"Ghoulish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for the purpose. I was fated to subsist in after days on disgusting diet of the most varied description, but to this day the recollection of that Bete-Kul jelly produces a faint feeling of nausea, although I can recall other ghoulish repasts of raw seal-meat with comparative equanimity. Pure melted butter formed the second course of this Yakute dejeuner, each guest being expected to finish a large bowl. Stepan, however, alone partook of this tempting dish, but he merely sipped ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... here, where his bones might lie beside these that had whitened this desert spot for so many months. Perhaps this poor creature's soul hovered over his death place and in its loneliness and desolation had fastened ghoulish talons into his and would pin him down to die in the same spot. The idea took instant possession of his bewildered mind and filled him with such quaking fear and horror that he turned and ran with new strength ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... One by one the ghoulish muzzles emerged, peered into the darkness, and were satisfied; then the clumsy, ill-balanced bodies, entangled in loose-folded leathern cerements—the noctule's wing-spread measures a full foot; lastly, the webbed curving triangle of ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... married her with the intention of putting her to death. She immediately heated the poker and terminated his career, for which she was taken to King George upon his throne, and received the compliments of royalty on her great discretion and valour. This same narrator, who had a Ghoulish pleasure, I have long been persuaded, in terrifying me to the utmost confines of my reason, had another authentic anecdote within her own experience, founded, I now believe, upon Raymond and Agnes, or the Bleeding Nun. She said it happened to her brother-in-law, who was immensely ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... In Mat Lewis' ghoulish romance, The Monk (1796) it will be remembered that Ambrosio, after having enjoyed Antonia, to whose bedchamber he has gained admittance by demoniacal aid, discovers that she is his sister, and heaping crime upon crime to sorcery and rape ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... dictates of reason and humanity; yet the Hindoos make a constant practice of it here under our very eyes. These native states are under treaty to observe the law. I intend to do all in my power to put a stop to their ghoulish practices, and Maharajah Howrah knows what my intentions are. It must be a Mohammedan, this time, to whom I intrust my ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... beyond. Shadows rose and fell and flitted in and out of the circle of firelight. Weird and uncanny they seemed, taking strange forms like dancing spirits. In the darkness outside the firelight and moving shadows Jamie fancied that terrible ghoulish forms were stalking stealthily and grinning ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... the old diseases, remarkably normal. But an interior drama; not to put too fine a point on it, a drama of one's insides, and especially one that dealt with the raising from the dead of that section which refined women ceased to discuss after they had got rid of it—it was positively ghoulish. Drama of any sort in this respectable old drawing-room, which might have been photographed as the sarcophagus of all the Respectabilities, was extremely offensive. And what a drama! Never had these old walls listened ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... I unto the trysting-oak, and by blast of horn summoned me my outlaw company. They came apace and in great wonderment, for, seeing me, they fell to great awe and dread, thinking me dead, since many had seen my body a-dangle on the gallows; wherefore, seeing me manifestly alive, they took me for ghoulish ghost 'stead o' good flesh and blood, and fled from me amain. So, by reason of my dead body, that is no body o' mine, yet that nobody will believe is no body o' mine, they believe that this my body is yet no body, ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... amuck killing and slaying down four flights of stairs—to do something very terrible in fact—something deadly and horrible and final that would put an end forever to this melancholy haunt of Tuesday stews and ghoulish boarders with the torturing tattle of their everlasting tongues. I shocked the Little Woman daily with words and phrases, used heretofore only under very trying conditions, that had insensibly become the decorations of ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... old-fashioned that he used to frighten me sometimes—I'd almost think that there was something supernatural about him; though, of course, I never took any notice of that rot about some children being too old-fashioned to live. There's always the ghoulish old hag (and some not so old nor haggish either) who'll come round and shake up young parents with such croaks as, 'You'll never rear that child—he's too bright for his age.' To the devil ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... friend's expense, Or blacken a name in a public bar or over a backyard fence. And this you learn from the libelled past, though its methods were somewhat rude — A nation's born where the shells fall fast, or its lease of life renewed. We in part atone for the ghoulish strife, and the crimes of the peace we boast, And the better part of a people's life in the ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... evening following the burial of Katrina Potgieter's baby, which died of drinking water after a surfeit of dried peaches, the old lady was in great feather. Never were her reminiscences so ghoulish and terrifying, and never did she hurl her weighty moralities over so wide a scope. Eventually she lapsed into criticism, and announced that the art of dying ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... she lies, This old mother of you all, You great cities proud and tall Towering to a hundred skies Round a world she never knew, Is it nothing, this, to you? Must the ghoulish work go on Till her very floors are gone? While there's still a brick to save Drive ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... covered God only knows what horrors of midnight disappearances, of ghoulish rites with packing-case and sack, in the dark cellars of that evil house, I felt that, could I but draw back from the enterprise to which I had so rashly committed myself, I would do so gladly. Only then did ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... to "things" may easily become a ghoulish passion. It is such that Ibsen hints at in the Master Builder, when he makes Aline Solness attribute her perpetual black, her somber eyes and smileless lips, not to the death of her two little boys which has come about through the burning ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... you life as life is, full Of beauties that we miss Till time withers with his kiss? Do you laugh in cynic vein Since you cannot try again? And you know that we, like you, Will too late our failings rue? Tell me, ghoulish, grinning skull What deep broodings, o'er you mull? Tell me why you smirk and smile Ere ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... by all that was unusual, deformed, and monstrous, by the pictures that represented the hideousness of man or that reminded you of his mortality. He summoned before Margaret the whole array of Ribera's ghoulish dwarfs, with their cunning smile, the insane light of their eyes, and their malice: he dwelt with a horrible fascination upon their malformations, the humped backs, the club feet, the hydrocephalic heads. He described the picture by Valdes Leal, in a certain place at Seville, ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... and "scored" and "flayed," "Common or garden variety," "Wave of crime" and "reform crusade," "Along these lines" and "it seems to me," "Noted savant," "I fail to see," The "groaning board" of the "banquet hall,"— Masonjar 'em in "ghoulish glee"— Into the brine go one ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... black shadows throng apace, The wood is still, the moon grows wan and old, White marsh-mists wreathe like clammy arms, death-cold, And moth-wings like dead fingers sweep my face; The bittern wailing leaves the sombre pool, Voicing the world-old pain that never dies; The owl with ghoulish laughter outward flies Like some weird ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... Edgar A. Poe. In religion she inclined toward spiritualism. Her favorite amusement was to gather a few shuddering friends about her, turn out the gas, and tell ghost stories. She had an extensive repertoire of ghoulish incidents, that were not fiction but the actual experience of people she knew. She had even had one or two spiritual adventures herself; and she would set forth the details with wide eyes and lowered voice, while her auditors held one ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... it, so that our light will not be visible. It will be quite safe, I think; besides, it will be very comforting to think that if one of us should die suddenly his body will not become a prey to the ghoulish people of ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... of the Square newspaper boys were calling their evening wares, and the ghoulish cries mingled and jangled with the sound ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Buddy wished they were; red stripes on their arms, the number showing their rank in the tribe; open-seated, buckskin breeches to their knees where they met the tightly wrapped leggings; moccasins laced snugly at the ankle—they were picturesque enough to any eyes but Buddy's. He saw the ghoulish greed in their eyes, heard it in their voices when they shouted to one another; and he hated them even more ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... had perished in the nearby dwelling place of evil spirits. In the canoes were the ghostly forms of the victims, for ever paddling their phantom crafts around the lakes, vainly striving to escape the torment of mocking, ghoulish spirits which pursued them. Surrounding the lakes were wild marshes and deep black forests, which were peopled by innumerable evil spirits for ever searching for new victims to destroy. Their thunder voices ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... Borgne showed no interest. While the others stripped the dead and wreaked their ghoulish work, Le Borgne gathered up the furs of the Little Sticks and with two or three young men stole away over ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... observed them, and gained first-hand knowledge of them in their daily traffic. I have not painted the picture blacker than it was, nor selected gruesome morsels and joined them together to make a jig-saw puzzle for ghoulish delight. Unlike Henri Barbusse, who, in his dreadful book Le Feu, gave the unrelieved blackness of this human drama, I have here and in other books shown the light as well as the shade in which our men lived, the gaiety as well as the fear they had, the exultation as ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... am going to Bremen; but we shall travel together as far as—you go by Amsterdam, I suppose?—as far as Leer, then. That will be very pleasant.' I fancied there was a ghoulish gusto in his tone. ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... with dark eyes and feverish high color, and she kept her active eyes fixed on her companion with the alertness of a hawk. From time to time she would lean and whisper intently to him, and he would answer by inclining his head heavily or by a particularly ghoulish ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... It was ghoulish. I felt then and I did still that instead of contributing to the amelioration of conditions that could not be otherwise than harrowing, everything about the old Morgue lent itself to the increase of the horror ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... occurrences were quite the order of the day there. When being cooked, the hens used to scream and the mutton used to bleat in the pot. Black dogs were seen frequently. The beds used to be lifted up, and the occupants thereof used to be beaten black and blue, by invisible hands. One particularly ghoulish tale was told. It was said that a monk (!) was in love with one of the daughters of the house, who was an exceedingly fat girl. She died unmarried, and was buried in the family vault. Some time later the vault was again opened for ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... boats cruising about on George's. When its warning column falls, the whole fleet makes for the open sea, however good the fishing may be. But, with all possible caution, the losses are so many that George's, early in its history, came to have the ghoulish nickname ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot |
