"Weird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... encourage this suggestion. There was, he thought, no historical evidence for it. But it seemed to me that if these people ever practised such sacrifices this was the place for them. A gloomier chamber for weird rites ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... supernatural beings dwelt for the most part. Out of culture back to nature the human being sometimes has to go and have strange communings with the spirits there; such is often the movement of the Fairy Tale. But who are these spirits or weird powers dwelling in the lone island or in ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... constant dropping in of friends, nothing to relieve the monotony of daily life. But none of this did Mrs. Orban mind; she was always busy and content by day. It was only of the night-time she was afraid, when strange-voiced creatures were never silent an hour, weird cries from the scrub pierced the air, and there arose from the plantation below wild sounds, sometimes of revelry over a feast, the beating of tom-toms, and wailing of voices as the natives conducted their heathen worship, or indulged in noisy quarrels likely to end ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... known as THE GREAT1 (356-323 B.C.), king of Macedon, was the son of Philip II. of Macedon, and Olympias, an Epirote princess. His father was pre-eminent for practical genius, his mother a woman of half-wild blood, weird, visionary and terrible; and Alexander himself is singular among men of action for the imaginative splendours which guided him, and among romantic dreamers for the things he ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Caliphs and the Caliphate return to Baghdad and Cairo, whilst Asmodeus kindly removes the terrace-roof of every tenement and allows our curious glances to take in the whole interior. This is perhaps the best proof of their power. Finally, the picture- gallery opens with a series of weird and striking adventures and shows as a tail-piece, an idyllic scene of love and wedlock in halls before reeking with ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Northern Divers]. They were somewhere out on the glittering water, and far apart. We could not see them, but there were four, and one wild call answering another rang out into the great silence. It was weird and beautiful beyond words; the big, shining lake with its distant blue islands; the sky with its wonderful clouds and colour; two little canoes so deep in the wilderness, and those wild, reverberant voices coming up from invisible beings away in the "long light" which lay across the ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... know. All round,' he explained wildly, with a graphic gesture in the direction of the sea and the sky. 'All out round. We've left them all round at places.' To this day I don't know what he meant, but I merely asked when they would quit these weird retreats. He said in an hour: in an hour I called again. Were they in now? 'Well not in—not in, just yet,' he said with a sort of feverish confidentialness, as if he wasn't quite well. 'Are they still—all out at places?' I asked with restrained humour. 'Oh no!' ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Emily, Charlotte and Anne. They, with their brother, lived in a kind of dream world. Charlotte was the natural story-teller, and she wove endless romances in which figured the great men of history who were her heroes. She also told over and over many weird Yorkshire legends. These children devoured every bit of printed matter that came to the parsonage, and they were as thoroughly informed on all political questions as ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... vast were the proportions of the globe that there was no swaying, shaking, nor trembling ever perceptible. It was as if the splendid structure were a rock, and all the world a swift flying panorama far beneath them. Very strange and weird was the sight of the sun, traveling in one continuous circuit but a few degrees above the horizon, never rising nor setting during six months of the year. The atmosphere was particularly clear and frosty, so that as they promenaded the balcony, ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... of gentle race. 'T were strange in ruder rank to find Such looks, such manners, and such mind. Each hint the Knight of Snowdoun gave, Dame Margaret heard with silence grave; Or Ellen, innocently gay, Turned all inquiry light away:— 'Weird women we! by dale and down We dwell, afar from tower and town. We stem the flood, we ride the blast, On wandering knights our spells we cast; While viewless minstrels touch the string, 'Tis thus our charmed rhymes we sing.' She sung, and still a harp unseen Filled up ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... reveries were broken. In the shallow water of the ford down at the river splashed a horse's hoofs and she heard a voice singing in the weird falsetto of mountain minstrelsy an old ballade which, like much else of the life there, was a heritage ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... about to strike, when his eyes met Jeanne's. The young woman was smiling, happy to die for her lover. Her pale face beamed from out her black hair with weird beauty. Cayrol trembled. That look which he had loved, would he never see it again? That rosy mouth, whose smile he cherished, would it be hushed in death? A thousand thoughts of happy days came to his mind. His arm fell. A bitter flood rushed from his heart to his eyes; ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... hand pulled Garrigan to freedom. Getting the other men up to the floor was the work of but a few moments. They were a weird-looking crew in the torn fragments of clothing that remained to them. Foster stationed them beside the locked cavern door so that they would be hidden behind ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... this weird and hilly country, that prominent natural feature, Anthony's Nose, which was located on the opposite shore, strongly appealed to my imagination and somewhat excited my mirth. One needs a powerful imagination, I thought, ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... through Hitt of the girl's unusual voice, and had dropped in on his way home to ask that he might hear and test it. With only a smile for reply, Carmen tossed her books and hat upon the sofa and went directly to the piano, where she launched into the weird Indian lament which had produced such an astounding effect upon her chance visitors at the Elwin school that day long gone, and which had been running in her thought and seeking expression ever since her conversation with Doctor ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... and took hold of the old-style door bell. It did not respond at first. Using more force, it emitted a faint eerie tinkle. "It sounds positively weird," was Marjorie's thought. She smiled to herself as she rang it again. "I hope I shall never have to live in a boarding house like this. I am lucky to have love and a beautiful home ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... will make the holiest day more sacred still. Strike with hand of fire, O weird musician, thy harp strung with Apollo's golden hair; fill the vast cathedral aisles with symphonies sweet and dim, deft toucher of the organ keys; blow, bugler, blow, until thy silver notes do touch and kiss ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... darkness save for some weird object in the centre of it, on which a fire was burning, sending up a smoke which hung about the room. Ashe recognized an old Spanish brazier of beaten copper, standing on iron feet, which had been a purchase of his own in days when he trifled with bric-a-brac. Upon it, a heap of ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... exaggerated Milky Way, suddenly caught fire at its eastern end. Rapidly the red flame along ran its entire length to the other horizon. Then countless unexpected shadows woke up on the rocks about me, weird, undefined shapes, which became clear-cut only when the rim of the sun came ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... western sea-rim, and there was still no sign of the captain's boat. On the shore an ominous silence prevailed, though now and then it would be broken by the weird, resonant boom of a conch-shell. The night was passed in the greatest anxiety by all on board, every man, musket in hand, keeping a ...
— The Adventure Of Elizabeth Morey, of New York - 1901 • Louis Becke
... reply. He could not have spoken if he had tried. Once more the spell had seized him—the spell of her weird fascination for him. As she sat typewriting, with her back almost toward him, he sat watching her and analyzing his own folly. He knew that diagnosing a disease does not cure it; but he found an acute pleasure in lingering upon all the details of ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... I fared till, treading the clear heights, I found one frantically painting the peaks and pinnacles of the mountains in weird stipples of alternate ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... I have been getting at. You dip and turn into Vandewater Street. Under the Bridge at once you go, where all sounds are weird, hollow sounds, and then out again. The atmosphere has been becoming more and more charged with the character of the printing business. Now may be felt the tremour and heard the sound of moving presses. Printing houses, dealers in "litho inks," linotype companies, ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... all the sins of that pupil, in connexion with the Occult Sciences, whether of omission or commission, until the moment when initiation makes the pupil a Master and responsible in his turn. There is a weird and mystic religious law, greatly reverenced and acted upon in the Greek, half-forgotten in the Roman Catholic, and absolutely extinct in the Protestant Church. It dates from the earliest days of Christianity and has its basis in the law just stated, of which it was a symbol and an expression. ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... abject terror, she let go her hold of her babe. The boy leaped from her arms into the air, and, whilst the distracted mother uttered a wail of anguish, Giovanni deftly caught his little son in his arms. The child chortled merrily, as if enjoying his weird experience, and, inasmuch as he never so much as uttered the slightest cry of fear, the intrepid Condottiere felt perfectly reassured as to the auspicious ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... across the water came the dull resonance of distant guns and a remote weird crying. Then everything was still. A cockchafer came droning over the hedge and past us. High in the west the crescent moon hung faint and pale above the smoke of Weybridge and Shepperton and the hot, still splendour ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... were these noises around her making her start? Rats! Yes, here they were, venturing out from all the corners. They knew there had been food in the room. This was why Madge had those to gaunt, weird-looking cats in her kitchen! Aurelia went and sat on the step into the court to be out of their way, but Madge hunted her in that the door might be shut and barred; and when she returned trembling to the sitting ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... between the Thier and himself. Werner's men were well content to let their master fight it out. The words spoken by Henker Rothhals, that the Devil had forsaken him, seemed in their minds confirmed by the weird song which every one present could swear he heard with his ears. 'Let him take his chance, and try his own luck,' they said, and shrugged. The battle was between Guy, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and found they had next to no wood to build them. There was scarcely anything in that rocky waste but the dwarf trees of olive; a poetic fantasy woven about that war in after ages described them as hindered even in their wood-cutting by the demons of that weird place. And indeed the fancy had an essential truth, for the very nature of the land fought against them; and each of those dwarf trees, hard and hollow and twisted, may well have seemed like a grinning goblin. It is said that they found timbers by accident in a cavern; they tore ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... Fra Angelico; and the possession of this treasure was regarded by her as a far richer inheritance than that princely state of which she knew nothing. Her neat little cell had a window that looked down on the sea,—on Capri, with its fantastic grottos,—on Vesuvius, with its weird daily and nightly changes. The light that came in from the joint reflection of sea and sky gave a golden and picturesque coloring to the simple and bare furniture, and in sunny weather she often sat there, just as a lizard lies upon a wall, with the simple, warm, delightful sense ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... eye was really there, or if, his imagination stirred by the weird scene and the fairy history of Japan which the sailor had repeated, he was seeing things not present to ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... the roots of the gorse; the curious dodder spreading a tangled red skein of thread over it gemmed with little round white balls, the rare marsh cinquefoil, the brilliant yellow asphodel, the delicate, exquisite, bog pimpernel, the blue skull-cap, the two weird and curious sun-dews, and even in former times the beautiful dark blue Gentiana Pneumonanthe, as well as the two pinguiculas—Vulgaris, like a violet, and the ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... of emancipation. The boat which has been tethered to the weird, baleful shore is set free, and sails toward the glories of the morning. The man, long cramped in the dark, imprisoning pit, is brought out, and stretches his limbs in the sweet light and air of God's free world. Black servitude is ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... tree, the ash. Yggdrasil[6] is a tree worthy of the gods; it is a world-tree; its roots extend to all the worlds; its branches spread even over heaven. Under it is the fountain Mimir, spring of wisdom, from which Odin drinks daily. Near it is the dwelling of the Norns, fates or weird sisters, who establish laws and uphold them by their judgments, and allot to every man his span of life. They are named Urd the past, Verdandi the present, and Skuld the future. Daily do they water the ash from the spring to keep its leaves fresh, and help it to contend with its numerous foes, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... to see the camp-fires of a caravan. She laughed, then cried, and she tottered toward Peter, who stood there, a lean weird figure in his tattered blue ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... as I pondered on her sorry tale, One weird, unearthly, melancholy wail, Broke from her lips:—a cry of agony, Of hopeless, mad, despairing misery: Then grim starvation on her little head Laid his cold fingers, and she fell ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 6, 1892 • Various
... than this world must seem To one who its vagaries first does scan; It is less weird than the enchanted dream Which life may change to ere you be a man. Such as it is, take it for this alone,— That ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... to which tree the fruits, flowers, and leaves really belong. The trunks run straight up to a great height without a branch, and then form a thick leafy canopy far overhead; a canopy so dense that even the blaze of the cloudless blue sky is subdued, one might almost say into a weird gloom, the effect of which is enhanced by the solemn silence. At first such a forest gives the impression of being more open than an English wood, but a few steps are sufficient to correct this error. There is a thick undergrowth ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... vary the entertainment by giving us extremely quaint illustrations of holy people in stained-glass attitudes: his power of twisting his limbs into weird contortions being very great. (I am told that Sir William Wilde, his father, possessed the same power.) It must not be thought, however, that there was any suggestion ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... evening greeting of a passer-by, wafted down to her from some higher path along the fell? distant voices in the farm enclosures beneath her feet? or simply the eerie sounds of the mountain, those weird earth-whispers which haunt the lonely places of nature? Who can tell? Nerves and brain were strained to their uttermost. The legend of the ghost—of the girl who had thrown her baby and herself into the tarn under the frowning ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... buildings. Above all this hung a dense pall of smoke, showing lurid where the flames were reflected from its dark and threatening surface. To those nearer the scene presented many pathetic and distressing features, the fire glare throwing weird shadows over the worn and panic-stricken faces of the woe-begone fugitives, driven from their homes and wandering the streets in helpless misery. Many of them lay sleeping on piles of blankets and clothing which they had brought ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... faces skulked about. Even when we felt no personal danger this incubus of savage life all around weighed on our hearts. Thus it was day and night. Even those hours of twilight, which brood with sweet influences over so many lives, bore to us, on the evening air, the weird cadences of the heathen dance or the chill thrill ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... Nevada left Auckland two feet deeper in the water than she ought to have been, and laboured heavily. Seas struck her under the guards with a heavy, explosive thud, and she groaned and strained as if she would part asunder. It was a long weird day. We held no communication with each other, or with those who could form any rational estimate of the probabilities of our destiny; no officials appeared; the ordinary invariable routine of the steward department ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... campaigns had already smashed her flabby fleets and driven the remnants from space, but the Council, faced with the destruction and casualties from just a few days of the weird surprise bombardment, was cowed. ...
— Tulan • Carroll Mather Capps
... upon the headland Where the wind-distorted cedars Cling upon the rocky hillside. Long she prayed to the Great Spirit For his guidance and protection. Long she prayed and watched and waited Till the moon came up and silvered All the sea, and cast the shadows Of the cedars, weird ...
— The Legends of San Francisco • George W. Caldwell
... Gormack, the weird, a thane of the Pictish race, had his dwelling near the giddy cliffs where the young eagles scream to the roar of the dark waters of the Forth. He had a daughter whose beauty was the theme of all tongues. Her ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... their figures show weird-like—all the more from their grotesque gesticulations. Even if scrutinised closely, and in clearest light, they would present this appearance; for although in human shape, and wearing the garb of men, their faces more resemble those of demons. They are human ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... of burnished silver. Stretching across the valley from distant heights, a fleecy veil of enchantment woven in the loom of mist, etherealized city and river, dome and monument, tower and steeple, cottage and castle; adding a weird beauty to the magnificent array of public buildings, which owned the Capitol and the Library as chief. Above and beyond all else in its unapproachable glory, the Dome of the Capitol in the mellow, hazy moonlight, shone resplendent as a matchless crown to the ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... moon of a weird foe. By a strange law of nature, not wholly without parallel among mankind, all partridges go crazy in the November moon of their first year. They become possessed of a mad hankering to get away somewhere, it does not matter much where. And the wisest of them do all sorts of foolish ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... under the elm trees had been removed to the main pavilion. The diving springboard was submerged by the swollen lake, the rowboats rocked logily, half full of water, and the woods across the lake looked weird and dim through the incessant stream of rain, ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... was often at large, yet never seemed desirous of heading back to his old haunts where dinners were hard to secure, Toby had some weird-looking lop-eared rabbits; a bunch of quail from which he hoped to raise a family later on; a red fox that had a limp on account of the broken leg set by Toby after he had found the little animal apparently dying from hunger in the bitter ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... the Celtic divinities, when Belle-Isle was still called Kalonese, this grotto had beheld more than one human sacrifice accomplished in its mystic depths. The first entrance to the cavern was by a moderate descent, above which distorted rocks formed a weird arcade; the interior, very uneven and dangerous from the inequalities of the vault, was subdivided into several compartments, which communicated with each other by means of rough and jagged steps, fixed right and left, in uncouth ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hand with that co-operation had gone other experiments. Just as the clumsy armored diving suits of the early twentieth century had allowed man to begin penetration into a weird new world, so had the frog-man equipment made him still freer in the sea. And now the gill-pack which separated the needed oxygen from the water made even that lighter burden of tanks obsolete. But there remained depths into which man could not descend, ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... they might take Doris to Salem with them. Doris thought she should like to see the smart little Elizabeth, who was like a woman already, and her old playfellow James, as well as Ruth, who seemed to her hardly beyond babyhood. And there were all the weird old stories—she had read some of them in Cotton Mather's "Magnalia," and begged others from Miss Recompense, who did not quite know whether she believed them or not, but she said emphatically that people had been mistaken and there was no ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... fancy, half in fact, the thread of an occult idea runs through this weird theme. You cannot, even at the end, be quite sure whether the author has been making fun of you or not. Perhaps, if the truth were told, he could not quite tell you himself. The tale all hangs about one of a group of friends who lives for years in the Far East and gathers some of the occult ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... are: Riches, Knowledge, and Love; and in depicting their peculiar and wonderful virtues Mrs. Prentiss has wrought into the story with much skill her own theory of a happy life. She wrote the book with intense delight, and its strange, weird-like scenes and characters—the home in the forest; Dolman, the poor woodcutter; Cinda, his tall and strong-minded wife; Nidworth, their first-born; wandering Hidda, boding ill-luck; the hermit; these and all the rest—seemed to her, for ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... rocks and gulls forever circling about the Brown Cow. His was a narrow and surly old age, not overwell provided, for he had never been a thrifty man; and he found among the rattletrap furnishings of his neglected home one living chattel quite as worthless—a weird, lean goblin of a boy, his sole descendant, fatherless and motherless, playing lonely little games in corners, making crass drawings with a charred stick on the walls, and viewing the blossoming orchards of spring ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... given account of weird and extraordinary matters, I will say little. It lies before you. The inner story must be uncovered, personally, by each reader, according to ability and desire. And even should any fail to see, as now I see, the shadowed picture and conception ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... moment a cock crowed, and the weird procession vanished and left not a shred or a bone behind. I awoke, and found myself lying with my head out of the bed and "sagging" downward considerably—a position favorable to dreaming dreams with morals in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... exactly the same table, vase, and flamingo on every one of the thirty-two landings of that towering habitation. This is where it differs most perhaps from the crooked landings and unexpected levels of the old English inns, even when they call themselves hotels. To me there was something weird, like a magic multiplication, in the exquisite sameness of these suites. It seemed to suggest the still atmosphere of some eerie psychological story. I once myself entertained the notion of a story, in which ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... asserting that this was the best clause in the whole Bill, and that only a melancholy humbug would oppose it. Instead he vigorously supported his former foe with an argument that I am sure Mr. DILLON would never have thought of. "Was it not a weird proposal," he asked, "that a child who had unwittingly walked; through a turnstile should forthwith become a convict ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... sing, a quaint old Island lullaby, which rang weird and melancholy. William looked at her in alarm, but said nothing, and the other passengers watched her curiously, half in fear. She lifted her child from her knee to her breast, and held it there clasped a moment. 'I can't warm him,' she said, looking helplessly at all the wondering faces. ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... I weird ye to be a Laidly Worm, And borrowed shall ye never be, Until Childe Wynd, the King's own son Come to the Heugh and thrice kiss thee; Until the world comes to an end, Borrowed shall ye ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... to receive them. I have seen at times hundreds of squaws and children wading about in Yaquina Bay taking crabs in this manner, and the reflection by the water of the light from the many torches, with the movements of the Indians while at work, formed a weird and diverting picture of which ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... him appeared the principals in this dramatic encounter, revolvers and rifles in the hands of all parties, the Japs being still covered; while beyond, at sea, the two boats cleaving the water, their objective point the shadowy schooner, looking like a phantom ship, made a picture of weird excitement in an unearthly setting. The seconds seemed like hours. The row-boat was nearer the schooner and was traveling fast, but the launch was speeding even more rapidly, throwing up a high wave at the bow. It looked as though both boats would reach the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... afraid we should," he said. "But that's nothing. I did all manner of weird things when I first started to drive. Take the wheel again and ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... an empty water-gourd and his long staff lying by his side. A great silence around and above. Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild—and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country. Once a white man in an unbuttoned uniform, camping on the path with an armed escort of lank Zanzibaris, very hospitable and festive—not ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... from Bluebell's point of view, who could not shake off the weird feeling that possessed her, to which, perhaps, fatigue, mental and physical, not a little contributed. Yet when they came in no depression could withstand the cheery look of the lamp-lit room, with its snowy cloth laid for dinner, blazing fire, and closely-drawn ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... with the breath of tropic winds, and the horizon to the west and south was festooned with fierce red clouds. The sun was just setting, and spreading the broad ocean with a crimson light, giving a weird and curious outline to every feature of the ship. There was something grand, even enchanting and sublime, in the picture here spread out, presenting as it did the highest example ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... nature had bestowed on him that frame of mind which might have won him a distinguished career, had she placed the period of his birth in the eleventh century. Volktman was essentially a man belonging to the past time: the character of his enthusiasm was weird and Gothic; with beings of the present day he had no sympathy; their loves, their hatreds, their politics, their literature, awoke no echo in his breast. He did not affect to herd with them; his life was solitude, and its occupation study—and study of that ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pictures which illustrated it, and when she looked up was surprised to see how struck and interested he seemed to be. Like all people of his temperament he was very impressionable, and his life among hunters and Indians had made him superstitious; he believed in dreams, liked weird tales, and whatever appealed to the eye or mind, vividly impressed him more than the wisest words. The story of poor, tormented Sintram came back clearly as he looked and listened, symbolizing his secret trials even more truly than ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... stature of the great man, one of whose peculiar charms consisted in his being so unlike all other great men, will rather lose than gain by the idealization which so easily runs into the commonplace. For it was distinctly the weird mixture of qualities and forces in him, of the lofty with the common, the ideal with the uncouth, of that which he had become with that which he had not ceased to be, that made him so fascinating a character among his fellow-men, gave him his singular power over their minds and hearts, and fitted ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... is where the weird and uncanny part of it comes in," commented Craig, turning from the doctor to me to call my attention particularly to what ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... weird fascination of Poe's strangely beautiful poem "The Raven"? Perhaps on some stormy evening you have read it until the "silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain" has "thrilled you, filled you, with fantastic terrors never ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... fiction is, indeed, more strange than that which tells how this nimble-witted alien adventurer, with his poetic temperament, his weird Eastern imagination and excessive Western cynicism, his elastic mind which he himself described as "revolutionary," and his apparently wayward but in reality carefully regulated unconventionality, succeeded, in spite of every initial disadvantage of race, birth, manners, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... not answer, did not so much as seem to hear. He was standing before the Brigadier. His eyes gleamed in his alert face—two weird pin-points of light. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... Weird and tragical are the legends of the Kickapoo Corral, left for a stronger race to marvel over. For, with the swing of time, the white man cut a road down the steep bluff at the sharpest bend and made a ford in the shallow place between the whirlpool ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Broad, and I got out to view better the new, three-fifths-built marble edifice, the City Hall, of magnificent proportions—a majestic and lovely show there in the moonlight—flooded all over, facades, myriad silver-white lines and carv'd heads and mouldings, with the soft dazzle—silent, weird, beautiful—well, I know that never when finish'd will that magnificent pile impress one as it impress'd ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... is it, Doc? Gee, I'm glad to see you! This is a darned weird place to-night. Every time the wind blows I ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... continued to hold it from the middle of the eleventh century until the late disturbances in Italy. Most of the streets of Turin converge into the Piazza di Castello, in the centre of which stands the Palazzo Madama, a weird-looking, half-ruined building overgrown with ivy, with a gloomy look about its desolate towers. It is a fine and picturesque old place, especially on a moonlight night—a unique relic of the Middle Ages. Near it are the Royal Palace and the Duomo. The former is not unlike ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... been a garden-party at the Commander-in-Chief's, and we two joined the crowd of homeward-bound folk. As I saw them then it seemed that they were the shadows—impalpable, fantastic shadows—that divided for Mrs. Wessington's 'rickshaw to pass through. What we said during the course of that weird interview I cannot—indeed, I dare not—tell. Heatherlegh's comment would have been a short laugh and a remark that I had been "mashing a brain- eye-and-stomach chimera." It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... brotherhood and opened a straight way into his confidence. In two minutes the man—perhaps a wild hawk from the Afghan hills—would be pouring out into the ear of this sahib, with heaven-sent knowledge and sympathy, the weird tale of the blood feud and litigation, the border fray, and the usurer's iniquity, which had driven him so far afield as Lahore from Bajaur. To Kipling even the most suspected and suspicious of classes, the religious mendicants, would open ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... by—hot, dreamy, and with the water keeping exactly to the same depth, so that they were hopelessly prisoned still on their tree. They tried again to capture a fish, but in vain; and once more the night fell, with the sounds made by bird, insect, and reptile more weird and strange to ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... beard floating in the wind, the bronzed naked figure, like some weird old Indian fakir, still climbed on steadfastly up the mizzen-chains of the ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... a swarm of scorpions that had to be exterminated before a man dared move his possessions in. The once white calico ceilings moved suggestively where rats and snakes chased one another, or else hunted some third species of vermin; and there was a smell and a many-voiced weird whispering that hinted at corruption and war to the death behind skirting boards ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... The head of a man, without any body; with eyes in it that scintillate and see; a mouth that opens, and shows teeth; a throat from which issue sounds of human intonation; around this object of weird supernatural aspect, a group of wolves, and over it a flock ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... whenever he writhed or groaned under the tortures that, no doubt, that old accursed carle had inflicted upon him. But even this face did not dwell with pleasure in his memory,—it woke up confused and labouring associations of something weird and witchlike, of sorceresses and tymbesteres, of wild warnings screeched in his ear, of incantations and devilries and doom. Impatient of these musings, he sought to leap from his bed, and was amazed that the leap subsided into a tottering crawl. He found an ewer and basin, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... came in to-day from The Hague to effect formal delivery of the first bargeload of food, and had weird tales to tell of his adventures by the way. Thank goodness, the first of the food has arrived in time, and if the flow can be kept up, the worst of our ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... haunches. Some of the women were engaged in milking the sheep and goats in an inclosure. Others were busy making butter in a churn which was nothing more than a skin vessel three feet long, of the shape of a Brazil-nut, suspended from a rude tripod; this they swung to and fro to the tune of a weird Kurdish song. Behind one of the tents, on a primitive weaving-machine, some of them were making tent-roofing and matting. Others still were walking about with a ball of wool in one hand and a distaff in the other, spinning yarn. The flocks stood round about, bleating ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... Salome followed the wild, weird, religious enthusiast. She pushed through the crowd and placed herself near the man, so the smell of her body would reach his nostrils, and his eyes would range the swelling lines of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... in the wild wind, and many a one draws his garment or cloak or coverlet closer round him; the gale sweeps in with such fury that the pitch torches against the wall are well nigh blown out, and the red and yellow glare casts a weird ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... valuable; but soon the banks show a long line of thick tall shrubs, one mass of glorious pink and green. Set these in a little valley, framed by mountains whose rocks gleam out blue and purple colours such as pre-Raphaelites only dare attempt, shining out hard and weird-like amongst the clumps of castor-oil plants, oistus, arbor vitae and many other evergreens, whose names, alas! I know not; the cistus is brown now, the rest all deep or brilliant green. Large herds of cattle browse on the baked ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had taken place among the machine men of Zor. They were overcome by a great curiosity which they could not allow to remain unsatiated. Accustomed as they were to witnessing strange sights and still stranger creatures, meeting up with weird adventures in various corners of the Universe, they had now become hardened to the usual run of experiences which they were in the habit of encountering. It took a great deal to arouse their unperturbed attitudes. Something new, however, about this queer space craft ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones
... the place began to exert a weird fascination upon me. It is difficult to describe or to induce people to believe; but I felt as if the whole house was like a living organism slowly and imperceptibly digesting me by the action of ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... to convince them of its unlimited power and ferocity. She knew as well as he that the big drifts around the cabin had grown bigger; that other drifts were forming around the walls. For the sounds were muffled, and a great, weird calm had settled inside the cabin. The walls, snow-banked, ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... "Check Number?"—"Can you read?" "A little." The barest suggestion of amusement in his voice caused me to look up quickly. "My library," he said, with the ghost of a weird smile, nodding his head slightly toward an unpainted shelf made of pieces of dynamite boxes, "Mine and my room-mates." The shelf was filled with four—REAL Barcelona paper editions of Hegel, Fichte, Spencer, Huxley, and a half-dozen others accustomed to sit in the same company, ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... delighted in hearing them. She allowed herself to be elbowed and jostled by the throng, reaching every moment by judicious pushing a place where she could not only hear but see, and where escape was impossible. The jubilant chorus ceased and one of those weird minor wails, such as their music abounds in, floated ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... A weird effect of lighting is obtained by making lantern boxes from any discarded boxes which may be in the house. Cover them with crepe paper, cut eyes, nose, ears and mouth, paste colored tissue paper behind the features and set a ...
— Armour's Monthly Cook Book, Volume 2, No. 12, October 1913 - A Monthly Magazine of Household Interest • Various
... positively laughed, and a weird cackling sound it made in Hester's ears as she bent to support one of the smaller girls, who had fainted. "Agen' you? Take an' look around on your mornin's work! You've struck down my brother's son, Tom Trevarthen—isn't that enough? Go an' pack ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sense that Mavering professed to have received from it, when he jumped out of the beach wagon in which he had preceded the other carriages through the weird forest lying between the fringe of farm fields and fishing-villages on the western shore of the island and these lonely coasts of the bay. As far as the signs of settled human habitation last, tho road is the good hard ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... I went out into the streets again, guided by the weird Voice, and via Grafton Street, Albemarle Street, the Royal Arcade, Bond Street, Burlington Gardens, Vigo Street and Sackville Street, Piccadilly, Regent Street, Pall Mall East, Cockspur Street and Whitehall, steadily wheeled my ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... you mean!"—she said—"But I am sure you cannot possibly realise the weird nature of old Alison! She made me stand before her, just where the light of the sun streamed through the open doorway, and she looked at me for a long time with such a steady piercing glance that I felt as if her eyes were boring through my flesh. Then she got up ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... daytimes, you don't know a bit what pine trees really are. But I can tell you. Listen! This is what they say," finished the boy, whipping his violin from its case, and, after a swift testing of the strings, plunging into a weird, haunting little melody. ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... had a thing about him. He inspired you. When he looked at you with those weird eyes, you just knew you ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... As the weird strains died away, the host pressed the English lord to bide long as a guest, promising rest for horse, and refreshment and pleasure for man, with many a joust, or feat at arms, for those who wished to ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... linen frocks that Lucilla was constantly making for him, but in a radiant tartan, of such huge pattern that his little tunic barely contained a sample of one of each portentous check, made up crosswise, so as to give a most comical, harlequin effect to his spare limbs and weird, black eyes. The disappointment that Phoebe had to inflict was severe, and unwittingly she was the messenger whom Mrs. Murrell was likely to regard with the most suspicion and dislike. 'Come home along with me, Hoing, my dear,' she said; 'you'll always ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... followed; the silence was weird—only the cracking of the fire was heard, and the mournful soughing of the ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... chief indunas ventured to communicate the fact that a very old and strange-looking man, who did not appear to be quite right in his wits, together with a. slightly younger, though equally weird-looking companion, craved an audience ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... sweet music of Cummins and the little Melisse that he played now, but a wild, wailing song that he had found in the autumn winds. It burst above the crackling fire and the tumult of man and dog in a weird and savage beauty that hushed all sound; and life about him became like life struck suddenly dead. With his head bowed Jan saw nothing—saw nothing of the wonder in the faces of the half- cringing little black men who were squatted in a ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... know if any one were harming his mate, brooding under a wild grape leaf in a scrub elm on the river embankment. A brown thrush silently slipped like a snake between shrubs and trees, and catching the universal excitement, began to flirt his tail and utter a weird, whistling cry. ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... a halt was always called, for the water of it had healing properties, and from their babyhood the children had, as a matter of duty, tested its powers by bathing their eyes; but to-day, as they stooped over it, a weird shriek in the distance brought them to their feet again. Then came a great racket, as though a pile of all the loose iron in the world were tumbling over, the ground vibrated, and the ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... —that, in spite of the milder and smoother and perhaps, pictorially speaking, considerably emptier, Neapolitan face of things, things in general, of our later time, I recognised in my final impression a grateful, a beguiling serenity. The place is at the best wild and weird and sinister, and yet seemed on this occasion to be seated more at her ease in her immense natural dignity. My disposition to feel that, I hasten to add, was doubtless my own secret; my three beautiful days, at any rate, filled themselves with the splendid harmony, several ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James |
