"Appalling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to expect Peter, always a hater of business and a lover of quiet, to go all that way and worry himself with tiresome money arrangements. Besides, perhaps he was not feeling well. She knew he suffered from rheumatism; and when you have rheumatism the mere thought of a long journey is appalling. ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... "Victory," the last words he uttered to whom were:—"God bless you, Blackwood; I shall never see you more." He had a presentiment that, while he was certain of victory, it would, nevertheless, be gained at the price of his own life. Yet, with this prospect before him, appalling as it must have been to his mind, he was calm and serene. His whole attention was fixed on Villeneuve, who was wearing to form the line in close order upon the larboard tack, thereby to bring Cadiz under his lee, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... did I dream—wild, wandering dreams, I own, But such as haunt me ever, if alone, Or in that pause 'twixt joy and joy I be, Like a ship husht between two waves at sea. Then do these spirit whisperings like the sound Of the Dark Future come appalling round; Nor can I break the trance that holds me then, Till high o'er Pleasure's surge ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... was all right to look at, at first, or nearly so. But he behaved in the most appalling manner; and the subsequent developments were so disgusting that I really cannot describe them to you. He seized all sorts of things and swallowed them. He drank every fluid in the laboratory. I tried to ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... the horses' tails to her. I knelt on one side, and taking a steady aim at her breast, let fly. The ball cracked loudly on her tawny hide, and crippled her in the shoulder; upon which she charged with an appalling roar, and in the twinkling of an eye she was in the midst of us. At this moment Stofolus'a rifle exploded in his hand, and Kleinboy, whom I had ordered to stand ready by me, danced about like a duck in a gale of wind. The lioness sprang upon Colesberg, and fearfully lacerated his ribs and haunches ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... low-ceiling library she was introduced to Mr. Kingdon, a man of winning personality, a philosopher and a humorist. Ranged beside him were three appalling critics: two boys of nine and seven years respectively, and a little girl of five. They stared at her solemnly and surveyingly while she was presented to ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... one disservice, however, there can be no doubt. The French Revolution has furnished the enemies of each successive proposal of reform with a boundless supply of prejudicial analogies, appalling parallels, and ugly nicknames, which are all just as conclusive with the unwise as if they were the aptest arguments. Sydney Smith might well put "the awful example of a neighbouring nation" among the standing topics of the Noodle's Oration. The abolition ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... generally perhaps a blessing that the curtain that covers the future is impenetrable; but in this case, had it been lifted for us to gaze upon the appalling future, Gladstone's last effort for the peace of his country would surely not ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... of Don Carlos in Spain, and many, as I have been informed, to prowl about as banditti. The place is now abandoned to two or three menials, and exhibits an aspect of solitude and desolation which is truly appalling. Whilst I was viewing the cloisters an exceedingly fine and intelligent-looking lad came up to me, and asked (I suppose in the hope of obtaining a trifle) if I would permit him to show me the village church, which he told me was well worth seeing. ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... of the fact that Zaleski had so absolutely cut himself off from the world, that he was not in the least likely to know anything even of the appalling series of events to which I had referred. And yet it is no exaggeration to say that those events had thrown the greater part of Europe into a state of consternation, and even confusion. In London, Manchester, Paris, and Berlin, especially ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... of melody, the voice of the evangelist rose in a scream, appalling in its agony—"Oh, men and women, why will you die, why will ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... stripped the horror of her marriage under the eyes of her daughter. Nothing, not even the natural impulse to screen one's soul from the gaze of the people with whom one lived, had prevented the appalling indignity of this exposure. The delusion that it is possible for a woman by mere virtue of being a woman to suffer in sweetness and silence, evaporated as he looked at her. He had believed her to be a nonentity, and she was revealing an inner ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... Western Indians swelled into importance, General Scott was dispatched to the scene of hostility. There rose up before him then, in the ravages of a frightful pestilence, a form of danger infinitely more appalling than the perils of the field. How he bore himself in this emergency, how faithfully he became the nurse and the physician of those from whom terror and loathing had driven all other aid, can not be forgotten by a ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... of the plantation labourers has generally been very heavy, one large and well-managed estate recording on an average of seven years an annual death rate of 148 per thousand, and many rocas have still more appalling records. Against this, other plantations only a few miles away may show a mortality approximating to that of an average European city. In February, 1918, the workers in San Thome numbered 39,605, and the deaths during the previous year, 1917, were 1,808, thus showing ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... look forward to a festal treat. Their places taken, they, with eyebrows rais'd, Sit patiently, and fain would be amaz'd. I know the art to hit the public taste, Yet ne'er of failure felt so keen a dread; True, they are not accustomed to the best, But then appalling the amount they've read.. How make our entertainment striking, new, And yet significant and pleasing too? For to be plain, I love to see the throng, As to our booth the living tide progresses; As wave on wave successive rolls along, And through heaven's narrow ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... realized, and more especially on those relics which were considered as identifying particular spots, honoured by the sufferings or triumph of its Divine author. The zealous pilgrim, who had travelled many thousand miles amid the most appalling dangers, required a solace to his faith in the contemplation of the cross, or in being permitted to kiss the threshold of the tomb in which the body of his Redeemer was laid. To such a character no description could be ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... words would be as unintelligible to an educated Frenchman as to an Englishman. The bulk of French slang is never heard by the ears of educated people nor uttered by their lips: it circulates among the classes which create it; and the size of this dictionary is therefore not necessarily appalling to a Frenchman's eyes: it does not represent the corruption of the language, because slang does not taint the speech of those classes who control and make the standard speech and literature of the nation. If a dictionary of English ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... my views of the mutual relations of the Constitution and the States, because they unfold the principles on which I have sought to solve the momentous questions and overcome the appalling difficulties that met me at the very commencement of my Administration. It has been my steadfast object to escape from the sway of momentary passions and to derive a healing policy from the fundamental and unchanging principles of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... other country. He acted with great discretion, holding things steadily until some degree of preparation was made; and I have no doubt at all that the war would have been averted had not the Maine been destroyed in Havana harbor. The country forced us into it after that appalling catastrophe. ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... monuments are to be seen here, the Church of St. Germain, or rather, the fragment which was spared by the Huguenots, now being used as an adjunct to a hospital; and the Church of St. Pierre. The latter is the most appalling example of a Renaissance building which one is likely to meet with, and shows in its remarkable facade, in sheer perversion of misdirected labour, the grossness of pseudo-classicism, which quite entitles it to rank with that other equally abominable ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... If this appalling destruction was due to one hand grenade, it is an illustration of the potentialities of a small amount of high explosive detonated in the right spot, while the nature of the place where the disaster occurred, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... or a woman her age as soon as ask them the time of day. He had little delicacy of feeling on the conventional side but great tenderness of emotion on the purely human side. His candour was at times appalling, and he often brought a look of shame into Mother's face. He had received a fairly good schooling for those times and had been a school teacher himself in the winter months. Mother was one of his pupils when he taught in Red Kill. I passed the little school house recently ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... England with us, and found the ocean extremely monotonous and trying upon the voyage out. The same trouble still dogged his footsteps. He came aboard quite wild and haggard, and declared the universal and appalling lack of variety was telling ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... of abdominal operations that swept the country in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was appalling. The slightest pain during menstruation, or in the lower abdomen, in fact every pain that a woman had from head to toes was put under arrest and forced to bear false witness against the ovaries. It was a very easy matter to trump up testimony, when real evidence was embarrassing, ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... days succeeded each other with appalling swiftness, and nothing was done. By imperceptible degrees his horror of San Giacinto began to invade his mind even when it was most deadened by drink. So long as an idea is new and has not really become a habit of the brain, brandy ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... open vestibule, the sounds from the streets came louder and more clear. That awful cry of "Death" echoed with appalling distinctness, and to Dea Flavia's strained senses it seemed as if they were mingled with others, more awesome mayhap, but equally ominous of "The praefect of Rome! Where is the praefect of Rome! Hail! Taurus ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... which to a girl of honest nature was almost appalling. She had looked into her heart, and found that her early interest in Giles Winterborne had become revitalized into luxuriant growth by her widening perceptions of what was great and little in life. His homeliness no longer offended her acquired tastes; his comparative want of so-called ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... amor senilis, and right here if Mansfield took one step more his realism would be appalling, but he stops in time and suggests what he dares not express. This tottering, doddering, slobbering, sniffling old man is in love—he is about to wed a young, beautiful girl. He selects jewels for her—he makes remarks ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... Oriental art, the enormous expenditure of work is appalling to think of. Abulfeda describes the palace of the Caliph Moctader, on the banks of the Tigris, as being adorned with 38,000 pieces of tapestry, and of these 12,000 were of silk worked in gold. What a wealth of women had to be wasted in creating ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... things they were in his. Readers in general, however—even those of the literary world—have little conception of the extent to which Dante carries either his cruelty or his abuse. The former (of which I shall give some examples presently) shews appalling habits of personal resentment; the latter is outrageous to a pitch of the ludicrous—positively screaming. I will give some specimens of it out of Foscolo himself, who collects them for a different purpose; though, with all his idolatry of ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... into the curved and fretted choir-chapel especially dedicated to the Virgin, there lighting up with a warm glow the famous alabaster tomb known as "Le Mourant" or "The Dying One." A strange and awesome piece of sculpture truly, is this same "Mourant"!— showing, as it does with deft and almost appalling exactitude, the last convulsion of a strong man's body gripped in the death-agony. No delicate delineator of shams and conventions was the artist of olden days whose ruthless chisel shaped these stretched sinews, starting veins, and swollen eyelids half-closed over the tired eyes!—he ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... hard to condemn such conduct when we remember the appalling contrast between the weakness of the individual and the strength of a social order coextensive with civilisation itself. But in this spirit of reasonable submission to a state of things which appeared fundamentally unreasonable, in this conviction that the bad could ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... and leaned against the wall, overcome with nausea. The physical shock of the struggle was, however, less appalling than the ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... done. An opportunity soon arose to turn his knowledge and inventive powers to account in a very important way. For a long time the English public had every now and then been horrified by the terrible explosions which took place in the coal mines. These explosions resulted often in an appalling loss of human life. Their cause was the filling of the mine by a deadly gas, called "fire-damp," which, when ignited by a lighted candle or lamp, exploded with fearful violence. One day an explosion of fire-damp ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... whales. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that, yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack. But be ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... The appalling nature of this conversation, and of its result, struck the silence of horror into all but the speakers. But now those who stood round broke forth into clamour and expostulation. Old Lady Margaret, who, with all the prejudices ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... force now gathered for a final attack on the garrison house. Their appearance was so frightful, and their clamor so appalling, that one of the English muttered something about surrender. Convers returned, "If you say that again, you are a dead man." Had the allies made a bold assault, he and his followers must have been overpowered; but this mode of attack was contrary to Indian maxims. They merely leaped, ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... a family of brothers; sexuality that makes prudes shudder; poetic enthusiasm that scornfully dispenses with all the usual adventitious aids; and in general a largeness, coarseness, and vehemence that are quite appalling to the general reader. Lovers of poetry will of necessity be very slow in adjusting their notions to the standards of "Leaves of Grass." It is a survey of life and of the world from the cosmic rather than from the conventional standpoint. It carries the standards of the natural-universal ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... depressing, however, when there is snow everywhere. The afternoon passed swiftly and the horses were becoming jaded. At four o'clock it was almost dark. We had been going up a deep canon and came upon an appalling sight. There had been a snow-slide and the canon was half-filled with snow, rock, and broken trees. The whole way was blocked, and what to do we didn't know, for the horses could hardly be gotten along and we could not pass the snow-slide. We were ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... passed after we heard of Mrs. Fauquier's death,—she died in New York,—when the appalling tidings reached us that the Bishop, too, was gone. He had died suddenly in Toronto on December 7th. In the same mail bag which brought the sad news was a letter to me from him, written only an hour or ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... was almost appalling. 'Do you want an adventure now,' he said casually to John, 'or would you like ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... the past, a desire for expiation, than radical belief that this was the right and only thing for him to do. And when, some time after, he bade Ruth good-bye, as she went with her father, it came to him with appalling conviction that his life had been a mistake. The twist of a great wrong in a man's character distorts his vision; and if he has a tender conscience he ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... hideous, fantastic, appalling, flashed through his mind. He was beginning to learn what Zani Chada had meant when he had said: "I have followed your ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... consider the effects of this rapid fall, or approach, toward the sun, which is so foreign to our terrestrial experience, and so appalling ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... abuse of the nervous system. But every blow on the anvil is as distinctly an act of the nerve centres as are the highest mental processes. If this be so, how or why is it that excessive muscular exertion—I mean such as is violent and continued—does not cause the same appalling effects as may be occasioned by a like abuse of the nerve-organs in mental actions of various kinds? This is not an invariable rule, for, as I may point out in the way of illustration hereafter, the centres which originate or ...
— Wear and Tear - or, Hints for the Overworked • Silas Weir Mitchell
... still watched, with murderous purpose on my face, there came one awful cry, a scream that startled the gulls from slumber and awoke echo after echo along the shore—a scream like no sound in earth or heaven—a scream inhuman and appalling. ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... had gone by since that day, and the Scarlet Pimpernel was hardly ever out of France now; the massacres in Paris and in the provinces had multiplied with appalling rapidity, the necessity for the selfless devotion of that small band of heroes had become daily, hourly more pressing. They rallied round their chief with unbounded enthusiasm, and let it be admitted at once that the ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... purposely or not, the result was the same. His face had been mutilated beyond recognition. All you could tell was that he belonged to one or other of the two armies. He moaned and groaned and sobbed and shrieked and invented the most appalling cries. We listened to the sounds that he made in his agony, trying to find one word, the faintest accent, that would at least indicate his nationality. No use. Not a single intelligible sound from that something like ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... "This is appalling," said Mrs. Olston; "my husband would never forgive me if anything happened to those birds. They've been seen about the woods for the last year or two, but this is the first time they've nested. As you say, they are almost the only pair known to be breeding in the whole ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... as Erebus; the studding-sails were all taken in, and the royals furled; not a breath was stirring; the sails hung heavy and motionless from the yards; and the stillness and the darkness, which was almost palpable, were truly appalling. Not a word was spoken, but every one stood as though waiting for something to happen. In a few minutes the mate came forward, and in a low tone, which was almost a whisper, told us to haul down the jib. The ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... Monty, is that you are the next thing to being a poor man," groaned Gardner. "I've done my best to economize for you here at home, as you'll see by these figures, but nothing could possibly balance the extravagances of this voyage. They are simply appalling." ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... no doubt, in its gaunt, gray, prisonlike way. And, too, it had a moat and a miniature portcullis that rather tickled his boyish fancy. The furnishings, however, had an appalling grimness that took the very heart out of one. Chairs which seemed to have grown in their places for centuries crowded the corners of hallway and stairs like gigantic nightmares of their original prototypes. Monstrous curtains ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... Hospital for Sick Children are sent there by vice. But would to God it were only innocent suffering that is inflicted on the children of our land. Alas! alas! when I first began my work, a ward in a large London penitentiary, I found, was set apart for degraded children! Or take that one brief appalling statement in the record of ten years of work—1884 to 1894—issued by a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. In the classification of the various victims it is stated that the society ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... had been one of great vicissitudes and peril. He had often seen men pass suddenly into the other state of existence, and had been calm himself amid the cries, the groans, and what is far more appalling, the execrations of the dying, but never before had he witnessed so brief and silent an end. For more than a minute, he hung suspended over the dark and working water, expecting to see the student ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... characters, but of a syllabary of several hundred characters, including many homophones, or different forms for representing the same sound. But with the Persian translation for a guide on the one hand, and the Semitic languages, to which family the Assyrian belonged, on the other, the appalling task was gradually accomplished, the leading investigators being General Rawlinson, Professor Hincks, and Mr. Fox-Talbot, in England, Professor Jules Oppert, in Paris, and Professor Julian Schrader, in Germany, though a ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... France. The man who built that house was the citizen Nicholas Philibert, who had risen to wealth out of his business of baker, and was respected throughout the whole town. Bigot, the Intendant of the colony, was bringing the public finances to appalling ruin by his thefts and extravagances—for we all knew he was a robber—and was driving the people to madness. The Bourgeois Philibert was their mouthpiece. If the chateau of St. Louis stood out as ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... thigh-bone out of its socket. I had hardly released my foot, when, towering above me, came the colossal head of the great creature, as he ploughed through the bundle of debris that had just been a boat. There was an appalling roar of water in my ears, and darkness that might be felt all around. Yet, in the midst of it all, one thought predominated as clearly as if I had been turning it over in my mind in the quiet of my bunk aboard—"What if he should swallow me?" Nor to this day ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... now slumbers in the genial sunshine of a summer's afternoon, what visions it conjures up of bloodshed and rapine, plague, pestilence, and famine, and of all the calamities wrought by human hands, and all the appalling visitations of a divine power by which this ill-fated spot has been afflicted. Looking back through the wide waste of years, the mighty hosts of Tamerlane uprise before us, pouring through the passes of the Ural, and sweeping over the plains with their glittering ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... became anxious to know how we should reach port when the gale subsided. But we were soon spared further care on that head. As the day closed in, the tempest resumed its fury, and by the following morning, (the 8th,) raged with such appalling violence, that we laid her too. From her straining, the brig had now began to make so much water, as to require all hands in succession at the pumps till the following morning at two, when the larboard watch went below, ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... quarry with Corporal Dutton to get her tied up or else hobbled, lo and behold! the two guards had vanished. "What the devil...." And all of a sudden out pour the horses careering downhill like mad! It was so appalling that Corporal Dutton and I just stood and ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... chuckle that sounded like a magical and appalling rattle from the inner recesses of his person. He was getting brighter and brighter, as the stars appear to ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... animated by the struggle in which the whole earth was engaged. Lope did battle for the church—the Pope—and, if need be, would have done so—for the devil, if he had worn a mitre; he wrote plays where the heretics required an immense quantity of rosin and blue lights to do justice to their appalling situation. He preached, and prayed, and excommunicated, and stirred up men's minds to enjoy the splendours of an auto-da-fe; and, for all these, he was honoured by Pope and Caesar; was created a knight of Alcantara; and, as the acme to his glory, was made a familiar of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... the mingling of the mighty sounds, she heard distinctly the ringing of a horse's hoofs; and presently a wild cry, in which she recognised the voice of Godolphin, rang forth, adding to the wrath of nature the yet more appalling witness of a human despair. The cry was followed by the louder dashing of the waves, and the fiercer turmoil of the winds; and then her anguish and horror freeing her from the Prison ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to come up. He made up his mind then and there that when it came time for him to die he would see to it that he did not do it in the night. For, despite the gay lights of the city, there were always sombre shadows for one to be jerked into by the relentless hand of death; there was something appalling about being dragged off into a darkness that was to be dissipated at ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... wondering how ever he was to get out of this fresh dilemma. There appeared nothing for it but to attack the rope with his teeth, and for an hour Tricky worked at the tough strands, but without almost any success. After another hour's work the monkey made an appalling discovery. When he began work, the water was only up to his knees; and to his consternation, it now covered him up to his middle. In a short time more it came up to his neck, and it was clear to Tricky that if the ledge went on sinking at ...
— The Monkey That Would Not Kill • Henry Drummond
... miners, numbering two hundred thousand, responsible for the supply of coal to the British navy, refused to work unless the employers conceded certain demands about pay and conditions. The seriousness of the position was appalling. The president of the Board of Trade, Mr. Runciman, struggled hard to bring about a settlement. He failed. Something had to be done and done at once. The country, looking around for a man to come to the rescue, ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... feels quite sure about papa. Anyhow this particular mot attracted no comment. Doubtless the young lady was as far above suspicion as the wife of Caesar; but she and her companions in this particular set have an appalling frankness of speech and a callousness in regard to discussing the more personal facts of human existence that is startling to a middle-aged ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... Dismay at the thought that she was to be a governess held her spellbound. She certainly had not gathered from anything that Eleanor had said that she was expected to teach, and two naughty unruly children into the bargain. No wonder that she grew paler even than her wont at the appalling thought. Luckily for her, however, Maud was far from guessing the dismay her casually given information was causing her silent companion, and under cover of her chatter, Margaret had time to recover a little from the shock she had received and to ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... Dr. Pendegrast had been so severe a shock to Lynde that he could not straightway recover his mental balance. The appalling shadow which the doctor's presence had for the moment thrown across him had left Lynde benumbed and chilled despite the reassuring sunshine of the doctor's words. By degrees, however, Lynde warmed to life again; his gloom slipped ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... brought remembrance with a shock. She envied everyone else who was bound for the Savoy, even old women, and fat gentlemen with large noses. They were going there because they wanted to go, for their pleasure. Nobody in the world could be in such an appalling situation ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... sure that she would long ago have stood in the dock but for her ability to make scandalous and ruinous revelations. Did Redgrave know that he had a high-class criminal in his employment? Possibly he knew it well enough. There was no end to the appalling suggestiveness of this discovery. Hugh remembered what he had said in talk with Harvey Rolfe about the rottenness of society. Never had he felt himself so much a coward as in face of this woman, whose shameless smile covered secrets and ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... round me! I suppose its because, though he is provoking, he is never irritating. And he's as much of a fool as I was at his age! That keeps me fair to him. Well, he has stuff in him, that boy. He's as truthful as Edith; an appalling tribute, I know—but you like it in a cub. And there's no flapdoodle about him; and he never cried baby in his life. And he has imagination and music and poetry! Edith is a nice little clod compared ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... to the jog-trot at which the remainder of the pilgrimage is to be covered. A clergyman of the Church of England may be made a bishop, and exchange a quiet rectory for a palace. No doubt the increase of responsibility is to a conscientious man almost appalling; but surely the rise in life is great. There you are, one of four-and-twenty, selected out of near twenty thousand. It is possible, indeed, that you may feel more reason for shame than for elation at the thought. A barrister unknown ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... smoked cream below, and sooty above. True, he was not big, being only twenty-one inches—two inches less than the herring-gull. But what is size, anyway? It was the fire that counted, the ferocity, the "devil," the armament, and the appalling speed. Just as a professional boxer of any size can lay out any mere hulking hooligan, so this bird carried about him the stamp of the professional fighter that could lay out anything there in that scene that ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... calamities: to be poor, to teach, to live apart, not even knowing each other—and in England! In England we spent years; we instructed imbeciles of all grades; we were chilled by east winds, and tortured by influenza; we vainly strove to conciliate the appalling English; we were discouraged and desolate. But this, thank le bon Dieu! is past. We are united; we have our little apartment—upon the fifth floor, it is true, but still not hopelessly far from the ...
— Esmeralda • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the south, the stern limestone peaks of the dolomite region; the Vedretta Marmolata, with its breastplate of ice, king of these barbaric giants, the splintered pinnacles of the Drei Zinnen, the pyramidal Antalao, and many another jagged, appalling mountain, stern as the bewildering doctrines of election and reprobation, whilst the pure glistening snow, green meadows and pleasant woods opposite seemed to breathe forth the gentle, winning truths of the glad ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... retired to Bath, where she lives slenderly on an annual present from Sir Leicester and whence she makes occasional resurrections in the country houses of her cousins. She has an extensive acquaintance at Bath among appalling old gentlemen with thin legs and nankeen trousers, and is of high standing in that dreary city. But she is a little dreaded elsewhere in consequence of an indiscreet profusion in the article of rouge and persistency in an obsolete pearl necklace like ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... black, covered each ankle, a handkerchief protruded a virgin corner from every right sleeve and over every vest dangled a black silk ribbon. That only a few of them ended in glasses was merely because the supply of those aids to vision had proved inadequate to the demand. Soberly and amidst an appalling silence the nine exquisites paced to the front of the room and disposed themselves in the ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... more degraded than our own would be under similar circumstances, but its condition is appalling. How long will it take to develop the consciousness of manhood where all the tastes, and all the tendencies, and almost all the environment, are low and in the opposite direction? The colored people have not the help of higher ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., May, 1888., No. 5 • Various
... buried in the campo santo of Aquila, with its whitewashed walls of enclosure and its appalling monuments and mortuary emblems. Poor Felice! She had been a good wife, and he had been a good husband to her. She was such a simple creature that he could almost fancy her spirit shedding tears of satisfied pride at seeing her Giovanni ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... of but one other authentic instance in which an elephant went over a man without injury, and, for any one who knows the nature of the bush in which this occurred, the very thought of an encounter in it with such a foe is appalling. As the thorns are placed in pairs on opposite sides of the branches, and these turn round on being pressed against, one pair brings the other exactly into the position in which it must pierce the intruder. They cut like knives. Horses dread this bush extremely; indeed, most of them ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... child forgot her pain for a moment and smiled. At that instant there was a blinding flash of lightning, and the appalling thunder-peal ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... breathing difficult. The sky, however, instead of being clear and bright, as in former calms, was now overspread with menacing clouds; the sea looked black, and spread out before them on every side like an illimitable surface of polished ebony. There was something appalling in the depth and intensity of this calm with such accompaniments. All felt this influence. Although there was every temptation to inaction and sleep yet no one yielded to it. The men looked suspiciously and expectantly at every quarter of the heavens. The Captain ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... feeling, and induce the desire rather to praise the Lord for his goodness, than to spend time and strength in murmurings and disputings with their fellow-mortals. The destruction, not only of property, but of life; in some recent contests, is quite appalling, and we certainly live in very eventful times; the tendency, however, both of the good and evil, is so obviously towards an increase of light and knowledge, that it seems warrantable to expect all will be overruled to better views and practices becoming ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... wanting. Flowers in fanciful baskets on the tables and in great banks on the mantels and in the fireplaces deservedly attracted much attention and praise, though the sum expended on their transient beauty was appalling. Their delicious fragrance mingling with perfumes of artificial origin suggested a like intermingling of the more delicate, subtile, but genuine manifestations of character, and the graces of mind and manner borrowed for ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... of Sancerre, not even named in the edict,[1308] had been sustained under appalling difficulties by the confident hope of assistance from the south. But the hope was long deferred, and they grew sick at heart. The prospect was already dark enough, when, on the second of June, a Protestant soldier, who had made his way into the city through ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... this appalling malady. It commences apparently in a trifling way, it terminates in ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... so much! If your gown should be out of key——" Blaney rolled up his eyes and spread his hands, as if the thought were too appalling for words. ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... within one yard of a fellow-creature, bound and helpless, whose hours are numbered, from whom the last feeble ray of hope has fled for ever, and whose miserable career will shortly terminate in a violent and shameful death. Contact with death even in its least terrible shape, is solemn and appalling. How much more awful is it to reflect on this near vicinity to the dying—to men in full health and vigour, in the flower of youth or the prime of life, with all their faculties and perceptions as acute and perfect as your own; but ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the condition of Chinese medicine leaves the impression of the appalling stagnation and sterility that may afflict a really intelligent people for thousands of years. It is doubtful if they are today in a very much more advanced condition than were the Egyptians at the time when the Ebers Papyrus was written. From one point of view it is an interesting experiment, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... anyone should be so rude as to ask." Suddenly she caught her breath and stared at him in a sort of panic. "Heavens," she whispered, the toast poised half-way to her lips, "you're not, by any chance, engaged, are you? Appalling thought!" ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... kid, hare, lamb, porker or what not is turned into one of Nemestronia's walled gardens and the leopard let in, she will, at first sight of the game, crouch belly-flat on the ground and give out a really appalling series of screams or whatever they should be called, entirely unlike any other noise she ever makes. Her hunting- squall, as Nemestronia calls it, rises and falls like a tune on an organ, and besides changing from shriller to less shrill alters in volume from louder to less loud and ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... something in the moody and dogged silence of this pertinacious companion that was mysterious and appalling. It was soon fearfully accounted for. On 15 mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow traveler in relief against the sky, gigantic in height and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... the end of the strange garden. The second after, the flapping of the frock-coat at his knees made him feel inexpressibly a fool. But the next instant all such trifling sentiments were swallowed up by the most appalling shock of surprise the old soldier had ever felt in all his bold and wandering existence. His eyes fell upon the garden, and there across a large bed in the centre of the lawn was a vast pattern of pansies; they were ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... seems rather strange, rather appalling at first, when one is fresh from a town," he pursued, after a moment's pause; "but I suppose you're used to it, eh, Drayton? How do you find life here, Mrs. Drayton?" he asked, a little curiously, turning to ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... a roll of drums. I saw the muzzles lowered. I shut my eyes; I heard a most appalling crash of sound, to which succeeded groans and cries. Then I looked up, amazed to find myself still living. The redoubt was once more wrapped in smoke. I was surrounded by the dead and wounded. The captain was extended at my feet; a ball ...
— How The Redoubt Was Taken - 1896 • Prosper Merimee
... of an Atlas omnibus in Baker Street, he espied a placard with "Collapse of Middlesex" in appalling capitals. And at the station he got down to learn the worst before going ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... felt a chill. The thought that he and his machine were a threat as great as that, a threat to the two greatest nations of Earth, was appalling. ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... extravagant terms, he was not allowed to enter any Japanese house, or to remain within the city after sunset. For the rare favor of visiting the residence of a native Nagasakian, a special petition was needed, and if granted, the number of spies on such an occasion was multiplied at a most appalling rate. The Dutch were, moreover, forbidden the companionship of their own countrywomen, and only the most degraded female class of Nagasaki were allowed to visit them. In every way they were forced to acknowledge their inferiority and undergo deprivations and mortifications, for which, let us ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... oft recalling The well-known clang of sword and lance, The yells, Night's icy ear appalling; His own blue sky—the sky of France; Where, in his loneliness forgetting His broken sword, his ruin'd throne, With bitter grief, with vain regretting, On his fair Boy he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... of an early and final victory. Only such a belief is still sustaining the drooping spirits of the nation, only such an assurance enables them to submit to the starvation of their women and children, to their tragic isolation in a hostile world, to the appalling sacrifices on the battlefield. ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... will never hit Fort Ryan harder. When the thousand painted Sioux came riding, yelling, wild with joy, shooting their rifles in the air, racing in a vast, appalling hoof tornado down the long track and then to the lodge of all the stakes, they went as men who are rushing to save their own from some swift flood that threatens. But they got an unexpected shock. The red sentry and the white sentry were standing—sullen, for they were ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... for the progress of science, which has enormously increased the wealth of the world, it is doubtful if this war, which is mainly a war about wealth, would have taken place at all. Or if a war had broken out, it would not have involved the appalling destruction of human life and property we are now witnessing—such that, within a space of two years, about six million human beings have been killed, thirty-five millions wounded, and wealth destroyed to the extent of about fifteen thousand millions sterling—though some say it is very much more. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... in the name of my as yet unwritten poems, my masterpieces for which France, for which the whole brotherhood of letters, so anxiously waits, to put a term to this appalling chastisement!" ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... The thing raised its head and looked about until its eyes rested upon us; then it gave vent to a most appalling hiss that rose to the crescendo of a terrific shriek ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... taken instead of the fact itself, and to that as a ground-plan all that follows is fitted. People listen so badly, even when not sleepily, that the wonder is any thing of consequence should ever be even approximately understood. How appalling it would be to one anxious to convey a meaning, to see the shapes his words assumed in the mind of his listening friend! For, in place of falling upon the table of his perception, kept steady by will and judgment, he would see them tumble upon the sounding-board of his imagination, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... I do not think it meant much more for any of us than the milking, the wood-chopping, or the window-cleaning.) But, rather, that these capable, energetic women entirely ignored their unique opportunities of uplifting us. It was an appalling waste ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... expect anything but glimpses and ruins of the divinest? Sophocles is a pure Greek temple; but AEschylus is a rugged mountain, lashed by seas, and riven by thunderbolts: and which is the most wonderful, and appalling? Or if one will have AEschylus too a work of man, I say he is like a Gothic Cathedral, which the Germans say did arise from the genius of man aspiring up to the immeasurable, and reaching after the infinite in complexity and gloom, according as Christianity ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... some time recur, and perhaps the whole mountain arm would give way, hurling the upper cities to destruction, and crushing the nether cities under its falling masses. The terrible consequences that would ensue were more appalling even in their remoteness than the most vivid imagination ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... citizens, who sign Covenants and form volunteer armies at home, have in them the fixed belief that no one in the world is equal to them or can subdue them. It seems an absurd and arrogant faith. But there is this to be said. They remained just as convinced of their own strength after their appalling experience north of the Somme as they were when they shouted for Sir Edward Carson in the streets of Belfast. Men who believe in their invincibility the day after they have been driven back, with their wounds fresh and their bones ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the wind an appalling voice, half-shriek, half-roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... as paralyzing as it was appalling. The hut seemed to be lifted into the air and whirled around. Then came a crash, and the structure fell over on the ice and snow of the river, or lake, below. The boys tumbled in a heap, with Jack Wumble on top of them. Before they could get up, all felt themselves moving swiftly ...
— The Rover Boys in Alaska - or Lost in the Fields of Ice • Arthur M. Winfield
... a private printing-press is, no doubt, a very appalling type of bibliomania. Much as has been told us of the awful scale on which drunkards consume their favoured poison, one is not accustomed to hear of their setting up private stills for their own individual consumption. There is a Sardanapalitan ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... at this unnatural and appalling proposal. Springing instantly to his feet, O'Gaygun demanded that the Fiend be forthwith taken out and hung from the nearest tree. But the Fiend saved his life by immediately withdrawing his proposition and his bugs, humbly suing for mercy. It was then thought ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... Its leading proposition, supported by much learning, is that while population increases approximately in a geometrical ratio, the means of subsistence do so in an arithmetical ratio only, which, of course, opened up an appalling prospect for the race. It necessarily failed to take into account the then undreamed-of developments whereby the produce of the whole world has been made available for all nations. The work gave rise to a great deal of controversy, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... gleaming snow on the opposite side of it. She seemed to be walking in mid-air, cut off from the comfortable security of the solid earth below, and she found the clamor of falling water that came faintly up to her vaguely reassuring. There had been an almost appalling silence where she had left her companions beneath the frozen peaks, but now one could hear the hoarse fret of a rapid on the river, and this was a ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... I am sitting, o'er these stones, The ocean waves once heaved their mighty forms; And vengeful tempests and appalling storms Wrung from the stricken sea portentous moans, That rent stupendous icebergs, whose huge heights Crashed down in fragments through the startled nights. Change, change, eternal change in all but God! Mysterious nature! thrice ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... room at which the visitors entered was the neatest one in Heart's Desire. The tall, narrow fireplace of clay in the corner of the other room was swept clean, spick and span. A chair stood exactly against the wall. The parlor table—ah, appalling spectacle! the parlor table, bare and empty, held upon its surface no object ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... unharmed. Great masses of frothing billows came hurtling out of the gloom, which grew blacker and more menacing every hour. The sight of the ships tossing upon the mountainous masses was ominous, almost appalling. The billows broke with deafening roar, hurling tons of water on board, often filling the spacious decks fore and aft with their ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... final cause for the triumph of sociality; 2. It refuses all homage to women on an arena expressly dedicated to their predominance; 3. It is essentially fertile in des longueurs. Could there be imagined a trinity of treasons against the true tone of social intercourse more appalling ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... terrible bores beg us to take them in. People like that seem to think you have a house or an apartment on the Riviera for the sole purpose of putting them up for a fortnight or so. It's positively weakening! We've just got rid of an appalling young man, whom my husband asked out of sheer pity: a schoolmaster, who'd come here for his health and inadvertently turned gambler. At first he won. He used to haunt my tea-parties, which, as we're idiotically good-natured, are often half made up of criminals and frumps. ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... flashed across their closed eyelids with the vividity of noontide sunshine, followed an instant later by a crash of thunder that caused them to start upright from their fern beds in something akin to panic, so appalling was the sharpness and intensity of the sound, followed as it was by a series of deep, heavy, reverberating booms which might have been caused by the broadsides of an entire navy simultaneously discharged, and the concussion of which sent a perceptible tremor through ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... in many lands and in the midst of many dangers, but he had never before found himself in quite so unpleasant a position as now. Six ugly Tartar horsemen with very uncomfortable-looking spears and appalling shouts, and mounted on their swift Kirghiz ponies, were charging down upon him, while neither the rushing Yellow River on the right hand, nor the steep dirt-cliffs on the left, could offer him shelter or means of escape. These dirt-cliffs, or "loess," to give them ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... inches of the shank of a well-sooted pipe. An old red handkerchief was twisted rope-wise about his lean and scraggy neck, but it by no means sufficed to hide the scar of what had evidently been a most appalling gash, extending right across his throat, almost from ear to ear, the great cicatrix clearly visible like a white line through the thick stubble of some ten days' standing that graced his chin ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... several pages to it. The dream of his boyhood has grown with him—that delightful dream of authorship! How this will-o'-the-wisp of the brain entices one into mental fogs! How it coaxes and pets one, cheats and ruins one! And so that appalling pile of closely-written manuscript is Mortimer's romance? Wasted hours and wasted thought—who would buy ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... appears so calm and majestic, is in reality the seat of fierce conflagrations. Volcanic eruptions, the most appalling storms, the worst cataclysms that sometimes disturb our little world, are gentle zephyrs compared with the solar tempests that engender clouds of fire capable at one burst of engulfing globes of the dimensions ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... goods ashore and abandoned him forthwith. And when he crawled over the bow of the canoe and ascended the short, steep bank to a place beside Mike Breyette, this peculiar sense of being forsaken grew, if anything, more acute, more appalling. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... over-ripe fish—does in time become tolerable, especially if sufficiently disguised with creosote, which purely Terrestrial chemical is the most highly prized perfume of Nevia. But the head! It is that member that makes the Nevian so appalling to earthly eyes, for it is a thing utterly foreign to all Solarian history or experience. As most Tellurians already know, it is fundamentally a massive cone, covered with scales, based spearhead-like ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... quarters of the city, to whom discovery was death; but here their "sanctuary" was impenetrable. Here were women disguised as men, and men in the attire of women, hiding vice of every vileness and crime of every enormity,—at once the most disgusting, the most appalling, and the most unnatural that the heart of man has conceived. It was death in life, a charnel-house of quick corruption; a place of gloom and solitude indeed, wherefrom happiness, hope, courage, liberty, truth, were forever excluded, and ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... O'Connell appointed his crowning monster meeting to take place at Clontarf, in the immediate vicinity of the residence and presence of the Queen's representative, and of such a military force as rendered the bare possibility of encountering it appalling. The critical moment, however, for the interference of Government had at length arrived, and it spoke out in a voice of thunder, prohibiting the monster meeting. The rest is matter of history. The monster ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... War began, as we all most vividly remember, with the successful, although briefly but most importantly delayed invasion of Belgium. And this invasion resulted in producing very promptly not only a situation appalling in its immediate realization, but one of even more terrifying possibilities for the near future. For through the haze of the smoke-clouds from burning towns and above the rattle of the machine guns in Dinant and Louvain could be seen the hovering specter of starvation and heard ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... sounds and baring his ugly and ferocious tusks. Thinking to have some amusement at his expense, I rushed toward him, and when almost upon him sprang into the air, alighting far beyond him and away from the city. He wheeled instantly and charged me with the most appalling speed I had ever beheld. I had thought his short legs a bar to swiftness, but had he been coursing with greyhounds the latter would have appeared as though asleep on a door mat. As I was to learn, ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... but those who have been in the country, and have fallen in with this animal in its wild and savage state, can have any idea of the appalling effect of a lion's roar. What is heard in a menagerie is weak, and can give but a faint conception of it. In the darkness of the night it is almost impossible to tell from what quarter the sound proceeds; ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... blow on the ground and cracked the mountain to its base, so that the ocean flowed in, and a fearful fight of fire and sea began. Steam shot for miles into the air, with vast geysers leaping through it, and the hiss and screech and bellow were appalling. The crater filled with water, so that Pele and her brothers had to drink it dry, lest the fires should be quenched. When they had done this they resumed the attack on Kamapua, emptying the mountain of its ash and molten rock, and hurling tons of stone after the wretch, who was now straining ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... with only one meal a day. According to another authority—Sir Charles Elliot—70 millions of people in India do not know what it is to have their hunger fully satisfied even once in the whole course of the year. The poverty of the people of India, thus considered by itself, is truly appalling. And if this is the state of things after a hundred years of your rule, you cannot claim that your principal aim in India has been the promotion of the interests of ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... when woman voluntarily stops and becomes the agent of her own degradation, and with her own hands builds barriers against her own advancement; piling up opposition, Pelion upon Ossa, when the majority against her, even in New York and New England, is already appalling? And then for us to be referred to the teachings and experiences of the past for lessons in compromise, cold, calculating compromise, such as Abolitionists ever blasted with the breath of their nostrils, and scourged from their presence ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... no doubt some exaggeration on both sides of this statement. The appalling magnitude of the deportations and imprisonments by the new Government seems to show that the hatred went deeper than Tocqueville supposed, and on the other hand it can hardly be said that the educated classes wholly repudiated ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... of this morning to you, directing you to cause four hundred mounted men to be raised within your Division, I have received by Amos Rees, Esq., of Ray County and Wiley C. Williams, Esq., one of my aids, information of the most appalling character, which entirely changes the face of things, and places the Mormons in the attitude of an open and avowed defiance of the laws, and of having made war upon the people of this state. Your orders are, therefore, to hasten your operations ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... of all cities upon the farms and mines is to-day exemplified in Europe with such appalling tragedy, that even the smug isolation of the American farmer and the American business man is broken down, not only by human sympathy but by the necessity of a better adjustment of their own economic system to the world crisis from which ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... farmer in the United States sells his bushel of wheat for fifty cents. The former is proven by the history of the world to be an equitable price. The latter is writing its history, in letters of blood, on the appalling cloud of debt that is sweeping with ruin and desolation over ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... them—" he mused, and then an appalling idea came to him. "Supposing he's put them both into the same beast!" He ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... dreadfully behindhand with his speeches, his preparatives; however, the man's 'facility of work' is known to us. For freshness of style, lucidity, ingenuity, largeness of view, that opening Harangue of his was unsurpassable:—had not the subject-matter been so appalling. A Deficit, concerning which accounts vary, and the Controller's own account is not unquestioned; but which all accounts agree in representing as 'enormous.' This is the epitome of our Controller's difficulties: and then his means? Mere Turgotism; ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... painful pilgrimage of eleven hours, up Snowdon and back again, enables me to declare that had oaks, pines, and service-trees adorned that appalling and volcanic chaos, five or six years since, some storm sufficient to have shattered the universe, must have swept them all away, ere I looked upon that dreary assemblage of rocks which seems like the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... DEAR BELOVED GRANDMOTHER,—I am writing to you, having just struggled out of a most appalling nightmare, and out of Dantesque scenes that I have lived through. Things that Gustave Dore had the courage to picture through the text of the Divina Commedia have come to pass, with all the variety and circumstance of fact. In the midst of labours that happily tend to ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... Mississippi, and had been landed by Beaujeu on the shores of Texas. After having waited for some time, and ignorant of what had happened, Tonty, with the same indifference to fatigues and dangers of an appalling nature, retraced his way back, leaving a letter to La Salle to inform him of his disappointment. Is there not something extremely romantic in the characters of the men of that epoch? Here is Tonty undertaking, with the most heroic unconcern, a journey of nearly three thousand miles, through ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... secret felon being regarded in that way by the providence which, for some inscrutable purpose, permitted, yet would infallibly punish, a dreadful murder? She was a girl of devout mind, and the notion was appalling in its direct application to ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... months this assault has blotted out the whole pattern of democratic life in an appalling number of independent nations, great and small. The assailants are still on the march, threatening other nations, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... admiration of those who secured the independence of the Colonies, we have overlooked the sacrifices and sufferings of the loyalists;—their distress during the siege of Boston, the agony of the hour when suddenly confronted with the appalling fact that they must become aliens, exiles, and wanderers, leaving behind all their possessions and estates,—an hour when there was a sundering of tender ties, the ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... our sailors and soldiers, to that "wonderful spirit of light-heartedness, that perpetual sense of the ridiculous" which, in the words of one of Mr. Punch's many contributors from the front, "even under the most appalling conditions never seemed to desert them, and which indeed seemed to flourish more freely in the mud and rain of the front line trenches than in the comparative comfort of billets or 'cushy jobs.'" Tommy gave Mr. Punch his cue, and his high example was not thrown away on those at home, ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... must have been taken up, on the same grounds, by many other persons. If Agassiz told me that the forms of life which have successively tenanted the globe were the incarnations of successive thoughts of the Deity; and that he had wiped out one set of these embodiments by an appalling geological catastrophe as soon as His ideas took a more advanced shape, I found myself not only unable to admit the accuracy of the deductions from the facts of paleontology, upon which this astounding hypothesis was founded, but I had to confess my want of any means of testing ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... proportion of them, without any fault of their own, are compelled to drag out a weary and almost hopeless existence. To some peculiarly constituted minds, "over-production" is the explanation of the present appalling distresses of this country; and what they are pleased to consider a healthy state of things, is to be restored by a diminution of production;—yet nothing is more certain, than that the largest amount of production which has ever been ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... food. His cheek bones project fearfully, and his large temples seem, by the ghastly skin which is drawn tight about them, to remind one of those of a skeleton, were it not that the image is made still more appalling by the existence of life. Whilst in this position, motionless as a statue, a voice from one of the beds called out "Jemmy," with a tone so low and feeble that to other ears it would probably not have been distinctly ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... increase, the guns become heated and go off, and at last the ship suddenly sinks from our view, whilst the loud and awful death-cry of five hundred helpless beings, imprisoned in the burning vessel, rings in our ears, curdling our blood, and seeming as if it would burst the very vault of Heaven with its appalling tones. It was a fitting knell to be rung ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... first sound of those inexorable accents, the grove was thronged with the revellers. They jostled each other in their solicitude to minister to the cruelty of the despot; and that cruelty was as ruthless, and as hell-born, as it was ingenious and appalling. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... general, as an immense evil to the country—but the free part of it, by all, as the greatest of all evils.... They feel severely the effects of the deleterious influence which the free negroes exert upon the slaves—and they look, moreover, into futurity, and there they behold an appalling scene—in less than one hundred years, (a short time, we should hope, in the life of this republic,) 16,000,000 of blacks.' * * * * 'Since the recent revolution in the island of St. Domingo, which has placed it in the hands of the African race, it was thought by some that there an asylum might ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... to say to you, Richards,' resumed Mr Dombey, with an appalling glance at Mr John, 'that I was further assisted in my decision, by the recollection of a conversation I held with your husband in this room, on the occasion of your being hired, when he disclosed to me the melancholy fact that your family, himself at the head, were ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... available for the relief of national needs. We do not say that this would be enough, but if carefully laid out in grants to deserving novelists, so as to enable them to co-operate with publishers on lines that would allow a reasonable margin of profit, it might go some way towards averting the appalling calamity which Mr. JOHN ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... too strong, and in the matter of grammar we are still the slaves of the ancient world. As for spelling, the irregularities of our language seem to have driven us to one sole method, memorizing: and to memorize every word in a language is an appalling task. Our rhetoric we have inherited from the middle ages, from scholiasts, refiners, and theological logicians, a race of men who got their living by inventing distinctions and splitting hairs. The fact is, prose has had a very low place in the literature ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... expenses. It was appalling. I cast a corner of my eye farther down, and read, without pretending ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... kinship and locality, of tribe or family or village community, and with their own religion, customs, and government. Permanent captivity in a foreign land and in a servile condition snapped these ties once and for all. To take a single appalling instance, the 150,000 human beings who were sold into slavery in Epirus by the conqueror of Pydna, or as many of them as were transported out of their own country—and these were probably the vast ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... most appalling figure among the apocalyptic riders of Cornelius, who had used me when a child for the model of a laughing angel, he seemed to be stretching his hand toward me from his emaciated steed. The poppy leaf was not to flutter toward the sky, but ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that the individuality was, if not extinguished, at least merged in some central tide of life, and that the only rebutting evidence was the cry of the burdened heart that dared not believe a possibility so stern, so appalling. He wrestled dumbly and darkly against these sad convictions, and how many times, in miserable solitude, did he send out a wistful prayer that, if it were possible, some hint, some slender vision might be granted him as a proof that one so dear, so desired, so momently missed, was still near ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that desperate struggle for breath, for life it seemed to him, behind McIvor's broad back. The country was full of stories of men being overwhelmed by the choking, drifting whirl of snow. He knew how swift at times the on-fall of the blizzard could be, how long the storm could last, how appalling the cold could become. What should he do? He must think and act swiftly. That gleaming water near which his camp lay was, at the very best going, two hours distant. The blizzard might strike at any moment and once it struck all hope of advance would be cut ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... seasonable showers render the earth bountiful of grain; may the presiding Brahmans secure the favour of the gods by acceptable sacrifices; may the association of the pious confer delight until the end of time, and may the appalling blasphemies of the ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... Callingham, who was present in the room during the attack, and who alone might have been a witness capable of recognising or describing the wretched assailant, lost her reason on the spot, owing to the appalling shock to her nervous system, and remained for some months in an imbecile condition. Gradually, as we have informed our readers from time to time, Miss Callingham's intellect has become stronger and stronger; and ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... much wider range, are often indeed of a venerable antiquity. The lady of the notebooks was not, I fancy, of a critical temper, and versions not too credible of well-known contes figure in her quiet kindly pages. There are moreover stories which I should not hesitate to describe as of an appalling banality if they were not concerned with such very nice people. On the whole I don't think it quite fair to the spinster lady to have published her notes. They may well have been painstaking jottings to provide material for polite conversation and have ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... An appalling hush fell, for a few heart-beats, all over the field. Then from different quarters appeared uniformed attendants, racing and shouting frantically to divert the bull's attention. From fleeing groups black-coated men leapt forth, armed only with ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... to appear in the newspapers with appalling frequency. He leaped to instant fame by being the first man in California who paid ten thousand dollars for a single bull. His livestock specialist, whom he had filched from the Federal Government, in ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London |
