"Weird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "this was puir John Blower's spleuchan,[I-16] as they ca' it—I e'en wear it for his sake. He was a kind man, and left me comfortable in warld's gudes; but comforts hae their cumbers,—to be a lone woman is a sair weird, Dr. Kittlepin." ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... if I follow you through the village in these weird clothes?" she said civilly, as one who hesitates to make a suggestion. "Where ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... expression. Every mysterious element in the neighborhood—whether emanating from the Perdu itself or from the spirits of the people about it—appeared to find a focus in the personalities of the two children. All the weird, formless stories,—rather suggestions or impressions than stories,—that in the course of time had gathered about the place, were revived with added vividness and awe. New ones, too, sprang into existence all over the country-side, and were certain to be connected, soon after their origin, ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... dimly lit room Nostromo rolled his head slowly on the pillow and opened his eyes, directing at the weird figure perched by his bedside a glance of enigmatic and profound inquiry. Then his head rolled back, his eyelids fell, and the Capataz de Cargadores died without a word or moan after an hour of immobility, broken by short shudders testifying to ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... of Chinna Tumbe walks,—that always at midnight, when the Indian nightingale fills the Baboo's banian topes with her lugubrious song, and the weird ulus hoot from the peepul tops, a child, girt with silver bells, and followed by a Persian kitten and a mungooz, shakes the Baboo's gate, blows upon a silver whistle, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... attain perfection that they lost the capacity to feel anything. When I was a monk I often wished I could see a saint. I pictured him as living in the wilderness, abstaining from meat and drink and living on roots and herbs and cold water. This weird conception of those awesome saints I had gained out of the books of the scholastics and church fathers. But we know now from the Scriptures who the true saints are. Not those who live a single life, or make a fetish ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... that Fray Antonio and I looked closely at their wrappings and noted the way in which their mummied forms had been ranged before this idol—that certainly belonged to a primitive time—the more were we inclined to believe that this weird sepulchre belonged to the very far back past. But for the moment it mattered not to us whence these dead forms came: the essential matter was that while we remained in the cave with them we were in ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... wronged its former rulers, nor broken the traditions of beauty. He stood a long time looking at the old place, wondering at the charm which it had so suddenly flung upon him. Then he shook off the new and weird feeling and flew to embrace his Sonia ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... to think much about it, for fear he would do his friend an injustice. The fact that he could not see Cairns differently in the latter's first fame-flush, and observing past doubt, that he was lifted for the world's eyes, helped Bedient to realize that he was a bit weird in judgment. At all events, something was gone from the friendship. He was sore at heart, more than ever alone.... The two separated a second time in Peking after the relief of the Legations. Bedient went to Japan, where he made the acquaintance of an old Buddhist ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... things and achievements. In Kansas is a village called Lane, a name which, to the old settler in Kansas, is big with meaning, seeing it brings to life one of the strange, romantic, contradictory, and brilliant characters of the "Squatter Sovereignty" days, when Jim Lane wrought, with his weird and wonderful eloquence, his journeys oft, and his tireless industry, in championing the cause of State freedom. Him and his history, reading like a tale told by a campfire's fitful light, this name embodies. What an archive of history ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... had just finished his lunch, and certainly his empty dish bore evidence to the good appetite with which his housekeeper had credited him. He was, indeed, a weird figure as he turned his white mane and his glowing eyes towards us. The eternal cigarette smouldered in his mouth. He had been dressed and was seated in ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with clouds, yellow leaves strew the paths at the edge of the naked forest, and the forest itself turns black and blue—more especially at eventide when damp fog is spreading and the trees glimmer in the depths like giants, like formless, weird phantoms. Perhaps one may be out late, and had got separated from one's companions. Oh horrors! Suddenly one starts and trembles as one seems to see a strange-looking being peering from out of the darkness of a hollow tree, while all the while the wind is moaning and rattling ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... shore, I long watched the stars above me. As children sleep after a day of toil and play, so slept the dusky men who lay around me. It was my first night with these poor wild sons of the lone spaces; it was strange and weird, and the lapping of the mimic wave against the rocks close by failed to bring sleep to my thinking eyes. Many a night afterwards I lay down to sleep beside these men and their brethren—many a night by lake-shore, by torrent's edge, and far out amidst the measureless meadows of the West—but ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... choke; they're so soft, and lissom; the peace, and the pity—a sort of look of: "Why—why—when I was so alive?" Well, this elderly Johnny took a good squint at it, to see if the hole was big enough, then off he went again, sobbing and digging like a fiend. It was really a bit too weird, and I mouched off. But when I'd gone about half a mile, I got an attack of the want-to-knows, came back, and sneaked along the hedge. There he was still, but he had finished, and was having a mop round, and putting the last touches to a heap of stones. ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... confusion by howling at random and asking irrelevant questions, while they gazed at the figure of a man a little on in years arrayed in a long night-shirt, pawing fiercely at the unattainable spot in the middle of his back, while he danced an unnatural, weird, wicked-looking jig by the dim, religious light of the night-lamp. And while he danced and howled, and while they gazed and shouted, a navy-blue wasp, that Master Middlerib had put in the bottle for good measure and variety, and to keep the menagerie ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... poem is a triumph of romantic genius. The meter, the rhythm, and the music have well-nigh magical effect. Almost every stanza shows not only exquisite harmony, but also the easy mastery of genius in dealing with those weird scenes which ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... I can understand it, painters claim that while you are looking at an object you do not really see it all, you merely gain an impression; so they paint only the impression. In a museum of art I was shown several rooms full of daubs, having absolutely nothing to commend them, weird colors being thrown together in the strangest manner, without rhyme or reason, but over which people went mad. The great masters of Europe appeal to me strongly. In America, marine painters attract me the most, for example, Edward Moran, who is a splendid delineator of the sea. Bierstadt ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... legends she has obtained with a certain degree of historical criticism, that gives a value to her work as an illustration of national beliefs, without reference to its character as a hortus siccus of weird and marvelous stories. In point of style, her volume is unexceptionable; its spirit is modest and reverent; it can not be justly accused of superstition, though it betrays a womanly instinct for the supernatural: and without being imbued with any love of dogmas, breathes ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... He won't mind being offered a coffee and liqueur. We can give him something decent—Where's the waiter?" Angus lifted his pinched, ugly bare face and looked round with weird command for the waiter. The waiter, having not much to do, and feeling ready to draw these two weird young birds, ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... this cheerfulness, he found, glimmering like some weird death-fire over the actual horror, which made his realisation of the tragedy the more poignant, and lent even a certain distinction to the poverty which she described. Here, indeed, was the supreme vulgarity of suffering—and before it his own personal afflictions ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... land you out here. I coaxed a cross old tinner to make the frame for me. He expostulated the while that the thing was impossible, because it had never been done before in this part of the country. It was rather a weird shape, but I left the girls to trim it and went to the church to help decorate. The bell was to follow upon completion. It failed to follow and after waiting an hour or so I sent for it. The girls came carrying one trimmed bell and one half covered. I asked, "Why are you making two wedding-bells?" ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... what the principal dishes were to be: and on the answer depended his acceptance or declination. Dining with him one night, I was fascinated by his wife; it seemed to me that I had never seen a woman of such wonderful and almost weird powers: there was something exquisitely beautiful in her manner and conversation; and, on my afterward speaking of this to another guest, he answered: "Why, of course; she is the daughter of Goethe's Bettina, to whom he wrote the 'Letters ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... to one who has come out of the eternal shadows the world is ever strange—was drowned in the supreme indifference of absolute ease and rest. It seemed to him as though he were floating midway between the earth and the sun, not in a weird dream wherein the subconscious mind says, "This is not real; I know that I dream"; but actual, in that Pete could feel nothing above nor beneath him. Being of a very practical turn of mind he straightway opened his eyes and was at once conscious of the arm of ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... stretched the great brown moor, weird and lonely looking, except for where, less than a mile away, Paul could see the chimneys of Moor Farm smoking, and the sunlight shining on the windows. Stella had fallen with her back to the house, and all she could see ...
— Paul the Courageous • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... 'Shecase,' or fire-brigade, passing silently along the streets, lighted by its weird red-and-black distinguishing lanterns, is a strange sight. Some of its members wear armour, with helmets and black-lacquered iron visors, and carry 'martoe,' or 'fire-charms,' and various necessary implements; others are clad in head-and-shoulder pieces and gauntlets of light ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver
... take no heed of all these earthly things. They lay grovelling in the mud before some unseen power; and beating their tom-toms in unison, with barbaric concord, they cried aloud once more as Felix appeared, in a weird litany that overtopped the tumultuous noise of the tempest, "Oh, Storm-God, hear us! Oh, great spirit, deliver us! King of the Rain and Queen of the Clouds, befriend us! Be angry no more! Hide your wrath from your people! ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... campaigns had already smashed her flabby fleets and driven the remnants from space, but the Council, faced with the destruction and casualties from just a few days of the weird surprise ...
— Tulan • Carroll Mather Capps
... each other, bit and squealed, stamped their forefeet, and tossed their manes. The men were silent. It made a weird ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... spine, and formed this system of lakes. Another break occurs on the high plateau, from Portuguese East Africa in the south to British East Africa in the north, along the Great Rift Valley, with its magnificent escarpments and weird scenery, prolonged through Lake Rudolf to the Red Sea and on to the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley. Great volcanoes, now mostly extinct, though some to the north of Kivu are still active, are a still later feature ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... weird and lurid, true and untrue, have been told of this body of saline water lying imposed on the breast of the beautiful and scenic State of Utah. Although one of the transcontinental highways of ocean-to-ocean travel has extended its bands of steel directly across its wide bosom for many ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... very clearly foretelleth unto everyone who is desirous to be certified of the condition of his lot what his destiny will be, and what future chance the Fates have ordained for him; for the Parcae, or Weird Sisters, do not twist, spin, or draw out a thread, nor yet doth Jupiter perpend, project, or deliberate anything which the good old celestial father knoweth not to the full, even whilst he is asleep. This will be a very summary abbreviation ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the infernal mixture and inhaled the pungent sickening vapors, we were impressed with the idea that this was a most perfect realization of Shakespeare's image in Macbeth. It needed but the presence of Hecate and her weird band to realize that horrible creation of poetic fancy, and I fancied the "black and midnight hags" concocting a charm around this horrible cauldron. We ventured near enough to this spring to dip the end of a pine pole into it, which, upon removal, was covered an eighth of an ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... made such a mistake, and finding in his own forlorn heart an echo of the sweet, melancholy evening music. Around him the mosquitoes wailed out their dreary little song; away down by the edge of the wet, low pastures, where the fireflies wandered, each with his weird little torch, the frogs were piping mournfully. The whitethroat was sending out his "silver arrows of song" clearly and pensively from the depths of the velvet dusk. The discordant twang of the swooping night-hawks came down from the ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... know what to expect,—how to manoeuvre. If only he could have seen these beasts that filled the forest with their hob-goblin outcries—if he could have had a good look at the creatures who gave forth that weird, ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... of the town the white tower of the old church of Skagen may be seen peeping over the sand-dunes. This "stepped" tower, with its red-tiled, saddle-back roof, forms a striking feature in this weird and lonely landscape. The church itself is buried beneath the sand, leaving only the tower to mark the place that is called the "Pompeii of Denmark," sand, not lava, being answerable for this entombment. It is said that the village which surrounded ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... stand pressed against the houses; they greet the procession or scoff at it, according as they are friends or foes. Upstairs, behind the big windows, are gaily clad ladies and gentlemen, quizzing the procession with half- scornful, half-uneasy smiles. What weird, hungry, unkempt world is this that has suddenly risen up from obscurity to take possession of the highway? And behind their transparent lace curtains the manufacturers gaze and grumble. What novel kind of demonstration is this? The people have been forgiven, and instead of going ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... transparent roofing we saw clearly the bottom, one forest of soft, undulating weeds, which, catching the sunlight through the crystal-clear water, looked like golden woods of some enchanted world within its depths; and it looks just as weird and lovely when folks go drowning down there, only they don't see it. I sang Mrs. Hemans's "What hid'st thou in thy treasure-caves and cells?" and sang and sang till, after rowing for an hour over the hardly heaving, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... around the circle. Then something like a light ring of smoke up-curved from the saddle before him, and, slowly uncoiling itself in mid air, dropped gently to the ground as he passed. Again, and once again, the shadowy coil sped upward and onward, slowly detaching its snaky rings with a weird deliberation that was in strange contrast to the impetuous onset of the rider, and yet seemed a part of his fury. And then turning, Pereo trotted gently to the ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... In little more than a week's time he composed an opera, "Rodrigo," for which he obtained one hundred sequins. His next visit was to Venice, where he arrived at the height of the carnival. Whatever effect Venice, with its weird and mysterious beauty, with its marble palaces, facades, pillars, and domes, its magnificent shrines and frescoes, produced on Handel, he took Venice by storm. Handel's power as an organist and a harpsichord player was only second ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... place. I had had no experience in parachute jumping and I couldn't pilot the plane if Hughes jumped. We swooped down over the wreck as close as we dared and that was when we saw the condition of the bodies. The whole plane was cracked up pretty badly, but the weird part of it was the fact that the bodies of the crew had broken into pieces, as though they had been made of glass. Arms and legs were detached from the torsos and lying at a distance. There was no sign of blood on the ground. We saw ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... haunches. Some of the women were engaged in milking the sheep and goats in an inclosure. Others were busy making butter in a churn which was nothing more than a skin vessel three feet long, of the shape of a Brazil-nut, suspended from a rude tripod; this they swung to and fro to the tune of a weird Kurdish song. Behind one of the tents, on a primitive weaving-machine, some of them were making tent-roofing and matting. Others still were walking about with a ball of wool in one hand and a distaff in the other, spinning ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... ears. This evening had completely confirmed him in his suspicions about his wife. He no longer doubted that his wife, with the aid of the Evil One, controlled the winds and the post sledges. But to add to his grief, this mysteriousness, this supernatural, weird power gave the woman beside him a peculiar, incomprehensible charm of which he had not been conscious before. The fact that in his stupidity he unconsciously threw a poetic glamour over her made her seem, as it ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... attractions that govern crystallization? Is the day dawning, when the phenomena of hypnotism will be analyzed and formulated as accurately as the symbols of chemistry, or the constituents of protoplasm, or the weird chromatics of spectroscopy? Beryl's head, that hitherto had turned restlessly on its pillow, became motionless; the closed eyes opened suddenly, fastened upon the lawyer's; and some inexplicable influence impelled her to stretch out ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... impressed with awe by it, and accounted for the phenomenon he had observed by ascribing to the dull fossil a living soul. That is the unconscious impression still, after twenty-five hundred years have passed since Thales died; that hidden in the heart of electrical phenomena there is a weird sentience; what a Greek would consider something divine and immortal apart from matter. But neither Thales, nor Theophrastus, nor Pliny the elder, nor any ancient, could conceive of a fact but dimly guessed until the day of Franklin; that this secret of the silent ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... the two paths to a something beyond an earthly life diverge. Up to this point the two religions are alike, but from this point on they are so utterly unlike that the very similarity of all that went before only suffices to make of the second the weird, life-counterfeiting shadow of the first. As in a silhouette, externally the contours are all there, but within is one vast blank. In relation to one's neighbor the two beliefs are kin, but as ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... events themselves than upon my possessing any special facility for recalling them. Perhaps I am too imaginative, and the earliest impressions I received were of a kind to stimulate the imagination abnormally. A long series of little misfortunes, connected with each other as to suggest a sort of weird fatality, so worked upon my melancholy temperament when I was a boy that, before I was of age, I sincerely believed myself to be under a curse, and not only myself, but my whole family, and every individual who bore ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... 1200 Of Eormenric then, and chose rede everlasting. That ring Hygelac had, e'en he of the Geat-folk, The grandson of Swerting, the last time of all times When he under the war-sign his treasure defended, The slaughter-prey warded. Him weird bore away Sithence he for pride-sake the war-woe abided, The feud with the Frisians; the fretwork he flitted, The gem-stones much worthy, all over the waves' cup. The King the full mighty cring'd under the shield; Into grasp of the Franks the King's life was gotten 1210 With the gear ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous
... to Mrs. John Quincy Adams, who was Louisa Catharine Johnson of this same Maryland family, and, as she was an occasional visitor at the White House during her relative's residence there, she mingled with many prominent people. I recall a weird story she once told me in connection with a daughter of Smith Thompson, Secretary of the Navy under President Monroe. It seems she married the Viscount Paul Alfred de Bresson, the third Secretary of the French Embassy in Washington, and subsequently many elaborate entertainments ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... Beneath an oak weird eddies play, Where fate was writ for Saxon seer; And yonder park is white with may, Where shadowy hunters chased ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... through the dim light, that leaped out and plunged into the darkness again, shouting and thundering as it dropped into a yawning ink black void rimmed with granite boulders. She crept closer, her ears filled with the din, her eyes bright with the strange, weird, almost unearthly beauty of the place. She crept so close, gripping one of the boulders with tightening fingers, that she could peer downward into the chasm that swallowed the water. It was only a small stream, such as is ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... polished himself with the meticulous attention of a bootblack. Then he wandered into the bedroom, and whistling the while a weird, uncertain melody, strolled here and there buttoning, adjusting, and enjoying the warmth of the ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... is situated at the base of lofty peaks along the water's edge at the head of moderately pretty harbors. It seems to be the generic home of storms, and the mountains, the rocks, the buildings, and trees, and all, show the weird workings of nature's wrath. In 1863 it was a thriving town where miners outfitted for the mines of the Stikeen river and Cassian mines of British Columbia; but that excitement has temporarily subsided, and the $150,000 government buildings are falling in decay. The streets are filled with debris, ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... impossibilities are unknown to Strauss. Although he depicts with predilection the weird and ghastly, following closely the libretto, often sacrificing beauty of expression to realistic truth, yet he also finds motives of deep feeling. These are for instance the melodious songs of Chrysothemis, the sisters' first duet ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... this incubus of savage life all around weighed on our hearts. Thus it was day and night. Even those hours of twilight, which brood with sweet influences over so many lives, bore to us, on the evening air, the weird cadences of the heathen dance or the ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... in the weird and flashy costume considered by his class to be the proper thing for an outing in the country, and his face betrayed the sad fact that, while he was mentally, spiritually, and physically greatly in need of a change from the unclean ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... Miss Sally was four or five years older than her picture, and that later experiences, enlarged capacity, a different life, and new ambition had impressed her youthful face with a refined mobility; it was a weird fancy to imagine that the blood of those who had died for her had in some vague, mysterious way imparted an actual fascination to her, and he dismissed it. But even the most familiar spectator, like Sophy, ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... thing of literature, no other sort of book admits of such variety of topics, style, and treatment as the novel. As diverse in talent and quality as the story-teller himself,—now harlequin, now gossip, now threnodist,—with weird ghostliness, moping melancholy, uncouth laughter, or gentle serious smile,—now relating the story, with childlike interest in it, now with a good heart and now with a bad heart ridiculing mankind, now allegorical with rich meanings, now freighting the little story-cricket that creeps ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... wild drive. The trail threaded its way between great Ceiba trees, looming weird and gigantic with their buttressed trunks, all knotted and entwined with hanging lianas and curiously hung with air plants dropping from the branches. Gay-colored birds flashed in the patches of sunlight that filtered through ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... across the waters from the tug. There was a loud splash beneath the bows, while shadowy figures that howled a weird ditty as they hove the hawser in, rose and fell black against the foam-flecked sea on the dripping forecastle. Nobody had missed Black, who now sat astride the yard watching the tug, as the ship, listing over further and commencing ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... the boy, on whom the sight of the coin seemed to operate like some weird talisman, leading me to a remote part of the stage, the floor of which had been tastefully littered with orange-peel in a variety of patterns; "we shall ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... hand, and placed her against the wall between the Thier and himself. Werner's men were well content to let their master fight it out. The words spoken by Henker Rothhals, that the Devil had forsaken him, seemed in their minds confirmed by the weird song which every one present could swear he heard with his ears. 'Let him take his chance, and try his own luck,' they said, and shrugged. The battle was between Guy, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... then sit and look at it. After that, it is a mere matter of choice and labour and—determination. When this"—he raised his calm eyes to the figure—"came to me—in the clay—I saw it as plainly as I see it now. I couldn't forget, or, if I did, I began again. Sometimes, I confess, I got weird results as I worked; once, after three days of toil, a—a devil was evolved. It wasn't bad, either, I almost decided to—to keep it; but soon again I caught a glimpse of the vision, always lurking close. So I pinched and smoothed off and added to, and, in the ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... they would leave him wi' me—but they bore him away, and he's been lang ower the sea, and now he's come for his ain, and what should withstand him? I swore to keep the secret till he was ane-an'-twenty—I kenn'd he behoved to dree his weird till that day cam—I keepit that oath which I took to them—but I made another vow to myself, and if I lived to see the day of his return, I would set him in his father's seat, if every step was on a dead man. I have keepit that oath, too;—I will be ae step ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... missionary hears the sound of Chinese music from somewhere up the street. To her ears it is weird and unintelligible, but the children at their play instantly recognize the tune, and raise ...
— Have We No Rights? - A frank discussion of the "rights" of missionaries • Mabel Williamson
... creature. He had been taught to fear the "painter," as it was called in Arkansaw, but he had no fear now. He almost felt that he must himself step out into that enchanted circle and join in the weird dance. ...
— The Arkansaw Bear - A Tale of Fanciful Adventure • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Most strange and weird is this extraordinary regularity. It seems to mean something, to be arranged on some plan and for some humanly intelligible purpose. In the evenings and early mornings especially, when these oft-repeated shapes stand solemnly round the horizon, cut hard and blue against the sky ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... followed. The lantern which gave out the light flickered in the wind and the beat of the rain increased in violence. In all the adventurous lives of the Boy Scouts nothing so weird, so uncanny, as this ...
— Boy Scouts on Motorcycles - With the Flying Squadron • G. Harvey Ralphson
... their bright colour, but retained some purple in the vapour for a long time. If the red sunset clouds turn black, the country people say it will rain; if any other colour, it will be fine. The path from the river led beside the now dusky moor, and the curlew's weird whistle came out of the increasing darkness. Wild as the curlew is in early summer (when there are young birds), he will fly up within a short distance of the wayfarer, whistling, and alight on the burnt, barren surface of the moor. There he stalks to and fro, grey and upright. He looks a large ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... out of the front door of the section house, and slink stealthily to the very spot where his darling's tiny garments had been found, and there amid heart-rending shrieks, which we in our bunk house could plainly hear above the weird moanings of the winter storms, he would dig with his bare hands deep into the cruel snow, searching for his lost ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... The sight was peculiar, and as the marsh ran into an actual swamp, he thought he had seldom seen a more weird effect. Still, what interested him most of all was the picture of Ralph, up to his knees in the soft slime that lay concealed under the ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... guard at the fort heard a weird chant and saw issuing from the distant forest a file of warriors whose naked bodies were smeared with black paint. Every one of them carried a pole over his shoulder, and the horrified watchers knew ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... into the so-called third courtyard. Here I took a lantern from the hall, lit it and crossed to the mill where the clay was prepared for the factory. The tall wheels and cylinders, with their straps and bolts, looked like weird creatures of the night in the dim light of my tallow candle. I felt my courage sinking even here, but I pulled myself together, opened the last door with my key and stepped out into the fourth courtyard. A moment later I stood on the dividing line between ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... those years I had become fascinated by psychic phenomena—by the intrusion into human experience of weird happenings that materialism could not very well explain. Many of these happenings indicated, at least to my satisfaction, not only future existences, but also previous ones. I admitted to Antonio that, since I was in Italy again, I intended to investigate the case of a Perugian peasant girl ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... glimpse of Mont St. Michel is strange and weird in the extreme. A vast ghostlike object of a very pale pinkish hue suddenly rises out of the bay, and one's first impression is that one has been reading the "Arabian Nights," and that here is one of those fairy palaces which will fly off, or gradually fade away, or sink bodily ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... weird journey. The swaying lantern shot its beams abroad into the darkness of the great, dim galleries, casting instantaneous flashes on the objects in the cases, so that they leaped into being and vanished in the twinkling ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... not attain. Hawthorne's effects are moral where Poe's are merely physical. To Poe the situation and its logical development and the effects to be got out of it are all he thinks of. In Hawthorne the situation, however strange and weird, is only the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual struggle. Ethical consequences are always worrying Hawthorne's soul; but Poe did not know that there ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... that picture of the quaint, mysterious old piper piping through Hamelin's narrow streets, and the children following with dancing feet and thoughtful, eager faces. The old folks try to stay them, but the children pay no heed. They hear the weird, witched music and must follow. The games are left unfinished and the playthings drop from their careless hands. They know not whither they are hastening. The mystic music calls to them, and they follow, heedless and unasking where. It stirs and vibrates in their hearts and other sounds grow ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... How strong are little fancies! She should be a beautiful Queen. But she goes about white and crying, in fear of the gods. The gods, that are no more than shadows in the moonlight. Man's fear rises weird and large in all this mystery and makes a shadow of himself upon the ground and Man jumps and says "the gods." Why they are less than shadows; we have seen shadows, we have not ...
— Plays of Gods and Men • Lord Dunsany
... as much sensation as a fake "medium." In all appearance, a violin, mandolin or guitar, placed on a table, will begin to produce music simply through stamping the foot and a few passes of the hand. The music will not sound natural, but weird and distant. ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... pushed on still farther into the great Dismal Swamp, a weird section of strange vegetable and animal life, where great black trees stood silent and grim, with Spanish moss dangling from their branches, bright-plumaged birds flashed across the opens, ugly snakes glided sinuously over the boggy land, and sleepy alligators slid from muddy ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... number of attendants, and the swift flight of the princess and her retinue through the air caused a violent storm to rage over the lands they crossed. Like a thick black cloud they swooped down on the land where Bar Shalmon dwelt, and their weird cries seemed like the wild shrieking of a mighty hurricane. Down they swept in a tremendous storm such as the city had never known. Then, as quickly as it came, the storm ceased, and the people who had fled into ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... wind blew over a glassy sea. The sound of the rippling water on the reef of rocks and on the sandy beach had a weird, melancholy effect. Then came the dull noise of muffled oars commingling with the cawing of the gull and hollow surging of the waters into the Fairy Rocks. There was neither moon nor stars visible, but in the bay the experienced eye could ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... and white. The roof and the water send the light back to each other. Not a sound is heard save distant splashes here and there as a bucket descends to supply the necessities of some house above. Nowhere can be beheld a scene more weird and enchanting. It will remain printed on the memory when many another experience of Stamboul ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... was buried at sea on the 2nd of May, 1872. Poor fellow! He was the smallest in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September 1849 and remaining in his aunt's possession. "Stone has painted," Dickens then ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... pirates. Over the single landing-place frowns from the cliff the keep of an old ruin, 'Moresco Castle,' as they call it still, where some bold rover, Sir John de Moresco, in the times of the old Edwards, worked his works of darkness: a gray, weird, uncanny pile of moorstone, through which all the winds of ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... the sandy road by ten or twelve donkeys. As to vegetation, there were huge clumps of mimosa-bushes, just shedding their yellow blossoms, through which the branches showed up with their long white thorns, giving them a weird and withered appearance. It must indeed have required great courage on behalf of the old Voor-trekker Boers, when they and their families left Cape Colony, at the time of the Great Trek, in long lines of white-tented waggons, to ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... Arctic Circle should, of course, be crossed to witness the midnight sun in all its glory, but I doubt if the quiet crepuscule (I can think of no other word) of the twilit hours of darkness is not even more weird and fascinating viewed from amid silent streets and buildings than from the sullen dreariness of an Arctic desert, which is generally (in summer) as drab and as flat as a biscuit. In Arctic Lapland, where for two months the sun never sinks below the horizon, you may read small print without difficulty ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... the saddest and most tragic of all. We saw high up in the wall, frowning over the river, the window of the chamber from which she had thrown herself after slaying her recreant lover in her rage and despair. A weird story it is, but if the luckless maiden still haunts the scene of her blighted love, an observant sojourner who fitly writes of Ludlow in poetic phrase never saw her. "Nearly every midnight for a month," he says, ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... It is bad enough, I know; but there is something more than an "only" round us here. Had it not been that I took a definite precaution I might have been like the Nurse there." She turned her eyes swiftly on the weird figure, sitting grimly upright like a painted statue; and then her face softened. With the action ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... away and upward, brick buttresses appear constantly, but always with the courses of brick laid slanting to the earth's level, and perpendicular to the thrust of the dome. Every possible effect of light and obscurity makes the strange vistas yet more weird, and, now and then, there is a feeling of standing upon the vast, rounding slope of some planet that shines at one's feet, then gradually falls ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... could I have wanted richer when the limits of reality, as I advanced upon them, seemed ever to recede and recede? It is true that but the other day, on the scene revisited, I was to be struck rather as by their weird immobility: there on the north side, still untenanted after sixty years, a tremendous span in the life of New York, was the vacant lot, undiminished, in which a friendly goat or two used to browse, whom we fed ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... the world, always assumed that Dante got his ideas of the Inferno. Lighted by a million candles, and crowded with peasants in their picturesque costumes, which made wondrous arabesques of moving shadows, the caves presented a weird and unearthly appearance, which the music and dancing subsequently intensified. Shortly afterwards Drake left for Palestine. In May (1874), Burton was struck down by a sudden pain, which proved to arise from a tumour. An operation was necessary, and all was going on well ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... but this morning. I wish people would come into the country on May-day, and fix in town on the first of November. But as they will not, I have made up my mind; and having so little time left, I prefer London, when my friends and society are in it, to living here alone, or with the weird sisters of Richmond and Hampton. I had additional reason now, for the streets are as green as the fields: we are burnt to the bone, and have not a lock of bay to cover our nakedness: oats are so dear, that I suppose they will soon be eaten at Brooks's and fashionable tables as a rarity. The ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... respectfully and even timidly over the objects about him. In truth the room in which he found himself was worthy of inspection, for it was no common room, either in aspect or furnishing. It boasted, it is true, none of the weird properties, the skulls and corpse-lights, dead hands, and waxen masks with which the necromancer of that day sought to impress the vulgar mind. But in place of these a multitude of objects, quaint, curious, or valuable, filled that half of the ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... of objects, acts and phenomena have been the subjects of taboo, and just as numerous and weird have been the charms and amulets and ceremonies that saved him from the dangers that everywhere beset his way. The life of the primitive human being was a journey down a narrow path; outside were infinite dangers from which magic ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... dree our weird. You are a canny Scotch-woman, and know what that means. Come, you must cheer up, for I have brought a young lady with me who is going to put your daughter-in-law a little more comfortable and see after her from ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... was the sight of Tricky. That ever gay animal was careering down the hill straight towards the feeding sheep. The pump-handle was still tied to its neck, and it clattered over the stones with a noise weird enough to drive the whole flock into the sea. The shepherd knew there must be a catastrophe, but he was powerless to avert it. He was too sore to follow, so he slowly limped towards the hut, to nurse his ...
— The Monkey That Would Not Kill • Henry Drummond
... voice was heard—deep, solemn, awful, portentous, ominous, sorrow-laden, weird, mysterious, prophetic, obscure, ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... individualities, once resident in mortal tenements, but torn from their sheltering envelope too soon, or too suddenly, to have acquired the strength and consistency of a fresh existence. And yet the numbers of these restless phantoms were legion, and their multitude seemed to be ever increasing, when, lo! this weird phantasmagoria too passed away, but not before the seeress had, with entranced lips, described to the listeners every feature of the scene she ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... the weird sisters upon whose spindles hang the threads of every human life! Go ask the winds that echo the wails of human hearts and often carry them along with a cruel insatiable spirit of revenge, until all is hushed in the stillness ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... later than the latest, swaying over his tubs and sad-irons in the shanty on the stranded scow by Pickett's wharf, dreaming perhaps of the populous rivers of his birth, or of the rats he ate, or of the opium he smoked at dead of night, or of those weird, heathen idols before which he bowed down his shining ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... hair from thy veiled eyes, show thy face as thee beseems, For yet is starlight in the skies, weird woman piteous through my dreams, 'Nay,' she mourns, 'forsooth not now, veiled I sit for evermore, Rose is shed, and charmed prow shall not ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... beyond Ctesiphon, Carus was not convinced, but he fell sick, and his projects were delayed; he was still in his camp near Ctesiphon, when a terrible thunderstorm broke over the ground occupied by the Roman army. A weird darkness was spread around, amid which flash followed flash at brief intervals, and peal upon peal terrified the superstitious soldiery. Suddenly, after the most violent clap of all, the cry arose that the Emperor was dead. Some said that his tent had been struck by lightning, and that his death ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... wearily disengaged himself from one of the Ionic columns of the portico and walked to the box, remained for a moment in serious and expectorative contemplation of the boot, and then returned to his column. There was something so weird in this baptism that I grew ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... the teamster's overcoats, its collar turned up against her dishevelled hair, had transformed her into a vagabond. She was still weak from shock, but she went to work with Margaret and Annette, brewing a pail of tea, while Thayor, Holcomb and the rest straightened out their weird bivouac in the acrid opal haze. The Clown was again busy with his fry-pan, the old dog watching him with ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... stopped; then, with the same attention that a dog gives to his master's gestures, he looked at the other bowls flying through the air, or rolling along the ground. You might have taken him for the weird and watchful genii of the cochonnet. He said nothing; and the bowl-players—the most fanatic men that can be encountered among the sectarians of any faith—had never asked the reason of his dogged silence; in fact, the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... picturesque than any we had yet seen since leaving Bagamoyo. The ground rose into grander waves—hills cropped out here and there—great castles of syenite appeared, giving a strange and weird appearance to the forest. From a distance it would almost seem as if we were approaching a bit of England as it must have appeared during feudalism; the rocks assumed such strange fantastic shapes. Now they were round boulders raised one above another, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... glued together on the inside with some tenacious substance, so that she was obliged to go without it. The sub-prefect finally asked for another appointment. The cowardly submissiveness of this officer had much to do with firmly establishing the weird and comic authority of the Knights ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... considering him with an enigmatical smile, that lay in the region between amusement and pity; her shapely chin resting on her hand, and the lace falling from the whitest wrist in the world. One day the smile lasted so long, was so strange and dubious, and so full of a weird intelligence, that it chilled him; it crept to his bones, disconcerted him, and set him wondering. The uneasy questions that had haunted him at the first, recurred. Why was this girl so facile, who had seemed so ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... A weird effect of lighting is obtained by making lantern boxes from any discarded boxes which may be in the house. Cover them with crepe paper, cut eyes, nose, ears and mouth, paste colored tissue paper behind the features and set a lighted ...
— Armour's Monthly Cook Book, Volume 2, No. 12, October 1913 - A Monthly Magazine of Household Interest • Various
... coachman whips up the spanking Arabs, and the syces bawl louder than ever, and Kalidas Ramaya Mullick turns away his eyes. But for all that, the durhna woman heaps dust upon her head, which he sees, and mutters a weird warning, which he hears; and though the lawn is wide, and the banian topes are leafy, and a gilded temple, the family shrine, stands between, and the marble veranda is spacious, and the state apartments are remote, they do say the shadow of the durhna woman falls on the iced Simpkin ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... through a speaking trumpet has a most startling effect, and more particularly a blast on a horn. In this case after an interval of some seconds a wild note will be flung back from the house-tops below, answered and re-answered on all sides as it echoes from roof to roof—a wild, weird uproar that awakes suddenly, and then dies out ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... that had moved them both. And why had he sung that Bedouin Love Song just as she was thinking it as something that explained him and identified him? It was mysterious as the desert itself lying there so quiet under the moon. It was weird as the cry of the coyote. It was uncanny as spirit rappings. But she could not feel any resentment; only a thrill that was part pleasure and part pain. She wondered if he had felt the same; if he knew. But she could not ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... matters, an incident from the writer's boyhood in New England may be instanced. The house of an unpopular gentleman was assailed—not in the ostentatious manner just described, yet in a way that gave him a good deal of trouble. Dead cats appeared mysteriously in his neighborhood; weird noises arose under his windows; he tried to pick up letters from his doorstep that became mere chalk-marks at his touch, so that he took up only splinters under his nails. One night, as a seance was about beginning in his yard, he emerged from a clump of bushes, flew ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... surprised eyes with recognition of brotherhood and opened a straight way into his confidence. In two minutes the man—perhaps a wild hawk from the Afghan hills—would be pouring out into the ear of this sahib, with heaven-sent knowledge and sympathy, the weird tale of the blood feud and litigation, the border fray, and the usurer's iniquity, which had driven him so far afield as Lahore from Bajaur. To Kipling even the most suspected and suspicious of classes, the religious mendicants, would open ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... watched, and the woman danced. The lanthorn overhead threw a weird light on red caps and tricolour cockades, on the sullen faces of the men and the shoulders of the women, on the dancer's weird antics and her flying, tattered skirts. She was obviously tired, as a poor, ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... footing and clings to a projecting rock. The height of the Gulf is ninety-five feet and the distant sound of falling water is not reassuring. The walls are not smoothly worn away, but have the rough and weird appearance of having been torn by a torrent in a narrow mountain gorge, and are stained with the ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... wave its head to and fro with a weird, graceful movement, and, as it waved, so Mona's eyes followed it—to and fro, to and fro—followed it because he ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... one Sunday in the summer season. There were enthusiasts whose interest ran from March to November. There were fanatics who insisted on trips thitherward in January. And there were one or two super-fanatics—ranking ahead even of the fishermen and the sand-diggers—who clung to that weird and changing ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... time," said Lydia ominously. "Mrs. Morgan, I can't stand that weird old gentleman any longer. He has got on my nerves so that I could scream when ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... not stranger than this world must seem To one who its vagaries first does scan; It is less weird than the enchanted dream Which life may change to ere you be a man. Such as it is, take it for this alone,— That it is all ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... deeply dejected, silent group that stood in this weird half-light, awaiting the development of Roland's mind regarding them; he, the youngest of their company, quiet, unemotional, whose dominion no ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr |
