"Eyeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was weak as a child new born. Then suddenly there rushed forth a freezing wind, as from an air of ice, and the bones from their whirl stood still, and the buzz ceased, and the mitred skull grinned on me still and voiceless; and serpents darted their arrowy tongues from the eyeless sockets. And, lo, before me stood (O Hilda, I see it now!) the form of the spectre that had risen from yonder knoll. With his spear, and saex, and his shield, he stood before me; and his face, though ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the back room of Shirley's Shop looked as if there had been a revolution in toyland. Dolls without heads, others without arms or legs, eyeless ones, big and little were strewn about the room, while doll carriages minus wheels, kiddie cars, battered and streaked, awaited the skillful hand ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... of endeavouring to look upward with both eyes, while resting on one side at the bottom. We may also attribute to the inherited effects of use the fact of the mouth in several kinds of flat-fish being bent towards the lower surface, with the jaw bones stronger and more effective on this, the eyeless side of the head, than on the other, for the sake, as Dr. Traquair supposes, of feeding with ease on the ground. Disuse, on the other hand, will account for the less developed condition of the whole inferior half of the body, ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... next one hundred feet you encounter and pass in the same manner three more ponds of varying sizes. The guide calls your attention to the fact that you are not alone, and looking about you by the dim light of your candle you see numbers of small eyeless salamanders, from four inches to one foot long. They are peaceable and harmless, appear to have no teeth and are easily caught, if ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... is, How far alteration in the amount of light may affect the more delicate creatures. What fishes do without light has been solved by the darkness of the Mammoth Cave, the tenants of whose black pools are eyeless, evidently because there is nothing to see. The more deeply located Infusoria and Mollusks must dwell in an endless twilight; for Humboldt has found, by experiment, that at a depth one hundred and ninety-two feet from the surface the amount of sunlight ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... the end of all that primal force Which, in its changes being still the same, From eyeless Chaos cleft its upward course, Through ravenous seas and whirling rocks and flame, Till the suns met in heaven and began Their cycles, and the morning stars sang, and ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... event gave blind Tiresias fame, Through Greece established in a prophet's name. The unhallowed Pentheus only durst deride The cheated people, and their eyeless guide, To whom the prophet in his fury said, Shaking the hoary honours of his head; 'Twere well, presumptuous man, 'twere well for thee If thou wert eyeless too, and blind, like me: For the time comes, nay, 'tis already here, When the young god's solemnities ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... one knelt not; stark, gaunt, and blind, His arms the massive pillars twined,— An eyeless captive, strong with hate, He stood there like ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... dreary, speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, downcast and hooded with new-fallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul? Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower of London tell so much more strongly on ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... at that moment, the snow slackened for a little while; the last rays of the setting sun struck upon the dun walls and gilded them with red tracery; some panes of glass gave back the ruddy glare, but mostly the windows were bare and empty, like eyeless sockets. Harley looked farther, and all the other buildings—the opera-house, the stores, and the residences—were the same, desolate and decaying. About the place were snow-covered heaps, evidently the refuse of mining operations, but they ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... thing, off to thy daisies go. Mine was not news for child to know, And Death—no ears hath. He hath supped where creep Eyeless worms in hush of sleep; Yet, when he smiles, the hand he draws Athwart his grinning jaws Faintly their thin bones rattle, and.... There, there; Hearken how my bells in the air ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... apse and gilded pipes. As a chessboard the squares of buildings were spread out, defined by wide streets, where humanity and its traffic sped, busy as ants. In a green plot, the sombre facade of the court-house surmounted by an eyeless stone statue of Justice, frowned on the frivolous throng below; and along the verge of the common, marble fingers pointed up to the heaven of blue that bent above "God's Acre"; while now and then, bulbous towers, and glittering steeple vanes, caught the sunshine ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... some pale Nymph in dark-leafed solitude Of rocks and gloomy waters all alone, Where sunshine scarcely breaks on stump or stone To scare the dreamy vision. Thus did she, A star in deepest night, intent but free, Gleam through the eyeless darkness, heeding not Her beauty's praise, but musing o'er ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... stand with wings extended and clawed feet apart, their necks outstretched and curved heads dripping slime and blood, a fitting setting amidst the black ruin of war. The charger now looks upward from eyeless sockets; his gutted carcass, flattened into a shapeless streak, shrinks towards the earth, as if asking to be veiled from the laughter of the skies. But there is neither pity from above nor shelter from below as the red wave of war, like the curse ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... Above, around, hasten, beloved elves, In hundred thousand nooks to hide yourselves! 'Mid boxes there of by-gone time, Here in these age-embrowned scrolls, In broken potsherds, foul with grime, In yonder skulls' now eyeless holes! Amid such rotten, mouldering life, Must foolish whims for aye ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... "for one outrageous thought. I was suddenly possessed with the idea that the blind, blank back of his head really was his face—an awful, eyeless face staring at me! And I fancied that the figure running in front of me was really a figure running backwards, and dancing as ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... the chapel shook, Her eyeballs fell from her burning brow, And blooded the psalter book. And thrice she groan'd and thrice she sigh'd, And thrice she bowed her head. And a heavy fall and a light'ning flash Was the knell of a sinner dead. And forth from her eyeless sockets flew A furious flame around, And blood stream'd out of her spirting mouth, Like water upon the ground. The magpie chatter'd above the corpse, The owl sang funeral lay, The twisting worm pass'd over her face, And it writhed and turn'd away. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... hope in heaven, no lights from shores ward help on earth. Is there help or hope to seaward, is there help in love, Hope in pity, where the ravening hounds of storm make mirth? Where the light but shows the naked eyeless face of Death Nearer, laughing dumb and grim across the loud live storm? Not in human heart or hand or speech of human breath, Surely, nor in saviours found of mortal face or form. Yet below the light, between the reefs, a skiff shot out Seems ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... bend down the stiff, yet elastic, lower lip. Energetic prying admits first his head, then he squeezes his body through, brushing past the stamens as he finally disappears inside. At the moment when he is forcing his way in, causing the lower lip to spring up and down, the eyeless turtle seems to chew and chew until the most sedate beholder must smile at the paradoxical show. Of course it is the bee that is feeding, though the flower would seem to be masticating the bee with the keenest relish! The counterfeit tortoise soon disgorges its lively mouthful, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... not object. I should so enjoy taking her with me to the Mammoth Cave, and afterward straight home to Massachusetts. You would like to see the Cave and the eyeless ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... Look on its broken arch, its ruined wall, Its chambers desolate, and portals foul; Yes, this was once ambition's airy hall, The dome of thought, the palace of the soul. Behold, through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole, The gay recess of wisdom and of wit, And passion's host, that never brooked control. Can all, saint, sage, or sophist ever writ, People this lonely ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... Death was by, like shell of pyramid Among old obelisks, and his eyeless head Shook o'er the wiery ribs, where darkness lay The image of a heart—He is away! And Julio is watching, like Remorse, Over the ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... 'Tis a mistake in nine painted corpses out of ten. If you want to paint a drowned man, wait till you've seen one close. That sailor in the seaweed's asleep. Sleep is graceful, remember; death by drowning is generally ugly—stiff, stark, hideous, eyeless, fish-gnawed a week after the event. But what does it matter? You've painted a great picture. That sea, with the circular swirl, as each wave goes back into the belly of the next, is well done; and those lumps ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... been noted by press. The city itched in its last days of woolens and drank sassafras tea for nine successive mornings. A commuter wore the first sweet sprig of lilac. The slightly East Sixties took to boarding up house-fronts into bland, eyeless masks. The very ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... eyeless sockets and found a piece of fibrous grass, with which she proceeded to bind together the adjoining parts that had formed the knee. When she had done, he gave one or two ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... the way, Beyond all gleams of night and day, And still that hideous hissing grew Louder and louder on our ears, And tortured us with eyeless fears; Then suddenly the gloom turned blue, And, in the wall, a rough rock cave Gaped, like ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... of saplings and caribou skin. It is a human skull. Only a short time ago it was a living man, with a voice, and eyes, and brain—and that is what makes me uncomfortable. If it were an old skull, it would be different. But it is a new skull. Almost I fancy at times that there is life lurking in the eyeless sockets, where the red firelight from the pitch-weighted logs plays in grewsome flashes; and I fancy, too, that in the brainless cavities of the skull there must still be some of the old passion, ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... to take turns, he playing at doll with me one time, and I playing at horses with him next time. How well I remember my hairless, eyeless doll, and all the pleasure she gave us! And good-natured old nurse was quite willing, whenever Willie was a little better than usual, to work wonders with dolly's toilet. One week she would be a fine, grand ...
— My Young Days • Anonymous
... shot, and he was followed by Tsaichik the cripple, who offered him a piece of soap for the hare; and there was the black heifer in the yard, and Domna sewing a shirt and crying over something, and there was the eyeless bull's head ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... P'an precipitately screamed. "My dear Sir, do spare me, an eyeless beggar; and henceforth I'll look up to you with veneration; I'll ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... through dark circuitous ways, I plunged and stumbled; round me, far and near, Quaint hordes of eyeless phantoms did appear, Twisting and turning in a bootless chase, — When, like an exile given by God's grace To feel once more a human atmosphere, I caught the world's first murmur, large and clear, Flung from a singing river's ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... and scorning fear, Thus with new taunts insult the monster's ear: 'Cyclop! if any, pitying thy disgrace. Ask, who disfigured thus that eyeless face? Say 'twas Ulysses: 'twas his deed declare, Laertes' son, of Ithaca the fair; Ulysses, far in fighting fields renown'd, Before whose arm Troy tumbled ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: On the left The sun arose and crowned a broad crag-cleft; There stopped and burned out black, except a rim, 55 A bleeding eyeless socket, red and dim; Whereon the moon fell suddenly south-west, And stood above the right-hand cliffs at rest: Yet I strode on austere; No hope could have ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... about where they can be easiest reached. The rest of their acts is written for the information of the proper authorities. It reads like a page of Todhunter. But the masters of merchant-ships could tell more of eyeless shapes, barely outlined on the foam of their own arrest, who shout orders through the thick gloom alongside. The strayed and anxious neutral knows them when their searchlights pin him across the deep, or their syrens ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... my own separate meaning in that. We have seen in modern times the power of the lower Pthah developed in a separate way, which no Greek nor Egyptian could have conceived. It is the character of pure and eyeless manual labor to conceive everything as subjected to it: and, in reality, to disgrace and diminish all that is so subjected, aggrandizing itself, and the thought of itself, at the expense of all noble things. I heard an orator, and a good one too, at the ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... cluttered room. It appeared that the children were not yet dressed nor had their beds been put in order and they sat, two weedy pallid- looking mites, in the midst of a tremendous heap of broken toys and fought desperately for the possession of an eyeless, hairless carcass of a doll. A sewing machine piled high with garments was in front of the one broad window that opened on the gloomy whiteness of the court. An overturned basket, from which oozed tangled spools and myriads ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... Thy works are lessons; each contains Some emblem of man's all-containing soul; Shall he make fruitless all Thy glorious pains, Delving within Thy grace an eyeless mole? Make me the least of thy Dodona-grove,[19] 45 Cause me some message of thy truth to bring, Speak but a word to me, nor let thy love Among my boughs disdain to ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... pitying words, reproving them for their evil deeds (and many lepers were horribly immoral); but before ever he talked to them he kissed the men, embracing longer and more lovingly those who were worst smitten. The swelled, black, gathered, deformed faces, eyeless or lipless, were a horror to behold, but to Hugh they seemed lovely, in the body of their humiliation. Such he said were happy, were Paradise flowers, great crown gems of the King Eternal. He would use these as a text and speak of Christ's compassion to the wretched, Christ who now took ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... fling Your spirit into everything!" The Master's hand here dealt a whack Upon the Deputy's bent back, When straightway to the floor there fell A shrunken globe, a rattling shell A blackened, withered, eyeless head! The man had been ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... thieves, despised, forsaken, spit upon, rejected of men. In their lives they seldom had a place where they could safely lay their weary heads, and dying their bodies were either hidden in another man's tomb or else subjected to the indignities which the living man failed to survive: torn limb from limb, eyeless, headless, armless, burned and the ashes scattered or sunk ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... Helena, Nor weeping as Magdelena, Neither Argus, nor yet quite blind, And having too a thickish rind, Resisting somewhat to the touch, And as a bull should weigh as much; Not eyeless, weeping, nor quite white, But firm, ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... ways. He never could pass by an old, bent, used-up nail, bit of string, pin or a straight stick without picking it up and putting it away. The collar of his coat and front of his gaudy flannel vest were stuck full of pointless pins and eyeless needles. The shed opposite the house was a museum of rubbish, odds and ends of the most worthless articles neatly sorted, tied up in small bundles and hung about the sides of the building. It was ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... and its walls are covered with stalactites. The same bird has been found in the province of Bogota, and may probably be discovered in other caverns. Animal life exists in considerable quantities in many subterranean regions, such as beetles, eyeless spiders, scorpions, millipedes, and crustaceans. The most curious is the Proteus anguinus, which breathes at the same time through lungs and gills. It has a long eel-like body, with an elongated head, and four very short and thin ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... eyeless venom'd worm] The serpent, which we, from the smallness of his eyes, call the blind worm, and ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... the wind-blown dust of faces fair, Had I a god's re-animating breath, Thee, like a perfumed torch in the dim air Lethean and the eyeless halls of death, Would I relume; the cresset of thine hair, Furiously bright, should stream across the gloom, And thy deep violet ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... darker and drearier dungeon, stood a heavy oblong wooden box, with two apertures near the top, peering through which we found that we were looking into the eyeless sockets of a skull. Within this box Ecelino had immured the victim we beheld there, and left him to perish in view of the platters of food and goblets of drink placed just beyond the reach of his hands. The food we saw was of course ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... to the old eyeless man! Stripp'd of his all—even of the light of day, The common blessing of the meanest wretch? Tell me no more of patience, of concealment! Oh, what a base and coward thing am I, That on mine own security I thought And took no care of thine! Thy precious head ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief) |
