"Gruesome" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be seen as she made her way eastward, shaping her course for Princes street, and peering, with a gruesome fear of the school-board officer, round every corner. That early bird, however, was not so keenly on the alert as she gave him the credit of being, and she reached her goal unchallenged after coasting along in parallel lines with it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... speak to-day?" Bassett asked, by this time so accustomed to the old man's gruesome occupation as to take even an interest in the progress ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... quartered above the Refectory. The buildings were clean and comfortable, and the only drawback lay in the fact that one sometimes found it objectionable to have to look at these poor old creatures, dragging themselves around. They had nothing to do, it seemed, but to wait and die. One old man was a gruesome sight. He was about ninety years old and spent his days walking about the courtyard, wearing a cigarette tin hung around his neck, into which he used to cough with such terrible effort that it seemed as if he would die every time the spasm shook him. As a matter of fact, ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... entered into a dark region where, from a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and the gutter. A wind of early autumn raised yellow dust from cobbles and swirled it against an hundred windows. Long streamers of garments fluttered from fire-escapes. In all unhandy places there were buckets, brooms, rags and bottles. In the ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... death's gloomy gate Shall fade away the mists that hide The gruesome and the nobly great, Borne ever on by time and tide. This from thy book of fate alone A liberated soul may tell thee: Perish thou shalt by deed thine own, And yet a stranger's ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... of the Old.—In the annals of savage life we find many gruesome tales of intentional disposal of the aged. The use of the old grandmother as a target for the training of young boys in the art of slaying one's enemy is an extreme example. The pathetic couple left behind when the tribe migrated, often with a small supply of food saved for them by some pitiful ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... imagination around the sinister and repulsive figure of Jean Paul Marat. She knew nothing of his associates, Danton and Robespierre. It was in Marat alone that she saw the monster who sent innocent thousands to their graves, and who reveled like some arch-fiend in murder and gruesome death. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... night. On Sunday morning Ike went to the barn later than usual and hesitatingly. Even then he was first to enter. He found the drunkard's body hanging here over the mow, just about where we are sitting, stark and cold. It was a gruesome end to ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... of wild animals is by no means a pursuit of academic interest only. Men now are mixing up with dangerous wild beasts far more extensively than ever before, and many times a life or death issue hangs upon the man's understanding of the animal mind. I could cite a long and gruesome list of trainers, keepers and park owners who have been killed by the animals they ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... strangely, weirdly dim; a kind of blue light pervaded the scene; the different animals crouched together; and ghostie, very tall, very skeleton-like, very fearsome, with his jet-black eyes, walked calmly on. Oh, but he was a gruesome thing to see! There was a look of horror on his face, and when he spoke, ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... philosophic, which concerns death and its accompaniments. It cannot be thought morbid. Hardy is too fond of Nature ever to degenerate into mere morbidity. He has lived much in the open air, which always corrects a tendency to 'vapors.' He takes little pleasure in the gruesome, a statement in support of which one may cite all his works up to 1892, the date of the appearance of Tess. This paper includes no comment in detail upon the later books; but so far as Tess is concerned it would be critical folly to speak of it as morbid. It is sad, it is ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... gruesome tae hear him,' said Geordie; 'he's no' canny'; and reaching out for Billy as he went stumbling past, he pulled him down to a seat beside him, saying, 'Sit doon, lad, sit doon. We'll mak a man o' ye yet.' Then he rose and, using many ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... critical moment, and attacked the astounded Indians with such ferocity that the diversion thus created enabled the settlers to escape from the deadly trap. During the next two years the history of the Cumberland settlements is but the gruesome recital of murder after murder of the whites, a few at a time, by the lurking Indian foe. Robertson's dominant influence alone prevented the abandonment of the sorely harassed little stations. The arrival of the North Carolina commissioners for the purpose of laying off ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... is an excellent example of transitional Franco-Italian sculpture; and the half-reclining bronze effigy of Prince Carpi from the great Franciscan church (the Cordeliers) of Paris, is wholly Italian in style. The gruesome figure, La Mort, in the embrasure of a window, from the old cemetery of Les Innocents, and a fine bust, 173, of John of Alesso, will also be noted. We pass to Room IV., dominated by the most eminent sculptor of the French renaissance, Jean ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... and saw an animal whose gruesome oddity even he, who knew so many of the strange creatures, two of which were never the same, that used to live inside the mountain with their masters the goblins, had never seen equalled. Its eyes were flaming with anger, but it seemed to be at the housekeeper, ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... 