"Appalling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vengeance, and his own sense of self-abasement—all conspired to add to the fever of his brain; and when Walter and his daughter were admitted to his cell, it was a gibbering maniac that rushed forward to meet them. Walter removed his fainting daughter from the appalling spectacle, and returned with a sickening heart and terrible forebodings. The shades of evening had given place to bright moonlight ere they reached the castle. The driver used his utmost speed, but the snow hindered their progress, and just as they arrived at the castle gates, the horses swerved ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... and its secret felon being regarded in that way by the providence which, for some inscrutable purpose, permitted, yet would infallibly punish, a dreadful murder? She was a girl of devout mind, and the notion was appalling in its direct ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... orthodox physiological theory, which contends that one portion of the body affects another portion (only), and does not contend or pretend that this action may extend beyond the surface of the body; for, if it did so extend, we should have a nervous current without nerves—an appalling fact, and one totally ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... unpopular to expose the evils of using tobacco; these evils are so appalling, it will not do to slumber over them longer.—We must look at them; we must lay them open—we must raise our voice against them; (we would gladly raise it so high that it should reach every family in the nation.) Yes, we must cry aloud and spare not; or give up our claim ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler
... through the infinite azure, Alternate turning to earthward and falling, Measuring life with Damastian measure, Finite, appalling. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... had been so severe a shock to Lynde that he could not straightway recover his mental balance. The appalling shadow which the doctor's presence had for the moment thrown across him had left Lynde benumbed and chilled despite the reassuring sunshine of the doctor's words. By degrees, however, Lynde warmed ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... zero. The hail gave place to snow, and darkness came on like night. The wind, rising to the highest pitch of violence, boomed and surged amid the desolate crags; lightning flashes in quick succession cut the gloomy darkness; and the thunders, the most tremendously loud and appalling I ever heard, made an almost continuous roar, stroke following stroke in quick, passionate succession, as though the mountain were being rent to its foundations and the fires of the old ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... turned to the third child. And behold! the Fenris Wolf was so appalling to look upon that Odin feared to cast him forth, and he decided to endeavor to tame him by kindness so that he ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... had proved fair and kindly, temperate in his tastes and delicate in his appreciations of humor and natural effects. He could express himself fluently in Russian, German, English and French, but was a caste-man to the core, a militarist and autocrat. As such he proved rather appalling to Peter Mowbray on ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... premonitions of disaster. How could such a voyage be possible, with such a crew, on the huge Elsinore, a cargo-carrier that was only a steel shell half an inch thick burdened with five thousand tons of coal? It was appalling to contemplate. The voyage had gone wrong from the first. In the wretched unbalance that loss of sleep brings to any good sleeper, I could decide only that the voyage was doomed. Yet how doomed it was, in truth, neither I nor a madman ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... rock and watched Casey distractedly bungle his cooking. She must have had a great deal of initiative for a squaw, for she plunged straight into the subject which most nearly concerned Casey, and she was frank to the point of appalling him with her bluntness. Casey is a rather case-hardened bachelor, but I suspect that Lucy Lily ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... matter in any sense as we know it. Then when the sun is passed the comet sinks away again, and as it goes the tail dies down and finally disappears. The comet itself dwindles to a hairy star once more and goes—whither? Into space so remote that we cannot even dream of it—far away into cold more appalling than anything we could measure, the cold of absolute space. More and more slowly it travels, always away and away, until the sun, a short time back a huge furnace covering all the sky, is now but ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... young to learn simply to wait; and poor Sara felt that, to make the outlay necessary for the reception of summer boarders, would actually impoverish them, and then—what if the boarders never came? The thought was appalling! ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... the biting of the frost, and the pelting of the pitiless sleet and snow destroys the beauty at a very early age, and if in infancy their personal advantages are remarkable, their ugliness at an advanced age is no less so, for then it is loathsome and appalling:—"He wanted but the dark and kingly crown to have represented the monster who opposed the progress of Lucifer whilst careering in burning arms and infernal glory to the outlet of his hellish prison." In our own country a number of Gipsies sit as models, for which they get one shilling ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... five years, at length fell a victim to a cold in the head, beneath which he gradually sunk until he fell into a perspiration and recovered; this he could vouch for, on his own authority, but he had heard (and he had no reason to doubt the fact) of a still more heart-rending and appalling circumstance. He had heard of the case of an orphan muffin boy, who, having been run over by a hackney carriage, had been removed to the hospital, had undergone the amputation of his leg below the knee, and was now actually pursuing his occupation on crutches. Fountain ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... last office was to fix the two lighted altar candles on the head and foot railing of the bed. They showed the corpse in its appalling stillness, and stood like two angels, with the pit ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... subordinate. To his clear, capable head was owing somewhat of the greatness of England on the seas. In the exploits of Hawke, Rodney, or Nelson, this dead Mr. Pepys of the Navy Office had some considerable share. He stood well by his business in the appalling plague of 1666. He was loved and respected by some of the best and wisest men in England. He was President of the Royal Society; and when he came to die, people said of his conduct in that solemn hour—thinking it needless to say more—that it ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... understood his anxiety argued a very real danger. She had heard tales before she left Biskra, and since then she had been living in an Arab camp, and she knew something of the fiendish cruelty and callous indifference to suffering of the Arabs. Ghastly mental pictures with appalling details crowded now into her mind. ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... Marutta said, "This appalling crash of the thunderbolt together with the howling of the winds, seem terrible to my ears and my heart is afflicted again and again, O Brahmana, and my peace of mind ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Wamibo, stretched full length, his face on the pillow, groaned slightly with the pain of his tormented universe. Now and then, for the fraction of an intolerable second, the ship, in the fiercer burst of a terrible uproar, remained on her side, vibrating and still, with a stillness more appalling than the wildest motion. Then upon all those prone bodies a stir would pass, a shiver of suspense. A man would protrude his anxious head and a pair of eyes glistened in the sway of light glaring wildly. Some moved their legs a little ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... and wondered what appalling gulf divided our views on supreme things. What view did he really take of women? Did he or did he not think that the planets and stars were inhabited? Did he believe in the evolution of ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... I wondered then why Lady Georgina came there—for she hadn't any; but they are also recommended for nervous irritability, and as Lady Georgina had visited the place almost every summer for fifteen years, it opened before one's mind an appalling vista of what her temper might have been if she had not gone to Schlangenbad. The hot springs are used in the form of a bath. 'You don't need them, my dear,' Lady Georgina said to me, with a good-humoured ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... then I can but sing For I dream her coming— May, sweet May! I see her bring Buds and wild-bee humming! Through the silence heart-appalling, As I stand and listen, I can hear her song-birds calling, See her green ...
— Songs of Labor and Other Poems • Morris Rosenfeld
... is true that no plain, however beautiful, ever seemed so in his eyes; he required torrents, rocks, dark forests, mountains, and precipices.[85] This does not affect the fact that he never moralised appalling landscape, as post-revolutionary writers have done, and that the Alpine wastes which throw your puniest modern into a rapture, had no attraction for him. He could steep himself in nature without climbing fifteen thousand feet to find her. In ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... seemed to notice about him when I bumped into him yesterday was that he didn't look very cheery. Looked to me rather as though he'd lost something and was wondering where it was. Ha! But—dashed funny—I mentioned something about that appalling speech that chap made in that blasphemy case yesterday.... Eh? yes, absolutely frightful, wasn't it?—well, I'm dashed if old Sabre didn't puzzle up his nut in exactly the same old way and say, 'Yes, but I see what he means.' I reminded him ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... and of course hanged; for, while the Government did nothing to alleviate the horrors of the Famine, it put the law in force with a bloody severity. The number of persons condemned to death at the Spring Assizes of 1741 was really appalling. There was a sort of small food riot at Carrick-on-Suir, where a boat laden with oats was about sailing for Waterford, when the starving people assembled to prevent the food they so much needed from being taken ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... leaving his wife and family to remain some time longer in Sydney; and from this period may be dated her extraordinary efforts for meliorating the condition of poor female emigrants. What fell under her notice in connection with these luckless individuals was truly appalling. Huddled into a barrack on arrival; no trouble taken to put girls in the way of earning an honest livelihood; moral pollution all around; the government authorities and everybody else too busy to mind ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... colonies ran for six or seven hundred miles a loose, thin, dishevelled fringe of population, the half-barbarous pioneers of advancing civilization. Their rude dwellings were often miles apart. Buried in woods, the settler lived in an appalling loneliness. A low-browed cabin of logs, with moss stuffed in the chinks to keep out the wind, roof covered with sheets of bark, chimney of sticks and clay, and square holes closed by a shutter in place of windows; an unkempt ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... arms folded on its bony breast. The back of the high altar itself was a great throne whereon sat in judgment a misty being of awful form, judging the dead women all through the lonely night. The stillness was appalling. ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... find the courage to impart the appalling news to her? He was now convinced beyond all doubt that the so-called Sprouse had made off with the priceless treasure and that only a miracle could bring about its recovery. O'Dowd's estimate of the man's cleverness ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... fullness and to sickles waned. The gossips still conversed with bated breath. The appalling mystery of Gray Cloud's death, Wrapped in impenetrable gloom, remained A blighting shadow o'er the village spread. But youthful spirits are invincible, Nor fear nor superstition long can quell The bubbling flow of that perennial well; And so the youths and maidens soon ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... out of its socket. I had hardly released my foot, when, towering above me, came the colossal head of the great creature, as he ploughed through the bundle of debris that had just been a boat. There was an appalling roar of water in my ears, and darkness that might be felt all around. Yet, in the midst of it all, one thought predominated as clearly as if I had been turning it over in my mind in the quiet of ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... these comedies. All these excellences are summed up in the incomparable wealth and flexibility of his vocabulary. He has a Shakespearean mastery of the technicalities of every art and mystery, an appalling command of billingsgate and of the language of the cuisine, and would tire Falstaff and Prince Hal with base comparisons. And not content with the existing resources of the Greek vocabulary, he coins grotesque ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... vehemently, requesting a moment's interview with her uncle. While the sentinel hesitated what to do, his attention was called to a loud noise at the door, where a crowd had been assembled in consequence of the appalling cry, that the enemy were upon them, occasioned, as it afterwards proved, by some stragglers having at length discovered the dead bodies of Nanty Ewart ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... if Corporal Victor, of the Chasseurs, can be permitted a moment's interview with your mistress. I come by permission," he added, as the native hesitated between his fear of a Roumi and his sense of the appalling unfittingness of a private soldier seeking audience of a Spanish princesse. The message was passed about between several of the household; at last a servant of ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... impossible to bear. In the dark, as she sat hour after hour at the open window, looking out in the direction where through the veil of snow the grey walls of the Chatelet prison towered silent and grim, she seemed to see his pale, drawn face with almost appalling reality; she could see every line of it, and could study it with the intensity born of ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... And drives of an afternoon for an airing-by heaven! You're out of that mess, Redworth: not much taste for the sex; and you're right, you're lucky. Upon my word, the corruption of society in the present day is awful; it's appalling.—I rattled at her: and oh! dear me, perks on her hind heels and defies me to prove: and she's no pretender, but hopes she's as good as any of my "chaste Dianas." My dear old friend, it's when you come upon women of that kind you have a sickener. And I'm bound by the best there ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... chum. Neither your father nor mine realized the truth until you innocently carted me home with you for a holiday visit. When your father found out the fact he was too polite to turn me out-of-doors; he just acted the gentleman and made the best of a bad dilemma," explained Van with appalling convincingness. "He even had the goodness to save my life the day we got lost on one of your New Hampshire mountains. He didn't tell you any of this because he didn't want to spoil your pleasure; but I am certain that if he had known who I was before I came he would not have allowed ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... excesses of the Thirty Years War, but modern history offers no other instance of forced labour and wholesale deportations. If, fifty years ago, the conscience of the world revolted against black slavery, what should its feelings be today when it is confronted with this new and most appalling form of white slavery? We should in vain ransack the chronicles of history to find, even in ancient times, crimes similar to this one. For the Jews were at war with Babylon, the Gauls were at war with Rome. Belgium did not ...
— Through the Iron Bars • Emile Cammaerts
... the wall in an epileptic fit, with all the terrible symptoms I have described in a previous portion of this story. These were new to his poor wife, and, as she strove in vain to control his fearful convulsions, her shrieks rent the air. Indeed, her screams were so appalling that Bassett himself sprang at the wall, and, by a great effort of strength, drew himself up, and peered down, with white face, at the glaring eyes, clinched teeth, purple face, and foaming lips of his enemy, ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... several days I have been working on a ponderous article that allows no play for the fancy. My imagination requires a judicious rein; I am afraid to let it loose, for it carries me sometimes into appalling places beyond the stars and beneath the world. No one realizes the danger more than I do. But what a foolish thing to write here—for there is no one to know, no one to realize! My mind of late has held unusual thoughts, thoughts I have never had before, about medicines and drugs and ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... awful, a. appalling, terrible, dreadful, frightful, grewsome, horrible, shocking, heinous, flagrant; awe-inspiring, majestic; (Slang) immoderate, great, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... ashore, and whose murderous yells could be distinctly heard on board of the vessel. The entire coast, so far as the eye could reach, looked like another sea—a sea, though, of flame and smoke, which shot up its leaping billows in long tongues of fire far against the sky. It was a terrible, an appalling spectacle; and Josephine fled from it to the bedside of her little sleeping daughter. Then, kneeling there by the couch of her child, she uplifted to heaven her face, down which the tears were streaming, and implored God ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... occurred at longer intervals, the thunder lost its appalling fury, and as the wind drove the storm farther and farther to the southwards, at last it ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... story is soon told. The pirates, showing their true colors, ran alongside and took possession without opposition; for the crew of the merchantman were so overwhelmed by the suddenness and appalling nature of the calamity that had befallen them that they had no ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... white man of South Carolina, was in 1844 sentenced to death for aiding a young slave woman, whom he loved and had married, to escape from slavery. In pronouncing the sentence Judge O'Neale addressed to the prisoner these words of appalling blasphemy: ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... words were comforting. On the crest of the ledge the fierceness of the storm was revealed. Great sheets of wind-blown rain were flung athwart the landscape, and the utter blackness that followed the lightning's glare, and the roaring of the wind and river were appalling. ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... (The novelist who has put his back into a novel will be ready to kick the whole crowd of his characters down the front-door steps.) But because the strain of keeping a long book at the proper emotional level through page after page and chapter after chapter is simply appalling, and as the end approaches becomes almost intolerable. I have just finished a novel myself; my nineteenth, I think. So I know the rudiments of the experience. For those in peril on the sea, and for novelists finishing novels, prayers ought to be ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... authorship; and Uncle Lancelot having promised to send an estimate, a meeting of the Mouse-trap was convened to consider of the materials, and certainly the mass of manuscript contributed at different times to the Mouse-trap magazine was appalling to all but Anna, who knew what was the shrinkage in ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... words, his enthusiastic personality disarming all criticism; what the labored productions of his fancy might prove to be, I hardly dared think. It was this dread that induced me, upon receipt of the box, appalling in its bulk and unpleasantly suggestive of the departure to other worlds of the original consignor, since it was long and deep like the outer oaken covering of a casket, to delay opening it for some days; but finally I nerved myself up ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... and if no great statesman be raised up in our hour of need to undeceive this unhappy multitude, now eagerly rushing or heedlessly sauntering along the pathway of revolution, as an ox goeth to the slaughter or a fool to the correction of the stocks, what is it but a symptom as infallible as it is appalling, that the day of our greatness and stability is no more, and that the chill and damp of death are already creeping over England's glory.' These dolorous spectres haunted him incessantly, as they haunted so ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... alive with the subject; of the two sons, one is murdered by his father for preferring the love of a Capulet to the success of the Montagues; the other, Ostap, is taken prisoner, and tortured to death. Taras, in disguise, watches the appalling sufferings of his son; just before his death, Ostap, who had not uttered a word during the prolonged and awful agony, cries out to the hostile sky, like the bitter cry "My God, why hast thou forsaken ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... first experience of parting, and their hearts sickened at the thought. Love surely does well in this world, so full of snares and dangers, to fear to lose from its eyes for a moment the face of its beloved; and in this respect the courage of love is the more remarkable. How bravely it takes the appalling risks of life! To separate for an hour may mean that never as long as the world lasts will love hear the voice it loves again. "Good-bye," love has called gaily so often, and waved hands from the threshold, and the beloved has called "good-bye" ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... and extends across its frontiers into Russian Trans-Caucasia. That indicates the district which once was peopled by Armenians. To-day, owing to the various Armenian massacres, the latest of which, described in another chapter, was by far the most appalling, such part of Armenia as lies in the Ottoman Empire is practically, and probably absolutely, depopulated of its Armenian inhabitants. Such as survive, apart from the women whose lives were spared on their ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... most appalling noises with their soup. . . . Do you remember that German baron at ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... him? Was it not degrading him in his own eyes? Was it not trying to stifle the voice of conscience in his breast? Would it not make of him a living, walking lie? a thing to be shunned and scorned? Had he a right to place a burden so appalling on himself? Would it not be better to face the toil, the pain, the poverty, the fear? Would it not be better even to die than to live a ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... relation of its parts; not as they enhance each other's beauty by known and constant laws of composition, but as they give each other expression and meaning, by particular application, requiring distinct thought to discover or to enjoy: the choice, for instance, of a particular lurid or appalling light, to illustrate an incident in itself terrible, or of a particular tone of pure color to prepare the mind for the expression of refined and delicate feeling; and, in a still higher sense, the invention of such incidents and thoughts as can be expressed in words as well as on canvas, and ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... he said helplessly. "These English names are hard to bear in mind. Such things, ach! as I have had to remember in the last year." The burden was evidently appalling. "Yet," he added kindly, that he might do no injustice, "it might be so that ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... individual case ever yet received. But in general those women who counsel the delay of the marriage age are opposing the facts of feminine development and psychology. They are indirectly encouraging male immorality and female prostitution, with their appalling consequences for those directly concerned, for hosts of absolutely innocent women, and for the unborn. Further, those who suppose that the granting of the vote is going to effect radical and fundamental ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... heaven. And