"Misshapen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the sun. On the upper curve of its huge body there were three great projections which I can only describe as enormous bubbles, and I was convinced as I looked at them that they were charged with some extremely light gas which served to buoy up the misshapen and semi-solid mass in the rarefied air. The creature moved swiftly along, keeping pace easily with the monoplane, and for twenty miles or more it formed my horrible escort, hovering over me like a bird of prey which is waiting to pounce. Its method of progression—done ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "So misshapen a figure, it may readily be supposed, made a very good target for the shafts of mockery. Nicholas, however, troubled himself but little about them; and it was small complaint you heard from him so long as he was well paid, got his savoury morsel, and, above all, a liberal supply ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... earthy to animal matter varies with age. In infancy the bones are composed almost wholly of animal matter. Hence, an infant's bones are rarely broken, but its legs may soon become misshapen if walking is allowed too early. In childhood, the bones still contain a larger percentage of animal matter than in more advanced life, and are therefore more liable to bend than to break; while in old age, they contain a greater percentage ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... dwarf, whose name was "Try," met us at this juncture; and by his bright example urged us on to greater tasks. But alas! there were so many weary hearts waiting for his cheery countenance that he was forced ere long to leave us. Scarce had he gone when his enemy, a misshapen gnome, called "I Forgot," sprang up in our path, and by many devices, sought to undo the good work of "Try." Finding this impossible, he, too, soon departed, but his injured lordship, not caring to retire utterly defeated, left his first cousin, "I Didn't Mean To," to pester and annoy ...
— Silver Links • Various
... workingman in society! After a full and candid survey of his plays, Bottom, the weaver with the ass's head, remains his type of the artizan and the "mutable, rank-scented many," his type of the masses. Is it unfair to take the misshapen "servant-monster" Caliban as his ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain; rhyme, which can turn man's utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme, the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in Robert Browning's hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made him masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too often with his tongue in his cheek. There are moments when he wounds us by monstrous music. Nay, if he can only ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... world beneath the dignity of his inquiry. He feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity of men; his soul is exalted, not by vain shows and shadows and ideals, but by realities, in which alone the truth lives. In criticism it is his business to break the images of false gods and misshapen heroes, to take away the poor silly, toys that many grown people would still like to play with. He cannot keep terms with "Jack the Giant-killer" or "Puss-in-Boots," under any name or in any place, even ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... eyes. A column of steam rose from their bodies into the rain-pierced air. Panting and palpitating, yet they stood with their backs to the water, as though determined to sell their lives dearly. Beyond them, not fifty yards away, crouched a humpbacked boulder, casting a long, misshapen shadow in the moonlight. And beneath it were two black objects, ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... hand in the person of one so dear, flamed round him like some hideous blast from the hot furnace of an accepted hell, and he realized the terrors of things he had read about and seen depicted—lost souls, dark and yet lurid pits of destruction, misshapen beasts and angry angels—the blood flowed from his arteries and from his stricken heart up to his frightened brain, and surged there while he stood, not raising his eyes to this ill-starred woman. It was child's play to read ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... among the trees, but, away to his left, though as yet low down, the moon was rising, filling the woods with mystery, a radiant glow wherein objects seemed to start forth with a new significance; here the ragged hole of a tree, gnarled, misshapen; there a wide-flung branch, weirdly contorted, and there again a tangle of twigs and strange, leafy shapes that moved not. And over all was a deep and ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... food hanging in the tree,' I said. I had hung it up to keep the ants from it. But as soon as I finished speaking I heard the Thing creeping away. In the morning I found it had left the track of one small torn moccasin and a strange misshapen lump. It came up from and disappeared into the creek, so I was sure it must have been a Gahonga. But that evening as I sat by my fire I was aware of it behind me. No, I heard nothing; I felt the thought of that ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... from an indistinct murmur to audibility as the flap was raised and the watchers could readily understand their words. Two of them sat with their faces toward the main entrance and the third man faced them. Carnes bit his lip as he looked at the man at the head of the table. He was twisted and misshapen in body, a grotesque dwarf with a hunched back, not over four feet in height. His massive head, sunken between his hunched shoulders, showed a tremendous dome of cranium and a brow wider and even higher than Dr. Bird's. The rest ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... town; I no put my nose out de door, fear dey chuck me into ze ground. Bury folks dis summer sometimes all warm and limber. I want to live till I'm dead, so I keep down. Life's as sweet to me as others, though I am misshapen, and lame, and poor, and miserable to look upon. Hih, hih, Monsieur, yes, ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... too cold, too gray and misshapen in that thought to see it as life. It could not be. It was only that she was exhausted. ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... later years they have improved (?) and modernized the old structure. A stone pulpit, huge and clumsy, erected by subscription to the memory of some elderly inhabitant, stands like a misshapen blot before the altar rails; a window, too broad for its length, and generally out of proportion, throws too much light upon the dinginess within; the general character of the ugly old place has lost something, but assuredly gained nothing, by these innovations. It is hard to put "a piece of ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... to my mystery and fear, I sallied forth, and kept the route to Putney's, with ears erect and expectant pulses. I had gone but a quarter of a mile, when I discerned, through the gathering gloom, a black, misshapen object, standing in the middle of the road. As it seemed motionless, I ventured closer, when the thing resolved to a sutler's wagon, charred and broken, and still smoking from the incendiaries' torch. Further on, more of these burned wagons littered the way, and in one place two slain horses ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... already been peopled! The majestic rusa, captured in the sultry forests of Bengal, and the elegant gazelle, which has once bounded over the parching deserts of Barbary, have become intimate and make their couch with the white reindeer, brought from the icy wastes of Lapland. The misshapen but harmless kangaroo of New Holland is a fellow-lodger with the ferocious gnu of Southern Africa; and the patient llama, who has left the snowy sides and precipitous defiles of the Andes, contemplates without terror its formidable neighbours, the wolf of the Pyrenees, and the bear of the stupendous ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... beauty: there is no deformity but in monstrosity, wherein notwithstanding there is a kind of beauty, nature so ingeniously contriving the irregular parts that they become sometimes more remarkable than the principal fabric. To speak yet more narrowly, there was never anything ugly or misshapen but the chaos; wherein, notwithstanding, to speak strictly, there was no deformity, because no form, nor was it yet impregnate by the voice of God; now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature, they being both servants ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... made by a man's boot-maker, and there was only one place in London where they could be made sufficiently ugly to suit her; and infinite were the pains she took to procure the heavy, thick, cumbrous, misshapen things that as much as possible concealed and disfigured her finely turned ankles and high, arched, Norman instep. Indeed, her whole attire, peculiar (and very ugly, I thought it) as it was, was so by malice prepense on her ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Archie go to the Cove school together. They also come down and chop with me, Archie being armed with a hatchet blunt enough to be suitable for his six years. He is a most industrious small chopper, and the other day gnawed down, or as the children call it, "beavered" down, a misshapen tulip tree, which was about ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... vexatious, and even, towards the end, how repulsive that becomes! The wearying search after something that corresponds to the perfect ideal in one's brain, the constant raising of hope and ensuing disappointment as a misshapen foot or crooked knee destroys the effect of neck and shoulder, produce at last an intolerable irritation. I had dismissed them all finally, and they had trailed away in the rain, a dismal ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... stern-gallery was nigh lost in the mist, bethinking me of the boat I had seen, I glanced about and beheld matter that set me wondering; for he was the fellow plying his oars with a will and so near that I might have tossed a biscuit aboard him; moreover the great misshapen bundle had lain in the stern-sheets was there no longer, which set me mightily a-wondering. Long after man and boat were swallowed up in the fog I sat there lost in thought, insomuch that I started to feel a hearty ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... measured praise. With its delicate and vital delineations of character, its rich sympathy and depth of tragic pathos, its plea for the sacredness of human life, and its protest against the religious and social prejudice by which life is so often misshapen, this book is an epitome of all the ideas and feelings that have gone to the making of the author's personality, and have received such manifold expression in his works. It is a simple story, concerned mainly with four people, in no ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... as you are pleased to call his gang of thugs, is that hideous, misshapen monster that shrieks like a ghoul. I suppose that he too was hunting for the ruby Friday night—after having stolen it the night before." My sarcasm failed to touch ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... begins. Instead of the fair distant city, all spires and towers, which we discerned in the distance in a sort of glory, we find that there are crooked lanes, muddy crossings, dull market-places, tiresome houses. Odd misshapen figures, fretful and wearied, plod through the streets or look out at windows; here is a ruin, with doleful creatures moping in the shade; we overturn a stone, and blind uncanny things writhe away from the light. We begin to reflect that ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... within the great mounds, within the ring of oaks, deep in the heart of the matted thicket. Slowly and timidly he began to untie his boots, fumbling with the laces, and glancing all the while on every side at the ugly misshapen trees that hedged the lawn. Not a branch was straight, not one was free, but all were interlaced and grew one about another; and just above ground, where the cankered stems joined the protuberant roots, there were forms that imitated the human ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... beasts of burden, wan faces from which vampire society had sucked the juice of life, bloated forms swollen with physical grossness and corruption, withered hags and death's-heads bearded like patriarchs, festering youth and festering age, faces of fiends, crooked, twisted, misshapen monsters blasted with the ravages of disease and all the horrors of chronic innutrition—the refuse and the scum of life, a raging, screaming, ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... painter when he named his dog Titian. But having done his duty in this matter, he found it convenient to shorten the name into Tit—sometimes Tittles. Tittles had no face whatever, as far as could be seen by the naked eye. His whole misshapen body was covered with long shaggy hair of a light grey colour. Only the end of his black nose was visible in front and the extreme point of his tail in rear. But for these two landmarks it would have been utterly impossible to tell which end of the ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... carefully back over the misshapen shoulders, and then lighted a candle. It showed the little parlour to be dingy, but orderly and clean. She stood it on the mantelshelf, remote from the dressmaker's eyes, and then put the room door open, and the house door open, and turned the little low chair and its occupant towards the ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... had appeared immediately under them was forty feet away, and appeared a vague, misshapen black mass. They had been seen, for they had waved the lantern from the edge of the cliff before starting, and they had several times shouted as they descended, and as they neared the ground, they were delighted at hearing by an answering ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... pity me, or rather laugh at me, to tell how many awkward ways I took to raise this paste; what odd, misshapen, ugly things I made; how many of them fell in and how many fell out, the clay not being stiff enough to bear its own weight; how many cracked by the over-violent heat of the sun, being set out too hastily; ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... of spirits, calls up the midnight ghost, exhibits before us the witches with their unhallowed rites, peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs; and these beings, though existing only in the imagination, nevertheless possess such truth and consistency that even with such misshapen abortions as Caliban, he extorts the assenting conviction that, were there such beings, they would so conduct themselves. In a word, as he carries a bold and pregnant fancy into the kingdom of nature, on the other hand he carries nature into the region of fancy which lie beyond the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and then tied to the tree, is now afloat, for the tide has risen, and the long stretches of yellow sandbanks which line the channel on the farther side are covered now with a foot of water. As we drift up the river, eating our lunch, and letting the boat take care of herself, a huge, misshapen thing comes round a low point, emitting horrid groanings and wheezings. It is a steam stern-wheel punt, loaded with mighty logs of black-butt and tallow wood, from fifty feet to seventy feet in length, cut far up the Hastings ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... and so it is with us individually, as we too well know. Ah, brethren! the seductions are omnipresent, and our poor eyes are very weak, and we turn away from the Lord to look on these misshapen monsters that are seeking by their gaze to draw us into destruction. I wonder how many professing Christians are in this audience who once saw Jesus Christ a great deal more clearly, and contemplated Him a great deal more fixedly, and turned their hearts to Him far more lovingly, than they do to-day? ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain, and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature. And, yet, what ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... you, Sir Kay," said the lady, but the steward was too much amazed to answer. Such a face as that of the lady he had never even imagined, and he took no notice of her salutation. By this time the rest of the knights had joined him, and they all halted, looking in astonishment on the misshapen face of the poor creature before them. It seemed terrible that a woman's figure should be surmounted by such hideous features, and most of the knights were silent for pity's sake; but the steward soon recovered from his amazement, ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... appearing to notice the uneasiness of his favourite, 'I am that diver. Amid this dark ocean of humanity, wherein confusedly move so many defective or misshapen beings, so many forms incomplete or degraded, so many types of bestial ugliness, wretched outlines of nature's experimental essays, I have found beauty, pure, radiant, without spot, without flaw, the ideal made real, ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... way. In this part of the wild road the Saxon feels himself, indeed, a stranger—in race, in creed, and in language. Now and then he sees the Irishman of the stage, clad in the short swallow-tailed coat with pocket-flaps, the corduroy breeches, the blue worsted stockings and misshapen caubeen, made familiar by a thousand novels and plays. These articles of attire are becoming day by day as rare as the red petticoats formerly worn by the peasant women. On the latter, however, may still be seen, now and then, the great blue cloth cloaks which once formed a distinctive article ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... himself to his labors. She could hear his voice in the distant furnace-room giving directions to Aminadab, whose harsh, uncouth, misshapen tones were audible in response, more like the grunt or growl of a brute than human speech. After hours of absence, Aylmer reappeared and proposed that she should now examine his cabinet of chemical ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... holy and a placid grief that comes over you,—not crushing, but bringing to life from the grave of boyhood all its better and nobler instincts. In their light your wild plans of youth look sadly misshapen and in the impulse of the hour you abandon them; holy resolutions beam again upon your soul like sunlight, your purposes seem bathed in goodness. There is an effervescence of the spirit that carries away all foul matter, and leaves you in a state of calm that seems kindred to the ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... more humiliating sight than misshapen gentlemen playing at jockeys. Playing at soldiers is bad enough, but playing at jockeys is infinitely worse—above all, playing at steeple-chase jockeys, combining, as they generally do, all the worst features of the hunting-field and racecourse—unsympathizing ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... desired to revenge myself upon your impudent mistress. Often she has made sport of me with her tricking shadows. Often she has even dared to make my own form flicker and dance before me—not as it is—indeed, but twisted and misshapen to please her own mischievous fancy." His eyes glinted with malice, and Black Shadow was well pleased to find him so willing to give ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... was vaguely dissatisfied. It seemed to him that there was something in these two misshapen bullets that should be investigated. He took one of Solange's cartridges from his pocket and looked at it. Then, with strong teeth, he jerked the ball from the shell and compared the bullet with those he held in his hand. To ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... that seemed to assert equality with the queen of flowers, and would not be eclipsed by the fragrant loveliness of their beautiful dependents. The borders of box, which had once been trimmed and trained into fanciful points and tufts and convolutions of verdure, had grown into misshapen clumps; and the white, pebbly walks no longer ...
— Step by Step - or, Tidy's Way to Freedom • The American Tract Society
... came, the old Nurse following her like a misshapen shadow. Daughter of sun and moon,—a modern Pandora endowed with the strength of a loftier nature! She was robed in creamy white; her pendants were woven pearls. Fine lines of virgin gold gleamed in her turban, and through her long ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... at her ironing in the other room. Outside there was the steady thrashing of the rain. The child was looking at me with large, round eyes filled with a terrible pathos. I noticed that the little body was misshapen. It never moved; it made no sound; but I had the feeling that out of those strangely wistful eyes something was trying to speak to me. Something was forming itself before me—not visible to my sight; but it was there, in the room. It was the man I had last looked upon as, dying, he sat ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... Now I am Elspeth. I love her. I would give her gladness—serve her. She says, 'Let him alone! Do you not know that his own weird will bring him into dark countries and light countries, and where he is to go? Is your own tree to be made thwart and misshapen, that his may be reminded that there is rightness of growth? He is a tree—he is not a stone, nor will he become a stone. There is a law a little larger than your fretfulness that will take care of him! I like Glenfernie better when he is ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... reflections with the contemplation of their gnarled, twisted, gouty, and knotty limbs, still bearing gracious and goodly fruit, I know not, but it was his private retreat, and under one of the most rheumatic and misshapen trunks there was a rude seat. Here Father Pedro sank, his face toward the mountain wall between him and the invisible sea. The relentless, dry, practical Californian sunlight falling on his face grimly pointed out a night of vigil ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... mischievous in his nature, except that he took rather too much pleasure in tormenting an ugly monster called Caliban, for he owed him a grudge because he was the son of his old enemy Sycorax. This Caliban, Prospero found in the woods, a strange misshapen thing, far less human in form than an ape: he took him home to his cell, and taught him to speak; and Prospero would have been very kind to him, but the bad nature which Caliban inherited from his mother Sycorax, would not let him learn anything good or useful: therefore he ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... The owner of the misshapen body had a noble head, a face marked with intellectual quality, but the glitter in the large blue eye told the same tale of mental anarchy. Startled and astonished, the evangelist backed away from the extraordinary creature that continued ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... imagination. His dreams on retiring to seek repose were frightful—several times in the night he saw graceful Phil squinting at him with a nondescript leer of vengeance and derision in his yellow goggle eyes, and bearing Mary off, like some misshapen ogre of old, mounted upon Handsome Harry, who appeared to be gifted with the speed of Hark-away or flying Childers, whilst he himself could do nothing but stand helplessly by, and contemplate the triumph of his ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... her that very night. The sky was heavy and dark; down from it swept incessantly scarcely visible drops of rain, and the melancholy elegy in nature all around me was emphasised by a couple of battered and misshapen willow-trees and a boat, bottom upwards, that was ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... composites, I have been struck by certain general impressions. The consumptive patients consisted of many hundred cases, including a considerable proportion of very ignoble specimens of humanity. Some were scrofulous and misshapen, or suffered from various loathsome forms of inherited disease; most were ill nourished. Nevertheless, in studying their portraits the pathetic interest prevailed, and I returned day after day to my tedious work of classification, with a liking for ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... received his rifle, bayonet, belt, and cartridge-box from the armorer at the lodge. The stone-dressing gang passed close under the window, and Hugh Ritson reeled back as one of the men—a stalwart fellow in a blue cap, who was walking abreast of a misshapen creature with a face full of ferocity—lifted his eyes upward from ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... procrastinating,' withal desirous of shining in society. His ideal of the Lord's head is the highest that art has realised. The apostles' heads are among the truest and noblest. The countenances of his Madonnas are full of ineffable sweetness and pathos. 'At the same time he analysed the monstrous and misshapen, and has left us caricatures in which he seems to have gloated over hideousness half human, half brute. He altered and retouched without ceasing, always deferring the conclusion of the task which he executed with untiring ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... say. Some of you even grumble that your neighbors' children should be healthy when yours are pining. You would allow that you are not of much good yet; but you forget that to make you comfortable as you are would be the same as to pull out Joseph's misfitted thrones and doors, and make his misshapen buckets over again for him. That you think so absurd that you can't believe the story a bit; but you would be helped out of all your troubles, even those you bring on yourselves, not thinking what the certain consequence would be, namely, that you would grow of ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... to the sky. There, blazing with light, like a great misshapen moon, was a giant airship moving swiftly over the city. As it sailed along, streams of fire fell from it, and immediately there followed the terrible thunder of bursting bombs. When it passed out of sight, it seemed as if the voice of the city itself must rise in anguish at the terrible destruction ...
— The Belgian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... in italics are written in strange, misshapen letters, inclining to the right hand, in imitation of Stella's writing" (Deane Swift). (Italics replaced by capitals for ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... great wads of paper. See the people of Vienna and Warsaw, their inside pockets are all misshapen by the bulge of the money. The pockets of an international traveller are worse. He holds his unnegotiable accumulation of the money which is not worth changing nor yet ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... as they passed in the street below, and listened. Trent was pronouncing an encomium upon his wife, and they were both wondering by what enchantment she had been brought to marry such a misshapen wretch as he. The dwarf after watching their retreating shadows with a wider grin than his face had yet displayed, stole softly ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... n't believe what larnin' that boy has got. He has more larnin' than all the people around here put together," I heard one farmer say to another, looking at me, in my own view of the case, as if I were some monster misshapen in the womb. Instead of feeling that my bookish taste was something to be valued, I looked upon myself as a lusus naturae whom Nature had cruelly formed to suffer from an abnormal constitution, and lamented that somehow I never could ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... its light we discovered, through the open door, the "load" huddled confusedly on the floor of the hack, face upward, his chin compressed upon his breast by his leaning against the further door, and looking altogether vulgar, misshapen, and miserably unlike a soldier. He neither moved nor spoke when we called. We hastily clambered within and lifted him upon the seat, but his head rolled about with an awful looseness and freedom, and another match disclosed a ghastly dead face and wide eyes that ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... worthy the proudest days of Greece or Rome; but it passed away like the sudden gleam of a summer sun. O'Leary was exceeded by none of his contemporaries as a patriot: but, though the coarse and misshapen habit of a poor friar of the order of St. Francis forebade his intrusion into the more busy scene of national politics, his pen was not inactive in enlightening and directing his countrymen in their ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... reared some twenty orphans—gave them home and bed and food; taught them all she knew; helped some to obtain a scant knowledge of the trades; helped others off to Canada and America. The author says she had misshapen features, but that an exquisite smile was on the dead face. It must have been so. She "had a beautiful soul," as Emerson said of Longfellow. Poverty disfigured the apple woman's garret, and want made it wretched, nevertheless, God's ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... being only a little above the level of the table, as he stood. With pain and labor, lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his sticks, he took a few steps from his place,—his motions and the dead beat of the misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and ear the malformation which is called in learned language ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... old yew-tree walk, with its strangely misshapen shrubbery, was bright and cheerful in the morning sunlight, and the lake rippled like silver, and gave no hint of dark or ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... early 1930's we have seen occasional individuals with abnormal foliage—somewhat mottled, usually curled and often misshapen. Thinking that a virus might be the cause of this trouble the senior author tried grafting some of the shoots on to healthy stocks. The grafts were in no case successful because the scions were too weak. Finally he succeeded in grafting a branch from an affected tree ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... my lot as a woman; I see the bitterness and the sorrow of my sex through the ages. I have become physically misshapen, so that I am no longer attractive to him. I am no longer active and free, I can no longer go about with him; on the contrary, I am a burden, and he is a man who never tolerated a burden before. What this means is that I have lost the ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... with him at all times, so that muscle and brawn were packed on my tall, broad woman's body with the same compactness as it was packed upon his, by the time I had reached my twenty-first birthday. By that time he and I had been alone together for eight long years, for my mother had left us with tiny, misshapen Pierre as a heart burden but with only ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... fellow attacked him and tried to throw him into the stream. The emperor's cries for help brought his attendants to the spot, and the assailant, in his turn, was thrown into the river. On another occasion an old, misshapen man glided into the camp, bearing poisoned wares which he sought to dispose of to the emperor. Frederick, fortunately, had been forewarned, and he had the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... elevation or "bench" upon which he sat he looked down upon a greasewood flat where patches of alkali gleamed dazzling white under the noon-day sun. The flat was quarter-circled by a waterless creek upon whose banks grew a few misshapen and ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... elf-land. When the glamour is taken away, the splendid feasts and draperies, and gold and silver, and gallant knights and lovely ladies, are seen to have been a squalid misery of poor roots and scraps, tatters and pebbles and bark and dirt, misshapen dwarfs and old hags. Or else, the deceitful vision vanishes all away, and was only empty, unconscious time. Or am I indeed unfortunate, and inferior to other men in innate qualities, in social ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... His hand fell to his side; then fastened mechanically on the railings of a house near him. His rough, misshapen fingers trembled round the iron. Recollections that had slumbered for years and years past, were awakening again awfully to life within him. Through the obscurity and oblivion of long absence, through the changeless darkness of the tomb, there was shining out now, vivid and solemn ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... that had nearly sent his rider sprawling over his head. Just at this moment a plashy tramp by the side of the bridge caught the sensitive ear of Ichabod. In the dark shadow of the grove, on the margin of the brook, he beheld something huge, misshapen, and towering. It stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom, like some gigantic monster ready to spring ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... figure of their friend are all three struck dumb with grief. Without any previous consultation among themselves, they sit silent and sad for seven days and seven nights, gazing with fascinated horror on the misshapen figure on the dunghill. This curious manifestation of friendship unmans the hero whose fortitude had been proof against the most cruel physical and moral suffering; utterly breaking down, he "fills with woes the passing wind," and bitterly curses his existence. Awe at first keeps him from ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the engineer got a glimpse of a misshapen hand, a long, lean, hideous hand that clutched a spear. But, hardly seen, it vanished ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... about a cannon-shot from the shore between two islands, one lofty and the other somewhat lower. It was inhabited by Papuans, whose mode of bedecking themselves, owing to their natural deformity, made them literally appear like monsters. Nearly the whole of them had their limbs fearfully misshapen, besides which they had strings of hogs'-teeth hung about their necks, rings in their noses, their hair frizzled, and their faces black and ugly. Their habitations were remarkable, being light structures of bamboo, mounted on ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... animated that desolate wilderness. We advanced and soon were surrounded by tall bare hills, overspread from top to bottom with prickly-pears and other cacti, that seemed like clinging reptiles. A plain, flat and hard, and with scarcely the vestige of grass, lay before us, and a line of tall misshapen trees bounded the onward view. There was no sight or sound of man or beast, or any living thing, although behind those trees was the long-looked-for place of rendezvous, where we fondly hoped to have found the Indians congregated by thousands. We looked and listened ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... sounds that came to her ears, and she feared she would be whirled away with the great clouds that passed her and went like smoke into the skies. Cold she was and drenched with the rain that fell everywhere around her; gray and misshapen were the moving masses under her gaze; and only where her hands lay holding to her dead body did she see aught of the world she had left behind. There the sweet green grass lifted itself and a brier ...
— The Story and Song of Black Roderick • Dora Sigerson
... passion for the analysis of motives comes the strong character, slightly gnarled and knotted by natural circumstances, as trees that are twisted and misshapen by storms and floods—or characters gnarled by some interior force working in conjunction with or in opposition to outward circumstances. She draws no monstrosities, or monsters, thus avoiding on the one side romance ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... which she was designed fully and nobly to fill. The place is not too high, too large, too sacred for woman, but the type that you have chosen is far too small for it. The woman we declare unto you is the rude, misshapen, unpolished object of the successful artist. From your stand-point, you are absorbed with the defects alone. The true artist sees the harmony between the object and its destination. Man, the sculptor, has carved ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... ordinary coal, with sharp angles that show that they have not been rolled; and the sandstone has taken their exact details, which are found in hollow form in the gangue. In other cases these fragments exhibit the aspect of genuine shingle or rolled pebbles. These pebbles of coal have not been misshapen under the pressure of the surrounding sandstone, nor have they shrunk since their burial and the solidification of the gangue, for their surface is in contact with the internal surface of their matrix. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... as if everything were well ordered; the irregularity is of our nature; our political world is like our globe, a misshapen thing which always preserves itself. It would be mad to wish that the mountains, the seas, the rivers, were traced in beautiful regular forms; it would be still more mad to ask perfect wisdom of men; it would be wishing to give wings to ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... to rely on these advantages alone for attaining an excellence in the finer arts.[*] And there may even remain a suspicion, that we overrate, if possible, the greatness of his genius; in the same manner as bodies often appear more gigantic, on account of their being disproportioned and misshapen. He died in 1616, aged ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... sat a little cripple, whose pale countenance bore that expression of suffering sweetness so peculiar to the deformed, while his lank hair, bony hands, and misshapen shoulders awakened the beholder's pity. He, too, was an orphan—a grandchild of the old lady's; his parents had ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... together, "Nushka! you shall have a sweetheart, You shall have a handsome husband!" "Ugh!" the old men all responded, 215 From their seats beneath the pine-trees. And whene'er a youth or maiden Found a crooked ear in husking, Found a maize-ear in the husking Blighted, mildewed, or misshapen, 220 Then they laughed and sang together, Crept and limped about the corn-fields, Mimicked in their gait and gestures Some old man, bent almost double, Singing singly or together: 225 "Wagemin, the thief of corn-fields! Paimosaid, the skulking robber!" Till the corn-fields rang with ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... this mammoth, this leviathan, this monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, as I remember my old father used to call a certain gigantic and misshapen bull that we had on the Station, flapping a pair of ears that looked like the sides of a Kafir hut, and waving a trunk as big as a weaver's beam—whatever a weaver's beam may be—an ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... Holies, where the golden statue of the Goddess had been kept; but alas, the figures themselves! Alas! I knew how Cleopatra must be feeling; and I dared not speak. Perhaps she was even blushing: but I did not look. Instead, I gazed helplessly up at that exposed, misshapen ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... way or that and never change. You talk as though Isabel was a cat one could give to any kind of owner.... We two are things that change and grow and alter all the time. We're—so interwoven that being parted now will leave us just misshapen cripples.... You don't know the motives, you don't know the rush and feel of things, you don't know how it was with us, and how it is with us. You don't know the hunger for the mere sight of one ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... me a country-man, said that my bones were misshapen, and then stated that glory does not go hand in hand with tuberculosis. Poor Alejandro! He was sound at heart, an eloquent child of the Mediterranean, born to orate in the lands of the sun, but he took it into his ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... lash the great, and monarchs to revile. His figure such as might his soul proclaim; One eye was blinking, and one leg was lame: His mountain shoulders half his breast o'erspread, Thin hairs bestrew'd his long misshapen head. Spleen to mankind his envious heart possess'd, And much he hated all, but most the best: Ulysses or Achilles still his theme; But royal scandal his delight supreme, Long had he lived the scorn of every Greek, Vex'd when he spoke, yet still they heard him speak. Sharp ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... treatment that had followed upon it, had greatly altered the face. The nose, once fine and delicate, was now coarse and misshapen. A wound had permanently distorted the mouth, producing a strange, sneering expression. The whole of the right side of the face was puffy and heavy-looking, and drawn down towards the chin. It was also at present ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... absurd and pitiful pomp of the few houses that affected to be palaces, the filthiness and gothicism of the churches, the vandalic structure of the theaters of that time, and the many and many and many disagreeable objects that all day fell under my notice, and worst of all the unspeakably misshapen and beplastered faces of those ugliest ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... picking pockets in the Times Square Subway station and once more Max was forced to journey jail-ward. Sullivan's story gave his chief still more occasion for thought, for this arrest seemed plainly "a frame," being absurd upon its face. The pugilist had huge, misshapen paws that could scarcely explore his own, much less another's pockets, and his stiffened fingers could not palm a coin in the dark, yet a stranger had accused him of deftly lifting a watch. It seemed significant that two plain-clothes men should ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... The shadow ceased drifting, for the boat had come to anchor. Then in a very few minutes, because the creatures of the sea seem unable to fear what does not move, the life of the sea-floor again bestirred itself, and small, misshapen forms that did not love the sunlight began to convene in ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... vertically to the length required. Each stone is shaped and fashioned to the size that may be wanted, before it is removed from the parent rock, by which much difficulty is avoided and less power required in conveying it to its destination. Rude misshapen blocks, requiring additional labour for their removal, are never detached from the rock in such a state. In this respect they are more provident than the late Empress of Russia who, at an immense expense and with the aid ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... writing-table gave evidence of it. The back wall of the study, opposite the window, was lined with books. On the wall over the fireplace hung a large map of Africa. Rendel looked intently at it as he thought of the stirring pages of history that were in the making on that huge, misshapen continent, of the field that it was going to be for the statesmen and administrators of the future: he thought of Lord Belmont, only two years older than himself, with whom he had been at Eton and at Oxford, ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... years now, and they do not know how we hate them. They do not know how disgusting and hideous we find them, with their ugly misshapen bodies, so narrow-shouldered and tiny-chested, their weak sibilant voices that need amplification to carry in our Martian air, and above all their ...
— Keep Out • Fredric Brown
... at the fence and leaned against it, gazing for the last time at the tent, glimmering white, like a misshapen ghost, among the somber trees. He had no ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... Moyen, the genius of the misshapen body, the pale eyes which reflected the fires of a Satanic soul, set deeply in the midst of the face of an angel; and wondering if he would be able to arrive in time, sorry that he had not returned home ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... the death of a member of Parliament, a prominent county magistrate, the owner of large estates, and an active, public-spirited man in all local and national matters, was it known by those who had not seen him, that it was but the misshapen block of a man that had ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... entire pirate gang was here encamped. Manuel now made the acquaintance of El Bizco, a cross-eyed species of chimpanzee, square-shaped, husky, long-armed, with misshapen ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... fetes he offered. Equally astonished were they with their new monarch. Louis was thirty-eight and not attractive in person. His eyes were piercing but his visage was made plain by a disproportionate nose. His legs were thin and misshapen, his gait uncertain. He dressed very simply, wearing an old pilgrim's hat, ornamented by a leaden saint. As he rode into Abbeville in company with Philip, the simple folk who had never seen the king were greatly amazed at his appearance and said quite loud, "Benedicite! Is ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... chords could be played in a world drenched with Ingredient Beta. Steadily the idea grew that peace and beauty were supremely good, that violence and ugliness were supremely evil. Even competitive sports which simulated violence; even children born ugly and misshapen.... ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... stone had now completely assumed the form of a man, though a monstrous and gigantic one! He could clearly perceive that the little blue lights were borne by Dwarfs whose pale clay-coloured faces, with their huge noses and red eyes, disfigured too by birds' bills and owls' eyes, were supported by misshapen bodies, and they tottered and wabbled about here and there, so that they seemed to be at the same time merry and in pain. Suddenly, the circle opened; the little ones retired on each side, and Guru—who was the woman Guru, whom ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... silver radiance of the moon spread itself on the high curtain of the dark. Then the edge of her orb appeared above the hill and an arrow of white light fell into the little valley. It struck upon and about the jutting rock, revealing a misshapen, white-headed figure squatted between its base and the ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... coarse, and strangely discordant and disjointed from each other. His lips were thick, and the tone of his voice broad and unmodulated. His legs were of equal size from one end to the other, and his feet misshapen and clumsy. He had nothing spiteful or malicious in his disposition, but he was a total stranger to tenderness; he could not feel for those refinements in others, of which he had no experience in himself. ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... sensation, vague as it was, seemed to have been recognised, shared for an instant by the young creature beside him. It was rather uncanny. He had heard that idiots or half-witted people were like that. She rose uneasily, placing upon her long, sprawling curls an old sun hat, very dirty, the brim misshapen by frequent wettings of pipe-clay. A servant appeared from behind the far corner of the verandah, an old man, dark skinned, emaciated, clad in a faded red sarong. He was her personal servant, told off to attend her. Something must be done for the men on ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... well. He is a rich man, and there is a good deal of business in connection with the estate, and so on. I am a poor man. By my father's will nearly everything was left to him and to Isabel. I was something of an offence to him, being the cause of my mother's death and misshapen into the bargain." ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... Howat Penny expressed no regret, and the other hesitated awkwardly. "It's no use!" he finally exclaimed. "I can't reach you; as if one of us spoke Patagonian. Hellish, it seems to me." He turned and disappeared, as violently as he had come, over the obscurity of the lawn. A reddish, misshapen moon hung low in the sky, and gave the aging man an extraordinarily vivid impression of dead planets, unthinkable wastes of time, illimitable systems and spaces. James Polder's passionate resentment, his own emotion, were no more ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Mr. O'Royster watched his misshapen body as it disappeared through the entry. Then he gazed at the banker and finally remarked: "Can't say that your ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... gaze gradually took in other features—the china monkeys swinging on cords, the porcelain parrots hanging in great brass rings, huge misshapen terra-cotta jars and pots, dead grass in bloated drain-pipes, tambourines, beribboned and painted with kittens and robins, enormous wooden sabots, gilded Japanese fans, a woolly white rug ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... time. When she came back again she bore in her arms a bundle, large, knobby and misshapen. It was wrapped in newspapers which had cracked away here and there over the end of a rib; but it was enclosed in a network of strings that crossed and crisscrossed like ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... the great room was filled with eaters, just as the vast court was filled with vehicles of every sort—wagons, gigs, chars-a-bancs, tilburies, innumerable vehicles which have no name, yellow with mud, misshapen, pieced together, raising their shafts to heaven like two arms, or it may be with their nose on the ground and their rear ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... chairs and tables queer, but, with due regard to the principle that a man's surroundings should bear the impress of that man's life and occupation, the chief ornaments of the dwelling were a curious collection of calcinations, that had been discovered from time to time in the lime-kiln—misshapen ingots of strange substance, some of them ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... The misshapen monarch himself was the very caricature of a man, hideous and grotesque as a gargoyle. He was short of stature, spindle-shanked, rachitic and malformed, and of his face, with its colossal nose, loose ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... and there, were mural paintings of knights in armour, and fat peasants drinking, dimmed and half obliterated. Beneath were legends and proverbs, printed in quaint, old-German characters; while across one end, like a frieze, ran a ledge carven with gargoyles, rude and misshapen. On the ledge were beer mugs of every size and description, with queer tops and crooked handles. Above, suspended from the ceiling by chains, hung a huge Fass; and from the throats of the gargoyles, dragon and devil alike, dripped the beer, turned ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... the Guard, and one other—that, David Rizzio, who from an errant minstrel had risen to this perilous eminence, a man of a swarthy, ill-favoured countenance redeemed by the intelligence that glowed in his dark eyes, and of a body so slight and fragile as to seem almost misshapen. His age was not above thirty, yet indifferent health, early privation, and misfortune had so set their mark upon him that he had all the appearance of a man of fifty. He was dressed with sombre magnificence, and a jewel of great price smouldered upon the middle finger ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... architecture of medieval towns. That which is funny is calculated to provoke laughter; that which is droll is more quietly amusing. That which is grotesque in the material sense is irregular or misshapen in form or outline or ill-proportioned so as to be somewhat ridiculous; the French bizarre is practically ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... that gave it lasting fame. Another image of the Christ crucified was revered in a village near Bislig, and was later given a place in the Recollect church at Manila. It was a small ordinary image such as was used on the altar during mass. As it was very ugly and misshapen the priest determined to bury it, ordering some of the natives to perform that task. But when the hole was dug, and they went to get the image, in its place they found the most beautiful and symmetrical image that they had ever seen, and nailed ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... her face was coarser than it had been when he loved her. Her hair was tied untidily about her head, and he could see that her hands, as she held the child, were rough and red, and that her nails were broken and misshapen. Her boots were loosely laced, and she ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... arch-traitor, which are sold on the evening of Good Friday, and let off on Saturday morning. Hundreds of these hideous figures were held above the crowd, by men who carried them tied together on long poles. An ugly misshapen monster they represent the betrayer to have been. When he sold his master for thirty pieces of silver, did he dream that in the lapse of ages his effigies should be held up to the execration of a Mexican mob, of an unknown people in undiscovered countries beyond the seas?—A secret bargain, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... the lines of the features, the beauty of the eyes, the wealth of the dark, clustering hair, were all as near artistic perfection as could be. But all else spoke of deformity—the badly bent back, the twisted body, the short leg, the misshapen foot. It was as if Nature had endeavoured in some wickedly mischievous freak to show how beauty and ugliness can be ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... been ugly, misshapen, vulgar; if only they had spoken with coarse, rough voices, or irritated him by their inferior social tone, or shown themselves unworthy to be the heirs of Tilgate—why then, the Colonel might possibly have ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... city and you asked her where she would prefer to reside, she returned some very unexpected answer. She would say in Copenhagen, or in Barcelona; having, while making the tour of Europe, spent a couple of days at each of these places. On the whole, with her poetic furbelows and her misshapen, intelligent little face, she was, when you knew her, a decidedly interesting woman. She was naturally shy, and if she had been born a beauty, she would (having no vanity) probably have remained shy. Now, she was both diffident and importunate; extremely reserved sometimes with her ...
— The American • Henry James
... him on here, I'd better tell him myself," Samms directed, and his face hardened in ruthless decision as the horny, misshapen face of the Martian lieutenant appeared upon the screen. "What do you think, Knobos? Shall they come to ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... Sichliffe went on, her voice shaking, 'he isn't a good life, but perhaps I can—patch him up. Come here, sir.' The misshapen beast lurched toward her, squinting down his own nose till he fell over his own toes. Then, luckily, Bettina ran across the lawn and reminded Malachi of their puppyhood. All that family are as queer as Dick's hatband, and fight like ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... the fever craze and pains began to leave him, and when at last he crawled out in the sun, he found himself a poor misshapen thing, all maimed and marred, with twisted back and face all drawn awry, and foot that dragged. One hand hung nerveless by his side. Never more would it be strong enough to use the Sword. He could not even ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... and with a black gag around his face and in his mouth. We were in a huge dim open space. Presently, as my vision cleared, I saw that the dome was overhead. This was a circular, hundred-foot-wide room. It was dimly lighted. The figures of men were moving about, their great misshapen shadows shifting with them. Twenty feet from me there was a pile of golden rock—chunks of gold the size of a man's fist, or his head, and larger, heaped loosely into a ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... squat, hump-backed blotch, that was sprawling blackly beside a misshapen block, was either wriggling on the floor as if trying to stand upright . . . or else there was something wrong with ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... his attention. There was a man working, the Potter. There was the instrument with which he worked, the wheel. And there was the substance upon which he worked, the clay. In the Potter's hand the clay was misshapen and unsightly. The cup was not yet finished in the Potter's hand. But there was a place where it was finished, and that was in the mind of the Potter. The Potter could already see the finished product. He was trying ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... was such a contrast between man and woman ever witnessed, as that which presented itself on this occasion. There stood the large, ungainly, almost misshapen father, with a countenance distorted, by the consequences of ill-suppressed passion, into a deeper deformity—a deformity that was rendered ludicrously hideous, by a squint that gave, as we have ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... of sixteen followed her, ugly and misshapen as a gargoyle; he carried the baby in a sling on his back. Two timorous little ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... looked around him, and beheld a plain trampled, bare and devastated, all the trees cut down within a few feet from the surface, and farther off craggy hills, the highest of which appeared to be the most misshapen. It had all the appearance of an extinguished and destroyed volcano. The ground was covered all around with fragments of helmets and cuirasses, broken drums, gun-stocks, tatters of uniforms, and standards ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... children, set fire to the castle, and perished in the flames. The Justiciars were too much occupied with their own quarrels to heed such matters. Hugh was a stately and magnificent prelate. William was lame and misshapen, quick of wit and unscrupulous. In a few weeks he had deprived his rival of all authority. His own power did not last long. He had a sharp tongue, and did not hesitate to let all men, great and small, know how meanly he thought of them. ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... discontent and the waters of loneliness make fertile soil for the seeds of fear, even if those seeds be planted by the hand of a misshapen slave; but a little smile and a sigh of satisfaction had been the outcome of a prolonged scrutiny in a mirror, before which she had stood whilst quoting certain ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... crowded, in union fearful and black, In a horrible mass entwined, The rock-fish, the ray with the thorny back, And the hammer-fish's misshapen kind, And the shark, the hyena dread of the sea, With his angry teeth, grinned fiercely ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... vegetable—sprawling, large framed, later maturing, longer yielding, vigorously rooting. However, many of these old-timers have not seen the attentions of a professional plant breeder for many years and throw a fair percentage of bizarre, misshapen, nonproductive plants. These "off types" can be compensated for by growing a somewhat larger garden and allowing for some waste. Dr. Alan Kapuler, who runs Peace Seeds, has brilliantly pointed out to me why heirloom varieties are likely to be more nutritious. Propagated ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... said the blind child, "listening to the falling water, and the neighbors came to fill their pitchers, and I heard them talking. It was terrible! it seems that every one in the whole village is either bald or cross-eyed, wrinkled or misshapen. All ...
— The Silver Crown - Another Book of Fables • Laura E. Richards
... the first time you have been to our church?" asked Father Yakov, hanging his hat on a huge misshapen nail. ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... from the trunk and about the same from the ground. The nest was more substantial than that of G. lanceolatus, much more moss having been used in the outer casing, but the lining was similar; it was a misshapen nest, and appeared, in the distance, like an old deserted one; the bird was sitting at the time; I took one egg, hoping more would be laid, but the other was deserted and destroyed by vermin. Another nest I found on the 2nd June; it contained three ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... beautiful valley of Aosta, as the transparent azure veil of the Italian dusk was drawn, and out of that dusk glimmered now and then, as if born of the shadows, strange, stunted, and misshapen forms, gnome-like creatures, who stood aside to let us pass along the road. It was as if the Brownie Club were out for a night excursion; and I remembered my muleteer's lecture about the cretins of this happy valley. These ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... the man was hideous, though his ugliness was not unpleasant, being due chiefly to a great development of his tribal feature, the nose, and in body he was misshapen to the verge of monstrosity. In fact Otter was a dwarf, measuring little more than four feet in height. But what he lacked in height he made up in breadth; it almost seemed as though, intended by nature to be a man of many inches, he had been compressed ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... flood, Such names as Morton, Reynolds, Dibdin, Cherry. Morton a melancholy wight, whose muse, Now sighs and sobs, like newly bottled ale, Now splits her ugly mouth with grinning.[10] Reynolds,[11] whose muse most monstrous and misshapen, Outvies the hideous form that Horace drew. Dibdin[12] a ballad monger—and for Cherry— But Cherry has no character ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... or the silver columns that shoot aloft, worked by the gnomes from the mines of the mountains of Taunus; but of the strange inhabitants that from time to time they came upon. They found in one solitary cell, lined with dried moss, two misshapen elves, of a larger size than common, with a plebeian working-day aspect, who were chatting noisily together, and making a pair of boots: these were the Hausmannen or domestic elves, that dance into ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... months together on Klaas's farm. It was a dreary place, save for Hilda. The bare daub-and-wattle walls; the clumps of misshapen and dusty prickly-pears that girt round the thatched huts of the Kaffir workpeople; the stone-penned sheep-kraals, and the corrugated iron roof of the bald stable for the waggon oxen—all was as crude and ugly as a new country can make things. It seemed to me a desecration that Hilda should live ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... to swim about with a gentle tremulous motion in a mute inquiring way from side to side of the pail that contains them. Looked at closely with an attentive eye, the complex moving mass gradually resolves itself into two parts: one a ruddy seaweed with long streaming fronds; the other, a strangely misshapen and dishevelled pipe-fish, exactly imitating the weed itself in form and colour. When removed from the water, this queer pipe-fish proves in general outline somewhat to resemble the well-known hippocampus or sea-horse of the aquariums, whose dried remains, in a mummified state, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen |