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 paid him ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... and an almost equally stalwart woman were both caught by one gigantic Quabo which had a tentacle around the throat of each. The man and woman were chopping at the viscous, gruesome head. One of the Thing's eyes was gashed across, giving it a fearsome, blind appearance. It heaved convulsively, and the three struggling figures toppled into the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... like a human, ain't she?" He instantly beheld a vision of the man in the front of the almanac whose envelope is neatly drawn back to reveal his complicated structure in behalf of the zodiacal symbols. "It's downright gruesome," he added. But his guest was viewing the neat complexities of metal with real pleasure and with what seemed to the car's owner a practiced ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... burial, and his "House of Usher" and several other stories reflect the imagined horror of such an experience. The same criticism applies to his miscellaneous thrillers, in which with rare cunning he uses phantoms, curtains, shadows, cats, the moldy odor of the grave,—and all to make a gruesome tale inspired by some ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... "Speaking of gruesome things," the talker had said, "reminds me. I'm a doctor—not quite full fledged, I'll admit, but with the right to put M. D. after my name. Spent a couple of years as an interne in Bellstrand Hospital in New York. Big place. Any of you ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... from the stage by the author of "A Texas Steer"; and where once the haughty Richard trod the boards, the skirt-dance assumes the center of the stage and looms lurid like the spirit of the Brocken. Recently a vaudeville "turn" of Hamlet has been presented, where the gravediggers do their gruesome tasks to ragtime; and on every hand we behold the Lyceum giving way to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... ceased. A wave of excitement went round the room. Some people shouted, others pressed forward to gaze on the abandoned wretch who had been caught in the act of committing a gruesome deed. ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... to his gruesome sentry-go and turned back into the room. A man of fifty, with a tawny moustache, a long and rather narrow face and eyeglasses, was sitting at an office table with some ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... surely 'tis gruesome To gaze all around, When bloodred through heaven Drives cloudrack o'er head; Air soon shall be deep hued With dying men's blood When this our spaedom Comes speedy ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... spilling of blood the skua gulls assemble, and soon, for them at least, there is a gruesome satisfaction to be reaped. Oddly enough, they don't seem to excite the dogs; they simply alight within a few feet and wait for their turn in the drama, clamouring and quarrelling amongst themselves when the spoils accrue. Such incidents were happening constantly to-day, ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... Southey to sound the note of terror. Yet they too, in their fashion, played a part in the "Renascence of Wonder." Coleridge, fascinated by the spirit of "gramarye" in Buerger's Lenore, etherealised and refined it. Scott and Lewis gloried in the gruesome details and spirited rhythm of the ballad, and in their supernatural poems wish to startle and terrify, not to awe, their readers. Those who revel in phosphorescent lights and in the rattle of the skeleton ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... brushes and sweetmeat dishes if she wants them to look nice. Of course it may be said that extra silver can be put by till circumstances improve, or that it might be useful in a financial emergency. This last idea is rather a gruesome one to take to a wedding, and it is in the early days of her housekeeping that the young wife likes to have her pretty things about her. Why an artistic chair or table should not be as suitable as an entree dish I do not quite ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... ride away and say nothing for a while. He could let it appear that he had not been at the house at all and so had not discovered the crime when he did. That would give Aleck Douglas more time to get away. But there was Jean, due at any moment now. He could not go away and let Jean discover that gruesome thing on the kitchen floor. He could not take it up and hide it away somewhere; he could not do anything, it seemed to him, ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... be made. And it had remained for Robert Fairchild, the son, to find the hidden secret, for him to come upon the thing which had caused the agony of nearly thirty years of suffering, for him to face the alternative of again placing that gruesome find into hiding, or to square his shoulders before the world and take the consequences. Murder is not an easy word to hear, whether it rests upon one's own shoulders, or upon the memory of a person beloved. And ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... don't think he felt much. What a gruesome little woman it is this evening! You're shivering. ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... required. Having selected the house you pay a call and lay ground-bait, so to speak. You tell the tenant you are interested in the place because you happen to know that at one time it was haunted. You relate a gruesome tale of some mysterious tragedy that you say has occurred there, and generally make ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... It was a gruesome thing to do, perhaps, but it must be remembered that it was necessary to strike terror into the hearts of other evil-doers, to whom the free-booter in question had been something of a hero. Every Malik[1] who came into court recognised the features of the dead man's head as it rested by Nicholson's ...
— John Nicholson - The Lion of the Punjaub • R. E. Cholmeley
... relieved Mr Munroe so much that he covered his strange companion with profuse compliments on his knowledge of the inanimate human body, and nicknamed him 'Ralph-ower-mony.' After this extraordinary being had finished his gruesome revenge on the dead body of his master, it was placed in a hastily-constructed deal casement, and put on top of the longboat, and then covered over with the Union Jack and an awning, so that it might be ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... than to theatrical—unjustly; for even though we regard the play as but the scenic representation of the incidents of a night, the representation is of absorbing interest and is entirely free from the crudities which make Muellner's dramas more gruesome than dramatic. But Grillparzer nevertheless resolved that his next play should dispense with all adventitious aids and should take as simple a form and style as he could give it. A friend chanced to suggest to him that the story of Sappho would furnish ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... admitted. "There was a mining fellow who used to come over and clean out my whiskey, and sing gruesome songs for hours together to a banjo that had, I think, two strings. I stayed out all night quite frequently when I had reason to believe that he was coming. Then, we killed a good many tarantulas—and a few equally ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... classical writings and in Irish texts, had also a sacrificial aspect. The heads of enemies were hung at the saddle-bow or fixed on spears, as the conquerors returned home with songs of victory.[824] This gruesome picture often recurs in the texts. Thus, after the death of Cuchulainn, Conall Cernach returned to Emer with the heads of his slayers strung on a withy. He placed each on a stake and told Emer the name of the owner. A Celtic oppidum or a king's palace must have been as gruesome ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... Bradshaw, were ruthlessly torn from their graves soon after the Restoration and were taken to the Red Lion, whence, on, the following morning, they were dragged on a sledge to Tyburn and there treated with the ignominy hitherto reserved for the vilest criminals. All kinds of legends surround these gruesome proceedings. One tradition will have it that some of Cromwell's faithful friends rescued his mutilated remains, and buried them in a field on the north side of Holborn, a spot now covered by the public garden in Red Lion Square. On the other hand grave doubts have been ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... of crimson over hills of purest snow, which caught a reflected glow from rock and crag. Between me and the hills lay miles of rough ice and long veins of thin black slob that had formed during the night. For the foreground there was my poor, gruesome pan, bobbing up and down on the edge of the open sea, stained with blood, and littered with carcasses and debris. It was smaller than last night, and I noticed also that the new ice from the water melted under the dogs' bodies had been formed at the expense ...
— Adrift on an Ice-Pan • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... found the next day, grounded on the shoals off Hatteras. The sea was oily and calm. It lay like a gruesome shell, as though some fire had swept all its interior. Yet not fire either, for there were no embers, no ashes. Diseased, leprous, gruesomely weird with parts of its interior intact and other parts obliterated. And ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... of his loving daughter Meg when she heard this! What could she do? She could not suffer it to stay there, so she bribed two men and took a boat, and, going down the river, stole her own father's head, and, wrapping it in a cloth, returned with her gruesome burden to Chelsea, where she is said to have buried it in the church. Can you picture anything more awful than the task ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... ballad, wedded to its wailing music, touches and moves a Manxman. Even to my ear as I have heard it in Manx, it has seemed to be one of the weirdest things in old ballad literature, only to be matched by some of the old Irish songs, and by the gruesome ditty which tells how "the sun shines ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... moment after the closing door of a room overhead had shut them from his ears, he stood there, with puckered brows and pursed-up lips, drumming with his finger-tips a faint tattoo upon the framework of the shattered lid; then he walked over to the skeleton case, and silently regarded the gruesome thing within. ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... 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 a thousand years before it reached its present extent; and with the rising of manufacturing ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... rather dressy foreigner who resides in a cage on the verandah. Miss Ropes, who owns him and ought to know, says he is a Grey Cardinal, but neither his voracious appetite for caterpillars nor his gruesome manner of assimilating them are in the least dignified or ecclesiastical. It takes the unremitting efforts of Miss Ropes and the entire available strength of convalescent officers (after deducting the players of bridge, the stalkers of rabbits and the ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... unfriendly-looking building of red brick, with a narrow, black-painted arched door. On the cross-section of the center panel was screwed a silver plate, with the name of the institution inscribed in black letters, which gave to the door the gruesome suggestion of a ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... told him the whole gruesome story. He saw, he could not help but see what a deep impress the events of the night had made on me. He heard me to the end with every appearance of sympathy,—and then all at once I discovered that all the time papa had been concealed behind a large screen which was in the ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... gruesome why should one be asked to present a subject which cannot be adequately presented without showing what pygmies we are and how helpless in the grasp ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... "and as there is no furniture here for a person to hide in, let us look elsewhere. It's a rather gruesome place." ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... every shock of the night seemed to recoil upon him. The feeling of mystery; the foreboding, despite his courage and his conviction that the boy was mad, of the imminent unknown; his recurrent and absorbing curiosity to learn the gruesome secret that he had declared; all rushed one by one back upon him, and then as swiftly left him to the simple grip of horror at his face. It was gazing at woman after woman, here, there and yonder, throughout ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... 1869, the other in the Lienchow massacre of 1905. Nor are these isolated cases. Two American ladies doing hospital work in Canton were set upon by a mob, who accused them of killing a man whose life they were trying to save, and they narrowly escaped murder. But why extend the gruesome list? In view of their mad fury, so fatal to their benefactors, one is tempted to exclaim: Unglaube du bist nicht so viel ein ungeheuer als aberglaube du! "Of the twin monsters, unbelief and superstition, the more to be dreaded is ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... along. The little group passed up the road, Tom pushing his wheel and answering their questions briefly and soberly as he always did. Planks had been laid across the German trenches where they intersected the road and as they passed over them Tom looked down upon many a gruesome sight which evidenced the surprise by the Americans and their undoubted victory. Not a live German was to be seen, nor a dead American either, but here and there a fallen gray-coat lay sprawled in the crooked topsy-turvy ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... which long practice had taught him to repeat by heart. When about half-way through the lesson he saw a glimmer of light, and Dick entered the church with a lantern, which he placed on the top of the coffin. It was a gruesome scene which the lantern brought into view. There was the coffin, and before it, in a seat, four figures of the navvy-bearers, and Dick himself covered with snow and as white as if he wore a surplice. They filed out into the churchyard, but ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... them all good boys to be, And sailed away across the sea. At London Bridge that Bishop he Arrived one Tuesday night— And as that night he homeward strode To his Pan-Anglican abode, He passed along the Borough Road And saw a gruesome sight. ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... ringing floors, all went to make up the vast grave in which she was to bury all hope of escape. Immense were the iron-bound doors that led from one room to another; huge the bolts and rusty the hinges; gruesome and icy the atmosphere; narrow the steps that led to regions deeper in the bowels of the earth. Dorothy's heart sank like lead as she surveyed the impregnable walls and listened to the mighty groans of long-sleeping doors as the shoulder of the sturdy Turk awoke them to torpid ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... in Mexican territory. Horses had to drink, men had to drink; and Ladd and Lash were not of the stripe that forsook a task because of danger. Slow to wrath at first, as became men who had long lived peaceful lives, they had at length revolted; and desert vultures could have told a gruesome story. Made a comrade and ally of these bordermen, Dick Gale had leaped at the desert action and strife with an intensity of heart and a rare physical ability which accounted for the remarkable fact that he had not yet fallen by ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... him was somewhat gruesome. Everything was carefully wrapped in newspapers. Pictures enveloped in newspapers hung on the walls, newspaper chairs stood primly around a newspaper table. In the dim twilight it looked like the very ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... Car 104 looked over at Martin and Ferguson. "If it isn't the gruesome twosome," he called. "Where have you two been? We thought the front office had finally caught up with you and found out that neither one of you could read or write and that they ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... his chum, for Hugh laughed merrily at the gruesome picture Thad drew of his complete subjugation to the ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... 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 forth. Point to a china-ornament and say, "I never ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... market at the base of the Palazza Strozzi was gay with pinks and carnations and early roses. They drove out of the city, passed innumerable villas, out into the open country where the only blot upon the fair landscape was a funeral train, the coffin borne by those gruesome beings, the Brothers of the Misericordia, with their black robes and black face cloths pierced only with ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... associate all this phantasmagoria of gloom with the death of the body—partly perhaps because they had a much more rational method of disposing of the body—a method which was not only infinitely better for the dead man and more healthy for the living, but was also free from the gruesome suggestions connected with slow decay. They knew much more about death in those days, and because they knew more ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... How things mischance! My castle is a gruesome place today. An idiot first, and then a corpse have knocked To crave admittance to my hall! My Lords, I pray you to ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... the emissary of a certain M'Bongwele—in whose territory we now were—a king of fierce, cruel, and jealous disposition, as we gathered, and so suspicious of strangers that he had issued a standing order against the admission into his country of any such, under certain gruesome pains and penalties. And it was by his orders that Lualamba and his warriors had come out on the previous night for the purpose of slaying the mysterious monster that had been seen flying so fearlessly and impudently over his ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... to the other, doing what we could for the wounded, and hurrying on again. It was a gruesome task, and the fear of finding what we sought so earnestly added to ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... Walter Towne and Jeff Bates pried the trophies off the wall of the big office. The lawyer shook his head sadly. "Pity about Dan Torkleson. Gruesome affair." ...
— Meeting of the Board • Alan Edward Nourse
... beg to gaze On all once ours—are shown a seat, O irony! In sad amaze We marvel that it looks so neat, Recalling how we used to meet At gruesome hours in days of yore,— Hours that fate can ne'er repeat: Another's ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... listening open-mouthed. Mrs. Halsey laid down her knitting, and stared at the speaker over the top of her spectacles; while across Betts's gnome-like countenance smiles went out and in, especially at the more gruesome points of the tale. The light sparkled on the young Canadian's belt, the Maple Leaf in the khaki hat which lay across his knees, on the badge of the Forestry Corps on his shoulder. The old English cottage, with its ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... both fastened by stout ropes to rings fixed in the rafters of the barn. Their heads dangled from the slip-knots. The one against which Perenna had struck was still moving slightly and the bones clicked together with a gruesome sound. ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... my child! unsay these words that be freighted with death for thee, and ruin for all that be near to thee. Shake of this gruesome dream. Call back thy poor wandering memory. Look upon me. Am not I thy mother that bore thee, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Death which makes our soldiers exult in self-sacrifice; but scarcely any attention has been drawn to Teaism, which represents so much of our Art of Life. Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilisation were to be based on the gruesome glory of war. Fain would we await the time when due respect shall be paid ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... to tell a gruesome story of fearful deeds by these bandits of the sea; of vessels plundered and scuttled, and sailors made to walk the plank of death; of rich spoil won by ruthless murder, and wild orgies on the shores of Grande Terre. But ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... don't think I really understand yet; but you have managed to make it all." He made a vague gesture towards the village and the tree-thronged land. "Well, gruesome! Every man in ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... 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 photograph? She ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... world was a counselling spouse, jealous of his good name. He did not regret his proposal to take the leap; he would not have regretted it if taken. On the safe side of the abyss, however, it wore a gruesome look to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... subjected, for some unknown reason, to police surveillance. Scraggs decided that after three days the presence of the two dead Chinamen aboard the Maggie would commence to wear on the Gibney nerves and the deadlock over the final disposition of their gruesome purchase would result in Gibney and McGuffey harkening to reason and accepting a profitable compromise. If it should cost him a leg, Captain Scraggs was resolved to make those two corpses pay for the repairs in ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... guaranteed to disturb your night's rest. It is a gruesome, ghastly, blood-curdling, hair-erecting, sleep-murdering piece of work, with a thrill on every ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... fine country, and here I should like to build myself a home," he said, little deeming in what gruesome manner his words ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... lively checks and tartans. It was as though they said—"Here at last is our opportunity for gratifying our natural taste in colours. It will probably be of but short duration. Therefore let us select a combination of all the most brilliant tints and wear them, for who knows how soon that gruesome pall of woe may again ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... toughened bearing of the hirelings he doubts what manner to assume. Shall he stand at the front door and exhort them to particular care with each sentimental item, crying "Be careful with that little chair; that's the one the Urchin uses when he eats his evening prunes!" Or shall he adopt a gruesome sarcasm, hoping to awe them by conveying the impression that even if the whole van should be splintered in collision, he can get more at the nearest department store? Whatever policy he adopts, they will not be much impressed. For, when we handed our gratuity, ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... manner—oh, so ruthlessly bright—talks what she thinks is smart slang, poses continually, and wears clothes that would not be out of place at Ascot, but are a positive offence to the little grey town. I hadn't realised how gruesome provincial smartness could be until I ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... 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
... house of the Romanoffs, for their guide to open the door, and just then a batch of beggars passed, their wild hair and terribly ragged sheepskins making them a queer gruesome sight. They craved alms with the same patient smile with which they thanked when money was given. Misery seemed to ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... history. At the time of the affair of the woman cut in pieces in the Rue Oberskampf—another forgotten story—he had taken to one of the editors of the "Epoque,"—a paper then rivalling the "Matin" for information,—the left foot, which was missing from the basket in which the gruesome remains were discovered. For this left foot the police had been vainly searching for a week, and young Rouletabille had found it in a drain where nobody had thought of looking for it. To do that he had dressed himself as an extra sewer-man, one ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... his fall. The barge which so often carried its owner to pleasure or business lay moored on the river ready to carry him that last sad journey to the Tower; and sadder still, to bring back the devoted daughter when the execution was accomplished, and later also when she bore her gruesome burden of a father's head, said to have been buried with her in ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... o' gruesome, don't it? 'Tain't nothin' very lovely neither. When that feller's pains in his leg gets hold o' him an' he roars out that way o' nights—that goes right through an' through any one. No, before I'd stand pain like that I'd go an' put a bullet ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... put them into glass boxes to watch them, they manage to corrode the glass so it ceases to be transparent. And they can bore their way out of any wood, or even metal, containers you try to keep them in. The termite seems destined to remain a gruesome, ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... the Boers' wagons, surmounted by a white flag, were seen coming across the plain, their attendants being engaged for a long time in the gruesome task of collecting ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... itself a task of no small magnitude under the circumstances. And while the meal was in progress, the officers of the Bolivia were going round among the rescued people, carefully noting the names of the survivors for transmission to England and America by wireless. Then followed the gruesome task of identifying such of the dead as had been found; after which came the separation of those who wished to go on to New York from those who wished to return to England, this in turn being followed by the trans-shipment of the rescued in accordance with the arrangement come to ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... again in the apartment. Through the darkness only a few feet away from Jimmie Dale, the two men sat there silently, waiting, as he had waited, in the darkness, and the silence—for the Magpie. There seemed an abhorrent, gruesome analogy in the situation—this waiting for a ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... SPATULATE-LEAVED SUNDEW (D. intermedia) and the THREAD-LEAVED SUNDEW (D. filiformis) whose purplish-pink flowers are reared above wet sand along the coast, possess contrivances similar to the round-leaved plant's to pursue their gruesome business. Why should these vegetables turn carnivorous? Doubtless because the soil in which they grow can supply little or no nitrogen. Very small roots testify to the small use they serve. The water sucked up through them from the bog aids in ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... decidedly uncanny. She was standing near the southern wall, when, of a sudden, she heard low but distinct whispers. Again she listened. Yes. The sounds were not due to her excited imagination at the recollection of those romantic traditions of love and hatred, or of those gruesome stories of how the Wolf of Badenoch had been kept prisoner there for five years and put to frightful tortures, or how the Laird of Weem was deliberately poisoned in that old banqueting-hall, the huge open fireplace of which still existed ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... sister, Jemima—"was turning your room into a hospital-ward when I left, against the arrival of your mangled corpse. She had also ordered the wagon prepared like an ambulance, mattresses, chloroform, bandages—every gruesome detail complete. Our Jemima," she said, "is having the time of her ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... with the men who had met in his own town and denounced his deed as cruel, gruesome ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... but a dream,—a gruesome, haunting dream. With an instinct of wiping out the dreadful memory, I raised my hand wearily to my forehead. As I did so, I became conscious again of how it hurt me. I looked at it. It was covered with half-dried blood, and ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... hobbies," Heneage answered. "Take the Colonel, for instance, the most harmless, the most good-natured man who ever lived. Nothing in the world fascinates him so much as the details of a tragedy like this, however gruesome they may be. I have seen him handle a murderer's knife as though he loved it. His favourite museum is the professional Chamber of Horrors in Scotland Yard. My own interests run in a slightly different direction. ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... here, I suppose, until your gruesome visit is accomplished. What makes you think that I would give up ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... 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 ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... more of these gruesome items—so many of them that it appears as though no more than a handful of this stalwart crew survived the Massachusetts by a dozen years. Incredible as it sounds, Captain Delano's roster accounted for fifty of them as dead while he was still in the prime ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... because it is gruesome, or because it may seem like intimidation, is sentimentalism: in this matter, as elsewhere in the realm of knowledge, the truth should scare no one who does not need to be scared. It is better to be safe than sorry; and it is better to be scared than syphilitic. "I dare do all that may become ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... in the ways of least resistance; and life for them is a wallowing in the morbid and unwholesome. In them feeling is perverted, they seem to see life habitually through dark glasses; they passively attend to the sad, the distressing, sometimes the gruesome and the horrible with a sort of pallid joy in their own discolored images. The first group puts joy in all they see, because they are brimming full of joy themselves. These others find only the unwholesome in life because their minds are storehouses ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... 