"Gruesome" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... advance any opinions," he advised. "A lady like yourself should have none on a subject so gruesome. I shall never cease regretting bringing you here tonight. I shall seize on the first opportunity to take you home. At present we are supposed to await the action ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... grasp. There is everywhere about it an awesome sacredness. One hesitates to treat lightly over the soil that belongs to those whose eyes were closed in the taking, and whose warrior forms lie at rest beneath the pathetic white crosses dotted over the gruesome waste. Those sad little emblems of Supreme Sacrifice: "To the memory of a British Soldier." Simple but magnificent! A farewell to some ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... Eleanore; she did not want to do it, but she could not help it. She was naturally vigilant, and she wished to ward off misfortune if possible. She was obsessed with an uncanny feeling, a gruesome curiosity. She dogged her sister's steps in secret. One time she saw from a distance that Eleanore had started off with a man who had been waiting for her. She could not move from the spot; ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... very words of hers increased his suspicion. Was it any wonder that she was horrified when she recalled that gruesome episode of the death of a brave and honest man? Her personal fascination had overwhelmed Harry Bellairs, just as it had overwhelmed himself. The devil sends some women into the hearts of upright men to rend and ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... abandoning library copies of Keats and buying an edition of my own. And this, too, may have been not unconnected with the gracious influence of the other sex as exhibited in a neighbouring athenaeum; and was accompanied by a gruesome spate of florid lyrics: some (happily) secret, and some exposed with needless hardihood in a college magazine. The world, which has looked leniently upon many poetical minorities, regards such frenzies with tolerant charity and forgetfulness. But the ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... right now." And I was able to look steadily at the gruesome surroundings and the dreadful ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... characteristic series of pictures or incidents from Madame Bovary: take Bovary's bungling and gruesome operations on the club-footed ostler's leg, with the entire village clustering agape; take the picture of the eyeless, idiotic beggar on the road to Rouen; or the scene in which Emma offers herself for three thousand ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... his efforts to escape from the gruesome place. There still remained a small hole through which he must climb. But he negotiated it successfully, and in another moment ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... but it was late before he had it skinned and dressed. When the carcase was hoisted to the gallows—and it seemed gruesome enough as it hung there in the pallid light of the moon, with the night birds dismally wailing like mourners from the lonely trees—we went ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... following to ask questions about the expected guests. She liked the gruesome sound of that term "blood relations" as Tippy used it, and wanted to know all about this recently discovered "in-law," the widow of her grandfather's cousin, Thomas Huntingdon. Barby could not tell her and Mrs. Triplett, too busy to be bothered, set her down to turn the leaves ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Loomis has found some of his most powerful inspirations in the work of our lyrist, Aldrich,—such as the rich carillon of "Wedded," and his "Discipline," one of the best of all humorous songs, a gruesome scherzo all about dead monks, in which the music furnishes out the grim irreverence of the words with the ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... to the fireplace, stopping for just a moment to glance at the body of Stella. Then he pulled the blinds down halfway, so that the room seemed somber and gruesome. He drew a chair so that the different individuals as he examined them, would be unable to lose sight of the dead woman. His arrangements completed, he ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... to find there I could not imagine. Whatever it had been he was disappointed, and he turned to me again, frowning perplexedly, and tugging at the lobe of his left ear, an old trick which reminded me of gruesome things we had lived through ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... One seized and bound her, with strange automatic action, unlike the movements of living creatures, and another smote the wall with a pickaxe that made no sound, while the third waited with his trowel and mortar. It was a gruesome sight to those who knew the story—a gruesome, yet an enjoyable spectacle; since, as Lady Sarah's friends had not had the pleasure of knowing the sinning Sister in the flesh, they watched this ghostly representation of her suffering with as keen ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... him. I told him the whole gruesome story. He saw, he could not help but see what a deep impress the events of the night had made on me. He heard me to the end with every appearance of sympathy,—and then all at once I discovered that ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... studies. I cannot pretend to diligence. The passing months found me less frequently in the classroom than in secluded spots along the Calcutta bathing GHATS. The adjoining crematory grounds, especially gruesome at night, are considered highly attractive by the yogi. He who would find the Deathless Essence must not be dismayed by a few unadorned skulls. Human inadequacy becomes clear in the gloomy abode of miscellaneous bones. My midnight vigils were ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... intent on exact quantities of tea, milk, and sugar, and she passed the cup to the engineer with a smile. Each of the men admired her coolness, but Tollemache, who had been quietly scrutinizing the nearer hills, gave painful emphasis to this gruesome ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... night on which the lacerated Caron la Boulaye was smuggled out of Bellecour in Robespierre's berline and in that four years much of the things that were prophesied have come to pass —aye, and much more besides that was undreamt of at the outset by the revolutionaries. A gruesome engine that they facetiously called the National Razor—invented and designed some years ago by one Dr. Guillotin—is but an item in the changes that have been, yet an item that in its way has become a very factor. It stands not over-high, yet the shadow of it has fallen athwart ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... he left Leverich's, but it lost somewhat of its alertness as he turned down the street that led to the factory, unaltered, since his first coming to it, save for the transformation of the neglected house he had noticed then, with its gruesome interior, which had been turned into a freshly painted shop long ago. The effect of association is inexorable. There was not a corner, not a building, along that too familiar way, that was not hung with some thought of care. There were moments of such strong repulsion that he felt as if he ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... the gruesome Sand-man of the old nurse's story was associated in your childish mind with old Coppelius, who, even though you had not believed in the Sand-man, would have been to you a ghostly bugbear, especially dangerous to children. His mysterious ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... A gruesome sight met them as Eli brought the dogs to a stop. Huddled close and lying by the side of the toboggan, partially covered by drift, were the stiff-frozen ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... them a collection of spear-heads, gruesome execution knives, elephant swords, and wonder-working ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... doubts upon Garvey's soundness of mind had a strong witness in the man's countenance. His face was too long, a dull saffron in hue, and immobile as a statue's. Pale-blue, unwinking round eyes without lashes added to the singularity of his gruesome visage. Goree was at a loss to account for ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... sudden, she heard low but distinct whispers. Again she listened. Yes. The sounds were not due to her excited imagination at the recollection of those romantic traditions of love and hatred, or of those gruesome stories of how the Wolf of Badenoch had been kept prisoner there for five years and put to frightful tortures, or how the Laird of Weem was deliberately poisoned in that old banqueting-hall, the huge open fireplace of which still ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... but a dream,—a gruesome, haunting dream. With an instinct of wiping out the dreadful memory, I raised my hand wearily to my forehead. As I did so, I became conscious again of how it hurt me. I looked at it. It was covered with half-dried blood, and two straight clean cuts appeared, one across the palm ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... and found him there. Peter's face was so white that his collar and shirt seemed to be a continuation of his body—a sudden gruesome nakedness. Both his hands were shaking and his eyes were puzzled as though he were asking himself some question ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... really liked me and were concerned about me. This but served to confirm me in my madness. I moved in, and, lying in the dead man's bunk, all afternoon and evening listened to dire prophecies of my future. Also were told stories of awful deaths and gruesome ghosts that secretly shivered the hearts of all of us. Saturated with this, yet scoffing at it, I rolled over at the end of the second dog-watch and ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... Terror. Even Larpenteur's bald statement of it fills me with the fine old Greek sense of fate. Men sickened at dawn and were dead at sunset. Every day a cartload or two of corpses went over the bluff into the river; and men became reckless. Larpenteur and his friend joked daily about the carting of the gruesome freight. They felt the irresistible, and they laughed at it, since struggle was out of the question. Some drank deeply and indulged in hysterical orgies. Some hollowed out their own graves and waited patiently beside them for the hidden hand to strike. At least fifteen thousand ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... gruesome To gaze all around. When bloodred through heaven Drives cloudrack o'er head; Air soon shall be deep hued With dying men's blood When this our spaedom Comes ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... Christ in the forefront of their message. With rapturous enthusiasm the Brethren depicted every detail of the Passion History; and thus they reminded their hearers of events which ordinary Christians had almost forgotten. At times the language they used was gruesome; and, lost in mystic adoration, the Brethren, in imagination, trod the Via Dolorosa. They nestled in the nail-prints; they kissed the spear; they gazed with rapt and holy awe on the golden head, the ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... brought about in a very few years, whereas the gradual extension of our poverty-stricken classes has been going on for centuries. To us poverty, besides being a horror, was more or less of a mystery; but America exhibited the development of the gruesome monster with lurid distinctness. In the old countries the men who first were able to seize the land gradually sublet portions either for money or warlike service; the growth of manufactures occupied a thousand years before it reached its present extent; and with the rising of manufacturing ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... away from here, I suppose, until your gruesome visit is accomplished. What makes you think that I would give up Sheila ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... move. Your next is as follows. Every rustic-cottage contains gruesome china-ornaments and excruciating-cheap German-prints of such subjects as "The Tryst" (always spelt "The Trist" on the German print), "The Saylor's Return," "The Warior's Dreem," "Napoleon at Arcola," ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... the Brondings, his fair stronghold-city, where he had subjects and treasures and a borough. The son of Beanstan performed faithfully all that he had pledged himself to. So I expect for thee a worse fatality,—though thou hast everywhere prevailed in rush of battle,—gruesome war,—if thou darest await Grendel at close quarters for the ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... in the man. How things mischance! My castle is a gruesome place today. An idiot first, and then a corpse have knocked To crave admittance to my hall! My Lords, I pray ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... to gaze On all once ours—are shown a seat, O irony! In sad amaze We marvel that it looks so neat, Recalling how we used to meet At gruesome hours in days of yore,— Hours that fate can ne'er repeat: Another's name is ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... had looked upon many a gruesome sight during my somewhat chequered career, though scarcely one more hideous than this which ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... could let it appear that he had not been at the house at all and so had not discovered the crime when he did. That would give Aleck Douglas more time to get away. But there was Jean, due at any moment now. He could not go away and let Jean discover that gruesome thing on the kitchen floor. He could not take it up and hide it away somewhere; he could not do anything, it seemed to him, but ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... Southern California coast in darkness without any preliminary twilight. The olive and fig trees at once lost their characteristic outlines in formless masses of shadow; only the twisted trunks of the old pear trees in the mission garden retained their grotesque shapes and became gruesome in the gathering gloom. The encircling pines beyond closed up their serried files; a cool breeze swept down from the coast range and, passing through them, sent their day-long heated ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... arrests were made, no traveler passing through was sure of his freedom, and after a few weeks half of France was seized with the intoxication of rage, a craving for revenge, and fear. Of the figures of the ludicrously-gruesome murder imbroglio, now this, now that one emerged with greater distinctness and reality, and the one that stood out finally as the most important, because her name was constantly brought forward, was ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... we knew it would. I heard it all. It wasn't gruesome, as you might imagine. I spoke with Lynds the whole time. It was sort of a resigned horror. The initial countdown went off without a hitch and the hissing of the escape valves on the carrier rocket changed to a sound that ...
— What Need of Man? • Harold Calin
... magical in the spectacle of the beautiful fair face aglow with joy, the rounded limbs (visible through the robes) clinging to the sides of the harp, and the delicate white fingers flying across the strings. There was something gruesome and awful, as well, for the face of the girl was blind, and her ears heard nothing of the sounds that her ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... without, looked at some of the famous paintings in the art gallery, then shuddered over the instruments of torture on exhibition in the "Torture Chamber" found in the old prison. There were some gruesome articles here. ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... the paper which he had thrown back to me and read the paragraph indicated. It was headed, "A Gruesome Packet." ...
— The Adventure of the Cardboard Box • Arthur Conan Doyle
... him to the saddle down; He hews the saddle into bits, And e'en the charger's back he splits. See, falling to the right and left, Half of a Turk that has been cleft! The others shudder at the sight And hie away in frantic flight, And each one feels, with gruesome dread, That he is split through trunk and head. A band of Christians, left behind, Came down the road, his work to find; And they admired, one by one, The deed our hero bold had done. From these the Emperor heard it all, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... utters He generally mutters His gruesome blasts and bans. But I, you need not doubt it, Prefer aloud to shout it, Hey, ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... began to chase each other up and down the spine of Eph Somers. He was not, ordinarily, an imaginative youth, but just now the gruesome thought that had ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... plate back over the multiple clock faces, and turned away. Three more years on the Ecological Base was a gruesome stretch of time when you thought of it as ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... fire; but he built it, and for fifteen minutes added pitch-heavy fagots of storm-killed jack-pine and spruce to it, until the flames leapt a dozen feet into the air. Half a dozen times he was impelled to return to the grave and assist MacDonald in his gruesome task. But he knew that MacDonald had meant that he should stay with Joanne. If he returned, ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... gesture toward the corpse of the murdered stool-pigeon. For the first time, Edward Gilder, as his glance unconsciously followed the officer's movement, looked and saw the ghastly inanimate heap of flesh and bone that had once been a man. He fairly reeled at the gruesome spectacle, then fumbled with an outstretched hand as he moved stumblingly until he laid hold on a chair, into which he sank helplessly. It suddenly smote upon his consciousness that he felt very old and broken. He marveled dully over the sensation—it was wholly ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... No, first beyond death's gloomy gate Shall fade away the mists that hide The gruesome and the nobly great, Borne ever on by time and tide. This from thy book of fate alone A liberated soul may tell thee: Perish thou shalt by deed thine own, And yet a stranger's ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... bending forward over the table in a gingerly and horrified manner, let him run on. The hospital porter and another man turned down the corners of the cloth, and stepped aside. The Chief Inspector's eyes searched the gruesome detail of that heap of mixed things, which seemed to have been collected in shambles ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... rude reviling!" Then I wheeled my office-chair in front of bird and bust and door; And upon its cushion sinking, "I," I said, "will smash like winking This impeachment you are bringing, O you ominous bird of yore, O you grim, ungainly, ghastly, grumbling, gruesome feathered bore!" Croaked the Raven, ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Volume 101, October 31, 1891 • Various
... youth to his gruesome sentry-go and turned back into the room. A man of fifty, with a tawny moustache, a long and rather narrow face and eyeglasses, was sitting at an office table with some papers in ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... could walk had walked in to where the little field-hospital of the regiment was established on the trail. We found all our dead and all the badly wounded. Around one of the latter the big, hideous land-crabs had gathered in a gruesome ring, waiting for life to be extinct. One of our own men and most of the Spanish dead had been found by the vultures before we got to them; and their bodies were mangled, the eyes ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... unexpected, his voice so inspiring that she relaxed, sinking to the floor, as Shirley caught her limp girlish form in his arms. He placed her on the couch again, and she regained her composure under his calm urging. Little by little she visualized the details of the gruesome evening and narrated them under the ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... the Highlands on either hand, the waters turned to a livid gray under the feeble light of the waning moon. No part of our voyage was more impressive, no scene more awe-inspiring. It was a region of such weird lights and gruesome shadows as no fancy could people with aught but gaunt goblins and dread demons, come down to us through generations untold, an unspent legacy of terror, from ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... vague sense of loss; for, henceforth, the Vier Marchi would lack a familiar interest; but mostly the people of Mattingley's world were wakeful through curiosity. Morbid expectation of the hanging had for them a gruesome diversion. The thing itself would break the daily monotony of life and provide hushed gossip for vraic gatherings and veilles for a long time to come. Thus Elie Mattingley would not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... terrible blow which had struck him down had not crushed the life from him. He was awakened. But when, after four weeks of gruesome fever and delirium, his mind had somewhat regained its equilibrium, his hair had turned white as snow, and his children beheld an ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... of ruler perfectly exemplified by Duke Karl of Wuerttemberg, up to about the year 1770; 'In a Battle', a powerful description of the rage of combat, with all its sickening and inspiring details; 'The Pestilence', a gruesome tribute to the power of God as manifested in the horrors of the plague, and 'Count Eberhard the Quarreler', a patriotic battle-ballad in honor of a locally renowned Suabian fighter. Better than any of these, however, from a poetic point ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... and precious stones, limped unchallenged the tireless figure of "Soapy" Shay, diamond thief, a bloody bandage about his head, an exalted light in his pain-stricken eyes. His one-time captor lay stark and cold in the gruesome line in the bow of the boat. It was "Soapy" Shay who staggered out of the rack and smoke with the burly, stricken detective in his arms, and it was "Soapy" Shay who wept when the last breath of life cased out through his tortured lips. For of all the company on board ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... story (if it were not rather the malicious counterfeit) of the new divine mother to whom he has thus absolutely entrusted himself. Was not this absolute chastity itself a kind of death? She, too, in secret makes her gruesome midnight offering with averted eyes. She dreams one night he is in danger; creeps to his cubicle [172] to see; the face is covered, as he lies, against the cold. She traces the motionless outline, raises the coverlet; with the nice black head deep in the fleecy pillow he is ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... machine not suited for a novice, the mechanics had felt sure some disaster would overtake me. But, as it happened, their anticipations were not fulfilled. The journalists and photographers did not, however, have a fruitless journey. Though there was nothing gruesome to chronicle, they found ample material, when they learned of them, in the early morning adventures of myself and my friend with this 60 h.p. monoplane. Next day, in fact, our exploits were given ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... streets at night collecting the victims. The drivers, benumbed with drink, frequently failed to ascertain whether death had occurred. Living patients, desperately ill, were piled into the wagons with corpses beneath, about, and on them. These gruesome loads were dumped pell-mell into huge pits hastily dug for the purpose. In some instances, living victims crawled out of these pits and survived to tell the tale. As the epidemics progressed, attempts to dispose of the dead were abandoned. Putrefying bodies were everywhere. Whole ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... sometimes apparently with jerks; but all the world might well be dead and cold and turned to ashes. Often the very air seems to hold its breath for sympathy; at other times a lull suddenly awakens into a strange wind, blowing with unnatural effect. Then out upon the darkness, gruesome but sublime, flashes the glory of the incomparable corona, a silvery, soft, unearthly light, with radiant streamers, stretching at times millions of uncomprehended miles into space, while the rosy, flaming protuberances skirt the ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... Warry," he greeted the little fellow; "you've got me a lawyer," and the pale features lighted with a smile of such radiance as seemed incongruous in this gruesome place. He held out his hand to the man who swung toward him, looming mountainous behind his brother's slight figure. "Thank you for coming," he said cordially, and in his tone was the same air of a grand seigneur as in the lad's. Suddenly a spasm of pain caught ...
— The Perfect Tribute • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... not always enthuse over the hard drudgery of practice. Those that witness only the final games of the year, little realize the gruesome task of preparedness. Every football player will acknowledge that some day he has ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... even then, Mr Farrer said, the wolf was so dreadful that several of the smaller children had to be taken out: and he said Mr Karswell began the story by producing a noise like a wolf howling in the distance, which was the most gruesome thing he had ever heard. All the slides he showed, Mr Farrer said, were most clever; they were absolutely realistic, and where he had got them or how he worked them he could not imagine. Well, the ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... like an elephant over egg-shells. Her household did her one service, at least, in return for their maintenance, and that was to provide the old lady with an audience. It was in no sense an unwilling service, for her imagination ran to the gruesome, and she never planted a precept but she drove it home with a case in point. As a result night was often shattered by a yell from some sleeper whose dreams had trespassed on devilish domains. The ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... of the floor lay a skeleton, every vestige of flesh gone from the bones to which still clung the mildewed and moldered remnants of what had once been clothing. Upon the bed lay a similar gruesome thing, but smaller, while in a tiny cradle near-by was a third, a ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... gruesome. I thought of Dr. Fu-Manchu and the severed fingers, and could not repress ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... and makes an impulsive step forward, and in doing so brushes against a small rickety table, that totters feebly for an instant and then comes with a crash to the ground, flinging a whole heap of gruesome dry bones at her ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... of how the body was found and how further investigation led the constable to the kitchen to make his second gruesome discovery. ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... phantasmagoria of gloom with the death of the body—partly perhaps because they had a much more rational method of disposing of the body—a method which was not only infinitely better for the dead man and more healthy for the living, but was also free from the gruesome suggestions connected with slow decay. They knew much more about death in those days, and because they ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... have been paid to this gruesome tale had it not been repeated to various people during the course of several months. The boy wrote letters reiterating these incidents. His stories always went on to include the most surprising amount of abuse. It seemed that everywhere he had been illtreated. Farmers had whipped him, ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... It was a gruesome sight in front of the stone wall where the deadly fire from Jack Bracken's pistols had swept. Thirteen dead men lay, and the back-bone of lynching had been broken forever ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... some would fain Find nepenthe for their woe; Following through shine or rain Where the "greens" like satin show; But I vote such sport as "slow"— Find it rather glum and gruesome; With a little maid I know I would ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have come. What Gettysburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden was in the first great contest between the white race and the Mongolian. Here covetous Death for once was satisfied, his gruesome garnering seen at each wintry nightfall in the {71} windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn along ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... behind him, and saw an animal whose gruesome oddity even he, who knew so many of the strange creatures, two of which were never the same, that used to live inside the mountain with their masters the goblins, had never seen equalled. Its eyes were flaming with anger, but it seemed to be at the housekeeper, for it came cowering and creeping ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... son bestrides him, And the pretty daughter rides him, And I meet him oft o' mornings on the Course; And there kindles in my bosom An emotion chill and gruesome As I ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... His mouth was a little to a side; one nostril nearly shut, and the other much inflated. The black dog was on his back, as people say, in terrifying nursery metaphor; and he breathed hard under the gruesome burden. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in theory, how to make The matutinal tea and coffee, And, when at school, I used to bake A gruesome mess described as toffee; But these, which form my whole cuisine, Are scarce the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... inscription, his shadowy visitor at Troyes once more arose vividly before his imagination, and the terrible scene of Philibert's murder seemed to be enacted again upon the flight of steps before the door. Absorbed in the gruesome story with which he was so strangely connected, he returned to his ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... numbered, death walked among the stars a familiar companion of all spacemen. And to the Free Trader it was the extra and invisible crewman on every ship that raised. But there were deaths and deaths—And Dane could not forget the gruesome legends Van Rycke collected avidly as his hobby—had recorded in his private library of ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... that has appeared since the St. Peter Martyr, with a mise-en-scene more classical than anything else from Titian's hand that can be pointed to, the picture may be guessed, rather than seen, to be also a curious and subtle study of conflicting lights. On the one hand we have that of the gruesome martyrdom itself, and of a huge torch fastened to the carved shaft of a pedestal; on the other, that of an effulgence from the skies, celestial in brightness, shedding its consoling ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... than a pit—and it seemed to be a natural cavity, with nothing remarkable about it. But I turned my attention to the floor, which felt curiously soft and greasy to the touch. It was strewn with pieces of human bones and skulls! The gruesome place weighed rather upon me, I confess, silent and stifling as it was, but having come to explore I proceeded to excavate lightly in the yielding material of the floor with a light pick. The singular nature of this material aroused my attention, and well it might, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... hear us. It turned its head. In the pale light of the cage interior, I had a closer view now of its face. It was a metal mask, welded to a gruesome semblance of a man—a great broad face, with high, angular cheeks. On the high forehead, the corrugations were rigid as though it were permanently frowning. The nose was squarely solid, the mouth an orifice behind which ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... God of Women struck light across his blindness, and taking her in his arms, he looked her straight in the eyes and told her the whole gruesome bitter tale. Before he had finished she closed her eyes against his and swayed away from him to ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... as there was no law by which we could restrain her permanently she is still at large. I think one of the Sunday papers at the time had an account of her—they called her 'Typhoid Bridget,' and in red ink she was drawn across the page in gruesome fashion, frying the skulls of her victims in a frying-pan over a roaring fire. That particular typhoid ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... reached Orange, it is, of course, impossible to know where the unfortunate woman, who, by her dress, belonged to the leisured class, entered the train. Her hand baggage had disappeared, no doubt stolen at some intervening station by someone who, having made the gruesome discovery, thought it wise to make himself scarce. The police do not, however, consider that they are in the presence of a crime. Dr. Fortoul, the well-known physician of Orange, has satisfied himself that the lady ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... he felt much. What a gruesome little woman it is this evening! You're shivering. Put on your ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... recalling us," said St. Clair. "The men have finished the gruesome task. I want you to know, Mr. Mason, that we bear you no animosity, and we're quite sure that ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... palpable fact that the American habit of lynching had so whetted the thirst for black blood that a negro suspected of crime had to face at least the possibility of a short shrift and a long rope, not to mention more gruesome horrors, without the intervention of judge or jury. Since to have a black face at such a time was to challenge suspicion, and since there was neither the martyr's glory nor the saint's renown in being ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... and shook with fear, and when the Crocodile, in a gruesome growl, remarked that he was hungry and wanted a good meal, the wretched creature hadn't ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... stories told in connection with the old quarry that had not been worked for so many years that the road leading to it across country had grown up in grass and weeds. Some adventurous boys who went out there once declared it was a most gruesome place, with pools of water covered with green scum lying around, and all sorts of holes looking like the cave Robinson Crusoe found on his island home to be seen where granite building rocks had been excavated ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... after all the chances and changes of seven hundred years, the finest inhabited chateau in the Soissonnais, and as, by a curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat gruesome tale, which has a ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... be! When I was a young wench at school"—and then, as she folded up the loose ribbons, Letty told a gruesome story of a farmer robbed and murdered; but as she came to the part the gray horse played in the tale, Katherine slowly walked into the room, with a letter in her hand. She was white, even to her lips; and with a mournful shake of ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... flight, the desperate hand-to-hand struggles for life, mingled with the brutal yells, interspersed with the piteous cries for mercy, followed by the horrible silence which finally settles over the slippery decks, and the gruesome spectacle of the dreadful vandalism as the murderers proceed to strip ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... all, "Charlie's Oak." Half a century ago, an Exmoor boy had hanged himself on this tree. Another Exmoor boy, many years later, had carved a cross on the tree and by that sign and others learned from Exmoor boys, they finally found the gruesome spot. ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... Bill's failings might have been, he was no faint heart, and despite the shock of the gruesome discovery he continued his investigation of the silent ship. Apparently some attempt had been made when first the Buena Ventura was caught in the deadly embrace of the Sargasso to convey her treasure to the boats, for, at the head of the main companion-way, ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay, kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and meanness. On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity always remain in the end the supreme forces of human life. Thackeray, with a fine and sympathetic soul, had ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Oliver? I don't know why Jem tells such gruesome things at a time like this when we're ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Kitty dropped on her knees in front of its riotous warmth and glow. Suddenly she sprang up and stared about her, sniffing and catching her breath. I had noticed it too; it fairly took one by the throat, the gruesome odor. ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... gruesome drama was the attack upon the second line represented by the sacks lying upon the parapet of the trench beyond. The completed action thus included the guard, thrust, recovery, the leap forward past the swinging line of sacks, and a second thrust at ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... up from his last gruesome bit of stage-setting with a sigh of relief. "Go ahead." He pointed to one of the other archways. "I ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... you put them into glass boxes to watch them, they manage to corrode the glass so it ceases to be transparent. And they can bore their way out of any wood, or even metal, containers you try to keep them in. The termite seems destined to remain a gruesome, marvelous, possibly ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... not that all were dead. He half regretted, as he watched his friend's sail drop down beneath the horizon, that he had not gone with him. But the three disappointments the New World had already given him made him dread its shores, and he shuddered as he thought of the gruesome tidings which must await La Pommeraye on that lonely northern isle. He shuddered, too, as he thought of De Roberval. Fate is sometimes slow-footed, but he felt certain that it must at last rush with unerring speed to the destruction of the man who ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... applies only to the space on the side of the bed next the fire. The bed itself—not to mention the shadowy region beyond it—on which the body of the pirate had lain, he could not regard without a sense of the awfully gruesome: itself looked scared at its own consciousness of the fact, and of the feeling it caused in ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... harnessed the dogs; he accompanied every step the woodsman took—wild horses could not have dragged him away in his present frame of mind—and finally, when they set out back toward the Canadian Line, he shambled along ahead of the team with head down and eyes averted from the gruesome bundle that lay in the sled. His punishment had overtaken him and he was ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... A clanking of arms sounded somewhere nearby. Men with long, gruesome, glittering spears came through a doorway. They stood aside. A girl entered the great hall. More spearmen followed her. They stopped by the door. The girl came across ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... Peter were summoned from the field. Mrs. Patterson became hysterical, and was taken into the spare room with such remedies as could be suggested. Everybody blamed poor Dan. Cecily asked him what he would feel like if Jimmy was never, never found. The Story Girl had a gruesome recollection of some baby at Markdale who had ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... rattan came, Big L was made to lie face down on the table, two cadets seized his hands and drew him forward, two others took him by the feet so that his body lay stretched out lengthwise. The tallow candles were taken from the table and lifted up high, and the whole affair had an absolutely gruesome look. ...
— Good Blood • Ernst Von Wildenbruch
... less effective, and will be the more easily overrun the more firmly the idea is fixed that such preventive means are at his disposal. At the same time the discussion of all these sexual matters, even with their gruesome background, will force on the mind a stronger engagement with sexual thought than had ever before occurred, and this will find its discharge in an increased sexual tension. On the other hand, this new knowledge of means of safety will greatly increase the playing with danger. Of course it may be ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... so much," I said nastily. (When people presage a remark by saying that they only say it because they love you, you may lay long odds that it's going to be disagreeable!) "It certainly sounds a gruesome prospect. Not even a choice between bankruptcy and mania, but a certainty of both! And within a year, too! Such a short run for one's money! Aunt Eliza had some suggestion to make, then? And you evidently approved. Would you ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... opportunity for gratifying our natural taste in colours. It will probably be of but short duration. Therefore let us select a combination of all the most brilliant tints and wear them, for who knows how soon that gruesome pall of woe may ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... working with unwonted rapidity. This man must be silenced at all costs. It would be fatal to his prospects in English society if one tithe of these gruesome stories were made public. And he believed Jimmy capable of making them public, being guilty thereby of an error of judgment. Jimmy, though he had no respect at all for Mr. McEachern, would have died sooner than spread any story which, even in an indirect way, could reflect ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... The gruesome meal in the story of the juniper tree reminds us of the Tantalus story and the meal of Thyestes. Demeter (or Thetes) ate a shoulder of the dismembered Pelops, who was set before the gods by his ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... both fastened by stout ropes to rings fixed in the rafters of the barn. Their heads dangled from the slip-knots. The one against which Perenna had struck was still moving slightly and the bones clicked together with a gruesome sound. ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... burn waits with his head unbandaged. My neighbour chokes in the clutch of chloral . . . O, a gruesome world! ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... Refectory. The buildings were clean and comfortable, and the only drawback lay in the fact that one sometimes found it objectionable to have to look at these poor old creatures, dragging themselves around. They had nothing to do, it seemed, but to wait and die. One old man was a gruesome sight. He was about ninety years old and spent his days walking about the courtyard, wearing a cigarette tin hung around his neck, into which he used to cough with such terrible effort that it seemed as if he would die ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... without waiting for a reply, applies his mouth to one of the ratholes. Something must come of it, if he doesn't burst. Good heavens! I hope he has no apoplectic tendencies. Yes, here it comes, sure enough, a gruesome sound between a moan and a roar, and spreads itself away over the valley, and up the hillside, and into the woods at the back of the house, a ghost-like, awful voice. "Um do say, sir," says mine host, rising purple-faced, while the moan is still coming out ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... sentence that evening in the Criminal Courts Building, did not give one the same uncanny feeling as this handful of Belgian scouts pedaling out to meet the German fire. I do not intend to say the Belgians were not brave men, for this was an isolated instance. And indeed there was something gruesome about that little company offered for the slaughter, simply for the purpose of locating the German batteries. The men understood the meaning of the order and appreciated the ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... is too gruesome," said Martin with fierce impatience. "I can't see why it's up to you more than ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... and life for them is a wallowing in the morbid and unwholesome. In them feeling is perverted, they seem to see life habitually through dark glasses; they passively attend to the sad, the distressing, sometimes the gruesome and the horrible with a sort of pallid joy in their own discolored images. The first group puts joy in all they see, because they are brimming full of joy themselves. These others find only the unwholesome in life because their minds are storehouses of it. We say that each type has ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... you in the night, howadji," pursued Najib, taking from the soiled folds of his abieh a large old volume, bound in stout leather, after the manner of religious or scientific books of a half-century ago. On the brown back a scratched gold lettering proclaimed the gruesome title: ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various |