he was guarded on all sides by huge-bodied Kalakeyas with upraised weapons resembling gigantic mountains with towering peaks. And the encounter that took place between the gods and the Danavas lasted for a short while and was, O chief of the Bharatas, terrific in the extreme, appalling as it did the three worlds. And loud was the clash of swords and scimitars upraised and warded off by heroic hands in course of those fierce encounters. And heads (severed from trunks) began to roll from the firmament to the earth like fruits of the palmyra palm falling upon the ground, loosened ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... into such consternation on the eruption of the plague that the citizens destroyed themselves, as if in frenzy. When the plague ceased, men thought they were still wandering among the dead, so appalling was the livid aspect of the survivors, in consequence of the anxiety they had undergone, and the unavoidable infection of the air. Many other cities probably presented a similar appearance; and small country towns and villages, estimated at two hundred thousand population, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... abandonment of wild priestesses to some wild god were again but shy brown Indian maids who went and set them meekly down upon the grass beneath the trees. From the darkness now came a burst of savage cries only less appalling than the war whoop itself. In a moment the men of the village had rushed from the shadow of the trees into the broad, firelit space before us. Now they circled around us, now around the fire; now each man danced and stamped and muttered to himself. For the most part they were painted ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... With the appalling roar of a bull of Bashan the gallant officer dashed in the direction whence, he judged, the stones came. He was just in time to stop a singularly hard stone with his marble brow. Then he found a gorse-bush (by tripping over a root) a gorse-bush which seemed unwilling ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... Africa is cursed with evils, unknown to the rest of the human race in any section of the globe—reptiles of the most deadly venom, beasts of unparalleled ferocity, deserts of sand, and moral deserts a thousand times more appalling. But her greatest curse of all is the white man's cupidity, tearing asunder the tenderest ties of human nature, and plunging villages and families into mourning and despair. The hyena, the tiger, the crocodile, are creatures existing by the will of God; the man-stealer ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... Scannadio, and wrapping himself in the grave-clothes, closed it, and laid himself down in Scannadio's place. He then fell a thinking of the dead man, and his manner of life, and the things which he had heard tell of as happening by night, and in other less appalling places than the houses of the dead; whereby all the hairs of his head stood on end, and he momently expected Scannadio to rise and cut his throat. However, the ardour of his love so fortified him that he overcame these and ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... "Struck with the appalling thought that every additional rod we travelled involved an increase of expense, my first impulse was to jump out and dismiss him. But then came the more frightful nightmare fancy, that it was not possible to dismiss him unless ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... sufferings that even his desire for freedom is lost. He is afraid to be free; he cannot live at ease outside of his cell walls. Perhaps you will say that goes to prove the gentleness and humanity of prison discipline. To me it seems a thing so appalling that I must be content with the bare statement of the fact. A man is afraid to be free, afraid of the great wonderful world, and of his fellow creatures, and can endure what he supposes to be life only in his steel cell. ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... mines of precious stones and gold. Plenty to see, plenty to find, especially wild fruits, such as were written of in the tropics. Everything with its spice of danger was tempting, till the recollection of that appalling roar came again, and with it a sensation ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... is due in part to ignorance and folly and that the parable of the Lost Coin shows that it may be occasioned by misfortune or accident. The parable of the Prodigal Son, however, shows that it is usually due to willful choice and to a desire for indulgence. Its results are sketched in appalling colors. We are shown all its disillusion, suffering, slavery, and despair. As a picture of the inevitable consequences of sin, no touch could be added to the scene of the prodigal in the far country when he had spent all, when the famine had arisen, when he had sold himself ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... An appalling hush fell, for a few heart-beats, all over the field. Then from different quarters appeared uniformed attendants, racing and shouting frantically to divert the bull's attention. From fleeing groups black-coated men leapt forth, armed only with their walking-sticks, and rushed ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... crisis of the situation; for as the Spaniard looked he made the appalling discovery that his victim's ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a greater poet than Wordsworth just as it made Peter a greater king than George III; but as it was, after all, only a negative qualification, it did not prevent Peter from being an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did it enable Byron to become a religious force like Shelley. Let us, then, leave Byron's Don Juan out of account. Mozart's is the last of the true Don Juans; for by the time he was of age, his cousin Faust had, in the hands of Goethe, taken his place ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... unexpectedly as to escape the vigilance of their enemy's scouts. Many are the battles they have fought and great the slaughter. In the slave-land of Samory they engaged twelve moons ago the pick of the Arab army, and defeated them with appalling loss. It is said, too, that they carry some of the strange guns made by your people, ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... were urged faster than they otherwise would have been. The beautiful snow is rather depressing, however, when there is snow everywhere. The afternoon passed swiftly and the horses were becoming jaded. At four o'clock it was almost dark. We had been going up a deep canon and came upon an appalling sight. There had been a snow-slide and the canon was half-filled with snow, rock, and broken trees. The whole way was blocked, and what to do we didn't know, for the horses could hardly be gotten along and we could not pass the snow-slide. ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... regarding the universe not as a dead thing but a living, and athwart the fire deluges that from time to time sweep it, and seem to threaten with ruin everything in it we hold sacred, descrying nothing more appalling than the phoenix-bird immolating herself in flames that she may the sooner rise renewed out of her ashes and soar aloft with healing in her wings. See CARLYLE, THOMAS, EXODUS ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... from whom they proceeded—worth mentioning in a work of this kind, did they not give indications of character rarely to be met with (and, in their case, how shamefully rewarded!), from having occurred at a crisis when their minds were occupied in affairs of such deep importance, and amidst the appalling dangers which hourly ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... ago, or rather more, accident made me, in the dead of night, and of a night memorably solemn, the solitary witness of an appalling scene, which threatened instant death in a shape the most terrific to two young people whom I had no means of assisting, except in so far as I was able to give them a most hurried warning of their danger; but even that not until they stood within the very shadow ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... these bareheaded women, with their hanging hair, their ferocious eyes, their brutal mouths; if you could see them there, half dressed, and that in a draggle-tailed slovenliness incomparably horrible; and if you could hear their appalling language loading their hoarse voices, and from their phrases receive into your mind some impression of their modes of thought, you would say that human nature in the earliest and most barbarous of its evolutionary changes had never, could never, ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... bodies, and an orchestra of one hundred and forty, in which figure eight flutes, seven clarinets, six horns, four Wagner tubas. Little wonder the impression was a stupendous one. There were episodes of great beauty, dramatic moments, and appalling climaxes. As Schoenberg has decided both in his teaching and practice that there are no unrelated harmonies, cacophony was not absent. Another thing: this composer has temperament. He is cerebral, as few before him, yet in this work the bigness ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the name of my as yet unwritten poems, my masterpieces for which France, for which the whole brotherhood of letters, so anxiously waits, to put a term to this appalling chastisement!" ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... pale-yellow hair ribbon, she waited about in her usual agonies of stage fright. Learning from Dr. Linton, however improving it might be to her touch, was hardly conducive to self-complacency, and, after having suffered much vituperation for her imperfect rendering of a piece, it was decidedly appalling to have to play it in public, especially with the horrible possibility that at any moment her master might happen to pop in to view the exhibition and arrive ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... (could he but get near enough). Volcanic to a degree all these; nor are the Russians wanting, though they get more and more astonished: Tempelhof, who was in it, says he never, except at Torgau next Year, heard a louder cannonade. Loud exceedingly; and more or less appalling to the Russian imagination: but not destructive in proportion; the distance being too considerable,—"1,950 paces at the nearest," as Tempelhof has since ascertained by measuring. Friedrich's two batteries, however, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... swiftly wiping out the old suspicions and superstitions about the medical profession. Time was when there was but one doctor in all of Leslie County, Kentucky. Mountain mothers relied on the old midwife; infant mortality was appalling. Then came the Frontier Nursing School headed by Mrs. Mary Breckinridge. Her work is known throughout the breadth of the nation. The Frontier Nursing Service has the support of the leading people of the nation. Debutantes gladly give up a life of ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... that against the overwork of pregnant mothers, through which, as one of the most able opponents of existing evils, W. Stanley Jevons, wrote, "infinite, irreparable wrong is done to helpless children," adding that the appalling infant mortality of the manufacturing districts attracted far less attention and interest in the public mind than the death of a single murderer. At nearly the same time Mr. F.W. Lowndes gave the fruit of long research in a paper read before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... them an attitude of absolute neutrality and of complete political disinterestedness. In the second war in which the Ottoman Empire has been engaged the loss of life and the consequent distress on both sides have been appalling, and the United States has found occasion, in the interest of humanity, to carry out the charitable desires of the American people, to extend a measure of relief to the sufferers on either side through the impartial medium ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... in the dictionary there is surely none worse than this one. The suggestions of stodginess are appalling, including, even at best, hints of overweight, general uninterestingness, and a disposition to sit at home in smoking-jacket and slippers after one's evening meal. As my guardian suggested, my first youth was over. I held up both my hands in token ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... pray to the extent of a simple and pleasant and enjoyable exercise, and know nothing of watching in prayer, and of weariness in prayer, we shall not draw down the blessing that we may. We shall not sustain our missionaries who are overwhelmed with the appalling darkness of heathenism. . . . We must serve God even to the point of suffering, and each one ask himself, In what degree, in what point am I extending, by personal suffering, by personal self-denial, to the point of pain, the kingdom of Christ? . . . It is ever true that ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... traversed the acute stage of suspense, and are gradually becoming sensible of these wider considerations. It was natural that for a prolonged period the disturbance of our economic conditions, the anxiety for the safety of our nation in face of an appalling menace, the personal concern of millions about the lives of sons or brothers who have bravely responded to the call, should keep our thoughts enchained to the daily or hourly fortunes of the field of battle. Now that the initial disorder has ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... the planks, And all look forward to a festal treat. Their places taken, they, with eyebrows rais'd, Sit patiently, and fain would be amaz'd. I know the art to hit the public taste, Yet ne'er of failure felt so keen a dread; True, they are not accustomed to the best, But then appalling the amount they've read.. How make our entertainment striking, new, And yet significant and pleasing too? For to be plain, I love to see the throng, As to our booth the living tide progresses; As wave on wave successive rolls along, And through heaven's narrow portal forceful ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... kindest manner, for his guests, who but half appreciated the sacrifice he was making on their account, from their dread of themselves becoming a sacrifice to the tiger. And as they crouched behind their respective bushes they had time to brood over the appalling stories of hairbreadth escapes just recounted to them by the gallant captain, who had been particular in describing the requisites for the successful tiger-shot—the steady hand and steady nerve—admitting that these were not always efficacious, as the last tiger he had encountered ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... off. A bald skull, as shining as a death's head, showed the man's real countenance. It was appalling. Lucien sat on his divan, his hands hanging limp, overpowered, and gazing at ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... complete personality. I felt then, and I still feel to-day, that every man, as he fights for his breath, must stand out at least part of his time for the right of being self-contained. It is, and always will be, one of the appalling sights of New York to me—the spectacle of the helplessness, the wistfulness, of all those poor New York people without one another. Sometimes the city seems to be a kind of huge monument or idol or shrine of crowds. ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the American Freedmen's Union, the Western Freedmen's Aid Commission,—in all fifty or more active organizations, which sent clothes, money, school-books, and teachers southward. All they did was needed, for the destitution of the freedmen was often reported as "too appalling for belief," and the situation was growing ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... friction when they are brought together. The base hospitals of the navy should be put in condition to meet modern requirements and hospital ships be provided. Unless we now provide with ample forethought for the medical needs of the army and navy appalling suffering of a preventable kind is sure to occur if ever the country goes to war. It is not reasonable to expect successful administration in time of war of a department which lacks a third of the number ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... thirty miles; and Burke's delight when he thought he saw the depot camp; "There they are!" he exclaimed; "I see them!" The wish was "father to the thought." Lost and bewildered in amazement, he appeared like one stupefied when the appalling truth burst on him. King has often described to me the scene. "Mr. Wills looked about him in all directions. Presently he said, 'King, they are gone;' pointing a short way off to a spot, 'there are the things ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... name of howling dervishes; all our religion consisted in howling like jackals or hyenas, with all our might, until we fell down in real or pretended convulsions. My howl was considered as the most appalling and unearthly that was ever heard; and, of course, my sanctity was increased in proportion. We were on our way to Scutari, where was our real place of residence, and only lodged here and there on our journey to fleece those who were piously ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... didn't go to college. Your mind is appalling; your language is more so. May I ask whether ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... her statements with a certain careless aplomb, and these were usually within measurable distance of the fact, whereas a youth her age and ten years older, if he be of a didactic turn, will hold forth upon life and human nature with an ignorance of both which is positively appalling. ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... stream he looked eagerly for an opening or sign of life, but there were only rows of ragged spires, cutting sharply against the sky. He felt inexpressibly lonely and badly afraid; the desolation was growing appalling, and he could not keep on his feet much longer. He had food enough for two scanty meals, and then, if no ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... object is gracefully and good-naturedly, but persistently to enjoy itself, there is a great gulf fixed, of which often neither are aware, until they attempt a close relationship with each other, when the chasm reveals itself with appalling clearness to the higher ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... Indian native potentates, and had establishments for that purpose in India. This man wished to be employed by our Government as a spy: Sir Charles applied on his behalf to Lord George Hamilton, who handed to him the man's dossier, an appalling catalogue of crimes and misdemeanours. He had an extraordinarily noble presence; Sir Charles said to him: "You ought to be Amir of Afghanistan." "No," he replied; "I should never have the patience to kill a ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... its trials, its joys and its dangers. Suddenly they heard a crackling sound in the cane-brake near them; then came from a greater distance the bay of bloodhounds. There was no mistaking these sounds; and for an hour they listened in almost breathless anxiety to these appalling indications of a slave-hunt. ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... gallantry that filled Washington with astonishment and admiration. Heretofore he had seen them only in camp or on the line of march, where their habits of ease and self-indulgence had led him to doubt their having the courage and firmness to face, without shrinking, danger in such appalling forms. Unmindful of the bullets that whistled continually about their heads, they galloped up and down the broken and bleeding lines, in the vain endeavor to rally their men, and bring them again to something like order. Mounted on fine horses, and dressed ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... more desperate resistance was ever opposed to the eagle-emblemed mistress of the ancient world. There is no event of ancient history the details of which are more minutely known. The circumstances in all their appalling features are given to us by the eye-witness, Josephus, so that we know them as vividly as we do the events of the career ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... in her chair, gazed for a moment at the ceiling and then closed her eyes. "You ARE frightful," she said. "You're appalling." ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... startled by a low growl, coming from a pile of rocks just ahead of him. What could it be? Holding his breath painfully, while a cold chill ran down his spine, Raynor came to a dead pause and listened. His improvised torch had almost burned out and it was appalling to think that he faced the possibility of being in darkness ere long, with a wild beast ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... and therefore weak and wretched, since ignorance is the chief source of man's misery. "My people," says the prophet, "are destroyed for lack of knowledge." From ignorance rather than from depravity have sprung the most appalling crimes, the most pernicious vices. In darkness of mind men have worshiped senseless material things, have deified every cruel and carnal passion; at the dictate of unenlightened conscience they have oppressed, laid waste, and murdered; for lack of knowledge ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... meet the varied exigencies of the service. When the difficulties with the Western Indians swelled into importance, General Scott was dispatched to the scene of hostility. There rose up before him then, in the ravages of a frightful pestilence, a form of danger infinitely more appalling than the perils of the field. How he bore himself in this emergency, how faithfully he became the nurse and the physician of those from whom terror and loathing had driven all other aid, can not be forgotten by a just and ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... attention of the German Fleet. A high-angle shell fell on the thinly protected deck of the Queen Mary; she blew up and sank in a few seconds. Another fell down the ammunition shaft of the Indefatigable with the same appalling result. Beatty was not deflected from his course; possibly no other could have been taken. The rest of his cruisers got round without mishap, and the brunt of the fighting now passed to Evan-Thomas's Queen Elizabeths, who stalled ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... the heart of an unexplored wilderness of Central Africa with a savage wild man was in itself sufficiently appalling, but to feel also that this man was a blood enemy, that he hated her and her kind and that in addition thereto he owed her a personal grudge for an attack she had made upon him in the past, left no loophole for any ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... for the fun he has afforded him in the past. The two first boys of creation were not bad fellows at all, although as was natural, their bringing up resulted in a general condition of pure cussedness that at times became appalling to their parents. The fact that there had never been any other boys in the world before placed Adam and Eve at a considerable disadvantage in rearing these two youngsters. There were no precedents to go by, ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... the attention of those surfeited eyes and ears. Actors and actresses of note almost perished with wrath and humiliation at the indifference to their arts. Loud laughter from the back rows broke in at the wrong time, and appalling silences greeted the ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... conductor as the train came into Hartford at 1.30 A. M. Thinks he had simply a glorious time—and wouldn't have missed the Centennial for the world. He would have run out to see us a moment at Cambridge, but was too dirty. I wouldn't have wanted him there—his appalling energy would have been an insufferable reproach to mild adventurers ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the moment did not stand in such urgent need of Miss Armytage as Miss Armytage imagined. She had heard the appalling story of her brother's escapade, but she had been unable to perceive in what it was so terrible as it was declared. He had made a mistake. He had invaded the convent under a misapprehension, for which it was ridiculous to blame ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... overcome; the environment of bestial savagery, and ruthless fanaticism;—all these contributed to make the achievement unique in human history. He was face to face with evil in its worst form, and saw it in all its appalling effects upon the nation and its people. He seemed to have everything against him, and to be utterly alone. There stood in front of him the grim ruined land. He faced it, however, as a saint and soldier should do; he stood for right, truth, ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... had waited to seize the children when they came forth had left them to dress themselves while she hastened to publish in the servants' dining-room the appalling fact that she had caught sight of a man in Miss Marie Louise's room. The other servants had many other even more astounding things to tell—to wit: that after mysterious excitements about the house, with ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... life, devout acceptance of the facts of life, are the prime characteristics of art in those moments when its veracity and power are at the highest point. A great work of art may be tragic in the view of life which it presents, but it must show no sign of the succumbing of the spirit to the appalling facts with which it deals; even in those cases in which, as in the tragedy of "King Lear," blind fate seems relentlessly sovereign over human affairs, the artist must disclose in his attitude and method a sustained ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... he uttered to whom were:—"God bless you, Blackwood; I shall never see you more." He had a presentiment that, while he was certain of victory, it would, nevertheless, be gained at the price of his own life. Yet, with this prospect before him, appalling as it must have been to his mind, he was calm and serene. His whole attention was fixed on Villeneuve, who was wearing to form the line in close order upon the larboard tack, thereby to bring Cadiz under his lee, and to facilitate, if necessary, his escape into that port. This induced ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... later, to produce a counteracting rise and progress in the fortunes of another; as the sea here advances, there recedes, swallowing up the fertilities of this shore to increase the territories of that; and fulfilling, in its awful and appalling agency, that mandate of human destinies which ordains all things to be changed and nothing to be destroyed. Without the invasion of Persia, Greece might have left no annals, and the modern world might search in vain for inspirations from ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... round the tissues of the national body, and we are sure to have a nasty growth striking out at intervals. It tears the heart-strings when we see the brave, the brilliant, the merry, the wise, sinking under the evil clement in our appalling dual nature, and we feel, with something like despair, that we cannot be altogether delivered from the scourge yet awhile. I have stabs of conscience when I call to mind all I have seen and remember how little I have done, and I can only hope, in a shame-faced way, that the use of ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... in a northerly direction, and shuddered in spite of himself. A strange animal, with appalling movements, whose foaming tongue emerged from enormous jaws, was leaping about at a cable's length from the ship. In appearance he seemed to be about twenty feet high, with hair like bristles; he ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... So appalling was the roar of the breakers, that it was with difficulty that the orders could be heard. In the meantime Mynheer Von Stroom lay upon the deck, kicking, sprawling, and crying ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... long, low-ceiling library she was introduced to Mr. Kingdon, a man of winning personality, a philosopher and a humorist. Ranged beside him were three appalling critics: two boys of nine and seven years respectively, and a little girl of five. They stared at her solemnly and surveyingly while she was presented ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... still unharmed. Great masses of frothing billows came hurtling out of the gloom, which grew blacker and more menacing every hour. The sight of the ships tossing upon the mountainous masses was ominous, almost appalling. The billows broke with deafening roar, hurling tons of water on board, often filling the spacious decks fore and ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... a few rags from a bleaching-ground, or the abstraction of a roll of ribbons from a counter, was visited with the penalty of blood; and such laws brutalized both their ministers and victims. It was the time, too, when a false religious outcry brought with it appalling guilt and misery. These are vices that leave more behind them than the first forms assumed, and they involve a lesson sufficiently required to justify a writer in dealing with them. There were also others grafted ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... difficult, and any but very slow progress out of the question. The horses crept along the road, which they were not infrequently left to find by themselves; the snow whirled and beat now against one window and now upon the other with a fury and a rush which were somewhat appalling. Still the horses struggled on, though all the light there was abroad came from the glimmer of the snow itself, unless when a gleam shot out into the night from the window of some house. They did keep on their way, ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... on a heap of blankets on a stone ledge. Above her was the boundless sapphire of the sky. Close beside her a little spring bubbled from the blank wall of the mountain. Rhoda lay in helpless silence, looking about her, while the appalling nature of her predicament ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... tingling nerve straining as if to catch something which had, but that very moment, eluded me. I was yet wondering what this could be, when, from somewhere close outside the cottage, there rose a sudden cry—hideous and appalling—a long-drawn-out, bubbling scream (no other words can describe it), that died slowly down to a wail only to rise again higher and higher, till it seemed to pierce my very brain. Then all at once it was gone, and silence rushed ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... here, moreover, further removed from my family, of whom I heard no more. The new faces that appeared wore a gloom at once strange and appalling. Report had greatly exaggerated the struggle of the Milanese and the rest of Italy to recover their independence; it was doubted if I were not one of the most desperate promoters of that mad enterprise. ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... will not be convinced, notwithstanding all the evidence. Indeed, who would credit that Justine Moritz, who was so amiable, and fond of all the family, could suddenly become so capable of so frightful, so appalling ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... Doyenne, a shudder freezes the soul, and we wonder who can lie there, and what things may be done there at night, at an hour when the alley is a cut-throat pit, and the vices of Paris run riot there under the cloak of night. This question, frightful in itself, becomes appalling when we note that these dwelling-houses are shut in on the side towards the Rue de Richelieu by marshy ground, by a sea of tumbled paving-stones between them and the Tuileries, by little garden-plots and suspicious-looking hovels on the side of the great galleries, and by a desert ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... No judge is rendered careful, no sheriff diligent, for fear that he may offend a black constituency; the contrary is most lamentably true; day after day the catalogue of lynchings and anti-Negro riots upon every imaginable pretext, grows longer and more appalling. The country stands face to face with the revival of slavery; at the moment of this writing a federal grand jury in Alabama is uncovering a system of peonage established under cover ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... on board some of the smacks. Although, however, there is no doubt many brutal skippers hail from Yarmouth; the fleet from that town bears a good reputation, in comparison with that of Grimsby—where the number of apprentices returned as drowned, each year, is appalling. ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... An appalling calamity has befallen the American people since their chosen representatives last met in the halls where you are now assembled. We might else recall with unalloyed content the rare prosperity with which throughout the year the nation has been blessed. Its ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... package of women's chemises under his arm. It was quite true that I often bought "poor clothes" at the sales. The objects exposed in the way of screens, pincushions, table-covers, and, in the spring, hats made by some of the ladies, were so appalling that I was glad to have poor clothes to fall back upon, but I don't remember his ever carrying my purchases ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... "claim a remarkable reason for certainty about an extremely grave danger which is almost upon the world. If it's the truth, Sergeant, it is appalling. If it is a lie, it may be more appalling. The Joint Chiefs of Staff take it very seriously, in any ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Julia's looks were an evidence of the fact that made it indisputable; and after the first starts and exclamations, not a word was spoken for half a minute: each with an altered countenance was looking at some other, and almost each was feeling it a stroke the most unwelcome, most ill-timed, most appalling! Mr. Yates might consider it only as a vexatious interruption for the evening, and Mr. Rushworth might imagine it a blessing; but every other heart was sinking under some degree of self-condemnation or undefined alarm, every other heart was suggesting, "What will become of us? what is to be done ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... more and more impressed with the appalling fact that the comparatively few men in that hall, now being held quiet for a while by Rachel's voice, represented thousands of others just like them, to whom a church and a minister stood for less than a saloon or a beer garden as ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... something appalling in the revealing which this truth teaches,—the power each soul possesses of shutting out all the love of God, of resisting the infinite blessing of the friendship of Christ. It is possible for us to be near to Christ through all our life, with ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... indicated facts of the case, so appalling to the unhappy Countess, were on the other hand eminently satisfactory to M. Paul de Roustache. To be plain, they meant money, either from the Countess or from the Count. To Paul's mind they seemed to mean—well, say, fifty thousand francs—that twenty ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... and South has sent a wail of grief into thousands of homes throughout the land, and the dreadful death-roll is daily being added to, for battle follows battle, and the slaughter is appalling, even to those who have been hardened to the sight by months of action. No wonder that the faces of wives and mothers are white with anguish—that fearful death-list has carried desolation to their hearts, and others, just as dear, are obeying the ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... for "Musseer" proved to be an appalling process. First they brewed what Mme. Remy called a "teaze Ann." After the tisane, a host of strange foreign drugs and cosmetics were marshalled in order. Then water was set to heat on a gas-stove. Then a little table ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... Mountain is one of the most appalling objects of the kind that I have ever seen, being a bleak rock, about twelve hundred feet above the level of the lake, with a perpendicular face of its full height toward the west; the Indians have a superstition, which ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... divorced from morality, and ritual was substituted for righteousness. There is no commoner or weightier burden in the prophets than this. It is on this subject that Isaiah lets loose the whole force of his prophetic soul in his very first chapter, where there is a truly appalling picture of the combination of religious rites the most multiplied with moral abuses the most clamant: "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to Me? saith the Lord. I am full of the burnt-offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; and ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... unparalleled from her being obliged to hoist in faster than it was possible she could stow away, she was driven out of harbour to encounter a heavy gale. A few hours more would have enabled her to proceed to sea with security, but they were denied; the consequences were appalling, they might have been fatal. In the general confusion some iron too near the binnacles had attracted the needle of the compasses; the ship was steered out of her course. At midnight, in a heavy gale at the close of November, so dark that you could not distinguish any object, however close, ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... vowing than by vowing, is to cherish a love to sin, and to betray the workings of a heart which regards not how God may be dishonoured, provided the sinner can escape with impunity. They who vow and swear falsely, or who perform not their oath, are exposed to an appalling curse; but dreadful also is the condemnation that hangs over those who vow not, because they do not desire to pay. All who love the Lord, desire to show to the utmost that they delight to honour him. In order to direct and encourage them to do ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... gushing up through crevices, sometimes in fountains of forty or fifty feet, hurling up large fragments of ice. The phenomenon was gigantic in all its aspects. To us, who expected every moment to see it borne forward and crush the schooner, it was appalling. But the sea filling in on the south, added to the narrowness of the arm, prevented the jam from rushing through; though a great deal of ice did float out, and, caught in the swirling currents, bumped pretty hard against the vessel's sides. The schooner swayed about heavily; but the anchor held ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... of this appalling malady. It commences apparently in a trifling way, it terminates ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... dim, and a bull-throated roar sounded from somewhere, an appalling sound of raw power. The slight tingling that Kieran had felt in the metal fabric around him abruptly became a vibration so deep and powerful that it dizzied him and he had to grab the stanchion of the bunk ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... It gives him a chance to buy something.—Your failure to understand the masculine nature is appalling. ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... married. He could not exactly be called ugly in spite of his hangdog countenance, in which I saw the outward signs of cruelty, disloyalty, treason, pride, brutal sensuality, hatred, and jealousy. The mixture of bad qualities was such an appalling one that I thought his physiognomy was at fault, and the goods better than the sign. He asked me to come and see him so graciously that I concluded that the man gave the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Mary's side and proceeded to hoist the obstreperous clothes-line, when "Bang! bang!" came the reports of distant cannonading on the front lawn, followed by an appalling yell from the little girls, who from the safe point of vantage of the drawing-room windows were looking on ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... and saw, just where the hollow of the throat joins on the shoulders, a muscle that had nothing to do with any man's regular breathing, twitching away steadily. The whole thing was a careful reproduction of the Egyptian teraphin that one reads about sometimes; and the voice was as clever and as appalling a piece of ventriloquism as one could wish to hear. All this time the head was "lip-lip-lapping" against the side of the basin, and speaking. It told Suddhoo, on his face again whining, of his son's illness and of the state of the illness up to ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... against the cliffside? Or did he sink into the reeling swirl of the foaming waters, and die more mercifully in their steel-dark depths? I could not see. I saw only the flying form dart through the mist like an arrow from a bow. I heard only the appalling cry, like nothing earthly ever heard before; and I woke in a panic, with hands tightly clasped, and my body damp with moisture. It was but a dream—this awful picture; it was gone as an image from a mirror, and I was awake, and gazing only upon ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... ah! dear lady, thus it sighed The eve thy sainted mother died; 135 And such the sounds which, while I strove To wake a lay of war or love, Came marring all the festal mirth, Appalling me who gave them birth, And, disobedient to my call, 140 Wailed loud through Bothwell's bannered hall, Ere Douglases to ruin driven, Were exiled from their native heaven. Oh! if yet worse mishap and woe, My master's house must undergo, 145 Or aught but weal to Ellen fair, Brood ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott |
