"Ghastly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... curtains of the cabinet, and my mother announced herself present, 'who had died from consumption.' The curtains were pulled aside, and I put my face close to the opening, since it was so dark I could see nothing. And there, in the dim twilight of that seance room, I beheld one of the most ghastly, most truly terrifying faces I have ever seen. It was white and drawn, and almost shiny in its glossy, ashen hue. The eyes were wide open and staring—fixed. The head and face were encircled in white; and altogether the face was one of the most appalling I have ever beheld, and ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... of diverting attention from a ghastly subject that SAUNDERSON led up to row alluded to. In course of remarks on release of Gweedore prisoners, he alluded to Father MCFADDEN as "a ruffian." Irish Members not used to language of that kind. Howled in pained indignation; the Colonel, astonished at his own moderation, varied ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 11, 1893 • Various
... to be lost in a forest where a traveller may ride round in a circle, thinking he is advancing, till he dies. But it is as easy to be lost in a wilderness, where there is nothing to see, as in a wood where one can see nothing. And there is something even more ghastly in being lost below the broad heavens in the open face of day than 'in the close covert of innumerous boughs.' The monotonous swells of the sand-heaps, the weary expanse stretching right away to the horizon, no land-marks ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... human whistle. Dim lights burned through the fog. We advanced with fearful caution; and while voices out of the air were greeting us, almost before we had got our reckoning, we drifted up under a dark pier, on which ghastly figures seemed to be floating to and fro, bidding us all-hail. And then and there the freedom of the city was extended to us, saturated with salt-sea mist. Probably six times in ten the voyager approaches Monterey in precisely this fashion. 'Tis true! ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... is simply ghastly, all the best fellows have gone," he said. "Next term we shall have Rudd head of the House. All the young masters have gone, and we are left with fossils, fretting because they are too old to fight, and ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... others in sky-blue, in gold and pink and combinations of brilliance that blended their loose garments to kaleidoscopic hues. But the figures were similar in one unvarying respect: they were repulsive and ghastly, and their faces showed bright blotches of blood vessels and blue markings of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... east with its stormy gold, But the turbulent ocean raged and rolled, And dashed on many a rock girt shore The wrecks of ships that would sail no more,— Lifting, at times, to the topmost wave Ghastly faces no hand could save,— And then, far down with his treasures vain, Burying each ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... pitiless despotism of Russian officialism and superstition, that I fell, as so many thousands of my race have fallen, into that abyss of nameless misery and degradation that Russian hands have dug for the innocent in the ghastly solitudes of Siberia, and, without knowing it, dragged my sweet and loving wife into it ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... time, so if you make up to him he will tell you some wonderful stories. Now, Manning, these boys are smitten with the 'scarlet fever' at present, as a young friend of theirs has just enlisted. Tell them something about the Crimea; you had plenty of ghastly experiences there." ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... also practiced his speech of acceptance. They rehearsed together and were "letter perfect" when they mounted the platform in the town hall. The throng which confronted them had, however, a disastrous effect. Holding the horn at arm's length, the fireman stalked across the platform and with a ghastly expression on ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... effect—rather with the effect of a struggling terror. Side by side with the dread of her husband had grown the self-dread which urged her to flee from the pursuing images wrought by her pent-up impulse. The vision of her past wrong-doing, and what it had brought on her, came with a pale ghastly illumination over every imagined deed that was a rash effort at freedom, such as she had made in her marriage. ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... voice was heard singing that holy hymn, the flower-garlands about the boat broke into ghastly flames, and wreathed it with a dreadful burning; and the radiant figures were changed into dark shapes crowned with fire; and the song of longing and love became a wailing and gnashing of teeth. The island vanished away in rolling smoke; and the boat burned down like a darkening ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... the king was accustomed to make of the heads and quarters of such people was to have the quarters hung about in conspicuous parts of London like quarters of beef; and the heads were set up on poles on Temple Bar or London Bridge to rot as a ghastly warning. ...
— The American Revolution and the Boer War, An Open Letter to Mr. Charles Francis Adams on His Pamphlet "The Confederacy and the Transvaal" • Sydney G. Fisher
... sleeping?' Yes, he was sleeping; sleeping the sleep from which there is no awaking; and the slight touch of Kate having disturbed the equilibrium of the corpse, down it rolled on the snow: the frozen body rang like a hollow iron cylinder; the face uppermost and blue with mould, mouth open, teeth ghastly and bleaching in the frost, and a frightful grin upon the lips. This dreadful spectacle finished the struggles of the weaker man, who sank and died at once. The other made an effort with so much spirit, that, in ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... ooze and the coral, down where earth's wonders are spread, Helmeted, ghastly, and swollen, Kanzo Makame lies dead: Joe Nagasaki, his 'tender', is ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... expos'd the tragic Muse, Rude were the actors, and a cart the scene, Where ghastly faces, smear'd with lees of wine, Frighted the ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... as a dead body lifted from the floor and a ghastly face was turned toward his own. A few unfortunate ones had gone down with the ship, and most of the ...
— Boy Scouts in a Submarine • G. Harvey Ralphson
... watched the remnant of his band approach. Groaning and sighing, a ghastly procession, it dragged its wretchedness past. It was given to Koolau to taste a deeper bitterness, for they hurled imprecations and insults at him as they went by; and the panting hag who brought up the rear halted, and ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... when Tamara awoke. Where was she? What had happened? Something ghastly, but where? Then she perceived her torn blouse, and with a terrible pang remembrance came back to her. She started up, and as she did so realized that she was in her stockinged feet. The awful certainty.... ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... night, when it was quite dark, the hollow echoes of old London Bridge responded to the rumbling of the cart which contained the ghastly load, the object of Will Marks' care. Sufficiently disguised to attract no attention by his garb, Will walked at the horse's head, as unconcerned as a man could be who was sensible that he had now arrived at the most dangerous ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... hysteria over the uproar. The singer was bowing profuse acknowledgments from the stage, his eyes, sly in their cynical humour, upon the face of the Slav at the piano, his head thrown back, the pallor of his face ghastly. ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... over the plain, revealing a world as wild as ever the frozen north outspread—as wild as ever poet's despairing vision of desolation. I see it! I see it! but how shall I make my reader see it with me? It was ghastly. The only similitude of life was the perplexed and multitudinous motion of the drifting, falling flakes. No shape was to be seen, no sound but that of the wind to be heard. It was like the dream of ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... which they both, patient and priestly ministrant, place implicit trust. Confession, the Eucharist, Extreme Unction,—these all inspire a confidence which without this symbolism is too apt to be wanting in over-sensitive natures. They have been peopled in earlier years with ghastly spectres of avenging fiends, moving in a sleepless world of devouring flames and smothering exhalations; where nothing lives but the sinner, the fiends, and the reptiles who help to make life an unending torture. It is no wonder ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... thee, caitiff, far beyond the seas, To the grim tyrant Echetus, who mars All he encounters; bane of human kind. Thine ears he'll lop, and pare the nose away From thy pale ghastly visage: dire to tell! The very parts, which modesty conceals, He'll tear relentless from the seat of life, To feed ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... men you pass or have to do with in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness and desperate revolt at the close of a life without elevation or naivety, (even if you have achiev'd a secure 10,000 a year, or election to Congress or the Governorship,) and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty, is the great fraud upon modern civilization and forethought, blotching the surface and system which civilization undeniably drafts, and moistening with tears the immense features it spreads ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... surrounds the church. These niches in the wall are rented for a certain yearly sum, and in the old Spanish days, when this rental was not promptly paid by relatives, the corpse was removed and thrown with others into a great pit. Recently this ghastly practice has been frowned on ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... misrepresented. It is true that no punishment is more dreaded by the Chinese than the Ling chi; but it is dreaded, not because of any torture associated with its performance, but because of the dismemberment practised upon the body which was received whole from its parents. The mutilation is ghastly and excites our horror as an example of barbarian cruelty: but it is not cruel, and need not excite our horror, since the mutilation is done, not before death, but after. The method is simply the following, which I give as I received it first-hand from ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... light threw a ghastly livid hue on the strongly-marked features of the sleeper, rendered sharp and haggard by disease and his penurious habits; she could just distinguish through the gloom the spectre-like form of the invalid, and the long bony attenuated hands which ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... acquaintances. I secretly hoped—such is human weakness—that I should not find them at home, and again I was mistaken. Both were at home. The change that had taken place in them during the last three days must have struck any one. Punin looked ghastly white and flabby. His talkativeness had completely vanished. He spoke listlessly, feebly, still in the same husky voice, and looked somehow lost and bewildered. Baburin, on the contrary, seemed shrunk into himself, ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... receded during that decade. To the intelligent young as well as to the intelligent elderly, efforts in the present atmosphere to opiate the public with mere pictures of frontier enterprise have a ghastly unreality. The Texas Rangers have come to seem as remote as the Foreign Legion in France fighting against the Kaiser. Yet this Guide, extensively added to and revised, is mainly concerned, apart from the land and its native life, with frontier ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... 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 way a marvelously dear experience. Could it be possible, I wondered, that I was in this life to woo a second time the woman I had killed by my own neglect ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... I went. My life is all reminiscence and anticipation—if you can call it life, if I am not rather a kind of ghost, haunting a past that has ceased to be, or a future that is still more shadowy and unreal. It's ghastly in a way, this exile and isolation. But why speak of it, ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... before the 23rd of June when these brave men knew their time was come. All night they prayed, and prepared themselves to die by giving one another the last rites of the Church, and at daylight each repaired to his post, those who could not walk being carried in chairs, and sat ghastly figures, sword in hand, on the brink of the breach, ready ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... these great purposes, he used to twist the lad's arms and administer a certain number of hard blows upon them. This he did every day so long as the whim lasted. As for the smoking, poor Brokenribs had to smoke a certain number of pipes every day. A single pipe made him look ghastly, and the whole series made him dreadfully ill. I remember his white face at such times; but he attained his reward in becoming ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Ghastly beings haunted the site of so many crimes, shapeless monsters, hovering by night, and weaving a fearful dance. Frequently they caught fire, as it seemed, and burned as they flew or floated in the air. Remembering these stories, which in part, at least, now seemed to be true, Felix ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... sagacity. As he looked he began to see perverse, insidious resemblances to the physician himself. When Schulze reappeared and busied himself writing, he looked from the stone face to the face of flesh with fascinated repulsion—the man and the "familiar" were so ghastly alike. Then he suddenly understood that this was a quaint double jest of the eccentric physician's—his grim fling at his lack of physical charm, his ironic jeer at the superstitions ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue; Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm; Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... order was that, after the great wash-basket of parcels had been distributed, and the school had rioted for twenty- four hours upon these unaccustomed luxuries, Rose was found lying on her bed, ghastly ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... head was butting turned and said in a lordly way, "Let that kid through," and he was roughly bundled to a front position. The boy who had commanded his presence jolted him in the back with his knee and said, using the school argot for to cheer or shout, "Swipe up, you ghastly young ass! Swipe up! Can't you see they're ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... seems to weigh upon him, rendering even gloomier his melancholy thoughts. How intolerably quiet the night is, not even a breath of wind is playing in the trees outside. On such a night as this ghosts might walk and demons work their will. There is something ghastly in this unnatural cessation of all ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... A ghastly superstition was attached to the Yew when thus growing in a churchyard, that it would prey upon [621] the dead bodies lying beneath its sombre shade. So Tennyson writes ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... to ice. All my hopes dashed to the ground. "Dig! Dig!" cried the bloodthirsty accuser, working himself with all his might. I looked at the rector. He was ghastly pale, staring with wide-open eyes ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... With ghastly, frightened faces they came rushing in one by one, huddled up in sheets and counterpanes or whatever else came first to hand, like so many ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... outside; the ghastly dark beyond the gates of the city of which God is the light—where the evil dogs go ranging, silent as the dark, for there is no sound any more than sight. The time of signs is over. Every sense has its signs, and they were all misused: there is no sense, no sign more—nothing now by means ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... mixture of sham sprightliness and real anguish, "Thank you, sir; I only trust that you will always find servants as devoted to your interest as my gratitude would have made me. Good-morning, sir." He clapped his hat on with a sprightly, ghastly air, ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... glided by, and the party reached the period when ladies' back-hair begins to look forgotten and dissipated; when a perceptible dampness makes itself apparent upon the faces even of delicate girls—a ghastly dew having for some time rained from the features of their masculine partners; when skirts begin to be torn out of their gathers; when elderly people, who have stood up to please their juniors, begin to feel sundry small tremblings in the region of the knees, and to wish the interminable dance ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... ghastly! When man, sorrowful, Firstly, lastly, Of to-morrow full, After tarrying, Yields to ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... a ghastly face and haggard eyes and wavering steps followed the keeper to the American court-room the next morning; for nothing could be tortured into a principle to stimulate Isaac's courage. It is easy to die for right, ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... had lived on for two days after that ghastly ride. Peter had been killed instantly, the doctors said. They gave no hope for Blackie. My escape with but a few ridiculous bruises and scratches was due, they said, to the fact that I had sat in the tonneau. I heard them all, in a stupor of horror and ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... her, would she be able to forget. That narcotic would never be given to her. Unrelenting, unsparing memory would be with her always to remind her of those last days of tragedy. Already her mind was dwelling on the details of that ghastly farewell dinner-party and recalling one by one the incidents of ill-omen that had marked it; how they had sat down seven to table and how one liqueur glass in the set of seven had been shivered into fragments; how her glass had slipped from her hand as she raised ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... were nearly now extinct; but the faint light of the fast dawning day threw a ghastly, sickly, hue over the countenances of the savages, which rendered them even more terrific in their war paint. The chiefs grouped themselves immediately around their prisoner, while the inferior warriors, forming an outer ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... descended into the cell, all green with damp, under the basilica, and lay down, fettered and manacled in the place of those found there beside the big bronze kettle in which the prisoners used to cook their dinners. How ghastly the thought of it was! If we had really seen this kettle and the skeletons there—as we did not—we could not have suffered more than we did. They took all the life out of the House of Perseus, and the beauty from his pretty little ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... did not look as ghastly in sunlight as they had done in the pale light of the moon. I could see too that this path was ancient, and nowhere could I find traces of its being used. As I had seen the night before, it led straight across the desert, and in the distance in that direction ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... willing to play with her. Now it was notorious in Littlebath that she had never played well, and that she had long since forgotten all she had ever known. The poor old woman had already had some kind of a fit; she was very shaky and infirm, and ghastly to look at, in spite of her paint and ribbons. She was long in arranging her cards, long in playing them; very long in settling her points, when the points went against her, as they generally did. And yet, in spite of all this, Mrs. ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... between the two men from Scotland Yard. Kerry stood awhile, chewing and staring at the ghastly face of ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... whispered Mrs. Doria, with a ghastly look, and a shudder at young men of republican sentiments, which he was reputed to entertain. "'The compensation for Injustice,' says the 'Pilgrim's Scrip,' is, that in that dark Ordeal we gather ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... terrible suspense ensued. It was worse than she had even feared. Carl lay by the roadside, not far from the mill, insensible, covered with blood, moaning feebly at first, and afterwards silent, if not breathless. Ghastly wounds covered his head, and his arms and shoulders were livid with bruises. The neighboring peasants surrounded the apparently lifeless body, and listened with awe to the frenzied imprecations of Frau Proch upon the murderer of her son. "May he die in a foreign land," said she, lifting her withered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... was being consummated. The king and courtiers must have been troubled under the spell of that horror, as Belshazzar when the hand wrote in characters of mystery over against the sacred candlestick. And when the soldier entered, carrying in the charger that ghastly burden, they beheld a sight which was to haunt some of them to their dying day. Often Herod would see it in his dreams, and amid the light of setting suns. It would haunt him, and fill his days and nights with anguish that all the witchery of ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... to tell over again the ghastly story of John's death, which no other words than the Evangelist's can tell half so powerfully. I need only remind you of the degradation of the poor child Salome to the position of a dancing girl, the half-tipsy generosity of the excited ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Hundreds of candles fill the sacred hall with their light and the whitened walls and ceiling appear to glow with glory. Rows of men in ghastly attire, constant reminder of the inevitable end of mundane greatness, stand with covered heads and with their faces turned towards the orient, fervently praying. Screened by the lattice-work of the galleries are the women, ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... that I was in the vault at Rhyd-Alwyn, and that my name was Weir Penrhyn, I knew that I was laid out as a corpse, and that the dead were about me. Child as I was, it seemed to me that I must go frantic with the horror of the thing, stretched out in that ghastly place, a storm roaring about me, bound hand and foot, unable to cry for help. I think that if I had been left there all night I should have died again or lost my mind, but in a moment I heard a noise at the ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... moment when the men, with their faces lighted by the small flame of the flickering fire, all looked up towards my eyrie. The culminating point of their treachery had come, and their countenances seemed ghastly and distorted, as seen from the fissure in the wall behind which I knelt. They listened to hear if we were asleep. Then all but one rolled themselves in their blankets, completely covering their heads and bodies. The one figure I could now see sat up by the fire for some time, as if absorbed ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... with the hat on, and with the bundle on his back, was none other than Anna Sophia Detzloff, daughter of the old school-teacher. She saw that the one who was following her, whose countenance was so ghastly pale—not because the moon was shining upon it, but because he was so sad, so truly wretched—that this other was Charles Henry Buschman, who was coward enough to let his bride go to battle in his stead! The moon saw them ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... shot was put at his feet, but not sufficient, and he was cast into the sea. In a few days the putrified body rose to the surface head upwards, as though the murdered man had come again to haunt his executioners and give them a further opportunity of gazing at the ghastly features of their victim.[11] The sight of his old friend emerging again terrified Ferdinand, and he became afflicted with a feeling of abiding horror which he sought to appease by having the body interred in a Christian ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... neither was he alive. To live, one must chose to live. He was dead with a death that was heavy upon him. There is a far worse death—the death that is content and suffers nothing; but annihilation is not death—is nothing like it. Cosmo's condition had no evil in it—only a ghastly imperfection—an abyssmal lack—an exhaustion at the very roots of being. God seemed away, as he could never be and be God. But every commonest day of his life, he who would be a live child of the living has to fight with the God-denying look of things, and believe that in spite ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... though the savages made vigorous search for him, he remained undiscovered. You can imagine the horrible sight the fort presented when the sun went down, the soldiers in their red uniforms lying there scalped and mangled, a ghastly heap under the summer sky. And to just think it was only a short time ago, a little more ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... back upon the pillow and he made one or two painful efforts to speak before he succeeded in finding a ghastly semblance of ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... all murderers to conceal the traces of their guilt. They dig holes in the earth and bury it, they carry it into the wilderness and hide it, they sink it in the depths of the sea. But the earth will not contain it, the wilderness betrays the ghastly secret, the waves ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... Philosophy had come, with its high-sounding terminology, and invaded the hallowed precincts of Scriptural truth. Literature, with its captivating notes, had well-nigh destroyed what was left of the old Pietistic fervor. The songs of the church were no longer images of beauty, but ghastly, repulsive skeletons. The professor's chair was but little better than a heathen tripod. The pulpit became the rostrum where the shepherdless masses were entertained with vague essays on such general terms as righteousness, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... had been awed and overwhelmed by the accounts of the terrific cannonade and the murderous hand-to-hand struggles. At night she would start up from vivid dreams wherein she saw the field with thousands of ghastly faces turned towards the white moonlight. In her belief Merwyn was incapable of looking upon such scenes. Therefore why should she think of him with scorn and bitterness? She herself had never before realized how terrible they were. Now that the dread emergency, with its imperative demand ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... and stretched himself at full length upon the cushions of the seats. A ghastly, greenish pallor was upon his face and no proof was required that he was far from ...
— Go Ahead Boys and the Racing Motorboat • Ross Kay
... health had been just struck down by a violent kick from a horse, and was not expected to live more than a few hours. The blow had broken his skull bone, and cut out a piece as large as the palm of his hand, presenting a ghastly and horrible sight. ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... sentence. He saw Suzanne opposite him, glaring at the pair of them. She was ghastly pale; and her mouth was wrung with a terrible expression of pain and hatred. He felt that she was ready to fling herself upon them ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... thickness of their chests—what had these figures to do with their captivity? And then the flyer saw the measures compared with the dimensions of a steel cage. Its latticed shape could be endlessly compressed, and within, he saw, were lancet points that lined the ghastly thing throughout. Long enough to torture, but not to kill; a thousand delicate blades to pierce the flesh; and the instrument, it seemed, was of a size that could enclose the writhing, helpless body ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... a shudder. "Hush!" he said, sharply. "It's too ghastly. Don't tell me any more about it." He wandered across the room, pulling a leaf from the azaleas, stopping at the window for a long look out. The wind was blowing some riotous young clouds over the sky like inarticulate shouts. There was an arrogant bird in the elm; there were pert crocus-buds ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... fact that his own wife was wishing him out of the way, praying for death to claim him. Praying? What if the prayers of the wife had in some way wished an illness upon the unsuspecting old man? Of course that was purely grotesque, yet as the ghastly notion occurred to her, Esther felt a sudden longing to confide in someone—Miss Clifford, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... through the ruinous streets of what had been their home, were compelled to tread upon the unburied remains of their fathers, husbands, or brethren. To none of these miserable creatures remained a living protector—hardly even a dead body which could be recognized; and thus the ghastly procession of more than three thousand women, many with gaping wounds in the face, many with their arms cut off and festering, of all ranks and ages, some numbering more than ninety years, bareheaded, with grey hair streaming upon their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... or his son bend to put a head within its jaws, and but for their watchfulness and quickness the tragedy of that other awful night would surely be repeated. Sir, it is not natural; I know now, as surely as if the lion itself had spoken, that someone is at the bottom of this ghastly thing, that some human agency is at work, some unknown enemy of the chevalier's is doing something, God alone knows what or why, to bring about his death as his ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... in vain that Mary prayed and reasoned and strove against the feelings that had been thus powerfully excited. One object alone possessed her imagination—the image of her grandfather dying—dead; his grim features, his ghastly visage, his convulsive grasp, were ever present, by day and by night. Her nervous system had received a shock too powerful for all the strength of her understanding to contend with. Mrs. Douglas sought by every means to soothe ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... become to terrible sights, the horror of that silent, grotesque figure began to freeze Dick Durwent's blood. A few minutes before it had been a thing of life. It had loved and hated and laughed; its veins had coursed with the warm blood of youth; and there it sprawled, a ghastly jumble of arms and legs—motionless, silent, dead. He tried to keep his eyes turned away, but it haunted him. When he stared straight ahead into the dark it beckoned to him—he could see the fingers twitching! And not till he ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... cried in battle-time, When my beautiful heroes perished; The earth of the Lord shall bloom sublime By the blood of his martyrs nourished. "Amen!" I have said, when limbs were hewn And our wounds were blue and ghastly The flesh of a man may fail and swoon But God shall ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... outside the Pale of Jewish Settlement, in the ancient Russian city of Nizhni-Novgorod, which sheltered a small Jewish colony of some twenty families. While comparatively circumscribed as far as the material loss is concerned, the Nizhni-Novgorod pogrom stands out in ghastly relief by the number of its human victims. A report, based upon official data, which endeavors to tone down the colors, gives the following description of ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... strange sea wall That checked the prow of the audacious Gaul, What time he steered towards the southern snow, From zone to zone, four hundred years ago!*3* By yonder gulf, whose marching waters meet The wine-dark currents from the isles of heat, Strong sons of Europe, in a far dim year, Faced ghastly foes, and felt the alien spear! There, in a later dawn, by shipless waves, The tender grasses found forgotten graves.*4* Far in the west, beyond those hills sublime, Dirk Hartog anchored in the ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... with constant zeale, and courage bold, 355 After long paines and labours manifold, He found the meanes that Prisoner up to reare; Whose feeble thighes, unhable to uphold His pined corse, him scarse to light could beare. A ruefull spectacle of death and ghastly drere. 360 ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... impaled on spikes; men, women, and children, were flung from precipices, hacked, tortured, roasted alive; the heads of some of the dead were boiled and the brains eaten; there are forty printed pages, and twenty-six ghastly engravings, by way of Protestant tradition of the ascertained variety of the devilry. The massacre was chiefly in the Valley of Luserna, but extended also into the other two valleys. The fugitives were huddled in crowds high among the mountains, moaning and starving; and not a few, women ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... as Faber was turning to go after him, out, like a bolt, shot from the open door a long-legged, gaunt mongrel dog, in such a pitiful state as I will not horrify my readers by attempting to describe. It is enough to say that the knife had been used upon him with a ghastly freedom. In an agony of soundless terror the poor animal, who could never recover the usage he had had, and seemed likely to tear from himself a part of his body at every bound, rushed through the spectators, who scattered horror-stricken from his path. Ah, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... an hour longer profound silence prevailed. Then Grandidier came out of the pavilion, bareheaded and still ghastly pale. Passing the little glazed work-shop on his way, he perceived Thomas and Pierre there, and at once came in. But he was obliged to lean against a bench like a man who is dazed, haunted by a nightmare. His good-natured, energetic ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... animated, if not a more picturesque landscape, and frequently met and overtook small caravans. One of these had been attacked the previous evening; the poor Arabs had offered a brave resistance, and had beaten off the foe; but one of them was lying half dead upon his camel, with a ghastly shot-wound in ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... I am just after having been killed in a sham battle, and so consequently I feel rather ghastly to-day. I don't exactly know whether I was a Red or a Blue, because I did a deal of fighting on both sides, but always with the same result. I was killed instantly and completely. People got sick of putting me out of my misery after a while and I was allowed to wander around at large ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... ghastly," said her hostess. "You're probably scared to death. This is my son, Delancy, who is going to take you in, and I'm wondering about you, because Delancy doesn't get on with debutantes, but that can't be helped. If he's pig enough not to talk to you, it ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... promised to be merciful, Marius would make no sign. [Sidenote: Death of Octavius.] Octavius is said to have seated himself in his official chair, dressed in his official robes, on the Janiculum, and to have awaited the assassins there. His head was fastened up in front of the Rostra in emulation of the ghastly precedent set by Sulla. He was an obstinate, dull man; and if this burlesque of the conduct of the senators when the Gauls took Rome was really enacted, the theatrical display must have been cold comfort for those of his party on whom his incapacity brought ruin. [Sidenote: Chief victims ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... me advice in his old manner. Twice he addressed me as "My boy," and corrected himself quickly to "Captain." My mate was about to leave me (to get married), but I concealed the fact from Mr. B-. I was afraid he would ask me to give him the berth in some ghastly jocular hint that I could not refuse to take. I was afraid. It would have been impossible. I could not have given orders to Mr. B-, and I am sure he would not have taken them from me very long. He could not have managed that, ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... end with that, sir," the major replied with a gesture of repulsion. "There was a gruesome, ghastly, appalling addition in the shape of two mummy cases—one empty, the other filled. A parchment accompanying these stated that the caliph could not sleep elsewhere but in the land of his fathers, nor sleep there until his beloved ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... fakir sat and stared at them and grinned. Brown raised the lamp and let its rays fall on him. The light glinted off his eyes, and off the only other part of him that shone—the long, curved, ghastly fingernails that had grown through the palm of his ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... in the silent watchfulness of these giants of the deep that a sailor always feels unpleasantly disposed toward them. I thought how ghastly would be the ending of any one who should get overboard that night. The sudden splash, the warm water about the body, and the heads of the fellows at the rail starting to pull the unfortunate aboard. Then the sudden ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... falsely to believe her his benefactor, his agony struck her with remorse. She put her hand to her heart as he ended, and as he left them he saw through his own tears her hand still pressed to her side and her faded face ghastly ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... treats that ghastly experience! It is a dear and lovely disposition, and a most valuable one, that can brush away indignities and discourtesies and seek and find the pleasanter features of an experience. Susy had that disposition, and it was one of the jewels of her character ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... passed by many Zouaves, lying stiff and stark; one I shall always call to mind: he was lying flat on his back, the soles of his feet firm on the ground, his knees drawn up to right angles above, and with his elbows planted on the grass, his fingers clinched the air. His open mouth grinned ghastly on us as ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... of her face and dress. Let me see if I can put together my impressions in the way and form in which I received them, as they were engraved ineffaceably on my brain in the light of the street-lamp which shone luridly over that ghastly scene. But I am exciting myself too much, though there is reason enough for it, as you will see further on. Don't be concerned, however, for the state of my mind. I am ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... They might well strain one another in these terrible clasps, they cried out with pain, they burnt and bruised each other, but were unable to calm their frightfully excited nerves. Each strain rendered their disgust more intense. While exchanging these ghastly embraces, they were a prey to the most terrible hallucinations, imagining that the drowned man was dragging them by the heels, ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... breakfast table. She leaned upon her stick as she walked, and her face seemed more than ever lined in the early morning sunlight. She wore a dress of some soft black material, unrelieved by any patch of color, against which her cheeks were almost ghastly in ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a pitiful wreck. Gordon was cold sober, and it was as if all his vital fluid had evaporated. His face was ghastly, his nerves utterly out of control, and his tongue stumbled as though it were hung by the middle with both ends at odds. Yet for all his shocking physical condition, something in the wastrel Englishman appealed to Barry as no part of the ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... irresponsible, but up to this he had not clearly seen the villainy of Rochester. The woman showed it. Rochester had picked up a stranger, because of the mutual likeness, and sent him home to play his part, hoping, no doubt, to have a ghastly hit at his family. What about his wife? He had either never thought of her, ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... me by thy petty malice," answered Front-de-Boeuf, with a ghastly and constrained laugh. "The infidel Jew—it was merit with Heaven to deal with him as I did, else wherefore are men canonized who dip their hands in the blood of Saracens? The Saxon porkers whom I have slain—they were the foes of my country, and of my lineage, and of my liege lord. Ho! ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... alas!—Now ghastly desolation, In triumph, sits upon our shatter'd spires; Now superstition, ignorance, and errour, Usurp our temples, and profane ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... or gave to their people peace, happiness or justice, but on the contrary inaugurated a veritable reign of terror under which murder became a governmental institution, while rape, inhuman torture, burying alive and other ghastly crimes were of common occurrence, and usually went unpunished. The data which I use in establishing these contentions are for the most part taken directly from the Insurgent records, in referring to which I employ ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... from the stream and laid on the shingle just as the foot men arrived with torches. It was a sad spectacle, this fine old man we all loved and respected so much, only a few hours before full of life and health, now a ghastly corpse, his hair and long white beard lying dank over his cold white face and glaring eyes. The scene was rendered all the more weird and awful by the surroundings, the still dark night, the rushing water, and overhanging cliffs under the red glare of ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... upon the disposition, rank, residence, of the young lady attempting it. Town-bred girl will utter some moral paradox on fast men, or love. Country miss adopts the more material media of taking a ghastly fence, whistling, or making your blood run cold by appearing to risk her neck. (MEM. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... sun had driven the appearance of night from the room, making the paraphernalia of sickness more ghastly than they had been under the light of the lamp, the brother turned himself back again, and began to talk of those things which ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... melancholy at that time, O Friend! Were my day-thoughts,—my nights were miserable; Through months, through years, long after the last beat Of those atrocities, the hour of sleep 400 To me came rarely charged with natural gifts, Such ghastly visions had I of despair And tyranny, and implements of death; And innocent victims sinking under fear, And momentary hope, and worn-out prayer, 405 Each in his separate cell, or penned in crowds For sacrifice, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... eyes she stared. Surely the heavy breath had come more quickly a moment ago. It seemed an age between each rise and fall of the coverlet. There was a ghastly whistling sound of it ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... a puzzling and unexplainable feature of these battlefields was that so many of the dead were found lying on their backs with rigid arms stretched straight up toward heaven—a ghastly spectacle. ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... briefly; and his glance rested on me for a moment in defiant significance. And then, without another word, he turned on his heel. He took no heed of Lafleur's dead body, that seemed to fondle the box, huddling it in a ghastly embrace, nor of me, who swayed and tottered and sank on the ground by the corpse. With set lips and eager eyes he passed me, taking the road by which we had come. And I, hugging my wounded arm, with open eyes and parted lips, saw him dive ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... with the works of Edgar A. Poe. Many will say that it might better not have been written, so utterly repulsive is it, but others will value it as a striking, though distorted, expression of unmistakable genius. It is a ghastly and gruesome creation. Not one bright ray redeems it. It deals with the most evil characters and the most evil phases of human experience. But it fascinates. Heathcliff, the chief figure in the book, is one of the greatest villains in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... her two hands upon her heart, and struggled, and gasped,—as though she wished to speak but could not. "I suppose it is that girl who has done it all," said Lucinda. Lizzie nodded her head, and tried to smile. The attempt was so ghastly that Lucinda, though not timid by nature, was frightened. She sat down and took Lizzie's hand, and tried to comfort her. "It is very hard upon you," she said, "to be twice robbed." Lizzie again nodded her head. "I hope it is not much now. Shall we go up and see?" The ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... firewood, and without too much trouble can be dragged out by horses! As a preliminary calamity, half-starved cows were turned in to nibble the grass, and incidentally to trample and crush flowers and ferns into one ghastly ruin. And at the same moment, as if inspired by the same spirit of destruction, some idle railroad "hand," with a scythe, laid low the whole bank of grapevines. Ruthless was the ruin, and wrecked beyond repair the spot, after man's desolating hand passed over it; a scene ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... Ghastly was the ruin that escaped, and awful was the wrath of the Bazar-Sergeant. Awful too was the scene in Orderly-room when the two reprobates appeared to answer the charge of half-murdering a "civilian." The ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... the dense thicket or isolated places, seeking lost friends and comrades, whose names were unanswered to at the roll call, and who were not among the wounded and dead at the hospital. The pale moon looked down in sombre silence upon the ghastly upturned faces of the dead that lay strewn along the battle line. The next day was a ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... her husband in education, and in almost every respect. She is surrounded by the most numerous and delicate attentions. Yet she is not satisfied.... The Anglo-Saxon 'new woman' is the most ridiculous production of modern times, and destined to be the most ghastly failure of the century." Apart from the deprecation—perhaps well placed—which is contained in this presentment, it adds nothing but obscurity to the woman question. The grievance of the new woman is made up ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... did not speak a word and his very neighbors could not have stated at what precise moment he had sat down between them; but every one felt that if the dead did ever come and sit at the table of the living, they could not cut a more ghastly figure. The friends of Firmin Richard and Armand Moncharmin thought that this lean and skinny guest was an acquaintance of Debienne's or Poligny's, while Debienne's and Poligny's friends believed that the cadaverous individual belonged to Firmin ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... you, sir," said the sufferer, with a ghastly attempt at a smile, as he screwed his head round to ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... "A ghastly error," said Braddock Washington angrily. "But of course there's a good chance that we may have got him. Perhaps he fell somewhere in the woods or stumbled over a cliff. And then there's always the probability that if he did get away his ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the booth stood the old Laird Fisher, his face ghastly pale, his eyes big and restless, the rain dripping from ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... disappears on the horizon, dashing his hopes to the ground. It appeared, as I learned afterwards, that these children saw me, though I could not see them, and ran away terrified at my unearthly aspect. Doubtless the head of a man protruding from a deep snow drift, crowned and bearded with ice like a ghastly emblem of winter, was a sight to cause a panic among children, and one cannot wonder that they ran off to communicate the news that "there was the bogie in the snow." Happily, however, for the bogie, he had noticed the direction from which these voices came, and struggling ...
— A Night in the Snow - or, A Struggle for Life • Rev. E. Donald Carr
... he showed his great powers of oratory and the splendid and thrilling notes of his fine voice. He defended himself at once from the charge of undue partiality with strong passion and deep emotion, which lie hidden beneath his deep reserve. With a face ghastly almost in its greyness, in its deepening glows and manifest passion, he repudiated the charge of unfairness; he vehemently struck his hand on the order paper which he held, and as he neared to the end of his little speech there was a ring in his voice dangerously near a sob ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... without doubt; but are the blind man, the beggar, the madman, the poor peasant, recompensed for their long life of misery by the single reflection that death is not an evil for them? No! An implacable melancholy, a ghastly fatality, overshadows the artist's work. It resembles a bitter imprecation upon the ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... light of dawn was just sufficient to give a ghostly appearance to what may be truly termed the ghastly ruins around them, and to reveal in undefined solemnity the neighbouring mountains. Smoke still issued from the half-smothered fires, and here and there a spectral figure might be seen flitting silently to and fro. But all was profoundly still and quiet, ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... a combined effort on the part of mankind to improve natural knowledge might have loomed larger than the Plague and have outshone the glare of the Fire; as a something fraught with a wealth of beneficence to mankind, in comparison with which the damage done by those ghastly evils would shrink ...
— On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge • Thomas H. Huxley
... sitting with her master's head in her lap. Marie had taken off Claude's helmet and revealed a ghastly wound on the temple. Marguerite stood beside her horse, shading her eyes with her hand, her face tense and strained as she watched the issue of the combat. It was not till the victor, flushed but triumphant, his gay riding-suit covered with blood and dust, advanced, and doffing ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... prevent this latter calamity, we hauled the boat farther up and held the cable in our hands. Occasional flashes of lightning shone with a ghastly glare through the watery curtains around us, and lent additional horror to the scene. Yet we longed for those dismal flashes, for they were less appalling than the thick blackness that succeeded them. Crashing peals of thunder seemed to tear the skies in twain, and fell upon our ears through ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... Say, Gren, I have killed a man. Dannox got my bullet right in the head and he never knew what hit him. Ghastly, isn't it? I feel beastly queer. It was he who turned on the lights and went at you with a club. I heard you call, and was in the door just as he hit you. His finish came inside of a second. You and he spoiled the handsomest ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... milder efforts; the door did not even shake to his stoutest kick. Breathless and panting, he desisted. I then tried the door myself, equally in vain. As I ceased from the effort, again that creep of horror came over me; but this time it was more cold and stubborn. I felt as if some strange and ghastly exhalation were rising up from the chinks of that rugged floor, and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life. The door now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own accord. We precipitated ourselves into the landing place. ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... of running water outside their shelter gradually forced its way into the tumult. The road was a yellow waterway; the brook tore above the limit of its deep banks into a widening saffron river among the green meadows, which showed in the ghastly light ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... Lord, will you be pleased to try the block?" Lord Kenmure, in reply, laid down his head on the block, and spread forth his hands. The headsman instantly performed his office. The usual words, "This is the head of a traitor!" were heard as the executioner displayed the streaming and ghastly sight ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... face very white and wan. Out in the dining-room could be heard voluble voices, weeping, and Irish expletives of mingled wrath and grief,—and then, with eyes dilating with horror, with streaming hair, with pallid lips and a ghastly look in her white face, Grace Truscott, clad in a morning wrapper, came rushing through the little parlor into the hall, gave one glance at her girl friend, and then, stretching ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... I verily believe it is my last visit," he answered, with a ghastly attempt at a smile. "I am done for, Holly. I am done for. I do not believe that ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... the possibility of collision with the armed forces of the Spaniards; and thenceforward, for four full days, the train wound its perilous way along narrow pathways bounded on the one hand by towering, inaccessible, rocky cliffs, and on the other by ghastly precipices, of such awful depth that their bases were frequently hidden by the wreaths of mountain mist floating far below; across frail swing bridges stretched from side to side of those awful, fathomless rifts called barrancas which seem ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood |
