"Grim" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... smoked on, with his back to the group. But the rest were a picture—the mutinous face and keen eyes of Fanny Dover, bristling with defense, at the window; Zoe blushing crimson, and newly started away from her too-enterprising wooer; and the tall, thin, grim old maid, standing stiff, as sentinel, at the bedroom door, and gimleting both her charges alternately with steel-gray orbs; she seemed like an owl, all ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... Gavin's knowledge of the grim men with whom he had now to deal. But as he sat beside Margaret after she had gone to bed, their talk ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... and farm-houses, several "leading citizens" had placed, above the river-bank, their prim wood-cut "residences," with porticoes and terraced lawns; and from the chief of these, Hopewood, brought into the Westmore family by the Miss Hope who had married an earlier Westmore, the grim mill-village had been carved. The pillared "residences" had, after this, inevitably fallen to base uses; but the old house at Hopewood, in its wooded grounds, remained, neglected but intact, beyond the first bend of the river, deserted ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... characteristics discoverable by the stranger in Mr F.'s Aunt, were extreme severity and grim taciturnity; sometimes interrupted by a propensity to offer remarks in a deep warning voice, which, being totally uncalled for by anything said by anybody, and traceable to no association of ideas, confounded and terrified the Mind. Mr F.'s Aunt may have thrown in these observations on some ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... to like it. She felt that she had done all that could reasonably be required of her when autographs, photographs, and autobiographical sketches had been sown broadcast over the land; when artists had taken her home in all its aspects, and reporters had taken her in the grim one she always assumed on these trying occasions; when a series of enthusiastic boarding-schools had ravaged her grounds for trophies, and a steady stream of amiable pilgrims had worn her doorsteps with their respectful feet; when servants left after a week's trial of the bell that ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... hour Dmitrieff grasped the situation and applied to Ivanoff for reenforcements. Owing to some blunder the appeal never reached the Russian chief, and Dmitrieff had to do the best he could. Nothing now could save his small force from those grim lines of gaping muzzles turned against his positions. The overture began on April 28, 1915, with an advance on the Upper Biala toward Gorlice, by Von Mackensen's right. Here some minor attacks had been previously ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... the sailor entertained no rooted objection. What he did object to, and object to with all the dogged insistence of his nature, was the fact that this habitual flow of profane scurrility was only the prelude to what, with grim pleasantry, he was accustomed to describe as "serving out slops." Anything intended to cover his back was "slops" to the sailor, and the punishments meted out to him covered ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... die—it is written on his countenance." He re-appeared a fourth time at Madrid, in light green coat and pantaloons that were almost new, and a glossy Andalusian hat "of immense altitude of cone," and leaning not on a ragged staff but "a huge bamboo rattan, surmounted by the grim head of either a bear or lion, curiously cut out of pewter." He had been wandering after Borrow in misery that almost ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... grateful even for the note of cheer supplied by the red cylindrical valise on the shelf above each cot, and by the occasional scarlet tunic and stable-jacket. But for these it had been, to the educated eye, an even more grim, grey, depressing, ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... belonging to the Halbrane. Owing to the precaution that had been taken on the previous day, when the cargo was stowed away in the clefts, it had been only slightly damaged. What would have become of us, had all our reserves been swallowed up in that grim encounter? ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... haunted not only by the memories of almost unimaginable terrors, but by the sore thought that generations of Hawaiians lived and died in the unutterable darkness of this ignorant worship, passing in long procession from these grim rites into the presence of the Father whose infinite compassions they had ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... stealthy growth gave birth to deeds of shame, The rage of battle, and the lust of gain. Then came Ausonians, then Sicanians came, And oft the land of Saturn changed its name. Strange tyrants came, and ruled Italia's shore, Grim-visaged Thybris, of gigantic frame; His name henceforth the river Tiber bore, And Albula's old name ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... of the succeeding five years let us draw a veil. We have no heart to picture its suffering, its desolation, its hopelessness. If, in the beginning, there was too much pride in the heart of Mrs. Ellis, all was crushed out under the iron heel of grim adversity. If she had once thought too much of herself, and too little of her husband, a great change succeeded; for she clung to him in all the cruel and disgusting forms his abandonment assumed, and, with a self-sacrificing ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur
... soul, so long borne down By Fate's despite and with'ring frown, A rescue know from care? Friend! when that dark home is thine, Never more thy heart shall pine— Grim sorrow comes not there. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... life distasteful? My life did, and does, smack sweet. * * * * * I find earth not gray but rosy, Heaven not grim but fair of hue. Do I stoop? I pluck a posy. Do I stand and ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... grim old collector who goes dunning for the abused wife, and Time finally forced a settlement ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... grim faces, all watching me, seeming to peer inside me, trying to gauge me as an enemy or a friend. I stood up, for the exciting near-nude body of the woman who had caused Nokomee's outburst was ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... sounds when brought to bay.' How huge the rocks! How dark and steep! The streams are swift! The valleys deep! Out blare the trumpets, one and all, As Charles responds to Roland's call. Round wheels the king, with choler mad, The Frenchmen follow grim and sad; Not one but prays for Roland's life, Till they have joined him in the strife. But ah! what prayer can alter fate? The time is past; too late! too late! As Roland scans both plain and height, And sees how many Frenchmen lie Stretched in their mortal agony, He mourns them like a noble ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... to the last penny—still cheerfully. Not heartless, either; in cases of extreme distress—more than once or twice—McClintock had both written off the obligation and added to it something for the day's need, in a grim but not unkindly fashion; always under seal of secrecy. No extortioner, this; a dry, passionless, ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... Hillport had organised itself on the lawn in the dim, verdurous retreats behind Mrs. Prockter's house. The lawn was large enough to be just too small for a tennis-court. It was also of a pretty mid-Victorian irregularity as regards shape, and guarded from the grim horizons of the Five Towns by a ring of superb elms. A dozen couples, mainly youngish, promenaded upon its impeccable surface in obvious expectation; while on the borders, in rustic chairs, odd remnants of humanity, mainly oldish, gazed in ecstasy at the picturesque ensemble. In the midst ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... and grim, With the horned moon hooked round the topmost limb, And the owl awatch on the branch below, What is the song of the winds that blow ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... the earliest and stay the longest are women who are getting ready for the fourth trip," said Mr. Gibson, the jolly father, whose grim face belied his heart. He had entered in time to catch Jim's query. "It's a case of accelerated motion," ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... awful as the gloom of death, The Night's grim shadows cover all beneath. Shapeless and black is ev'ry object round, And lost in thicker gloom the distant bound. Each swelling height is clad with dimmer shades, And deeper darkness marks the hollow glades. The moon in heavy clouds her glory veils, And slow along their ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... as to where we would come out. But our bold leader was solving the problem in the right way. Down and down and still down we went, as if we were to bring up in the bowels of the earth. It was by far the steepest descent we had made, and we felt a grim satisfaction in knowing we could not retrace our steps this time, be the issue what it might. As we paused on the brink of a ledge of rocks, we chanced to see through the trees distant cleared land. A house or barn also was dimly descried. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... with her eggs and fowl every morning. Certainly her clothes, though decent, were worn well-nigh threadbare. But the feelers that the neighbours sent out towards Margret met with no solid assurance. Grim and taciturn, Margret kept her own counsel, and was like enough to keep it till the day of ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... But only Asenath's grim, angular visage was seen, as it looked from Anna's window, wondering whom Jim could be ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... be employed to make the world laugh, and put the world's laughter on the side of all right as against all wrong. If this be not done, the seriousness of life will darken into gloom, its work become slavish tasks, and the conflict waged be a terrible conflict between grim virtues and fiendish vices. If you could shroud the bright skies with black tempest-clouds, burn to ashes the rainbow-hued flowers, strike dumb the sweet melodies of the grove, and turn to stagnant pools the silver streams,—if you could do this, thinking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... least idea, my dear boy," replied the captain with a grim smile. "So far, I have no plans. When you are able to move, Somers, we will ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... Revolution. About 1789, a friend of mine, then residing at Paris, was invited to see some procession which was supposed likely to interest him, from the windows of an apartment occupied by a Scottish Benedictine priest. He found, sitting by the fire, a tall, thin, raw-boned, grim-looking, old man, with the petit croix of St. Louis. His visage was strongly marked by the irregular projections of the cheek-bones and chin. His eyes were grey. His grizzled hair exhibited marks of having been red, and his complexion was weather-beaten, and remarkably freckled. ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of labor, than in poisonous liquors, horse races, politics, and the gaming table. Where the natural support of life is wanting, partial methods of relief may be employed. He who can no longer swallow, may gain an imperfect nourishment by means of baths, or artificial transmission. So, the grim and hardened soul, which has lost the support of inward cheerfulness, may find strength in work, merely for the sake of work. But it is a fraud upon humanity to educate men solely as industrious animals. Hives are beautiful, honey is sweet, and wonderful is the cunning ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... There was something grim in the ex-soldier's face and in the set of his gross lips as the two came up, but the aura of the girl prevented Peter from paying much attention to it. As the two reached Tump, Peter had just lifted his hand to his hat when Tump made ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... was by no means a grim German, but a very genial story-teller, also maintains this transformation of the original myth. "Plainly enough the water-pole of the heathen story has been transformed into the axe's shaft, and the carried pail ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... unimaginable terrors. Think what it must have been to wake up in the midst of that voiceless hush, and, look out over that grim congregation of the dead! What gratitude shone in his skinny white face when he saw a living form before him! And how the fervency of this mute gratitude was augmented when his eyes fell upon the life-giving cordials which I carried in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hotel, and Spanish grandees pervaded the place. There were several at Pension Paradis, and no one guessed what great creatures they were till a fete day arrived, and the grim, gray men blossomed out into counts, marquises, and generals covered with orders, stars, ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... A grim look from the butler chastised his interference, and he commanded him, by the name of Davie Gellatley, in a tone which admitted no discussion, to look for his honour at the dark hag, and tell him there was a gentleman from the south had arrived at ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... A grim smile came upon the handsome young face of Marcus as he watched the destruction going on. His eyes sparkled, his sun-browned cheek grew deeper in its tint, and he looked round again for the something that was not to hand, that something being a good stout stick. ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... built the two great guardian fortresses of the coast, Rutupiae, or Richborough, at the southern entrance, and Regulbium, or Reculver, at the northern exit. Under the walls of these powerful strongholds, whose grim ruins still frown upon the dry channel at their feet, ships were safe from piracy, while Ruim itself sheltered them from the heavy sea that now beats with north-east winds upon the Foreland beyond. In fact, the Wantsum ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... George," said the assistants, and there was a general laugh; for the wit was fitted for the meridian of the place where it was uttered. This general applause somewhat gratified the passions of the old hag; the "grim feature" smiled and even laughed—but it was a laugh of bitter scorn. She condescended, however, as if appeased by the success of her sally, to explain her business more distinctly, when the magistrate, commanding silence, again desired her either to speak out her errand, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... instead of hurtling through space, Mr. Schwab found himself luxuriously seated in a cushioned chair, motionless, at the side of a steep bank. For a mile before him stretched an empty road. And, beside him in the car, with arms folded calmly on the wheel there glared at him a grim, alert young man. ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... vol-plane to earth," answered Tom, and there was a grim look on his face. He had never executed this feat with a passenger aboard He was wondering how the BUTTERFLY would behave. But he would know very soon, for already the tiny monoplane was shooting rapidly ...
— Tom Swift and his Wireless Message • Victor Appleton
... physician, and turning to me, went on, "I have another patient to whom I must instantly go, and whom I may not be able to leave for hours. You can do all that I would do,—I believe,"—then he felt my pulse again, and nodding his head with a sort of grim professional satisfaction, which no amount of emotion could wholly divert from its delight in the steady nerves and undisturbed currents of a healthy body,—resumed, "You have but one thing to do: ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... on her perch and glanced down at the speaker. She was a decidedly plain girl with a thick nose and a wide mouth set in a grim line above an extraordinarily heavy chin. Her face was turned partly away as she spoke to the girl next to her, but Agony caught a glimpse of the sarcastic expression which informed her features, and a little chill of dislike went through ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... breakin' in, my girl, and you are goin' where you'll get it, so the sooner you're off the better for all on us. Come, Betsey, we may as wal leave, for we can't understand the wants of her higher nater, as Christie calls it, and we've had lecterin' enough for one night." And with a grim laugh the old man quitted the field, worsted ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... Thames, a mass of spars, smoke-stacks, ensigns and swelling hills. The low deck and quaint cupola of the famous Monitor appeared close into shore, and near at hand rose the thick body of the Galena. Long boats and flat boats went hither and thither across the blue waves: the grim ports of the men of war were open and the guns frowned darkly from their coverts; the seamen were gathering for muster on the flagship, and drums beat from the barracks on shore; the Lincoln gun, a fearful piece of ordnance, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... full of liquid damnation. Scattering miniature female figures, like dolls, to the winds, this monster passes over Paris, a baleful typhoon. The moral is not far to seek; indeed, there is generally a moral, sometimes an inverted one, in the Rops etchings. Order Reigns at Warsaw is a grim commentary on Russian politics quite opportune to-day. La Peine de Mort has been used by Socialists as a protest against capital punishment. Les Diables Froids personifies the impassible artist. It is a page torn ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... or has not lived up to his expectations and he never can begin over again. A creature of physical and mental habit, he must for the rest of his life trudge along in the same path, eating the same food, thinking the same thoughts, seeking the same pleasures—until he acknowledges with grim reluctance that ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... like it, don't she?" asked Vilda with a grim intonation; but her face softened a little as she glanced at Gay asleep on the ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a wild growl, just at my very lug. Up I jumps wi' the fusee in my hand, and my heart in my mouth, and out came a muckle brute o' a bear, wi' that wee towsie tyke sitting on her back, as conciety as you please, and haudin' the grip like grim death wi' his claws. The auld bear, as soon as she seed me, she up wi' her birse, and shows her muckle white teeth, and grins at me like a perfect cannibal; and the wee deevil he sets up his birse too, and snaps his bit teeth, ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... authoritative in her manner, and Hagar obeyed, whispering incoherently to herself, and thus further confirming her mistress' suspicions that she was partially insane. During the ceremony she stood tall and erect like some dark, grim statue, her hands firmly locked together, and her eyes fixed upon the face of the little one who was baptized Margaret Miller. As the clergyman pronounced that name she uttered a low, gasping moan, but her face ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... find the cause of the commotion. He had to laugh, notwithstanding tears were streaming down Beth's face. She looked so ludicrous, dancing up and down with that awful crab hanging on like grim death. ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine
... imagine the schoolmaster hanging on to his share of the glory, tooth and nail," the Squire said with a grim laugh. "But old Hingston, good old soul, he ought to have let go, if you ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... waited, his grim face tense and earnest. It might have been fifteen minutes, for whales often stay under water for twenty minutes before coming to the surface to breathe, but to Kalitan and Ted it seemed ...
— Kalitan, Our Little Alaskan Cousin • Mary F. Nixon-Roulet
... Mabunu had still been with her, to pinch or beat her as the mood seized the villainous old hag; but Mabunu was only one. When The Sheik was there also there were two of them, and The Sheik was stronger and more brutal even than Mabunu. Little Meriem often wondered why the grim old man hated her so. It is true that he was cruel and unjust to all with whom he came in contact, but to Meriem he reserved his greatest cruelties, his ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... last of the Horeszko family, from a little door concealed between the pillars, had quietly come forth a form like a phantom. It was Gerwazy; they recognised him by his stature, by his face, and by the little silvery Half-Goats on his yellow coat. He walked straight as a post, silent and grim, without taking off his hat, without even inclining his head; in his hand he held a glittering key, like a dagger; he opened a case and began to turn something ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... stepping to the open end of the bar, advanced toward her. Mrs. Poor held her hands before her about breast high, at half arm's length, elbows depressed, palms turned outward, the fingers curved like a cat's claws. There was an expression of grim satisfaction ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... forbidding. He perched in grim, expectant silence on the edge of his chair, waiting, watching. His lean face had the blue-white look of the much-shaven actor, and his manner was as portentous as that ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... and the Moon grew dim. "With my sledge, And my wedge, I have knocked off her edge! If only I blow right fierce and grim, The creature will ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... a republic, and they are due to the practice of treating the vast system of minor public places which are wholly ministerial, and whose duties are the same under every party administration, not as public trusts, but as party perquisites. The English-speaking race has a grim sense of humor, and the absurdity of transacting the public business of a great nation in a way which would ruin both the trade and the character of a small huckster, of proceeding upon the theory—for such is the theory of the spoils system—that ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... when the Lorings had held the country from the North Downs to the Lakes of Frensham, and when their grim castle-keep rising above the green meadows which border the River Wey had been the strongest fortalice betwixt Guildford Castle in the east and Winchester in the west. But there came that Barons' War, in which the King used his Saxon subjects as a whip with which to scourge his Norman barons, ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the fresh air," he said. "I am faint and weak. I must have movement. I must see my mother. I will tell her everything." Then he went to his mirror, and looked with a grim smile at its reflection. "I have the face of a lover kicked out of doors," he continued scornfully. He took but small pains with his toilet, and calling for some breakfast sat down to eat it. Then for the first ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... equipment; most of these advances take place in OECD nations; only a small portion of non-OECD countries have succeeded in rapidly adjusting to these technological forces; the accelerated development of new industrial (and agricultural) technology is complicating already grim environmental problems ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of the Banks Islands tell a story of the origin of Death, in which that grim power is personified. They say that Death (Mate) used to live underground in a shadowy realm called Panoi, while men on earth changed their skins like serpents and so renewing their youth lived for ever. But a practical inconvenience of immortality ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... was nothing there. He listened attentively; there was no sound now. Then he thought of the screams of the Merchant Prince's daughter, whose soul was the diamond's price, and smiled and went stoutly on. There watched him, apathetically, over the narrow way, that grim and dubious woman whose house is Night. Thangobrind, hearing no longer the sound of suspicious feet, felt easier now. He was all but come to the end of the narrow way, when the woman listlessly uttered ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... Chepstow Castle must have been in its day of might, and time has done little to soften its grim and forbidding aspect. Situated on a high cliff which drops abruptly to the river, it must have been well-nigh invincible in days ere castle walls crumbled away before cannon-shot. It is of great extent, the wails enclosing an area of about four acres, divided into ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... Beauregard! Grim Moultrie guards thy fame, Beauregard! Oh! first in Freedom's fight! Oh! steadfast in the right! Oh! brave and Christian ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... see the broad trees or the flower sprinkled grass or the blossoming manzanita bushes. They gazed through these things which they did not see, and instead saw what might lie in the future, what fate the grim gods of destiny might mete out . . . to one man . . . if the revolver below the waterfall ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... be, 780 Following him, destroyingly, On Death's white and winged steed, Which the fleetest cannot flee, Trampling down both flower and weed, Man and beast, and foul and fair, 785 Like a tempest through the air; Thou shalt quell this horseman grim, Woundless though ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Cornwallis during the Revolutionary War. We saw a monitor lying near it, and sought good positions to view this specimen of the redoubtable ironclads of which we had heard and read so much. It looked precisely as it did in pictures, as black, as grim, and as uncompromising as the impregnable floating fortress which had ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... stood watching his pretty antics she became aware that the Snimmy's wife had stopped her work and was watching them with a grim smile. Sara saw that she had just unscrewed the knob of the prose-bush, and was still holding the doorknob and the corkscrew in her hand. As far as Sara could tell, the doorknob seemed as neatly hemmed as ever; so, overcome by curiosity, she asked the Snimmy's wife what she ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... the country made it almost an obligatory courtesy to go in and spend money when one hitched in front of a saloon, an excuse for entering that Lambert accepted with a grim feeling of satisfaction. While he didn't want it to appear that he was crowding a quarrel with any man, the best way to meet a fellow who had gone spreading it abroad that he was out looking for one was to go where he was to be found. It wouldn't ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... had the Reverend Scoville, in fine black lisle; a merry eye; a rather grim look about the mouth, as has a man whose life is a secret disappointment. His little daughter worshipped him. He called her Harry. When Harrietta was eleven she was reading Lever and Dickens and Dumas, while other little girls were absorbed in ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... the home of Scott, Burns, Black, Macdonald, Stevenson, and Barrie—and of thousands of men like that old Highlander in kilts on the tow-path, who loves what they have written. I would wager he has a copy of Burns in his sporran, and has quoted him half a dozen times to the grim Celt who is walking with him. Those old boys don't read for excitement or knowledge, but because they love their land and their people and their religion—and their great writers simply express their emotions for them in words they can understand. You and I come over here, with thousands ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... by her side. They looked out over the city, grim and silent now, for it was long past midnight. For a moment her thoughts led her back to the evening when she and Courtlaw had stood together before the window of her studio in Paris, before the coming of Sir John ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The Canadians went out with a flourish, with cheers, with songs, with rousing music from the bands. The serious men were the French and Belgian reservists, who, silently, carrying their bundles, passed through our city, with grim, determined faces. They knew, and our boys did not know, to what they were going. That is what made ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... had come into their little world, Cummins' people were speechless in their grief and their waiting for the final word. And when the word came to them at last, and passed from lip to lip, and from one grim, tense face to another, the doors closed again, and the lights went out one by one, until there remained only the yellow eye of the factor's office and the faint glow from the little cabin in which John Cummins knelt with his sobbing face crushed ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... entitled "Recollections of Auld Lang Syne." Norval was a model among the tyrant pedagogues of the past; and as an illustration of Scottish school life fifty years since, we present our author's reminiscences of the despot. "Gruesome in visage and deformed in body, his mind reflected the grim and tortuous aspects of his person. The recollection of his monstrous cruelties,—his cruel flagellations,—is still unaccountably depressing. One day of horrors I shall never cease to remember. Every Saturday he caused the pupils to repeat ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... with the white cheek and the unyielding lips. Not a cry had left them; she had but crossed the threshold, and stopped that instant in the middle of the worn carpet, the sharpest of silhouettes against a background of grim tomes. There was no swaying of the lissome figure, no snatching for support, no question spoken or unspoken. In moments of acute surprise the most surprising feature is often the way in which we ourselves receive the shock; ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... raised a dust-cloud which towered high in air; and snorting and puffing and neighing and waxing fierce and furious. Now there happened to be in this thicket a lion of terrible might; hideous to sight, with eyes sparkling light: his look was grim and his aspect struck fright into man's sprite. Presentry the treasurer turned and saw the lion making towards him; but found no way of escape nor had he his sword with him. So he said in himself, "There is no Majesty and there is ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... venerable Oxford with its polite and leisurely dons, or to the staunch little cathedral city of Lichfield, welcoming back its famous son to dinner and tea, or to the seat of a country squire, or ducal castle, or village tavern, or the grim but hospitable feudal life of the Hebrides. And wherever we go with Johnson there is the lively traffic in ideas, lending vitality and significance ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... room without ceremony, and looking mighty grim. "Well, my lad, so we have got you, ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... be A man's live heart might beat Wherein a God's with mortal blood should meet And fill its pulse too full to bear the strain With fear or love or pleasure's twin-born, pain. Fiercely the gaunt woods to the grim soil cling That bears for all fair fruits Wan wild sparse flowers of windy and wintry spring Between the tortive serpent-shapen roots Wherethrough their dim growth hardly strikes and shoots And shews one gracious thing Hardly, ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 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
... asked Tom, while a grim look came over his face. "Maybe you'll think differently ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... water; how it breached the railway beyond, sapping four miles of embankment, and sweeping the bodies of a drowned flock of sheep far inland to the very foot of the hills; yet they saw enough to make them recall the grim memories of the historic shore, and doubt if our fortunes were not about to add a chapter to the legend of the ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... readily visible inlet, cutting and grinding its cavity as it develops in size and strength, yet it is not safe. Fate follows in insignificant guise, drills a tiny hole through its shell, and the toilsomely excavated refuge becomes a sepulchre. Even in the fastness of the coral "that grim sergeant death is strict in his arrest." All is strife—war to the death. If eternal vigilance is the price of liberty among men, what quality shall avert destruction where insatiable cannibalism is the rule. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... deserve," Hilliard interrupted with a grim smile. "Something less than hanging, I hope. That fellow in London; she was ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... care of themselves. PUNCHINELLO will only add that he would at any time rather suspend the public plunderers than habeas corpus, and that he means to take the gloss off the grim joke that "Hanging for ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 1, Saturday, April 2, 1870 • Various
... fellows; officers warned even as they galloped, "Steady, there! Keep back! Keep your places, men!" Bearded, bright-eyed troopers, with teeth set hard together and straining muscles, grasped their ready carbines, and thrust home the grim copper cartridges. On and on, as the flaring beacon grew redder and fiercer ahead; on and on, until they were almost at the valley's edge, and then young Ralph, out at the front with the veteran captain, panted to him, in wild excitement that he ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... and dragon-gate of Hell, Grim Cerberus guards, and frights the phantoms back: Ixion, who by Juno's beauty fell, Gives his frail body to the ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... waterhole was reached, Bettles, having evidently reviewed the quarrel during the silent walk, burst out in a final ''Twa'n't called for,' while Lon McFane kept grim silence. Indignation so choked him that he ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... I see he has two heads Like Janus—calm, benignant, this; That, grim and scowling: his beard spreads From chin to chin" this god has power Immeasurable at every hour: He first taught lovers how to kiss, He brings down sunshine after shower, Thunder and hate are his also, He is YES and he ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... Gull and Grim, Go you together, For you can change your shapes Like to the weather. Sib and Tib, Lick and Lull, You all have tricks, too; Little Tom Thumb that pipes Shall go betwixt you. Tom, tickle up thy pipes Till they be weary: I will laugh, ho, ho, hoh! And make me merry. Make ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... endless Sleep at last, Since Life's grim juggernaut 'neath ruthless wheels Crushes the heart; since Age like Winter steals On Youth's fair-flowered fields with blighting blast— Then to the gods our doubts and fears be cast! Enough of Sorrow! Joyance is our due. Gather the roses! Spurn th' envenomed ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... great remonstrance against the project of withdrawal. He told the General that to raise the siege would be fatal to our national interests. 'It is our duty,' he said, 'to retain the grip which we now have upon Delhi, and to hold on like Grim Death until the place is our own.' He argued it ably. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... sitting hen—just the leastest list to starboard; but a man could stand there easy. They had rigged up ropes across her, from bulwark to bulwark, an' besides these the men were mustered, holding on like grim death whenever the sea made a clean breach over them, an' standing up like heroes as soon as it passed. The captain an' the officers were clinging to the rail of the quarterdeck, all in their golden uniforms, waiting for the end ...
— The Roll-Call Of The Reef • A. T. Quiller-Couch (AKA "Q.")
... death,' she said, as she sat in her chair and told of it—'of death, and peace, and hatred glutted, and dead enemies, and love, and sin. A wild storm of dreams, was it not? A grim tempest to lay waste a sore heart. And she only eighteen, with eyes like lakes on a mountainside!' As she told it, she cast back on her memory— you could see she was aching to strip her fault naked and scourge it before us all—'And the thoughts were like a sleeping draught to my ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... prefer a pipe. And now what will you have to drink? I don't keep wine but I can get a bottle of anything you like from the common room. That's one of our privileges,"—he gave a grim chuckle as he emphasised ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... here. The bodies of rich folks' relatives, if identified, are immediately removed, and, by means of family influence, interred with religious rites. Many suicides are buried at Nice and Mentone, but the larger proportion, farther off still. Not to descant further on this grim topic, let me now say something ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... provided for her except those the fields and pastures kindly spread before her admiring eyes. Old Mrs. Thacher had been brought up to consider the hard work of this life, and though she had taken her share of enjoyment as she went along, it was of a somewhat grim and sober sort. She believed that a certain amount of friskiness was as necessary to young human beings as it is to colts, but later both must be harnessed and made to work. As for pleasure itself she had little notion of that. She liked ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... the Sieur d'Arques turned his mind to other matters. He was still a bachelor, for Reinault considered the burden of the times in ill-accord with the chinking of marriage-bells. They were grim times for Frenchmen: right and left the English pillaged and killed and sacked and guzzled and drank, as if they would never have done; and Edward of England began, to subscribe himself Rex Franciae with some show ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... Gradually the grim impression grew that Death was hovering over her bridal feast—a foolish fancy which persisted in her highly-wrought nervous state. Yet the idea, once fixed, could not be crushed. In vain she used her will to bring ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... pursuit of toy- making, he was a domestic Ogre, who had been living on children all his life, and was their implacable enemy. He despised all toys; wouldn't have bought one for the world; delighted, in his malice, to insinuate grim expressions into the faces of brown-paper farmers who drove pigs to market, bellmen who advertised lost lawyers' consciences, movable old ladies who darned stockings or carved pies; and other like samples of his stock in trade. In appalling ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... mind, in expanding his thought, in drawing him out of his habitual reticence and developing within him the sense of companionship and easy tolerance, was at one stroke rendered null. Brought face to face with the grim destroyer, all the doubt and confusion of former years broke the bounds which had held them in abeyance and returned upon him with increased insistence. Never before had he felt so keenly the impotence of mortal man and the futility of worldly strivings. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... grim face began to quiver and finally his love for his nephew burst forth with such strength, that he seized the boy in his arms, and ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw; The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... this sentence with another of his grim smiles. The actor was deeply moved by it, for in that bitter smile he read how the artist pined for his country. 'I will stay with you, I will stay with you, dear David!' now eagerly cried Talma. 'For your sake, I will desert my post, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... pleased with your kind affection for the Land, especially for Edinburgh and the scenes about it. By all means go again to Edinburgh (tho' the old city is so shorn of its old grim beauty and is become a place of Highland shawls and railway shriekeries); worship Scott, withal, as vastly superior to the common run of authors, and indeed grown now an affectingly tragic man. Don't forget ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... and whiskered, and grim, White-bellied, and yellow, he lay on the limb, All so still that you saw but just one tawny paw Lightly reach through the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... like men at sea, "All's well!" More, he had been able to feel it. But now he leaned on the churchyard wall and it was cold to his arms. And the song of the sea was cold in his ears. And the night lay cold upon his heart. And his mind—in the grim, and apparently unmeaning way of minds set to sad music in a sad atmosphere—crept round and round about the gravestone of this boy; bereft of boyhood so early, of manhood ere he won to it, and carried so swiftly into mystery beyond the learning of all ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... leaving it very grim. The words recalled to him his own earlier ambition—that of the gentlemanly scholar of the old order—and there flickered before his eyes the visionary library, suffused with firelight, and the translation of the "Iliad" he ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... darker as they flew along; trees by the roadside began to turn black and grim. A belt of pinewood looked as if it contained a band of robbers ready to spring ...
— 'Me and Nobbles' • Amy Le Feuvre
... dense of the mists; It gathered forces, one by one, Until the land by light was kissed. The waters slunk away to Lake Superior's bent, leaving a child At play, on a plateau's breast, content. Marking the march of time, the mount Grew grim and gray, while ages stored Their riches at its feet away:— Ore-of-iron riches deep stowed In vaults of rock, for creature king Of future age to fit the key Of genius in their ancient locks; Stowed wealth to bless a nation, whose ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... drew a deep impatient breath and drove it out again hissing through his teeth. Then he took grim ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... grim sort of curiosity regarding the way in which notoriously desperate men meet their end; and perhaps this is as natural as is the curiosity regarding the manner in which they lived. "Did he die game?" is one of the questions asked by bad men among ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... nagging, as it is called, at her, and brought the poor thing to such a state that she did not know where to look, and was almost crying with vexation. Gerasim got up all of a sudden, stretched out his gigantic hand, laid it on the wardrobe-maid's head, and looked into her face with such grim ferocity that her head positively flopped upon the table. Every one was still. Gerasim took up his spoon again and went on with his cabbage-soup. 'Look at him, the dumb devil, the wood-demon!' they all muttered in under-tones, while the wardrobe-maid got up and went ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... from Dubuque, Ia., there stands in grim isolation, upon a blackened and desolate prairie, a monastery of the fifteenth century pattern. Every morning at 2 o'clock the monks who occupy this lugubrious dwelling-place arise from the hard ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... of the attacking party, and killed him too, whereupon all the rest took to flight. Assistance now came from the vessel, and the bear was surrounded by thirty men, but against their will, because they had to do with a "grim, undaunted, and greedy beast." Of these thirty men only three ventured to attack the bear, whom these "courageous" men finally killed, after ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... savage tumult of a hand-to-hand fight. At the bow the British burst through the boarding-netting, and forced their way to the deck, killing or wounding all three of the lieutenants of the privateer; but when this had happened the boats had elsewhere been beaten back, and Reid, rallying his grim sea-dogs, led them forward with a rush, and the boarding party were all killed or tumbled into the sea. This put an end to the fight. In some of the boats none but killed and wounded men were left. ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... buckboard, his eyes alight and his face aglow with excitement. There was stirring in the boy's brain a dim and far-away memory of wild rides over the steppes of Southern Russia, and French, glancing now and then at his glowing face, nodded grim approval. ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... three hours before the children could possibly arrive, and I got out my knitting. I had brought along two dozen pairs of slipper soles in assorted sizes—I always send knitted slippers to the Old Ladies' Home at Christmas—and now I sorted over the wools with a grim determination not to think about the night before. But my mind was not on my work: at the end of a half-hour I found I had put a row of blue scallops on Eliza Klinefelter's lavender slippers, and I ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... A grim commentary upon the folly of the anarchist position was afforded by the attitude of the law toward this very criminal who had just taken the life of the President. The people would have torn him limb from limb if it had not been that the law he defied was at once invoked in his behalf. So ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... beneath his cloak and a pair of daggers in it, with his long-sword looped up; he had his felt hat on his head, buckled again, and decked with half a pheasant's tail; he had his long boots of undressed leather, that rose above his knees; and on his left wrist sat his grim falcon Agnes, hooded and belled, not because he rode after game, but from mere custom, and ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... wrapped in a heavy cloak, in one of the pews before the choir, and the grim Suzanne, also shrouded in a heavy cloak, sat beside her. John's heart was in a glow. He knew now that he loved his comrade Philip's sister. Two or three of the golden curls escaping from her hood, fell down her back, and they were twined about his heart. He knew too that ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... without, so sweetly at peace within, now crushed beneath their armour, looked more like victims on the wheel, than dandies armed for conquest; their whalebones seemed to enter into their souls, and every face grew grim and scowling. The pretty ladies too, with their expansive bonnets, any one of which might handsomely have filled the space allotted to three,—how sad the change! I almost fancied they must have been of the race of Undine, and that it was only when they heard the splashing ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... the village and the countryside remembered hearing their fathers say that the family of the Terra Vergine were descended from those great marquises who had reigned for centuries in that Rocca which was now a grim, ivy-covered ruin on the north of the Edera water. But more than this no one could say; no one could tell how the warlike race had become mere tillers of the soil, or how those who had measured out life and death up and down the ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... down and every single object pried into and besnuffled. After the customs' examination passengers were passed on to the searching-rooms, the men to one side, the women to the other. I caught sight of a female searcher lolling at a door ... a monstrous and grim female who reminded me of those dreadful bathing women at the seaside ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... of meaning, for of all words on the mountain desert there was none more familiar than Henry Allister. Scar-faced Allister, they called him. Of those deadly men who figured in the tales of Uncle Jasper, Henry Allister was the last and the most grim. A thousand stories clustered about him: of how he killed Watkins; of how Langley, the famous Federal marshal, trailed him for five years and was finally killed in the duel which left Allister with that scar; of how he broke ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand |
