yet even more than the soft grassy couches of the garden, for the strange thrill of passion they ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... floor lay a skeleton, every vestige of flesh gone from the bones to which still clung the mildewed and moldered remnants of what had once been clothing. Upon the bed lay a similar gruesome thing, but smaller, while in a tiny cradle near-by was a third, a ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... some gruesome sights, and I have heard such tales of ruthless cruelty as you would deem almost passing possibility. I have read of the awful doings of the Lord Bernabo Visconti at Milan in the olden time, but I believe ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... peered inside. In the darkness he could make out nothing. Throwing off his mittens, he lighted a match, and as the tiny flame threw its feeble light upon the interior he made out at the farther side a gruesome looking mound of blankets. The match burned his finger tips and the miserable shelter was once more plunged in blackness. Involuntarily Connie shuddered. His first inclination was to leave that place—to ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... Laramie set about his work, disdaining to inspect various gruesome specimens in alcohol ranged along a shelf. Aided by an occasional match which he lighted and shielded in his left hand, he found the cabinet and with his key opened the door. The flame of his match too carefully guarded, flickered in his fingers, ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... it will be all right to publish my report in the newspapers. I don't care much for newspaper publicity, and I do not think that my report is written in a style suitable for newspapers. The people want such a thing written with more poetry and color—gruesome, nerve-wrecking suspense, complete revenge, mountainous clouds, blue, breeze-swept sky—that is what they want. But if the publication of the report will bring you any joy, I will not ...
— An Aviator's Field Book - Being the field reports of Oswald Boelcke, from August 1, - 1914 to October 28, 1916 • Oswald Boelcke
... flight, the desperate hand-to-hand struggles for life, mingled with the brutal yells, interspersed with the piteous cries for mercy, followed by the horrible silence which finally settles over the slippery decks, and the gruesome spectacle of the dreadful vandalism as the murderers ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... and again, in response to orders given by the enterprising landlord of the property, long-closed doors and windows have been thrown open, and painters and paperhangers have brought their skill to bear upon gruesome rooms and halls; the house is once more inhabited, this time by a widow lady and some grown-up sons. These tenants come from a distance, and are entirely strangers both to the neighbourhood and the former history of the house, but, to use her own words, the mistress 'cannot understand ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... gruesome. I sneaked away, and had already reached the foot of the hill, when, to my horror, I noticed the grey man approaching. He took off his hat, bowed ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Hideous, gruesome carvings they were, resembling some futuristic sculpture of to-day, for the artist who had fashioned them had given hardly more than a hint of the finished representation. It was rather as if the masses of rock that had been transported there had become ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... a near relation of the late lamented Mr. Job," said Bob Dashwood, with a wry face. "But never mind, keep on rubbing. I'm feeling more life in it already. But, I say, Den, this is a weird place we're in. These German fellows don't seem to take their gruel like our chaps. It's a gruesome thing ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... theory, how to make The matutinal tea and coffee, And, when at school, I used to bake A gruesome mess described as toffee; But these, which form my whole cuisine, Are scarce the kind of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... perhaps, shot from behind—and now thrust out from the verge into the abyss, to go hurtling into the mist-wreathed depths.... No, Zeke must not come back. The hardness crept again into her face, as she went forward. She held her eyes averted from that gruesome cavern high in the ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... Mr. Crosby, who is known to nearly everyone, and Mr. Standish, who has so pleasantly introduced himself to me, I know none of you. So I'll have to ask— (He stops suddenly and rises, facing them all. He points slowly to the chesterfield, facing fireplace up C.) That's rather a gruesome thing there. I think we'll move it into another room. Will some of you gentlemen carry Mr. Wales' body into the other room. (There is a pause. The men all hesitate. Finally MASON starts to move to chesterfield. ...
— The Thirteenth Chair • Bayard Veiller
... shivered and shook with fear, and when the Crocodile, in a gruesome growl, remarked that he was hungry and wanted a good meal, the wretched creature hadn't a ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... poverty. The fearful state of things in American cities was brought about in a very few years, whereas the gradual extension of our poverty-stricken classes has been going on for centuries. To us poverty, besides being a horror, was more or less of a mystery; but America exhibited the development of the gruesome monster with lurid distinctness. In the old countries the men who first were able to seize the land gradually sublet portions either for money or warlike service; the growth of manufactures occupied ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... in his supple arms Took up the gruesome weight, And, with a cry of bitter fear, He threw ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... water-colour drawings, by Mr. EDWARD H. BEARNE. If there were not so many rivers and lagoons in the exhibition, it might be called the "Bearnese Oberland." These pictures are well painted, and, during the gruesome weather, a tiny tour round this sunny ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... it as he liked, free to speculate on its pictures and engravings; to rummage the immense collection of china in the basement rooms which no one but himself ever looked at; to examine some new corner of the muniment-room, and to ponder the strange and gruesome collection of death-masks, made by Coryston's grandfather, and now ranged in one of the annexes of the library—gave him endless entertainment. He was a born student, in whom the antiquarian instincts would perhaps ultimately overpower the poetic and literary tastes which were ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... looked down upon the savage horde beneath. He counted fifty Arabs and estimated that there were five times as many Manyuema. The latter were gorging themselves upon food and, under the very noses of their white masters, preparing the gruesome feast which is the PIECE DE RESISTANCE that follows a victory in which the bodies of their slain enemies fall into their ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... terror, Mary followed, while Mrs. Dunbar led the way with the light, and Jennie had hurried on ahead to make ready, scarcely knowing where the gruesome burden ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... opened the door and picked up the gander and, whirling it around his head, dashed it violently at the one candle which was thus knocked over and extinguished, leaving the room in darkness but for a few smouldering embers on the hearth, and with the gruesome addition to the company of what two of those present believed to be the severed head ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... answered the young man. "Things are not often so serious as they are supposed to be. It's like being in a house that's supposed to be haunted—on All Hallow E'en, for instance—it's awfully gruesome and creepy at night when the wind moans and the owls screech. And then, the next morning, one wonders how one could have been such an idiot. Other things are often like that. You think the world's coming to an end—and then it doesn't, you ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... would not have been paid to this gruesome tale had it not been repeated to various people during the course of several months. The boy wrote letters reiterating these incidents. His stories always went on to include the most surprising amount of abuse. It seemed that everywhere he had been illtreated. Farmers ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... church was still piled up to the windows with the corpses of those that had fled there for sanctuary. Skulls with gray hairs still attached to them, tresses which had once adorned the heads of young girls, and the rotting limbs of small children were mingled in one gruesome heap. It is said that the Ottoman High Commissioner, who was sent by the Turkish Government with the British commission to investigate, on beholding this sight, turned to one of the perpetrators who was present and asked him how much Russia had ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... of slavery, the leaders of the campaign made bitter and effective use of a number of recent events. "Uncle Tom's Cabin", published in 1852, and already immensely popular, was used as a political tract to arouse, by its gruesome picture of slavery, a hatred of slaveholders. Returned settlers from Kansas went about the North telling horrible stories of guerrilla warfare, so colored as to throw the odium all on one side. The scandal of the moment was the attack made by Preston Brooks on Sumner, after the latter's furious ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... Glen Springs. Some of them were even more nervous and indignant than the landlord, for almost the sole remunerative business of these people was the keeping of summer boarders, and they feared that gruesome reports about the place ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... Peace Congresses are held, observed Queen Wilhelmina's residence from without, looked at some of the famous paintings in the art gallery, then shuddered over the instruments of torture on exhibition in the "Torture Chamber" found in the old prison. There were some gruesome articles here. ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... The gruesome thought of those rats and of that long night drove me mad with fear. I rolled about on the floor, I struck out with my arms and legs, like one possessed, in violent, childish fury. Then, worn out, I let my arms and legs rest; at last, tired, swallowed up in my helplessness, left without ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... dry sensation in her throat, a guttered frightened feeling in her breast. Never in her life as yet had she suffered from even momentary fear that she would not get what she had set her heart on. The sensations of the afternoon had been full and poignant, and this gruesome discovery coming on the top of them had really made her head ache. No wonder her father had hidden that photograph, so secretly behind her own-ashamed of having kept it! But could he hate Jon's mother and yet keep her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... kind will become the less effective, and will be the more easily overrun the more firmly the idea is fixed that such preventive means are at his disposal. At the same time the discussion of all these sexual matters, even with their gruesome background, will force on the mind a stronger engagement with sexual thought than had ever before occurred, and this will find its discharge in an increased sexual tension. On the other hand, this new knowledge of means of safety will greatly increase the playing with danger. Of course it ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... crashed down a litter of non-ferrous wreckage. And now the cone of space-ships from the Buffalo base of Triplanetary was approaching Pittsburgh, hurling itself toward the Nevian plunderer and toward known, gruesome and hopeless defeat. ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... of the murdered stool-pigeon. For the first time, Edward Gilder, as his glance unconsciously followed the officer's movement, looked and saw the ghastly inanimate heap of flesh and bone that had once been a man. He fairly reeled at the gruesome spectacle, then fumbled with an outstretched hand as he moved stumblingly until he laid hold on a chair, into which he sank helplessly. It suddenly smote upon his consciousness that he felt very old and broken. He marveled ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... which looks like a young grainer's first attempt at imitating "birds'-eye maple." Upon a second glance it seems possible that the "hose" is a snake, the tail of which the devil is gnawing. The gruesome design illustrates a yet more gruesome Interlude, entitled, "The Bat and the Devil." But it gives no fair idea of the contents of the volume, some of which ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • Various
... devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay, kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and meanness. On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity always remain in the end the supreme forces of human life. Thackeray, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... he was engaged in dealing with a prosaic, crushed foot. A heavy boat had jammed his patient against the iron side of the steam-carrier. The man was stoical, like the rest of his mates, but he was in torture, for the bones were all huddled into a twisted mass—a gruesome thing, ladies, and a common thing, too, if you would but think it. Ferrier had to use the knife first, for the accident was not so recent as he could have wished; then for near half an hour he was working like some clever conjurer, while the vessel heaved slowly, and the reek of the cabin coiled ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... clumsy, slouching, rickety; gawky; lumping, lumpish^; lumbering; hulky^, hulking; unwieldy. squalid, haggard; grim, grim faced, grim visaged; grisly, ghastly; ghost like, death like; cadaverous, grewsome^, gruesome. frightful, hideous, odious, uncanny, forbidding; repellant, repulsive, repugnant, grotesque, bizarre; grody [Coll.], grody to the max [Coll.]; horrid, horrible; shocking &c (painful) 830. foul &c (dirty) 653; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... with their faith in the future. Dulcie had a proud, constant presentiment in the recesses of her woman's heart that the husband and father's good name and merited reputation would surely find his memory out in this world yet. She had no material possessions save a few of his gorgeous, gruesome, hieroglyphical pictures, and what she had borrowed or inherited of his lower cunning in tinting, a more marketable commodity in the present ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... Christian name. He played lawn-tennis and billiards daily with the General, and should he prove refractory (a not infrequent occurrence) the General had only to threaten, "I shall have to make you smoke another of my black cigars, Billy," for the S.B. to capitulate instantly with a shudder, for he had gruesome recollections of the effects one of these powerful home-grown cigars had produced on him upon ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... former Bishops adorn its white walls, and narrow rectangular windows at frequent intervals admit a dim, mellow light through their dark panes. Before one of these windows—apparently with no thought of incongruity in the exhibition of such a gruesome object attached to a Christian church—there has been affixed an iron grating, said to have served the Holy Inquisition as a gridiron on which to roast its heretical victims. Within, an ambulatory, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... ready for lighting. I touched a match to it, and Kitty dropped on her knees in front of its riotous warmth and glow. Suddenly she sprang up and stared about her, sniffing and catching her breath. I had noticed it too; it fairly took one by the throat, the gruesome odor. ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... larger and quieter scenes, of more ancient and enduring landscapes. Many of the country songs describing crime and death have refrains of a startling joviality like cock crow, just as if the whole company were coming in with a shout of protest against so sombre a view of existence. There is a long and gruesome ballad called "The Berkshire Tragedy," about a murder committed by a jealous sister, for the consummation of which a wicked miller is hanged, and the chorus (which should come in a kind of ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... torments of future punishment. They have nothing to do with that. 'Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire?' If you want a commentary, remember the words, 'Our God is a consuming fire.' That puts us on the right track, if we needed any putting on it, for answering this question, not in the gruesome and ghastly sense in which some people take it, but in all the grandeur of Isaiah's thought. He sees God as 'the everlasting burnings.' Fire is the emblem of life as well as of death; fire is the means of quickening as well as of destroying; and when we speak of Him as 'the everlasting ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... too cautious, sir," he explained. "Harf our chance of coming out ahead is being ready beforehand, and harf our satisfaction is to keep from having any burials at sea—which are gruesome things, any way ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... the steps lay a dead Marine, and beside him stood a French surgeon, who greeted them warmly. The wounded were in a cellar, and if they were not got out soon, it was obvious that they would be burned alive. Inside the hall were piles of bicycles, loaves of bread, and dead soldiers, all in gruesome confusion. In the cellar dead and wounded were lying together. The wounded had all to be carried on stretchers, for everyone who could crawl had fled from that ghastly inferno, and only those who have shifted wounded on stretchers can appreciate the courage it requires to do it under shell fire. ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... let our imaginations play. We hold conversations with Hans and Jacob in our long watches. Hans is fat and cheerful and trusting. He believes every thing that the Kaiser tells him and has a cheerful disposition. But Jacob is a professor and a fearful 'strafer.' It seems a little gruesome, doesn't it, but not after you have been in ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... everything hadn't made any mistakes. He was also bothered about the steering-rocket fuel, and he was uncomfortable about the business of releasing the spaceship from the launching cage. There was, too, cause for worry in the take-off rockets—if the tube linings had shrunk there would be some rather gruesome consequences—and there could always be last-minute orders from Washington to delay or ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... of Gimp's quarters, the bundles were opened; the contents, some of them dried and gruesome, all of them ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... the first witness. He described in his own fashion the finding of Archibald McBride's body. Then a few skilful questions by Moxlow brought out the fact of his having met John North on the Square immediately before his own gruesome discovery. The little lamplighter was excused, and Colonel Harbison took his: place. He, in his turn, quickly made way for Andy Gilmore. Moxlow next interrogated Atkinson, Langham's client, who explained the nature of ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... change in the scene. Under the tower a band of soldiers made a passage through the crowd of people. Pope John XVI came riding backwards on an ass. His ears and nose had been cut off, and his eyes had been dug out. It was a gruesome sight. A wine-bladder, waving over his head in the wind, made it worse. The people were silent, and shuddered simultaneously, for he was, after all, Christ's representative and St. Peter's successor, ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... a motion toward the back of the car. Then Anderson looked over the seats. With that he opened the door and in one powerful haul he drew Ruenke sliding out into the road. Ruenke's bruised and bloody face was uppermost, a rather gruesome sight. Anderson glared down upon him, while men from the other cars crowded around. Ruenke's eyes resembled those of a cornered rat. Anderson's jaw ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... quaking and mazed and skeery, for there was the great stone, half in, half out of the water, for all the world like a strange big coffin; and at the head was the black snag, stretching out its two arms in a dark gruesome cross, and on it a tiddy light flickered, like a dying candle. And they all knelt down in the mud, and said, "Our Lord, first forward, because of the cross, and then backward, to keep off the Bogles; but without speaking out, for they knew that the Evil Things would catch them, if they ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... The gruesome meal in the story of the juniper tree reminds us of the Tantalus story and the meal of Thyestes. Demeter (or Thetes) ate a shoulder of the dismembered Pelops, who was set before the gods by his father Tantalus, and the shoulder, after he was brought to life again, was ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... barrel-like paunch," cried Giles, "do I pronounce this dire and dreadful ban, videlicet, Sir Fatness, nota bene and to wit: may the fiend rend it with gruesome gripings—aye, rend it with claws and beak, unguibus et ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... of the Mannings in 1849, his going so often to the Morgue in Paris, his visit to America to 'the exact site where Professor Webster did that amazing murder', may seem legitimate for one who had to study crime among the other departments of life; but at times he revels in gruesome details in a way which jars on our feeling, and betrays too theatrical a love of sensation. However, no one could say that Dickens is generally morbid, in view of the sound and hearty appreciation which he had for all that is wholesome ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... a great gruesome carl!" said Black, echoing in Scotch the Dutchman's expression as he ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... again, they left the gruesome gallery and went down the stairway with the Olema's torch leaving vague, fantastic wreaths of odorous smoke curling up along the polished, dull-yellow slant of the pyramid. Back on the floor again, the ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... face down on the table, two cadets seized his hands and drew him forward, two others took him by the feet so that his body lay stretched out lengthwise. The tallow candles were taken from the table and lifted up high, and the whole affair had an absolutely gruesome look. ...
— Good Blood • Ernst Von Wildenbruch
... growing suddenly faint, she loosed her hold and dropped to the ground beneath, and down to the lowest depths of Nifl-heim. There she lay, pale and motionless, gazing with fixed and horror-struck eyes upon the gruesome sights of Hel's realm, trembling violently the while, like one overcome by ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... silence the men raised the poor lifeless body, and with some difficulty brought it back to the light of day. When the gruesome business was done, Gimblet returned to the cottage, tired out with his night's work; for, like all the men on the place, he had been scouring the moors since the previous evening, when Mark's derisive words had first sent them, hot foot, to assure themselves of Juliet's whereabouts. As he ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... been that I would complete my high school studies. I cannot pretend to diligence. The passing months found me less frequently in the classroom than in secluded spots along the Calcutta bathing GHATS. The adjoining crematory grounds, especially gruesome at night, are considered highly attractive by the yogi. He who would find the Deathless Essence must not be dismayed by a few unadorned skulls. Human inadequacy becomes clear in the gloomy abode of miscellaneous ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... first move. Your next is as follows. Every rustic-cottage contains gruesome china-ornaments and excruciating-cheap German-prints of such subjects as "The Tryst" (always spelt "The Trist" on the German print), "The Saylor's Return," "The Warior's Dreem," "Napoleon at Arcola," and so ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... friends, and when she found it was a disputed point, she determined to give the Hedgepig the benefit of the doubt. Then the taste for valerian, and the fox's method of capture, were drawn from facts, and the gruesome details as to who ate who in the Glass Pond ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... Hetman in his play of Hidalla (now renamed after the leading role), and as Ernest Scholtz in The Marquis of Keith. As Jack the Ripper in The Box of Pandora I am glad to say that I have not viewed him, though he is said to be a gruesome figure during the few minutes that he is in the scene. His mimetic methods recalled to me the simplicity of Antoine—who is not a great actor, yet, somehow or other, an impressive one. Naturally, Wedekind is the poet speaking his own lines, acting his own ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... over the hard drudgery of practice. Those that witness only the final games of the year, little realize the gruesome task of preparedness. Every football player will acknowledge that some day he has ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... things in a detached, impersonal manner, as one who states commonplace facts. He had not particularly desired to speak of them. For him those gruesome incidents of war and invasion held no special horror. They might have rested heavily enough on his mind once. But he had come apparently to accept them as the grim collateral of war, without reacting emotionally to their ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... "Hi, ho, steady there, old fellow!" said Rudolf. He now entered the part of the woods where the beeches and oaks grow so closely together that at midday the sky seems green, rather than blue. The moon shone out suddenly, and he saw by its light a gruesome-looking head without a body that seemed to grin at him from among the undergrowth. His heart stood still for a moment, and then he laughed at his fears; for he saw that it was only a grotesque old tree-stump, such as one so often sees ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... a kind of gruesome fable," she said when he was done, and she shuddered slightly. "The other brother was Death, wasn't he? When you told it to me ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... ensemble of the flying buttresses at the rear of the choir. Most persons, so gifted, have tried their prentice, or their master, hands at depicting this grand marshalled array of "folded wings," and, but for the gruesome morgue at its foot, which ever intrudes into the view, one might almost say it is the most idyllic and most specious view of a great cathedral that it were possible to have. Were it not for this charming view of these buttressed ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... reminded each other of this promise, the day after their arrival, and grumbled. Secundina had as much as she could do to keep the rooms in order; and the only other service she was able to give the visitors was to recount gruesome stories of the villa while she made their beds or took a top layer of dust off their dressing-tables. According to her, the Bella Vista was the cheapest furnished house to let in the principality, because years ago a murder had been committed in it. A woman had been killed ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... was a great stir and bustle and laying out of coats and dresses, for many were planning to go to the seashore to see the Princess offered up to the Stoorworm,—though a gruesome sight 'twould be to see. Ashipattle's father and brothers were planning to go with the rest, but his mother and sister wept, and said they would not see it ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... wounded and burying the dead. But from the looks of the field the task seemed difficult. In the little clusters of bushes, behind trees, in gullies, and in every conceivable place that seemed to offer shelter, lay the dead. What a shudder thrills the whole frame when you stand and contemplate the gruesome faces of the battle's dead. In every posture and all positions, with every conceivable shade of countenance, the glaring, glassy eyes meet you. Some lay as they fell, stretched full length on the ground; others show a desperate ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... them, although it must be borne in mind that we are looking at the matter collectively; that is to say, without reckoning on individual idiosyncrasies of expression in speech. Of course we know that joy is apt to make us raise the voice and sadness to lower it. For instance, we have all heard gruesome stories, and have noticed how naturally the voice sinks in the telling. A ghost story told with an upward inflection might easily become humourous, so instinctively do we associate the upward inflection ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... by John Vance Cheney, Loomis has found some of his most powerful inspirations in the work of our lyrist, Aldrich,—such as the rich carillon of "Wedded," and his "Discipline," one of the best of all humorous songs, a gruesome scherzo all about dead monks, in which the music furnishes out the grim irreverence of the ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... brief record of the titanic struggle five years ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have come. What Gettysburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden was in the first great contest between the white race and the Mongolian. Here covetous Death for once was satisfied, his gruesome garnering seen at each wintry nightfall in the {71} windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn along miles ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... a gruesome mandate. She had scant choice. She did not doubt that this was the fugitive, the "wolf's head," and should she turn to flee, he could stop her progress with a pistol-ball, for doubtless he would fancy her alert to disclose the discovery and share in the reward. Perhaps feminine curiosity aided ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... was still sitting staring out across the aisle. There was something more than a little gruesome in the sight of him. He wore a crushed, beaten look, as if all the life and fight had gone out of him. A customer came to the desk to cash a cheque. The cashier shovelled the money to him under the bars with the air of one whose mind is elsewhere. Mike could guess what he was feeling, ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... came-over-Waterloo-Bridge-with-half-a crown-in-my-pocket-and-now-look-at-me class of millionaires in existence. He had started almost literally with nothing. By carefully excluding from his mind every thought except that of making money, he had risen in the world with a gruesome persistence which nothing could check. At the age of fifty-one, he was chairman of Blunt's Stores, L't'd, a member of Parliament (silent as a wax figure, but a great comfort to the party by virtue of liberal contributions to its funds), and a knight. This was good, but he aimed still ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... slow way, comforted and elate. How almost shamefully easy it was; a few loads of coal and faggots here and there, a few blankets and warm garments whose cost counted for so little when one's hands were full, could change a gruesome village winter into a season during which labour-stiffened and broken old things, closing their cottage doors, could draw their chairs round the hearth and hover luxuriously over the red glow, which in its comforting fashion of seeming to have understanding of the dull dreams ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... dot that moved in wide circles and came up across the heavens slowly, and he knew it was a buzzard that scented carrion and was coming up the wind toward that scent. He had seen them many a time before on their gruesome trails, and the picture which he carried ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... wanderings in that gruesome land of swamps and sand, which, when we at last escaped from it, we learned was Florida, I must not write here. It was months before such of us as were left crawled through into civilisation, and it is not too much ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... of all "shop," ours is the most unsuitable for general conversation because of the morbid fascination it has for most people. Ladies especially will listen with avidity to medical matters, perceiving nothing gruesome in the details at the moment; but afterward developing nerves on the subject, and probably giving the young practitioner good reason to regret unwary confidences. I tried to stave off the topic, but the will-power of the majority was against me, and finally I found ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... first delightedly called her to share his discoveries, and learn the true story (if it were not rather the malicious counterfeit) of the new divine mother to whom he has thus absolutely entrusted himself. Was not this absolute chastity itself a kind of death? She, too, in secret makes her gruesome midnight offering with averted eyes. She dreams one night he is in danger; creeps to his cubicle [172] to see; the face is covered, as he lies, against the cold. She traces the motionless outline, raises the coverlet; ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... felt impelled to turn and look at these gruesome relics. In a square, glass case he saw the creatures. They lay in rows on a bed of moss; one might almost have supposed that unclean life yet survived in the little black insects. They were an unfamiliar species to Cairn, being covered with unusually long, ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... elephant over egg-shells. Her household did her one service, at least, in return for their maintenance, and that was to provide the old lady with an audience. It was in no sense an unwilling service, for her imagination ran to the gruesome, and she never planted a precept but she drove it home with a case in point. As a result night was often shattered by a yell from some sleeper whose dreams had trespassed on devilish domains. The Vrouw Grobelaar believed most entirely in Kafir magic, ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... he could outpull three dogs of his own weight. Maybe he could, but I never saw it. His intelligence didn't run that way. He could steal and forage to perfection; he had an instinct that was positively gruesome for divining when work was to be done and for making a sneak accordingly; and for getting lost and not staying lost he was nothing short of inspired. But when it came to work, the way that intelligence dribbled out of ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... animal had remained perfectly quiet in the room crouching at Jacqueline's feet and beside the bed. It had not attempted to molest me, as I had feared might be the case during the course of my gruesome work. ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... the most charming spots that Nature gave to this scenic Ohio region dwelt a being—a wretch—by the name of McKinney, the tales of whose terrible deeds recall the gruesome acts of the days of the Inquisition or the horrible tortures of the fierce Iroquois. In one of the caves embowered in this leafy wilderness, where the rays of the noonday sun scarce ever fall and there reigns perpetually a cavernous gloom, dwelt this bold robber. Only the complaining water ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... even now confused as to the following moments and our stumbling escape from that gruesome spot. Miss Anstell is now at her home, recovering from what her physician calls mental shock. My wife will not speak of it. The questions I would ask her are checked on my lips by the look of utter terror in her eyes. ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... role of "Shubel Morgan." He lied as he had lied to his victims when posing as a surveyor on the Pottawattomie. He lied as he had done when he crept through the darkness of the night on his sleeping prey. He lied as he had a hundred times about those gruesome murders. He ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... foreign to our, shall I say, Imperial ways; together with a plethora of scientific chefs who could metamorphose anything—rats as well as horses. There were revolutionaries in France in sufficient numbers to make traffic in gruesome dietary pay; and plenty of fodder, besides, with which to "fatten" beasts. All this gammon respecting Continental precedent and taste was beside the question; it only invited gratuitous vituperation of the French nation. An ugly feature of the traffic was ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... remarkable being the huge dragon with a long curly tail in the act of swallowing St. Margaret, whose skirts and feet are shown inside the capacious jaws, while the head is beginning to appear somewhere behind the dragon's neck. To the right is shown a gruesome representation of the martyrdom of St. Lawrence, and then follow Adam and Eve by the Tree of Life (a twisted piece of foliage), the martyrdom of St. Andrew, and what ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... standards. Even Lever, though he wrote for the English public, wrote mainly about Ireland. So, too, with his contemporary Le Fanu, whose reputation rests on a double basis. He made some wonderful excursions into the realm of the bizarre, the uncanny, and the gruesome. But in the collection known as The Purcell Papers will be found three short stories which for exuberant drollery and "diversion" have never been excelled. That the same man could have written Uncle Silas and The Quare Gander is yet another ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... failings might have been, he was no faint heart, and despite the shock of the gruesome discovery he continued his investigation of the silent ship. Apparently some attempt had been made when first the Buena Ventura was caught in the deadly embrace of the Sargasso to convey her treasure to the boats, for, at the head ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... startled from my gruesome speculations by the captain asking me if I had made up my mind to go to St. Dunstan's. I had to confess that I did not know the place, where it was, or what it was for. Then he told me that he wished to take down some particulars regarding ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... trees the digging went on merrily enough. About three feet down a skull was found; then another; then various human bones. These gruesome discoveries checked the singing and laughter, and for a while the men worked in silence. But there was nothing to dull the spirits of the water-carriers, and they romped and skylarked like a party of schoolboys. Those on board ship envied their companions ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... an easy stroke; because of the heavy dew the clear sparkle of the stars seemed to fall on me cold and wetting. There was a sense of lurking gruesome horror somewhere in my mind, and it was mingled with clear and grotesque images. Schomberg's gastronomic tittle-tattle was responsible for these; and I half hoped I should never see Falk again. But the first thing ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... second long novel, also bears the stamp of Russian influence. It is a gruesome, repulsive story of domestic infidelity, in which he has handled the theory of pardon, the motive of numerous recent French novels, like Daudet's 'La Petite Paroisse' and Paul Marguerite's ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... about it an awesome sacredness. One hesitates to treat lightly over the soil that belongs to those whose eyes were closed in the taking, and whose warrior forms lie at rest beneath the pathetic white crosses dotted over the gruesome waste. Those sad little emblems of Supreme Sacrifice: "To the memory of a British Soldier." Simple but magnificent! A farewell to ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... Come to the feast prepared for thee." She lowered her hand and with a contemptuous smile indicated the gruesome results of the explosion of ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... and then did some bold thinker dare openly to gainsay it. The idea that a conviction of personal immortality has a specially ennobling influence on the moral nature of man, is not confirmed by the gruesome history of mediaeval morals, and as little by the psychology of ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... shaking hands Stobart pulled it out of the sand. It came away easily, for the handle was burnt. He groped about near it and uncovered, one after another, a gold-washing dish, a pick-head, a couple of wedges, and a hammer. The sand had drifted over them and made a mound. Then he laid bare a truly gruesome sight—charred embers of wood and half-burnt ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... coast in darkness without any preliminary twilight. The olive and fig trees at once lost their characteristic outlines in formless masses of shadow; only the twisted trunks of the old pear trees in the mission garden retained their grotesque shapes and became gruesome in the gathering gloom. The encircling pines beyond closed up their serried files; a cool breeze swept down from the coast range and, passing through them, sent their day-long heated spices ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... A gruesome sight met them as Eli brought the dogs to a stop. Huddled close and lying by the side of the toboggan, partially covered by drift, were the stiff-frozen ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... the floor of the office lay a charred, shapeless, unrecognisable mass. What was that gruesome odour in the room? Burned human flesh? I recoiled from what had once been the form ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... distances on very short commons in the Arctic frost. Afterwards they lighted their pipes, and Emile, being tactfully encouraged, told them in broken English stories of the barrens. These were so strange and gruesome that it was only because they had learned something of the wilds that Harding and his friends believed him. Had they been less experienced, they would have denied that flesh and blood could bear the things the half-breed calmly ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... that amphibious creature, "as slimy and smeary as if he had been low-water mark too", who exhibited a bloated pair of shoes "as interesting relics that he had taken from the feet of a drowned seaman washed ashore". This type of the gruesome long-shoremen whom Dickens had encountered in his waterside rambles, as he collected the materials for Great Expectations, was afterwards elaborated in the Rogue Riderhood of Our ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... Maxon was occupied in removing the remaining stains and evidences of his gruesome work, but when he at last turned the key in the door of his workshop it was to leave behind no single trace of the successful result of his years ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... top of the ladder and forgot everything. It was a savage history of ferocious hate and barbarous reprisals. It had been a feud waged between two clans for three generations. The story of Dark Malcolm and Ian Red Hand was only part of it, but it was a gruesome thing. Pages told of the bloody deeds they wrought on each other's houses. The one human passion of Dark Malcolm's life was his love for his little daughter. She had brown eyes and brown hair, and those who most loved her called her Wee Brown Elspeth. Ian Red Hand was richer and more powerful ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... thrall to ancient mystic faiths, A land of iron creeds and gruesome deeds, A land of superstitions vast and grim, And all the noisome growths ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... heel, and together we stared and listened. Eyes and ears alike went unrewarded. The silence of desolation hung like a ragged pall, gruesome and deathly.... ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... him for leaving at Iquique. They now said he had been guided by a strange but merciful Providence to his old home. He told the eager listeners of the family circle many tales of daring adventure as they sat in the cosy room by the fire, but whenever the gruesome figure of the dead man in the wardrobe crossed his mind he became reticent and pensive. These lapses did not go unnoticed, and he was often pressed for the cause of so sudden a change ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman |