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 with a non-pessimistic ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... the hill out of sight of the gruesome, ghastly window display, and Miss Frayne gained courage ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... is a gruesome but very necessary business, and the provision of suitable implements is humane as well as economic in time and labour. The skin is first cut off with the blubber attached: the meat is then cut from the skeleton, the entrails cleaned out, the liver carefully excised. The whole is then ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... heads. I thought about this too, and found it quite easy to picture myself lying in the bed with a smashed head, and blood all over the pillow. Then it occurred to me that the plaster might smash me all over, and my impressions of Farringdon Meat Market added a gruesome vividness to my conception of the consequences. I always found it pleasant to imagine horrible things; it was only the ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... impression on his Buffalo readers, and you are pretty certain to hear of it when you mention Mark Twain in that city to-day. It vividly called attention to the neglect of the old North Street graveyard. The gruesome vision of the ancestors deserting with their coffins on their backs was even more humiliating than amusing, and inspired a movement for reform. It has been effective elsewhere since then, and may still be read with profit—or satisfaction—for in a note at ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... tell me when this butchery will cease! For seventy-two hours I have been plying my knife, and look at those who have yet to come"—he swept the circle of wounded with an outstretched bloody hand. "O God! If you know how to write, write to your papers and tell Europe she must stop this gruesome war." Then, tired out and enervated, he swooned into the arms of the medical orderly. As he came to to be apologized. "That," he said, "is the third time I have fainted; I suppose I must waste precious time in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... said; "but you see these marks are directly under the place where the dead man lay in the room above. The blood from his wound evidently ran through the chinks of the flooring on to the beams of the ceiling here and so fell drop by drop on the couch and on any one sitting there. Rather gruesome, but I am sure we must be all very glad to get the simple explanation. The only wonder is that no ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... Emmeline Lestrange, stranded on a remote island with a beautiful lagoon. As children, they are cared for by Paddy Button, a portly sailor who drinks himself to death after only two and a half years in paradise. Frightened and confused by the man's gruesome corpse, the children flee to another part of Palm Tree Island. Over a period of five years, they grow up and eventually fall in love. Sex and birth are as mysterious to them as death, but they manage to copulate instinctively and conceive a child. The birth ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... estate in the hands of trustees in order that this sentinel figure should stand guard above her in the sunshine and the rain. The idea was poetic. But Cap'n Sproul, joining the hilarious group at the graveyard fence, noted that some gruesome village humorist had seriously interfered with the poetic idea. Painted on a planed board set up against ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... the lower jaw series at Teddington, which is also, in all probability, the only instance of a man's nightcap figuring in such gruesome circumstances. ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... awake through pity, and a few through a vague sense of loss; for, henceforth, the Vier Marchi would lack a familiar interest; but mostly the people of Mattingley's world were wakeful through curiosity. Morbid expectation of the hanging had for them a gruesome diversion. The thing itself would break the daily monotony of life and provide hushed gossip for vraic gatherings and veilles for a long time to come. Thus Elie Mattingley would ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that the two groups still kept their oddly separated formation. Behind them the two egg-masses of jelly were now seething in new activity after a brief lessening of their gruesome shivering. Blake now saw that there was a direct and unmistakable connection between the activity of the jelly and the corresponding activity of ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... face up to one another blow for blow, feint for feint, until, in the storm, they fight it epically out, and Gilliat remains the victor; - a victor, however, who has still to encounter the octopus. I need say nothing of the gruesome, repulsive excellence of that famous scene; it will be enough to remind the reader that Gilliat is in pursuit of a crab when he is himself assaulted by the devil fish, and that this, in its way, is the last touch to the inner significance of the book; here, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shirt-sleeves preparing for his infernal work. He arranges black stones in a circle around a skull. His tools lie beside him: a ladle, bullet-mould, and eagle's-wing fan. The high voices of an invisible chorus utter the cry of the owl, which the orchestra mixes with gruesome sounds, ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel |
