"Ghoul" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and how she had loved her and appointed her her vice-queen and how she was thus become ruler over all the kings of the Jinn; and she showed him the patent of investiture that Queen Es Shuhba had written her and told him that which had betided her with the Ghoul-head, whenas it appeared to her in the garden, and how she had despatched it to her palace, beseeching it to bring her news of the Commander of the Faithful and that which had betided him after her. Then she described to him the gardens, wherein she had ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... never conceived anything so horrible. There is a face in one of the latter's illustrations to Un Voyage ou il vous plaira, which somewhat approaches the countenance of this creature, but does not equal it. It was the physiognomy of what I should fancy a ghoul might be. It looked as if it was capable ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... lights burn low, the music of the accompanying orchestra moans forth a sinister strain given by the flutes, mingled with a rattling tremolo which sounds like the clatter of bones. This creature evidently plays an ugly part in the piece—that of a horrible old ghoul, spiteful and famished. Still more appalling than her person is her shadow, which, projected upon a white screen, is abnormally and vividly distinct; by means of some unknown process this shadow, which nevertheless ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... forget the face of the wretched young chaplain who, like myself, found himself face to face with his first encounter with sudden death, and who, poor soul, had over-primed himself with stimulant. I shall never forget, either, that ghoul of a Calcraft, with his disreputable grey hair, his disreputable undertaker's suit of black, and a million dirty pin-pricks which marked every pore of the skin of his face. Calcraft took the business business-like, and pinioned his man in the cell (with a terror-stricken half-dozen ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... combatants whirled in the air like flails. The faces of the men, at first flushed to flame-colored anger, now began to fade to the pallor of warriors in the blood and heat of a battle. Their lips curled back and stretched tightly over the gums in ghoul-like grins. Through their white, gripped teeth struggled hoarse whisperings of oaths. Their eyes ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... meet a passing miner. Grasping his ponderous tools, he flits by like a phantom; even in the momentary glance, we can perceive how livid his sunless labor has left him; he is blanched as a ghoul, and moves as noiselessly, with feather-light step. Each with a motion salutes the Captain; but they do not heed the little group of strangers who have braved so many dangers to behold the wonders which to them are as ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... asp, rattlesnake, anaconda^. canker-worm, wire-worm; locust, Colorado beetle; alacran^, alligator, caymon^, crocodile, mosquito, mugger, octopus; torpedo; bane &c 663. cutthroat &c (killer) 461. cannibal; anthropophagus^, anthropophagist^; bloodsucker, vampire, ogre, ghoul, gorilla, vulture; gyrfalcon^, gerfalcon^. wild beast, tiger, hyena, butcher, hangman; blood-hound, hell- hound, sleuth-hound; catamount [U.S.], cougar, jaguar, puma. hag, hellhag^, beldam, Jezebel. monster; fiend &c (demon) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... were not to escape lightly. Talpers's attitude was a menace until, through a fortunate set of circumstances, we managed to secure a compensating hold over him. Undoubtedly Talpers had been first on the scene after the murder. He had robbed my brother's body, and was caught in his ghoul-like act by his partner, Jim McFann. The half-breed believed Talpers when the trader told him that a watch was all he had found on the dead man. The later discovery that Talpers had deceived him, and had ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... Wales should come to inquire after the queen, he answered in the following terms, worthy of his ancestry—worthy of himself. It is difficult to say which was the most painful scene, that in the chamber where the queen lay in agony, or without, where the curse of family dissensions came like a ghoul to hover near the bed of death, and to gloat over the royal corpse. This was the royal dictum:—'If the puppy should, in one of his impertinent airs of duty and affection, dare to come to St. James's, I order you to go to ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... he turned, and with teeth tight clenched, He told her he hated her,— That his love for her from his heart he wrenched Like a corpse from a sepulcher. And then she called him "a ghoul all red With the quintessence of crimes"— "But I know you love me now," she said, And kissed ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... authentic narratives, we used to be very reluctant to retire to our dormitories, and never ventured to get into bed till we had examined suspicious-looking closets, old wardrobes, and, indeed, every nook and corner that might be supposed to harbor a ghost or a ghoul. ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... penetrate; it played about the mildewy stucco partitions encrusted, in patches, with a poisonous lichen of bright green. Wandering about this dank and mournful pile of wreckage, he could understand why simple folks should dread to enter so ghoul-haunted a spot. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... so superbly!" We had Dr. Blimber himself, besides, with his learned legs, like a clerical pianoforte—a bald head, highly polished, and a chin so double, it was a wonder how he ever managed to shave into the creases. We had Miss Blimber, in spectacles, like a ghoul, "dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages." We had Mrs. Blimber, not learned herself, but pretending to be so, which did quite as well, languidly exclaiming at evening parties, that if she could have known Cicero, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... the ghoul of the "Arabian Nights," the readers of which will remember the story of Amina, who goes out at night to feast on ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... fell ophidian as in fierce meridian of Afric ever lurked in swamp or brake; And yet Corinthian LYCIUS never doted on the white-throated charmer of his soul With blinder passion than our fools of Fashion Feel for this gruesome ghoul. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 4, 1891 • Various
... from the store of that in him which he felt to be the purest, the cleanest, and the best, its bulk fattened upon the rot and the decay of all that was good, growing larger day by day, noisome, swollen, poddy, a filthy inordinate ghoul, gorged and bloated by feeding on the good ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... as if I had been drinking for a week, and had a lively sort of a nightmare! Here comes another ghoul, in a false face and black gown and hood! Now, how is anybody to tell what it is? Whether it is a tall woman or a short man? Gentleman, or lady, if your honor pleases?" said Joseph Joy, addressing himself to a black domino ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... the poor woman's frame at this confirmation of the awful revealment of the previous night; but she replied calmly, though with added sternness,—"He was my husband. How dared you disturb his bones? Are you a ghoul, that you burrow among graves ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... face, retreating once more behind the veils of mist. The breeze itself was lulled and the fog gathered itself together and wrapped the unavowable horrors of the night in a gray and ghoul-like shroud. ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... of the misery the whole thing causes me. I cannot understand it. What possible affinity there can be between myself and that disgusting little snob passes my comprehension. I assure you, my dear Mac, the knowledge that I was a ghoul, or a vampire, would cause me less nausea than the reflection that I am one and the same with that odious little Whitechapel bounder. When I think of him every nerve ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... the penangalan takes possession of the forms of women, turns them into witches, and compels them to quit the greater part of their bodies, and flyaway by night to gratify a vampire craving for human blood. This is very like one of the ghoul stories in the Arabian Nights Entertainments. Then they have a specter huntsman with demon dogs who roams the forests, and a storm fiend who rides the whirlwind, and spirits borrowed from Persia and Arabia. It ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... that connects Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely confessed regard for Hareton Earnshaw—the young man whom he has ruined; and then his half-implied esteem for Nelly Dean." But that Heathcliff is wholly inhuman—"a ghoul, an afreet"—I cannot really see. Emily's psychology here is perforce half on the unearthly plane; it is above our criticism, lending itself to no ordinary tests. But for all his unearthliness, Heathcliff is poignantly human, from his childhood when he implored Nelly ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... out a tattered yellowish journal. His lynx eyes peered up from under lanky wisps of hair, and his voice had the proprietary note of one making "a corner" in his news. Keith took the paper and gave him twopence. He even found a sort of comfort in the young ghoul's hanging about there; it meant that others besides himself had come morbidly to look. By the dim lamplight he read: "Glove Lane garrotting mystery. Nothing has yet been discovered of the murdered man's identity; from the cut of his clothes he is supposed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... my pretty passenger pigeon," replied the elder with a ghoul-like grin; "you will not require to find your way back this year." And the foaming, exhausted animals, relieved from the trying gallop, dropped into a feeble trot or lazy canter, whilst Amanda gazed wistfully ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... stone's throw out on either hand From that well-ordered road we tread, And all the world is wild and strange; Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite Shall bear us company to-night, For we have reached the Oldest Land Wherein the Powers of ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... a Scot who can blindly dote On the face of an Eastern ghoul, And a ghoul who was worth not a silver groat, Is a Scot ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... their earnest speechifying, and the gesticulation that accompanies it. Without comprehending a word that is said, Seagriff knows too well what they are talking about; their gestures are too intelligible with the lurid glare in their ghoul-like eyes. All that he sees portends a danger that he shrinks from declaring to his companions. They will doubtless learn ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... There is the hand pointing upward, here balanced on the top of an obelisk and there upon a cross. The white-robed angel, free from the remotest shadow of expression, meets us again and again. "All this is mine," says the tradesman ghoul. "Behold the names of me—Slap & Dash here, the Ugliness Company there, and this the work of the Cheap and Elegant Funeral Association. This is where we slew the art of sculpture. These are our trophies that sculpture is no more. All ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Best—and if Samoa didn't do, you needn't stay beyond the month, and I should have had another pleasure in my life, which is a serious consideration for me. I take this as the hand of the Lord preparing your way to Vailima—in the desert, certainly—in the desert of Cough and by the ghoul-haunted woodland of Fever—but whither that way points there can be no question—and there will be a meeting of the twa Hoasting Scots Makers in spite of fate, fortune and the Devil. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is, every man has, the moment he awakes, a hatred of his dream, and a great desire to be free of the dream, free of the persistent mother-image or sister-image of the dream. It is a ghoul, it haunts his dreams, this image, with its hateful conclusions. And yet he cannot get free. As long as a man lives he may, in his dreams of passion or conflict, be haunted by the mother-image or sister-image, even when he knows that the cause of the disturbing dream is the ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... feel like a ghoul,—man-hunting in One-lungdom, as Mr. Bierce calls it. Besides, I'd rather die an old maid than have a sick man on my hands for five minutes. I'm not heartless, but—well, we've all had our experiences with fathers and brothers. A sick man's an anomaly, ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... sort of expedition! That Durdles himself, who is always prowling among old graves, and ruins, like a Ghoul— that he should be stealing forth to climb, and dive, and wander without an object, is nothing extraordinary; but that the Choir- Master or any one else should hold it worth his while to be with him, and to study moonlight effects in such company is another affair. ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... said hoarsely. "I don't want to travel with that man! I won't associate with a ghoul! My God, I'm ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... old Mr. Harding, looking in the moonlight like some hideous old ghoul. "What game of cross-purposes and ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... to look at him, "I'm in up to my neck, and getting deeper. Owe! B'gad, Beverley—I believe you!" But now, at sight of gravefaced Barnabas, he laughed again, and this time it sounded less ghoul-like. "Debt is a habit," he continued sententiously, "that grows on one most damnably, and creditors are the most annoying people in the world—so confoundedly unreasonable! Of course I pay 'em—now ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... discordant cry could be heard somewhere in the distance, ending in a spasmodic jerk. It was like nothing human. Yet strangely it suggested something human. As if some unearthly ghoul were trying to simulate the wailing of human anguish.... Then again it was quite grotesque, bearing no resemblance to the cry ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... wert England's Nature, Bard Supreme, To fashion kings and lordlings fit to rule; They would be flesh and blood, not fiend and ghoul; And would thou wert her Sun, that every beam Might not, for tally, show a youth's blood-pool, Choking blithe Spring, as, now, to ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... to which people in society are naturally inclined, produced a large and growing crop of the most amusing ideas, the most curious expressions, the most absurd fables concerning this mysterious individual. Without being precisely a vampire, a ghoul, a fictitious man, a sort of Faust or Robin des Bois, he partook of the nature of all these anthropomorphic conceptions, according to those persons who were addicted to the fantastic. Occasionally some German would take ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... ashen and sober, The leaves they were crisped and sere,— " " " withering " " It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year; It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,— " " down " " dark tarn " " In the misty mid region of Weir,— " " ghoul-haunted woodland " " ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... gratified with exhibitions of suffering, compared with which the bloodiest arena was tame and insipid. Your Christian Rome, in the superb metaphor of Hobbes, was but the ghost of Pagan Rome, sitting throned and crowned on the grave thereof; nay, a ghoul, feeding not on the dead limbs of men, but on their living hearts and brains. Look at your Cross! Before Christ appeared it was the symbol of life; since it has been the symbol of misery and humiliation; and in the name of your Crucified One the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... been the ardor of their guilty passion, their confinement together in this foul cell had resulted in a mutual loathing. Within the narrow limits of these walls neither seemed able to support the barest contact with the other. They glared at each other in the dim light with ghoul-like eyes, and at night they lay down at opposite sides of the floor on bundles of straw for beds. This straw, having served them in their poverty for weeks and even months, had fermented ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... It was Hood's haunted house put in order and newly painted. The servants, too, were shadowy, and chary of their visits. Bells rang three times before the gloomy chambermaid could be induced to present herself; and the negro waiter, a ghoul-like looking creature from Congo, obeyed the summons only when one's patience was exhausted or one's want satisfied in some other way. When he did come, one felt sorry that he had not stayed away ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... is just an old body snatcher that snoops round robbing the graves of antiquity and setting up his loot in their museum at the university. No good telling that old ghoul to let the dead rest. He simply won't hear of it. He wants remains. He wants to have 'em out in the light of day and stick labels on their long-peaceful skulls. He don't act subdued or proper about it either, or kind ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... contents. A delicate perfume stole out into the room from those closely pressed sheets, so eagerly clutched in his yellow-stained fingers. A little bunch of crushed violets slipped to the floor unheeded. Ghoul-like he bent over the pages of delicate writing, the intimate, passionate cry of a soul seeking for its mate. They were no ordinary love-letters. Mostly they were beyond the comprehension of the creature who spelt them out word for word, ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... orders of Government? Burley's character for ruthlessness is defended by the evidence of the "Scottish Worthies." As Dr. McCrie objects to his "buffoonery," it is odd that he palliates the "strong propensity" of Knox "to indulge his vein of humour," when describing, with ghoul-like mirth, the festive circumstances of the murder and burial of Cardinal Beaton. The odious part of his satire, Scott says, is confined to "the fierce and unreasonable set of extra-Presbyterians," Wodrow's High Flyers. "We have no delight to dwell either upon ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... in au'gu rate joust sut'ure ce ru'le an guide pup'pet vi tu'per ate yours su'mac ac cu'mu late ghoul ful'some co ad ju'tor gi'aour con'duit pu'pil la ry de but cu'cum ber in'sti tute duc'at tru'cu lent eu re'ka U'lan con nois seur' cae su'ra sup'ple ju'gu lar con'sti tute du'ty nu'mer ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... fair son with a king's fair daughter, And full three hundred beside, they say, — Revelling on for the lone, cold slaughter So soon to seize them and hide them for aye; But they danced and they drank and their souls grew gay, Nor ever they knew of a ghoul's eye spying Their splendor a flickering phantom to stray Where the bones of the brave in the ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... The leaves they were crisped and sere— The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year: It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir:— It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... too tired to go on again, he had come to the beginnings of fertile land. He passed a village, but it had been looted, and he skirted around it rather than stare at the ghastly ghoul-work of the looters. The world was ending, but civilization seemed to have ended already. Beyond it, he came to a rude house, now abandoned. ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... in the so-called darkness of the Middle Ages, there were certain countries in Europe that believed in the existence of a fiend or ghoul that inhabited lonely places and unfrequented woods, and tore to pieces the imprudent traveller that ventured on its path. This fiend of the desert and lonely wood was at best but a fabrication of an excited fancy; ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... hurled itself across the brightness of my day. It seemed that after all I had hurried unnecessarily, for the financial problem forces itself even into the seventh heaven of love, and now it came like a ghoul to devour my happiness. It assumed concrete form in a picture of Doctor Todd when I went to him empty-handed, and I could not help feeling that it would have been better had I not let suspicion and jealousy hurry me to the attainment ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... of the litter, and beheld the great khan as he caroused; and when she beheld his hairy form, his gleaming eyes, his pug-nose, and his tremendously wide mouth—when she perceived that he had the form and features of a ghoul, or evil spirit, she wrung her hands, and wept bitterly, and all her love returned ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... bent, his long, yellow bony fingers clasped over the crutch-head of his stick, he was indeed a picture of misery, famine, squalor, and premature age, too horrible to dwell upon. I made him sit down, sent for some refreshment which he devoured like a ghoul, and set to work to unravel his story. It was difficult to keep him to the point; but with pains I learned what convinced me that he was entitled to some property, whether great or small there was no evidence. On parting, I said, "Now, Mr. F, you must stay in town while I make proper ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... ghoul, or a vampire?" I mused. I had read of such hideous incarnate demons. And then I set myself to reflect how I had tended him in infancy, and watched him grow to youth, and followed him almost through his ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... consecutive nights I suffered from a sort of vampire cockroach, who crept under my pyjamas whilst I slept, and nibbled my chest. When I awoke, I could feel him hurrying off by way of my arm or leg. The moment worn-out nature reasserted itself in me, and I dozed again, that ghoul of a cockroach came back and proceeded with its fell banquet. At length, weakened no doubt by loss of blood and frantic with the thought that a mere piece of determined vermin should thus habitually sup off me, I rose in the dead of a moonless night, turned on the electric light, selected ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... broke from the lips of the dead man, and the ghoul turned and fled, gibbering in ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... when I am on my death-bed?' Every cross word, every small disobedience, she was told, would be a 'thorn in her dying pillow.' I said, perhaps rather rudely, that Great-aunt Alison must have been a horrible old ghoul, but Jean defended her hotly. She seems to have had a great admiration for her aged relative, though she owned that her death was something of a relief. Unfortunately most of her ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... Gavin stood stock still, like an intruder. Then he ran towards the singing, which seemed to come from Windy ghoul, a straight road through Caddam that farmers use in summer, but leave in the back end of the year to leaves and pools. In Windyghoul there is either no wind or so much that it rushes down the sieve like ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... hands that work for thee, And fill his eyes with tears of agony, Till love shall turn as acid to his teeth, And thorns shall tear his side with hellish wreath, And daggers pierce his heart, and ice his soul, And thou become to him a hated ghoul! ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... rat, at the end of his amazing lightning display, reached the barn, with his mate behind him, he leapt—he could not stop—clean over the back of one great twenty-inch, glitter-eyed brown ghoul, called by the death-scream of his colleague—other rats usually answer it—coming out of a hole. The black rats dashed into the hole like flickering streaks, but the brown rat had instantly spun upon himself, and ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... audiences to riot. Against his brother editors he hurled such epithets as "loathsome and leprous slanderer and libeller," "pestilential scoundrel," "polluted wretch," "foul jaws," "common bandit," "prince of darkness," "turkey buzzard," "ghoul." Somehow, in thinking of the old days, I find it hard to reconcile those men and women who lived under the Knickerbocker sway with their newspapers. It is pleasanter to dwell upon the old customs, to picture Mr. Manhattan leaving the scurrilous sheet behind him ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... eyes closed in sleep, a curse, yelled into his ear, awoke him. Ta-inga-ro gave him drink from time to time, but never food, and so they rode for days. At last hunger overbore his loathing, and sinking his teeth into the dead flesh before him he feasted like a ghoul. ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... in their being really ghouls and ghosts, that it is not to be denied that strange feelings creep over one in reading their stories at the witching hour, when the fire is nearly out, and the candle-wicks are an inch and a half long. The Frenchman seldom introduces a ghost—never a ghoul; but he makes up for it by describing human beings with sentiments which would probably make the ghoul feel ashamed to associate with them. The utmost extent of human profligacy is depicted, but still the profligacy is human; it is only an amplification—very clever ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... Lord Monmouth at once,' said Lucretia, rising, her natural pallor aggravated into a ghoul-like tint. ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... Princess of China languished! Far away Was marriage, with a Vizier and a Chief Of Eunuchs and the privilege Of going out at night To play—unkenned, majestical, secure - Where the old, brown, friendly river shaped Like Tigris shore for shore! Haply a Ghoul Sat in the churchyard under a frightened moon, A thighbone in his fist, and glared At supper with a Lady: she who took Her rice with tweezers grain by grain. Or you might stumble—there by the iron gates Of the Pump Room—underneath ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... reward which life offers to those who crave it, is suffering and death. The desire of life—the Indian tanha or thirst of existence—Agur represents in the form of the beautiful but terrible Ghoul of the desert who has two daughters: birth and death. By means of her fascinating charms she entices the wanderer to her arms, but instead of satiating his soul with the promised joys, she ruthlessly flings him to her two daughters who tear him to pieces and devour ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... swirling waters—what if there, too, were merely a beginning again, and to seek a slumbering refuge there merely a blind and reiterated plunge into the heat and tumult of another day? Who was that poor, dark, homeless ghoul, Sabathier? Who was this Helen of an impossible dream? Her face with its strange smile, her eyes with their still pity and rapt courage had taken hope away. 'Here's not your rest,' cried one insistent voice; 'she is the mystery that haunts day ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... and slow, bear him swiftly past. With a curve and a sweep he circles round, down come the long bony legs, the bald and hideous neck is extended, and with talons quivering for the rotting flesh, and cruel beak agape, he hurries on to his repast, the embodiment of everything ghoul-like and ghastly. In his wake comes another, then twos and threes, anon tens and twenties, till hundreds have collected, and the ground is covered with the hissing, tearing, fiercely clawing crowd. It is a horrible sight to see a heap of vultures battling over ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... room, and seeking my wife, laid the case before her. "This is a ghoul," I said, "that we harbour: he is sucking my best blood, and the household is clean bewitched." She laid aside the book in which she read, and laughed at me. Now my wife was well-looking, and her eyes were the light of my soul. Consider, then, how I felt as she laughed, taking the ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the door, which she had left half open, and followed her by moonlight, till I saw her enter a burying- ground just by our house. I got to the end of the wall, taking care not to be seen, and looking over, saw Ameeneh with a ghoul. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... helping his employer to rise, was coolly reloading his rifle, did not immediately reply. As the shaken and somewhat unmanned Coronado looked at him, he was afraid of him. The moonlight made Smith's sallow, disfigured face so much more ghastly than usual, that he had the air of a ghoul or vampyre. And when, after carefully capping his piece, he drawled forth the word "Patchies," his harsh, croaking voice had an unwholesome, unhuman sound, as if it were indeed the utterance ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... fourth man poked among the packs. There was little to see except gleaming teeth and the whites of eyes, set in hairy faces in the mist. But Ismail danced all by himself among the stones of Khyber road and he looked like a bearded ghoul out ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... but Dickens who has a style that can drag these things into light. His style shrieks sometimes like a ghoul tugging at the roots of a mandrake. At other times it wails like a lost soul. At other times it mutters, and whimpers, and pipes in its throat, like an old man blinking at the moon. At other times ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... a panther in its den To do thee service as thy man of men, Or front the Fates, or, like a ghoul, confer With staring ghosts outside a sepulchre. I would forego a limb to give thee life, Or yield my soul itself in any strife, In any coil of doubt, in any spot When Death and Danger meet as ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... truth, I do look upon you as a sort of intellectual ghoul; you really do remind me of the lady in the Arabian Nights, whose taste or appetite, which you will, led her to scorn everything that did not ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... voyage, seldom tasted wine; and that, when he did occasionally take some, it was never more than half a glass mixed with water. He ate but little; and never any meat; only bread and vegetables. He made me think of the ghoul taking rice with ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... as he naturally was at his young master's unaccountable appearance and evident panic, nevertheless never moved a muscle of his face; he was one of those perfectly bred servants, who, if they chanced to open the door to a ghoul or a skeleton, would merely inquire, "What name, if ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... and frozen wold, oer horrid hill and gloomy glen, The home of grisly beast and Ghoul,* the ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... me wrongly at the very outset of our interview, and your once reputed skill as a Seer goes for naught! To me the world is a graveyard full of dead, worm-eaten things, and its supposititious Creator, whom you have so be praised in your orisons to-night, is the Sexton who entombs, and the Ghoul who devours his own hapless Creation! I myself am one of the tortured and dying, and I have sought you simply that you may trick me into a brief oblivion of my doom, and mock me with the mirage of a life that is not and can never be! How can you serve me? Give me a few hours' respite ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... night at Lady St Julians," said Mr Egerton, "and congratulated him on his brother's speech. He looked daggers, and grinned like a ghoul." ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... be expected to-morrow?" inquired Isfendiyar. "To-morrow," replied the demon-guide, "thou wilt meet with an enchantress, who can convert the stormy sea into dry land, and the dry land again into the ocean. She is attended by a gigantic ghoul, or apparition." "Then thou shalt see how easily this enchantress and her ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... belts, and sometimes the animals were even painted. Skulls of sheep and cattle, and even of human beings were often carried on the saddlebows to add another element of terror. A framework was sometimes made to fit the shoulders of a Ghoul which caused him to appear twelve feet high. A skeleton wooden hand at the end of a stick served to greet terrified Negroes at midnight. For safety every man carried a small whistle and a brace ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... arrives at the conclusion that Conchita—long loved by him, long vainly solicited—has surrendered her heart to the gigantic Texan, who like a sinister shadow, a ghoul, a very ogre, has chanced across the sunlight ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... out on either hand From that well-ordered road we tread, And all the world is wild and strange; Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite Shall bear us company to-night, For we have reached the Oldest Land Wherein ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... recent instance of an Aghori devouring human corpses is reported from the Punjab: [11] "The loathsome story of a human ghoul from Patiala shows that the influence of the Aghorpanthi has not yet completely died out in this country. It is said that for some time past human graves have been found robbed of their contents, and the mystery could not be solved until the other ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... the ghoul in the grave was a long tangle of black hair defiled with clay: but this was such an anti-climax that it received little attention. Suddenly, with a short exclamation and a gesture of excitement, the young man unearthed a fragment of grayish rock, and after a hurried inspection ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... himself on one of the trunks of Borroughcliffe, utterly disdaining the use of a chair; and, with the trencher in his lap, was using his own jack-knife on the dilapidated fragment of the ox, with something of that nicety with which the female ghoul of the Arabian Tales might be supposed to pick her rice with the point of her bodkin. The captain drew a seat nigh the cockswain; and, with a familiarity and kindness infinitely condescending, when the difference in their several conditions is considered, he commenced ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... in the persistent vitality and industry of this man. Only forty years of age when the Long Parliament released him from his second imprisonment and restored him to society, a ghoul-like creature with a scarred and mutilated face, hiding the loss of his twice-cropped ears under a woollen cowl or nightcap, and mostly sitting alone among his books and papers in his chamber in Lincoln's Inn, taking no regular meals, but occasionally munching bread and refreshing ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson |
