"Grotesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and storm. All Rome was early astir. It was ushered in by the criers traversing the streets, and proclaiming the rites and spectacles of the day, what they were, and where to be witnessed, followed by troops of boys, imitating, in their grotesque way, the pompous declarations of the men of authority, not unfrequently drawing down upon their heads the curses and the batons of the insulted dignitaries. A troop of this sort passed the windows of the room in which Julia and I were sitting at our morning meal. As the crier ended his ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... "papaya" trees, whilst two little boys shot small arrows into the green and yellow fruit, seeming to catch the fever from their elders. One man actually danced a kind of war-dance on his own account, strutting about with his bow and arrow pointed, and getting into all sorts of grotesque attitudes, moving about with his legs stiffened, and pulling the most hideous faces, till I was ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... heart to feel:—no more. His pictures of good fellowship, of social glee, of quaint humour, are equal to any thing; they come up to nature, and they cannot go beyond it. The sly jest collected in his laughing eye at the sight of the grotesque and ludicrous in manners—the large tear rolled down his manly cheek at the sight of another's distress. He has made us as well acquainted with himself as it is possible to be; has let out the honest impulses of his native disposition, ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... to the most inattentive observer; and, notwithstanding they are ever tossing out their immense arms in what might seem most extravagant gestures, there is a majesty and repose about them that precludes all possibility of the grotesque, or even picturesque, in their general expression. They are the priests of pines, and seem ever to be addressing the surrounding forest. The Yellow Pine is found growing with them on warm hillsides, and the White Silver Fir on cool northern slopes; but, noble as these are, the Sugar ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... remained hidden or unknown to the men of this time who were engrossed in the rude productions of their own age, in which they used no sculptures or paintings except such as were produced by the old artists of Greece, who still survived, making images of clay or stone, or painting grotesque figures and only colouring the first lineaments. These artists were invited to Italy for they were the best and indeed the only representatives of their profession. With them they brought the mosaics, sculptures, and paintings which ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... inn was distinguished by its peculiar form. It was very narrow, pointed, and, on two sides, cut-in teeth, like a saw. The carvings were strangely grotesque, interwoven and ornamenting the cornices and surrounding the windows; but the most remarkable fact was that the house opposite reproduced exactly the same sculptures, the same ornaments; even the signboard, with its post and spiral of ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... my reduced vitality. The intervening region is a plain of rock carved so smoothly, in places, as to appear artificially levelled with the chisel; large tracts of it are covered with the Indian fig (cactus). In the shade of these grotesque growths lives a dainty flora: trembling grasses of many kinds, rue, asphodel, thyme, the wild asparagus, a diminutive blue iris, as well as patches of saxifrage that deck the stone with a brilliant ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... dash and originality his rhymes out-rank even those in Butler's Hudibras and Lowell's Fable for Critics. We find in Pacchiarotto, for instance, many rhymes of the gayest, most freakish, most grotesque character—"monkey, one key," "prelude, hell-hued," "stubborn, cub-born," "was hard, hazard," all occur in a single stanza. An example of exceptional facility in rhyming is found in "Through the Metidja," where, without repetition of words and without forcing ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... photograph from the figure itself, so that you can suspect me of no exaggeration,—is Michael Angelo's Cumaean Sibyl, wasting away. It is by a grotesque and most strange chance that he should have made the figure of this Sibyl, of all others in the chapel, the most fleshly and gross, even proceeding to the monstrous license of showing the nipples of the breast as if the dress were molded over them like plaster. ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... the grave, the ode is hampered by no such restrictions. Neither is the sonnet, although by its strict requirements of form it is set off in a class by itself. In the ode the poet enjoys his greatest freedom, for he may use any meter, may write at any length and in any manner, grave, gay or grotesque. Accordingly the odes of our language are most ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... face relaxed into a broad smile as he examined the grotesque woodcut; but when he turned to the first page the smile vanished in a deep frown, and his eyes shone like hot coals with anger. ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... you promise Myry?" Marvin flared in sudden jealousy. Both women eyed him, as from a great and unattainable height. Then Nell's capable back disappeared beyond Myry's door; and his mother's little old grotesque and woolly figure was swallowed up by the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... which is the arena of its activities and marvellous achievements. To tell us, therefore, as Mr. Froude does, that the handful of malcontents whose unrespectable grievance he holds up to public sympathy represents the Anglo-Saxon race, is a grotesque facon de parler. Taking our author's "Anglo-West Indians" and the people of Ethiopian descent respectively, it would not be too much to assert, nor in anywise difficult to prove by facts and figures, that for every competent individual ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... thought for the twofold offer presented to her by her guardian, the inspiration of these sublime moments erased from her recollection the gloomy-faced youth and the grotesque old man, both of whom wanted to ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... undergraduates filed in and sank upon the grass below the terraces and parterres of brilliantly dressed ladies within the quadrangle of seats; the alumni pushed themselves together against the wall of Holder Chapel; the men of the Senior class came last in their grotesque variety of sweaters and second and third best clothes for the scramble at the Tree. The regulation cheers tore from throats that grew hoarser and hoarser, till every class and every favorite in the faculty had been cheered. Then the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... open space in its centre, sat Menzi wearing all his witch-doctor's trappings, bladders in his hair, snakeskins tied about him, and the rest, but even in this grotesque attire still managing to look dignified. With him were several acolytes or attendants, one of them an old woman, also peculiarly arrayed and carrying hide bags that contained their master's medicines. He rose as they came, ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... banks of the Borysthenes: they crowded in masses around the lofty walls and gates of the city; but this disorderly multitude, with their haggard faces begrimed with dirt and smoke, their tattered uniforms, and the grotesque habiliments which they had substituted in place of them: in short, with their strange, hideous looks, and their impetuous ardor, excited alarm. It was believed, that if the irruption of this crowd, maddened with hunger, were not repelled, that a general pillage would be the consequence, ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... laughter, his rage was so grotesque. He was making a mountain out of a molehill. In a moment, ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... man retiring more and more into himself as his growing experience with the world shows him his unfitness for it. Only in his work did he have any real reason for living. His every-day life became, for the most part, a phantasmagoria, wherein persons and events continually changed from grotesque to sublime, where nothing was stable or to be depended upon. The only reality was in his art. The consciousness that he was composing works that would go down the ages and delight many generations to come, ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... threads is the appropriate function of queens and noble women. All the Homeric shields are more or less ornamented with variously coloured metal, terrible sometimes, like Leonardo's, with some monster or grotesque. The numerous sorts of cups are bossed with golden studs, or have handles wrought with figures, of doves, for instance. The great brazen cauldrons bear an epithet which means flowery. The trappings of the horses, the various parts of the chariots, are formed of various metals. The women's ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... namely, that this ideal which he sought to honour was one with which he was himself wholly out of sympathy. Consequently, in place of the supreme picture of womanly purity he intended, he produced what is no better than a grotesque caricature. His cynical indifference is not only evident from many of his other works, but constantly forces itself upon our attention even in the present play. The falsity of his whole position appears in the unconvincing conventionality of the patterns of chastity themselves, and ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... of gold; some small four-cornered embossed sheets, which were worn either on the head or chest, and some crowns, made of laurel wreaths, were very elegant. There were chains and cauldrons in copper, and ugly grotesque faces and ornaments of various kinds, which were probably fixed on the exterior of the houses. I saw some coins which were remarkably ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... so, Ermine! One reason why she is so intolerable to me is that she is a grotesque caricature of ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Humphrey's Clock, containing the conclusion of "The Old Curiosity Shop," appeared on the 17th of January, 1841, and "Barnaby Rudge" began its course in the ensuing week. The first had been essentially a tale of modern life. All the characters that made a kind of background, mostly grotesque or hideous, for the figure of Little Nell, were characters of to-day, or at least of the day when the book was written; for I must not forget that that day ran into the past some six and forty years ago. Quilp, the ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... from committing faults was our wish to stand well with Jack: he never scolded, never gave advice, but if he were displeased with our conduct we could not eat or sleep. Once Harry committed a trifling error—to call it a wickedness seems a grotesque exaggeration now—and Jack ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... Tuesday," or Shrove Tuesday, the day before the beginning of Lent—comes down to us from pagan times by way of the Latin countries. The "Cowbellions," a secret organization of Mobile, in 1831 elaborated the idea of historical and legendary processions, and as early as 1837 New Orleans held grotesque street parades. Twenty years later the "Mystic Krewe," now known as "Comus," appeared from nowhere and disappeared again. The success of Comus encouraged the formation of other secret societies, each having its own parade and ball, and in 1872, Rex, King of ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... who knows the Edda will deny that Wuchowsen, or the Wind-blower, as he appears in the Passamaquoddy tale, is far more like the same bird of the Norsemen than the grotesque Thunder Bird of the Western tribes. He is distinctly spoken of by the Indians of Maine as a giant and a bird in one, sitting on a high cliff at the end of the sky, the wind—not thunder—coming from ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... influences of Sicilian life Blake listened with the greatest interest, noting the grave determination that had settled upon his friend; yet he could scarcely bring himself to accept an explanation that seemed so far-fetched. The whole theory of the Mafia struck him as grotesque and theatrical. ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... door. In that case the rising waters would quickly wipe out all traces of his work. Such a crumpling and shifting of the ice had never occurred before—at least, not within fifty years, as the alder and cottonwood growth on the east bank showed; but nothing seemed impossible, no prank too grimly grotesque for Nature to play in this solitude. O'Neil felt that his own ingenuity was quite unequal to the task of combating this peril. Set against forces so tremendous and arbitrary human invention seemed dwarfed to ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... lofty entertainments which I was led by my errand to examine in the skeleton, and with a wonder as big as theirs, but of another complexion: They hung about him, and perused and petted him quaintly; it was grotesque; they thought him deeply injured: by what, by whom, they could not say; but Julia was disappointed in me for refraining to come out with a sally on his behalf. He had quite intoxicated their imaginations. Julia told me of the things he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in its nimbus of prismatic spray; there was the swift, symbolic Aco. And then, at a half-hour's walk, there was the pretty pink-stuccoed village, with its hill-top church, its odd little shrines, its grim-grotesque ossuary, its faded frescoed house-fronts, its busy, vociferous, out-of-door Italian life:—the cobbler tapping in his stall; women gossiping at their toilets; children sprawling in the dirt, chasing each other, shouting; men drinking, playing mora, quarrelling, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... entered now the chancel tall; The darkened, roof rose high, aloof On pillars lofty, light, and small: The keystone that locked, each ribbed aisle Was a fleur-de-lis, or a quatre-feuille; The corbels were carved grotesque and grim; And the pillars, with, clustered shafts so trim, With, base and with capital flourished around, Seemed bundles of ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... the steps from above, recognised instantly as a reflection of day, as though some cover had been uplifted connecting this underground labyrinth with the clear sky. A dim shadow touched the illumined rocks for a brief moment, a moving shadow uncertain in its outlines, grotesque, shapeless: and then the daylight vanished as suddenly as it dawned. There was a faint click, as though a door closed, while darkness resumed sway, the silence unbroken, but for the scraping of a step on those rude stairs. The two guards below came ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... carried them out into a chill rain that drummed overhead and splashed along the compound path in silver points. The sunken flags in the road formed a narrow aqueduct that wavered down a lane of mire. A few grotesque wretches, thatched about with bamboo matting, like bottles, or like rosebushes in winter, trotted past shouldering twin baskets. The smell of joss-sticks, fish, and sour betel, the subtle sweetness of opium, grew constantly stronger, blended with exhalations of ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... illimitable spaces of the universe, in which our solar system is but a speck; with the mathematicians, to quit the uncertain realm of speculation and assumption, and plant our feet firmly on the rock of exact science:—to come back anon to lighter themes, and to revel in the grotesque humor of Dickens, the philosophic page of Bulwer, the chivalric romances of Walter Scott, the ideal creations of Hawthorne, the finished life-pictures of George Eliot, the powerful imagination of Victor Hugo, and the ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... and would carry eight or ten thousand pounds' weight, or twenty-five or thirty persons. These were constructed from the trunk of a single tree, usually white cedar. The bow and stern rose much higher than the gunwale, and were adorned by grotesque figures excellently well carved and fitted to pedestals cut in the solid wood of the canoe. The same method of adornment may be seen among the aborigines of Alaska and other regions of the North Pacific, to-day. The figures are made of small pieces of wood neatly fitted together by inlaying and ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... thunderstorm. The contrast of its intense brown blotches with the azure throat and the broad, snowy lip, affect me somehow with admiring oppression. Very absurd; but on est fait comme ca, as Nana excused herself. To call this most striking flower "Harryanum" is grotesque. The public is not interested in those circumstances which give the name significance for a few, and if there be any flower which demands an expressive title, it is this, in my judgment. Possibly it was some Indian report which had slipped his recollection that led Roezl to predict the discovery ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... they to be told that they descended in a direct line from the buffoons of the ancient Romans, and even from the Oscans!—With what drollery would they requite the labours of the antiquarian who should trace their glorious pedigree to such a root! From the figures on Greek vases, we know that the grotesque masks of the Old Comedy bore a dress very much resembling theirs: long trousers, and a doublet with sleeves, articles of dress which the Greeks, as well as the Romans, never used except on the stage. Even in the present ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... the room an upturned orange box served as sort of stand. The front was covered and festooned with a curtain, dexterously made of a bright skirt, hung over the sides, and draped from a knot at the top. The knot was drawn from the waist band of the skirt, and tied with the original string into a grotesque rosette. All over the box top were such articles as a girl might deem necessary in making a civilized toilette, except at the knot—where the table cover irradiated its fullness into really graceful folds, ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... seemed to think of stopping to assist her. A party of well-dressed boys were coasting down the middle of the street; what cared they for the storm? Several, who were standing awaiting their turn, glanced idly at the grotesque figure. ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... sun began to peep through the angles of the wooden gable fronts, projecting nearly midway across the street, streaming athwart the frosty air, and giving a beautifully variegated and picturesque appearance to the grotesque vista ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... would be extinguished, the bricks being duly baked, Israel often took a peep into the low vaulted ways at the base, where the flaming fagots had crackled. The bricks immediately lining the vaults would be all burnt to useless scrolls, black as charcoal, and twisted into shapes the most grotesque; the next tier would be a little less withered, but hardly fit for service; and gradually, as you went higher and higher along the successive layers of the kiln, you came to the midmost ones, sound, square, and perfect bricks, bringing the highest ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... The wise woman, to whom I have alluded, walks to Boston, from a distance of twenty-five or thirty miles, to sell a bag of brown thread and stockings; and then patiently foots it back again with her little gains. Her dress, though tidy, is a grotesque collection of 'shreds and patches,' coarse in the extreme. 'Why don't you come down in a wagon?' said I, when I observed that she was soon to become a mother, and was evidently wearied with her long journey. 'We h'an't got any horse,' ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... literature collected. The name is, however, also applied to the alphabet on the coins of the Parthian or Arsacid dynasty, which in its beginnings was clearly under Greek influence; while later, when a knowledge of Greek had disappeared, the attempts to imitate the old legends are as grotesque as those in western Europe to copy the inscriptions on Roman coins. The relationship between the Pahlavi and the Aramaic is clearest in the records written in the "Chaldaeo-Pahlavi'' characters; the most important of these documents is the liturgical inscription ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... next produced two volumes of "Tales of a Traveller," narrating legends of the continent, with masterly sketches of the scenery of the respective countries; the incidents of the Tales being fraught with points of grotesque humour, and abounding with pathos and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 584 - Vol. 20, No. 584. (Supplement to Vol. 20) • Various
... dreary life, without a friend. He dares not to seek acquaintances. Not a soul, not even a restaurant keeper, has ventured to be familiar. The man with a broken nose and missing teeth—the man with a grotesque voice—is scarcely desired as a customer at select places on the avenues and Broadway. Let him find better accommodations among the Frenchmen ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... his listener an effect of depraved intellectual power, strangely combined with artless simplicity,—an unspeakably distasteful conjunction! Imagination, freed from the check of the senses, easily becomes grotesque; and Helwyse, unable to see his companion, had no difficulty in picturing him as a grisly monster, having a satanic head set upon the ingenuous shoulders of a child. And what was Helwyse himself? No longer, surely, the gravely humorous moralizer? The ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... exception of Lord Tennyson, has been made the enforced associate of brewers and politicians. Mr. Besant does not think that titles in these democratic days are foolish and absurd, pitiful in the personality of those who own them by inheritance, grotesque in the personality of those on whom they have been conferred. Mr. Besant does not see that the desire of the baker, the brewer, the butcher, and I may add the three-volume novelist, to be addressed by small tradesmen and lackeys as "yer lordship", raises a smile on ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... personage in Lord Jim as far back as the year 1899, he became notably active in a certain short story of mine published in 1902. Here he appears in a still larger part, true to life (I hope), but also true to himself. Only, in this instance, his deeper passions come into play, and thus his grotesque ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... have never been to the House of Commons, and suspect that I have caricatured its manner. Not at all. Indeed, to save space in these pages, I have rather improved it. If a phonograph were kept in the house, you would learn from it that the average sentence of the average speaker is an even more grotesque abortion than I have adumbrated. Happily for the prestige of the House, phonographs are excluded. Certain skilled writers—modestly dubbing themselves 'reporters'—are admitted, and by them cosmos is conjured out of chaos. 'The member for South Clapham appeared ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... you—not just the you of these last days since we saw each other with our eyes—but the you that I had dreamed about and fashioned as my lover—my delight—Can I whisper to John all my joy and tenderness as I watch the growing up of my little one? No! the thing is monstrous, grotesque—I will not face the pain of it all. John gave you to me—he must have done so—it was some compact between you both for the family, and if I did not love you I should hate you now, and want to kill myself. ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... father patiently, "we have had enough of the grotesque this evening. It is growing late, my son. ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... seemed to rearrange the motions of his mind with a little of the old vanity, which was at once grotesque and piteous. "I am going to forgive you and to try to put things right," he said. "I have had my faults. You were not to blame altogether. I have left you too much alone. I did not understand everything all through. I had never studied women. If ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... literal truth of the Gadarene story. The following passage in his letter is worth quotation: "Now to the materialistic and scientific mind, to the uninitiated in spiritual verities, certainly this story of the Gadarene or Gergesene swine, presents insurmountable difficulties; it seems grotesque and nonsensical. To the experienced, trained, and cultivated Spiritualist this miracle is, as I am prepared to show, one of the most instructive, the most profoundly useful, and the most beneficent which Jesus ever wrought in the whole course of His pilgrimage of redemption on earth." ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... irregular object. As we ran towards it the vague outline hardened into a definite shape. It was a prostrate man face downward upon the ground, the head doubled under him at a horrible angle, the shoulders rounded and the body hunched together as if in the act of throwing a somersault. So grotesque was the attitude that I could not for the instant realize that that moan had been the passing of his soul. Not a whisper, not a rustle, rose now from the dark figure over which we stooped. Holmes laid his hand upon him and held it up again with an exclamation of horror. The ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... like whales. Evelyn, who was not without a sense of humor, would have enjoyed it all, and laughed at them, even if she could not laugh with them, if she could have forgotten that they were her husband's brothers, but it is very hard to see the humorous in the grotesque behavior of those to whom we are "bound by the ties of duty," ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... see the castellated monuments of the middle ages just as they were left by the builders, must come to this country. With us in old Europe, they are either modernized or in ruins, and in many of them every tower and gate reflects the taste of a separate period; some edifices showing a grotesque progress from Gothic to Italian, and from Italian to Roman a la Louis Quinze: a succession which corresponds with the portraits within doors, which begin with coats of mail, or padded velvet, and end with bag-wigs and shoe-buckles. ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... manuscript in the National Library represents a banquet, and around the table, so as to amuse the guests, performances of animals are going on, such as monkeys riding on horseback, a bear feigning to be dead, a goat playing the harp, and dogs walking on their hind legs." We find the same grotesque figures on sculptures, on the capitals of churches, on the illuminated margins of manuscripts of theology, and on prayer-books, which seems to indicate that jugglers were the associates of painters and illuminators, even if they themselves ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... shrouded in the mists of antiquity, and stalk dimly and undefined along the line which divides Time from Eternity; and forms of strange, wild, startling beauty mingled in the vast throngs of figures with shapes monstrous, grotesque, and hideous. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... wrong. Madame du Chatelet was made to write to the governor, praying him to soften the imprisonment of Socrates-Diderot as much as he could.[85] It was the last of her good deeds, for she died in circumstances of grotesque tragedy in the following month (Sept. 1749), and her husband, her son, Voltaire, and Saint Lambert alternately consoled and reproached one another over her grave. Diderot meanwhile had the benefit of her ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... began to be a little restive, when over he went into the tub, where he floundered for some short time. He was drawn out, the bandage removed from his eyes, and he appeared not a little surprised to see so many grotesque figures around him. He soon recovered himself and entered into the fun ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... condemned as extravagant, if faithfully delineated by pen or pencil. At a watering-place like Buxton, where people really resort for health, you see the great tendency of the English to run into excrescences and bloat out into grotesque deformities. As to noses, I say nothing of them, though we had every variety: some snubbed and turned up, with distended nostrils, like a dormer window on the roof of a house; others convex and twisted like a buck-handled knife; ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... is excruciating and, to hide his want of skill in sleight-of-hand, he moves his hands and arms in grotesque curves, with his body so bent that it is almost impossible to see what he is trying to do. I have never yet seen any Indian give an English performance that would be tolerated on the sands at Slushton-on-Sea ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... he was sitting on the shingle at Madame de Villegry's feet, both much amused by the grotesque spectacle presented by the bathers, who exhibited themselves in all degrees of ugliness and deformity. Of course Madame de Villegry did not bathe, being, as she said, too nervous. She was sitting under a large parasol and enjoying her own superiority over those wretched, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... kept the lower curtain of his window jealously drawn. But at night his shadow, strongly projected on the curtain, was in incessant motion; and far into the morning hours a gigantic head and arms shifted and blended upon it in grotesque forms. At the other window of the workman's apartment the young girl often sat, book in hand, and moved her lips as if she were reading aloud. Her eyes were never seen to wander to the outer world with those longings for freedom and fresh air ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... a radical and absurd incongruity between the real condition and the outward seeming of a man or woman who knows what life is, and purposes to discharge its duties, enjoy its joys, and bear its sorrows, and who is clad in a trivial, grotesque, or extravagant costume.—These, then, are the elementary requisites of dress: that it be comfortable and decent, convenient and suitable, beautiful in form and color, simple, genuine, harmonious with Nature ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... home, for the great public. Thackeray wrote for the clubs. The greatest novel in our language—and it may be in any other—is, according to my ideas, "A Tale of Two Cities." In that, are philosophy, pathos, self-sacrifice, wit, humor, the grotesque and the tragic. I think it is the most artistic novel that I have read. The creations of Dickens' brain have become the ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... their faces with red, blue, white, or black bars,—so the male mandrill of Africa appears to have acquired his deeply-furrowed and gaudily-coloured face from having been thus rendered attractive to the female. No doubt it is to us a most grotesque notion that the posterior end of the body should be coloured for the sake of ornament even more brilliantly than the face; but this is not more strange than that the tails of many ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... the world was "a sorry scheme of things." It was grotesque with inequalities. He had no right to love her; it was wrong to give in to the impulses of the heart, the natural, human impulses. A man can beat down the stone walls of a fort, scale the impregnable heights of a citadel, master ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... the proceedings interested him no more, and with a dismal croak he flew off to the skeoe, and, seating himself on the topmost point of its ruinous gable, commented in very uncomplimentary terms upon the ways of mankind. As his opinions were expressed aloud, and accompanied by many grotesque and expressive gestures, he created a good deal of amusement, although Mr. Adiesen remarked gravely enough, "We ought not to have allowed ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... a fort at Kenowit, are of the same tribe, and number about three hundred men. They speak the Milanow language, and have the same customs of burial. The men and some of the women are tattooed in the most grotesque patterns. When you look at them closely the invention displayed is truly remarkable; but at a distance they give a dingy, dusky appearance to the men, as if they were daubed with an inky sponge. Nature having denied them beards, they tattoo curly locks along their faces, always bordered by a ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... squat figure, in his black suit, against the white background made by the lamp, made the girl think of a huge, grotesque blot of ink. His broad, hairy hand rested on the table. She noticed the strong, thick fingers, devoid of flexibility, yet ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... than, or equal to, the physical desire of the man. To those, of course, who regard marriage from the old-fashioned and grossly immoral standpoint of Melancthon and other theologians, and who consider a wife as the divinely ordained vehicle for the chartered intemperance of her husband, it will seem grotesque in the highest degree that a physiological inquirer should attempt to advise them how often to seek the embraces of their wives; but those who regard woman from the standpoint of a higher ethics, who abhor the notion that she should be only the vehicle for her husband's passions, and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... surroundings, as when, an hour ago, he had stood at the grave-side, his eyes wandering from that long elm box with the silver plate and the wreath of flowers, to the mourners on the other side—her father in his broadcloth, his heavy, smooth face pulled in lines of grotesque sorrow; her mother, with her crimson, tear-stained cheeks, her elaborate black, her intolerable crape, and her jet-hung mantle. Even these people had been seen by him up to then through a haze of love; he had thought them simple honest folk, creatures of the soil, yet wholesome, natural, and sturdy. ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... often induced them, after having been seen naked, to offer their persons spontaneously. Of this I knew two cases in India, where the theft is justified by divine example. The blue god Krishna, a barbarous and grotesque Hindu Apollo, robbed the raiment of the pretty Goplis (cowherdesses) who were bathing in the Arjun River and carried them to the top of a Kunduna tree; nor would he restore them till he had reviewed the naked girls and taken one of them to wife. See also Imr al-Kays ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... wide interval between the grotesque effrontery that wears the Hellenic crown and the undeviatingly decorous self-effacement of the Dutch sovereign; and yet there is something of a common complexion runs through the whole range of establishments, all ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... you mean by that emphatic tone? What is all this bombastic sermon about? What manners are these? My friend, you are grotesque. Those lines should be repeated simply, naturally and with the utmost artlessness. Remember that it is the good La Fontaine who speaks! [accenting each syllable] the-good-La-Fon-taine—do you hear? There is but one way possible to ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... shaking hand, that splashed half as much again on the deal table. A monstrous shadow of him crouched upon the wall, and mocked his action as he poured and drank. I must confess I had scarcely expected these grotesque custodians. There is, to my mind, something inhuman in senility, something crouching and atavistic; the human qualities seem to drop from old people insensibly day by day. The three of them made me feel ...
— The Red Room • H. G. Wells
... mass shone out with the blandness visible in a glorious star. But its main beauty lay in those features by which I knew it to be ice—I mean in a vast surprising variety of forms, such as steeples, towers, columns, pyramids, ruins as it might be of temples, grotesque shapes as of mighty statues, left unfinished by the hands of Titans, domes as of cathedrals, castellated heights, fragments of ramparts, and the like. These features lay in groups, as if veritably the line of coast were dotted with gatherings of royal mansions ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... reveled in a crime which lay on the borderland of the exotic and the grotesque. Like the French philosopher in Poe's "Tales of Mystery and Imagination," the savant who read his newspaper in a dingy Paris room, and solved by sheer force of intellect extraordinary criminal problems which baffled the shrewdest official minds, he felt ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... The children, riotous from school, grow bold And quarrel with the wind whose angry gust Plucks off the summer-hat, and flaps the fold Of many a crimson cloak, and twirls the dust In spiral shapes grotesque, and dims the gold Of gleaming tresses with the blur ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... fascination which the squalid life of the bazaar had exercised occasionally on men of exalted rank at different periods of the world's history? The mere notion that he might succumb to it—that he should even feel its glamour by the operation of some subtle trait of heredity—was so grotesque that ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... Bolshevist statesman, from whom the 'Journal Epoca' obtained a special interview respecting the Leninist legislation on the sex problem, complains that a vast amount of grotesque misrepresentation has appeared on the subject in the hostile or ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... or at least the mere animal aspect of that inspiration, was to be seen in forms grotesque and sensuous enough in those very festivals, when the gayer and coarser part of the population, in town and country, broke out into frantic masquerade, of which that silly carnival of Rome is perhaps the last paltry and unmeaning relic. 'When,' as the learned O. Muller says, 'the ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... of rough-hewn red sandstone, combining solid dignity and some artistic merit, for Benham had not stood still architecturally speaking. The River Drive was a grotesque, yet on the whole encouraging exhibit. Most of the residences had been designed by native talent, but under the spur of experiment even the plain, hard-headed builders had been constrained to dub themselves ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... majesty, 'when gazing into the fire, see a grotesque face glow before you? That face, Phil, has been mine. You have, then, seen the King among the Coals. If you become a cinder, Mr. Spruce, you may consider ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... calumnious accusation; from which idea, lowering the Miltonic "archangel ruined" into the assessor of thieves, as a private slanderer (diabolos), proceeds, through the intermediate Italian diavolo, our own grotesque vulgarism of the devil; [Footnote: But, says an unlearned man, Christ uses the word devil. Not so. The word used is diabolos. Translate v. g. "The accuser and his angels."] an idea which must ever be injurious, in ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... he hastened to put it in training. All day long he was pulling faces. As an artist will sketch everything he comes across, so Mike would endeavour to imitate any characteristic expression or attitude, animate or inanimate, in the world around him. Dogs, little boys, and grotesque old men were his special delight, and of all his elders he had, it goes without saying, a private gallery ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... country where such vulgar and heartless curiosity, and even ridicule, is bestowed upon grotesque or unsightly types of humanity, ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of the rod or rods is unknown: it died when its work was done, and like many other things, holy and unholy, which would be priceless, e.g., the true Cross or Pilate's sword, it remains only as a memory around which a host of grotesque superstitions have ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... made public it would have been laughed out of Court. Her character might, indeed, have been ruined; she might have been denied recognition as a wife; and steps might have been taken for her quiet seclusion from public life. But a State trial would have been a grotesque absurdity; and Charles was acute enough to take the frenzied advice of his honest Minister ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... entirely justifiable. There is no national sense of quality; even the rich to-day in this country wear imitation laces. The effect of all this is a bewildering restlessness in costume—a sheeplike willingness to follow to the extreme the grotesque and the fantastic. The very general adoption of the ugly and meaningless fashions of the last few years—peach-basket hats, hobble skirts, slippers for the street—is a case in point. From every side this is bad—defeating its own purpose—corrupting national ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... explorers when they walked inland with about eighteen most obliging and courteous natives—an open space with four hollowed trunks of trees surrounding two stones, the trees carved into the shape of grotesque human heads, and among them, a sort of temple, made of sloping bamboos and pandanus leaves meeting at the top, from whence hung a dead man, with his face painted in stripes of red and yellow, procured, it was thought, from the pollen of flowers. There was not enough comprehension of ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... light, whirled open the door, and was in time to hear the irritable voice of Sir Horace say, testily, "Don't make an ass of yourself by your over-zealousness. I've only come down to have a word with Mr. Narkom," and to see him standing on the threshold, grotesque in a baggy suit of striped pyjamas, with one wrist enclosed as in a steel band by the ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... claiming a salary than the cook who asks for twenty sous from the Limousin whose nose with inflated nostrils took in the perfumes of beauty. To saunter is to enjoy life; it is to indulge the flight of fancy; it is to enjoy the sublime pictures of misery, of love, of joy, of gracious or grotesque physiognomies; it is to pierce with a glance the abysses of a thousand existences; for the young it is to desire all, and to possess all; for the old it is to live the life of the youthful, and to share their passions. Now how many answers have not the sauntering artists heard to the categorical ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... the same with the characters of men. Here, too, the variety passes all enumeration. But the cases in which the deviation from the common standard is striking and grotesque, are very few. In one mind avarice predominates ; in another pride ; in a third, love of pleasure-just as in one countenance the nose is the most marked feature, while in others the chief expression lies in ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... a great city are a never-failing source of amusement to the man whose sympathies are hospitable enough to embrace all his kind, and who, refined though he may be himself, will not sneer at the humble wit or grotesque peculiarities of the boozing mechanic, the squalid beggar, the vicious urchin, and all the motley group of the idle, the reckless, and the imitative that swarm in the alleys and broadways of a metropolis. He who walks through a great city to find subjects for weeping, may, God knows, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... lake was not large, but it lay like a gem amidst its setting of great dark pines. The shore where the plotters were lying was sandy, and from all appearance they had spent much of the night in a wild carousal. They were huddled in various grotesque shapes, ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... "Grotesque idiot," said Kenrick, laughing; "cease this weak, washy, everlasting flood of twaddle, and tell us whether ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... inscriptions, the forms of them will tell nothing. For generally in such cases an antique form of symbol would be assumed, if it were the alteration of a "learned clerk;" or the arabesque taste of the carver of the inscription would be displayed in grotesque forms. We would rather look for genuine than coeval symbols of this kind upon tombs and monuments, and the altar, than upon the building itself; and these will furnish collateral proofs of the genuineness of the entire inscriptions rather than any other class of architectural ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 18. Saturday, March 2, 1850 • Various
... night to sleep as she and Bill had slept, with her face bared to the stars. She would draw her bed a little aside from the camp fire and from the low seclusion of a thicket lie watching the nimble flames at their merry dance, smiling lazily at the grotesque shadows cast by Jake and his frau as they moved about the blaze. And she would wake in the morning clear-headed, alert, grateful for the pleasant woodland smells arising wholesomely from the fecund bosom of ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... restraint which made their predecessors, the Buccaneers, both formidable and respectable. These Ishmaels of the sea rendered an account to no man, and treated their prisoners according to the drunken whim of the moment. Flashes of grotesque generosity alternated with longer stretches of inconceivable ferocity, and the skipper who fell into their hands might find himself dismissed with his cargo, after serving as boon companion in some hideous debauch, or might sit at his cabin table ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not be seen by the musicians, but could hear them at her ease. At length, enchanted at a piece which they had just played, she abruptly thrust her head beyond the curtains, and cried out, "Mort diable! but they sing delightfully!" At this grotesque sight, the Italians, and particularly the castrati, who are not the bravest men in the world, were so frightened that they were obliged to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... abundance of meat, of a flavor as delicious as the refined palate of a modern epicure could well wish. Their clothes were made chiefly of the skins of animals, and were easily procured: and although calculated to give a grotesque appearance to a fine gentleman in a city drawing room; yet were they particularly suited to their situation, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... sex, primeval, scorned the road, and would have ignored it. But she knew men, and especially, at that moment as their eyes met, she knew Kirk; and she understood that to him the road was a thing that could not be ignored. The mere idea of doing so would seem grotesque and impossible, probably even shocking, to him. Men were odd, formal creatures, ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... upon a class of vagabonds who wandered over the country dressed in grotesque fashion, pretending to be mad and working upon the fears or the charity of people for alms. They were common in the time of Shakespeare, and were found even as late as the Restoration. The slang phrase "to ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... at the bottom, do not weary of the ladder ere they climb high. Few of such, or of others more enthusiastic, recall the early associations of "the office" with pleasure. Yet there is no world more grotesque, none, at least in America, more capable of fictitious illustration. Around a newspaper all the dramatis personae of the world congregate; within it there are staid idiosyncratic folk who ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... "Woman's War," which was so entirely unnecessary, Anne d'Autriche held her court in the Palace of Compiegne and received Christine de Suede on certain occasions when that royal lady's costume was of such a grotesque nature, and her speech so chevaleresque, that she caused even a scandal in a profligate court. Anne d'Autriche, too, left Compiegne practically a prisoner; another menage a trois had ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... occasional customers came in and ordered their victuals. Aubrey began to feel a relaxation swim through his veins. Gissing Street was very bright and orderly in its Saturday evening bustle. Certainly it was grotesque to imagine melodrama hanging about a second-hand bookshop in Brooklyn. The revolver felt absurdly lumpy and uncomfortable in his hip pocket. What a different aspect a little hot supper gives to affairs! The most resolute idealist or assassin had better write his poems or plan ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... Chinaman—if indeed he be such—could lawfully and validly perform that function. This, I submit, is not to be construed as an act of liberality on the Church's part. It is simply the result of the impasse to which it would otherwise be brought by the grotesque teaching that the Deity would condemn everlastingly the soul of an unbaptised infant. This, according to Augustine, being the Christian religion, naturally some loophole had to be fabricated, because priests are not always at hand in moments ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... forth from heaven and pour their golden glory on the sea, the sun rises in his glowing strength above the bank of purple clouds, and as they disperse themselves over the azure firmament, various are the shapes, whether beautiful or grotesque, that they assume. One can imagine he sees towns, hills, castles with tall towers, ships, and a thousand other objects in their flitting shapes, but yet scarcely formed ere they lose their evanescent beauty both of form and color, as the ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... of dragging and tapping had ceased. But the presence of this grotesque Oriental figure only increased my anxiety to pass the doorway. I looked steadily into the black eyes; they looked ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... sure, an hour or two later, that she was in some enchanted realm. There were such queer things,—some beautiful, and some she thought very ugly, especially the grotesque idols. ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... accoutred, the God of the Ocean, who was no less a personage than the captain of the forecastle, advanced with a suitable air of dignity, along the deck attended by a train of bearded water-nymphs and naiades, in a costume no less grotesque than his own. Arrived on the quarter-deck, in front of the position occupied by the officers, the principal personage saluted the groupe with a wave of his sceptre, and resumed the discourse as follows; Wilder, from ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... where he could see all avenues of approach to the house, and waited. Twenty minutes went by, and then Sam became suddenly alert and attentive, for the arc-light revealed a small, grotesque figure slowly approaching along the sidewalk. It was brown in colour, shaggy and indefinite in form; it limped excessively, and paused to rub itself, and ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... to the fairer reader, this grotesque personage had yet formed those ties which ordinary mortals are apt to consider their especial monopoly,—he was married, and had one child. What is more strange yet, his wife was a daughter of quiet, sober, unfantastic England: she ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Wanderoos, and the other is the little graceful grimacing rilawa[1], which is the universal pet and favourite of both natives and Europeans. The Tamil conjurors teach it to dance, and in their wanderings carry it from village to village, clad in a grotesque dress, to exhibit its lively performances. It does not object to smoke tobacco. The Wanderoo is too grave and melancholy to ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... first time a recondite charm. He remembered what an old citizen named Dain had said one evening at the Conservative Club: "People may say what they choose about Bursley. I've just returned from London and I tell thee I was glad to get back. I like Bursley." A grotesque saying, he had thought, then. Yet now he positively felt himself capable of sharing the sentiment. Rachel in the kitchen, and the kitchen in town, and the town amid those scarred and smoking hillocks!... Invisible phenomena! Mysterious harmonies! ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... able to kick my way through the flimsy walls, yet as completely a prisoner as if they had been of stone, I will confess that I fell into a most undiplomatical rage; and when I found myself played with from month to month by a people I scorned as a grotesque mixture of barbarian and mannikin, I was alternately infuriated, and consumed with laughter at the ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... demonstration of these laws, the evolution of which had occupied twenty years, can hardly be imagined by us. He has given some idea of it in a passage in his work on Harmonics, which is not now quoted, only lest someone might say it was egotistical—a term which is simply grotesque when applied to such a man with such ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... approaching with a large lighted lantern in each hand. These, placed upon the mignonette shelves, and snugly protected from wind and rain by the deep hoods, threw a clear light into the test-room, and brought out in grotesque distinctness the arabesque pattern wrought with dust and oil upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... 170 concluded by observing, that the poem was not calculated to excite passion in any mind, or to make any impression except on poetic readers; and that from the culpable levity betrayed at the close of the eclogue by the grotesque union of epigrammatic wit with allegoric personification, in the allusion to the 175 most fearful of thoughts, I should conjecture that the 'rantin' Bardie', instead of really believing, much less wishing, the fate spoken of in the last line, in application to any ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... we are also learning to appreciate the sublimity and divinity of the natural. The universe and organic life are no less wonderful and awe-inspiring because, distinguishing some of the natural laws that govern their evolution, we have abandoned the grotesque theories held by primitive men. Similarly we do not to-day demand, as did our forefathers, a supernatural origin for our sacred books before we are ready to revere and obey their commands. With greater insight we now can heartily sing, "God moves in a natural ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... side by side, and Walker Farr, piecing in his mind, from the scraps he had heard, the entire history of the Chick family, indulged the whim of Jared and forgot for a moment the grotesque ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... Froude attended it, and there first saw Carlyle, who burst, characteristically enough, into a shout of laughter at the close. Carlyle loved Emerson; but the Emersonian philosophy was to him like any other form of old clothes, only rather more grotesque than most. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... exclamation, I looked round the table with curiosity to see what it meant. At the further end of it I saw a head, and a small portion of a little deformed body, mounted on a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a fair level enough for him to get at his food. His whole appearance was so grotesque, I felt for a minute as if there was a showman behind him who would pull him down presently and put up Judy, or the hangman, or the Devil, or some other wooden personage of the famous spectacle. I contrived ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... at the Springs, surrounded by the soft forest beauty; ate our dinner in the midst of grotesque ant-hill scenery, and spent the afternoon looking for ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... brief, an objet d'art. The fact was curiously (and humorously) display during the late war, when great numbers of women in all the belligerent countries began putting on uniforms. Instantly they appeared in public in their grotesque burlesques of the official garb of aviators, elevator boys, bus conductors, train guards, and so on, their deplorable deficiency in design was unescapably revealed. A man, save he be fat, i.e., of womanish contours, usually looks better in uniform ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... all the thrills of the heroines in the moving picture plays when we ran into that car and expected to see the grotesque face of the Frog in the light of our lamps, with the terrified Margery near- by. The next minute showed us our mistake. The man who was standing beside his car in the road, when we had torpedoed it from the rear was ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... resigned myself to this imperative though inglorious course, my heart warmed once more to the jovial young squire. He would laugh, but not unkindly, at my grotesque dilemma; at the thought of his laughter I began to smile myself. If he gave me another chance I would smoke that cigar with him before starting home afresh, and remove, front my own mind no less than from his, all ill impressions. After all it was not his fault that ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... selfishness—elevates us far up above the clouds, into the loftiest regions of the sunny blue, and we seem to breathe an atmosphere, of which every glorious gulp is inspiration. Despondency is thrown to the dogs. Despair appears in his true colours, a more grotesque idiot than Grimaldi, and we treat him with a guffaw. All ante-bath difficulties seem now—what they really are—facilities of which we are by far too much elated to avail ourselves; dangers that used to appear appalling are felt now to be lulling securities—obstacles, like mountains, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... officiating garment; the latter is almost universally used at funerals, where the officiating priest seldom wears either his scarf or hood, and presents anything but a dignified appearance when he crowns this negligee with one of our grotesque chimney-pot hats, to the exclusion of the more appropriate ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... set in action by some deep-going phrase, or perhaps by some interior slow weakening of stubborn will, Deacon Allen gave way; and when the preacher called for penitents, the old man struggled to his feet, his seamed, weather-beaten face full of grotesque movement. ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland |
