"Specter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... coffee, and corn cakes without butter. But we had a half-pint of molasses (for seven) which cost 75 cts. The gaunt specter is ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... of the time, angel of the dawn who is neither night nor day; they found him seated on a lime sack filled with bones, clad in the mantle of egoism, and shivering in terrible cold. The anguish of death entered into the soul at the sight of that specter, half mummy and half fetus; they approached it as the traveler who is shown at Strasburg the daughter of an old count of Sarvenden, embalmed in her bride's dress: that childish skeleton makes one shudder, for her slender and livid hand wears the wedding-ring and her ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... Then I pictured myself with such a looking object in my embrace, and with nothing with which to conceal him. There were settlements ahead, daylight was approaching, and what a figure we would cut! It was too much for me, and I said, "No, get on behind," feeling that the specter might retard the pursuing foe. But my tall horse solved the difficulty. Withdrawing my foot from the stirrup, Brown would put his in and try to climb up, when suddenly the horse would "swap ends," and down he'd go. ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... it once; they can do it again. The Negro and his friends should see to it that the white majority shall never wish to do anything to his hurt. There still stands, before the Negro-hating whites of the South, the specter of a Supreme Court which will interpret the Constitution to mean what it says, and what those who enacted it meant, and what the nation, which ratified it, understood, and which will find power, in a nation which goes beyond seas to administer the affairs of distant ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... what did I promise? Wretch! what do I attempt? How all my courage Hath vanished from me since Aegisthus vanished! I only see the immense atrocity Of this, my horrible deed; I only see The bloody specter of Atrides! Ah, In vain do I accuse thee! No, thou lovest Cassandra not. Me, only me, thou lovest, Unworthy of thy love. Thou hast no blame, Save that thou art my husband, in the world! Of trustful sleep, to death's arms by my hand? ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... even the steep, tortuous canyons dried out and there was neither shade nor moisture in them. The few farms and ranches round about were scattered widely, and life thereon was a grim struggle against heartbreak, by reason of the gaunt, gray, ever-present specter of the drought. Of late this particular region had proven itself to be one of violent extremes, of extreme dryness during which flowers failed to bloom, the grass shriveled and died, and even the trees refused to put forth leaves; or, more rarely, of extreme wetness, when the country ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... had come upon us, who had seen us, and who stood in front of us, as motionless as a specter. Then ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... the specter stern rejoined, "These are unpardonable yearnings; If you are lame, and deaf, and blind, You've had your three sufficient warnings, So, come along; no more we'll part." He said, and touched him with his dart: And now old Dodson, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... visions wild, Such as might suit the specter's child. 150 Where with black cliffs the torrents toil, He watched the wheeling eddies boil, Till, from their foam, his dazzled eyes Beheld the River Demon rise; The mountain mist took form and limb, 155 Of noontide hag, or goblin grim; The midnight ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... portholes came the swish of bubbling water and a flood of sunlight. Then Riggs made a little speech and they all drank Clark's health, promising him continued support and such money as he needed to make steel rails. The threatening specter ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... mentioned rarely, and in whispers, when we were children, and how we had regarded it as a mysterious region, unfit for mortal habitation. Was It—the dark form with the chain—a creature of this world, or a specter? And again—more dreadful still—could it be that the corpses of wicked men were forced to rise and haunt in the body the places where they had wrought their evil deeds? And was such as these my grisly neighbor? The chain faintly rattled. My hair bristled; my eyeballs seemed ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... April 8-11, 1882. The conference, which had been called by Baron Horace Guenzburg, with the permission of Ignatyev, was made up of some twenty-five delegates from the provinces—among them Dr. Mandelstamm of Kiev, Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Specter of Kovno—and fifteen notables from the capital, including Baron Guenzburg himself, the railroad magnate Polakov, and Professor Bakst. The question of Jewish emigration was the central issue of the conference, although, in connection with it, the general situation of ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... lead men to great extremes, and was responsible for the cruel teaching of the theologians of the school, who were more logically consistent than the Bishop of Hippo. They endeavored to terrorize heretics by the specter of the stake. St. Augustine, bold as he was, shrank from such barbarity. But if, on his own admission, the logical consequences of the principle he laid down were to be rejected, did not this prove the principle ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... looking With a face of livid white Like the specter of the prairie That I saw one horrid night, Riding through the endless darkness Like a being doomed from birth Just to roam outside of heaven And denied a place on earth. Say one word to me! Speak, Nancy, If you have a voice and live! Tell the worst, e'en though ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... had to dread were the revolution which is held up as a specter to terrify us! Since I cannot imagine a society more detestable than ours, I feel more skeptical than alarmed in regard to that which will replace it. If I should have to suffer from the change, I should be consoled by thinking that the executioners of that day were the victims ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... who strives, with vain and frantic effort, to avert the blow. The whole is executed with terrible truth and spirit; we almost fancy we hear the gibbering yell of triumph bursting from the distended jaws of the specter. But why should we thus seek to clothe death with unnecessary terrors, and to spread horrors round the tombs of those we love? The grave should be surrounded by everything that might inspire tenderness ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... return to California a new specter appeared—the last that Adelle expected to encounter in her life. Archie hinted that it would be well to go slow with their "improvements" at Highcourt. The times were getting bad, he said, and the market looked as if they would get worse rather than better. Every one was talking of a dark ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... reviewed the events of the past six weeks. Never intrusive, yet always by her side and at her beck and call, never at a loss to do and say the right thing, Miller had wooed her in his own masterful way, trampling down prejudice, suspicion, unbelief, until he had gained his heritage—love. The specter of the past ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... gathered at the scene of the crime had not been large. The very thought of the Nipe kept people away from places where he was known to have been. The specter of the Nipe evoked a fear, a primitive fear—fear of the dark and fear of the unknown—combined with the rational fear of a very real, ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Luther departed than strife began its distracting work. War, political as well as theological, followed in the wake of his death. From the grave of the fallen hero a double specter began to loom up. Pope and Emperor now joined hands to crush Protestantism by brute force as they had planned long ago. The result was the Smalcald War. The secret enemies which Lutheranism harbored within its ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... shoes, a stain that had faded rose and became vivid on the carpet. Then a film came over Winny's eyes, and on the far border of the field of vision, somewhere toward the top of her head, a yellow chest of drawers with white handles grew dim and quivered and danced like the yellow and white specter of ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... nor given his soul in vain," this is the man who can make haste, even uphill, the only haste worth making; and it must be up the right hill, too: not that Corinthian Acropolis, of which, I suppose, the white specter stood eighteen hundred feet high, in Hades, for Sisyphus to roll his fantastic stone up—image, himself, forever of the greater part of ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... event, with Cuba a State, Porto Rico could not be kept a Territory. No more could the Sandwich Islands. And then, looming direct in our path, like a volcano rising out of the mist on the affrighted vision of mariners tempest-tossed in tropic seas, is the specter of such States as Luzon and the Visayas ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... Barbicane saw the specter of the dog, and other divers objects which had been thrown from the projectile, obstinately following them. Diana howled lugubriously on seeing the remains of Satellite, which seemed as motionless as if ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... of one's family is the one thing that a person of Julia's character and habits finds next to impossible. A beneficent limitation of nature; for the cases in which the judgment of a girl of eighteen is better than that of her parents are very few. Besides, the inevitable "heart-disease" was a specter that guarded the gates of Julia's prison. Night after night she sat looking out over the hills sleeping in hazy darkness, toward the hollow in which stood the castle; night after night she had half-formed ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... thing he had ever been afraid of in his life was woman, and he had been afraid all his life. Nor was that timidity to be put easily to flight now that he felt the first glimmering need and desire for woman. The specter of the apron-string still haunted him, and helped him to find excuses for getting on no forwarder ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... maintain the pace, to feel and keep fit, they discover that a glass of some advertised aperient or laxative water before breakfast works wonders, tides them over for the time being and keeps them "in the ring." They compliment themselves and push the specter of age aside. ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... he was ill. He seemed daily to lose more of the boyishness which all his life had made him want to dance in the sun. That loss was to Ruth like a snickering hobgoblin attending the specter of death. Staying by him constantly, forgetting, in the intensity of her care, even to want credit for virtue, taking one splash at her tired eyes with boric acid and dashing back to his bed, she mourned and ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... thought of England, with its scant area and its forty million souls. He smiled. An empire opened within range of his vision. He had had to go to Europe to appreciate his own country. Old, old peoples over there. Outworn, bewildered aristocracies and vast populations troubled with the specter of want, swarming like rabbits, pressing always close upon the means of subsistence. No room; no chance. Born in social stratas solidified by centuries. No wonder Europe was full of race and class hatred, of war and pestilence. Snap judgment,—but ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... site for their new home, and it was as though the horrid specter of a few moments before had never risen to menace them, for the girl felt that a great burden of apprehension had been lifted forever from her shoulders, and though a dull ache gnawed at the mucker's heart, still he was happier than he had ever been before—happy to be ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... AEschere is dead... The cruel hag has wreaked on him her vengeance. The country folk said there were two of them, one the semblance of a woman; the other the specter of a man. Their haunt is in the remote land, in the crags of the wolf, the wind-beaten cliffs, and untrodden bogs, where the dismal stream plunges into the drear abyss of an awful lake, overhung with a dark and grizzly wood ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... rallied from that shock of grief; but was not strong enough to sustain a shock of joy! I ought not to have given you this surprise! But try now to compose yourself, and give me welcome. I am here; alive, warm, loving, hungry even! a woman, and no specter risen from the grave, although you look at me just as if I were one! Dear Herman, kiss me! I have come a long way to join you!" she said, in a voice softer than the softest notes ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... going to in the boat. It being settled, for peace' sake, that he did live in the cottage, and was going in the boat to fish near the castle, the plot of the drama afterwards gradually thickened; and became, I believe, involved with that of the tragedy of Douglas, and of the Castle Specter, in both of which pieces my father had performed in private theatricals, before my mother, and a select Edinburgh audience, when he was a boy of sixteen, and she, at grave twenty, a model housekeeper, and very scornful and religiously suspicious ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... in silence. A general depres- sion has fallen upon all; the specter of famine has appeared among us, and each has remained wrapped in his own gloomy meditations, though each has doubtless but one idea dominant ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... messing around in your life. I'm different from that kind of people. If I'm sincere I can't pretend I'm not different. And I'm not a bit sure I know what's any better for them to do than what they're doing!" She had spoken impetuously, hotly, addressing not the men beside her but a specter of ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the world we become oblivious of the interior discords, as soldiers forget their wounds amid the stir and trumpets of the battle. With a busy life, a gay life, we manage to forget the skeleton of the heart, rarely permitting ourselves to look upon the ominous specter which some way or other has entrenched itself within us, and which is ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... man strolled disconsolately enough into the billiard-room, thence (dogged by a specter of loneliness) to the bar, and finally, in sheer desperation, to the dining-room, where he selected a table and ordered an evening paper with ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... departed things. At the foot of a wooden cupboard which looks like iron are lamp glasses in paper shirts; and farther away, groups of oil-drums. All is dilapidated and ruinous; all is dark in this angle of the great building where light is elaborated. The specter of a huge window stands yonder. The panes only half appear; so encrusted are they they might be covered with yellow paper. The great stones—the rocks—of the walls are upholstered with a dark deposit of grease, like the bottom of a stewpan, and nests of dust hang from them. Black puddles ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... partly from rational conviction and partly from absorption in new issues, were wholly indisposed to any further interference. Without such interference there was no slightest chance of any restoration of political preponderance of the negroes over the whites. The specter of "negro domination" haunted the Southern imagination long after it had become an impossibility. Then it was used as a bogy by small politicians. But the only serious attempt at national legislation for the South has been of ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... species are—the slow lemurs of South India, small tailless nocturnal animals, somewhat resembling sloths in appearance, and almost as deliberate in their movements, except when in the act of seizing their insect prey; the Tarsier, or specter lemur, of the Malay islands, a small, long tailed nocturnal lemur, remarkable for the curious development of the hind feet, which have two of the toes very short, and with sharp claws, while the others have ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... be—because I am, too," he answered. And instinctively, like two children, they drew close together. They both gazed at the specter sketch spread before them and drew ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... House, and my thoughts flashed back across the abyss of years. I remembered the dread Specter of the Place. A short while passed, and I saw that I was being wafted directly toward the enormous mass of that ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... not with the conscious grace Of gentle, winsome womanhood, Nor yet, withal, the flaunting face Of men and women understood, But rather as a thing apart, A wind-blown petal of a rose, A specter with a specter's heart That cometh ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... a town or a green pasture and you miles and miles away. And there was a sight to be seen off Sicily that the ignorant Italian people thought was the work of Morgan le Fay. And in the Alps was a horror men spoke of and called the Specter of the Brocken. ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne |
