"Hunchbacked" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the conversation of life. They who understand not the pain of other creatures, and who continue to slay and to devour them, last but few days in the land, and return to mundane existence, maimed, limping, one-eyed, blind, dwarfed, hunchbacked, and imperfect in such wise. Just as they consume the bodies of beasts and of birds, even so they end by spoiling their own bodies. From drinking spirits also the great sin arises, hence the consuming of spirits and ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... was afraid she thought we wanted her only as a sort of convenience, to help out our pantomime by the effect of her white hair. But in a minute she smiled in her cheery way, and said, as if she saw right through me: 'I suppose, my child, you think being old a sort of misfortune, like being hunchbacked or blind, and are afraid of hurting my feelings, but you need n't be. The good Lord has made it so that at whichever end of life we are, the other end looks pretty uninteresting, and if it won't hurt your feelings to ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... not be any one's lover. In that marvellous figure there was something both foul and ridiculous. He was not old; in his dirty beard and curly locks a gray hair shone here and there. He had a lank stomach and stooping shoulders, so that at the first cast of the eye he appeared to be hunchbacked; above that hump rose a large head, with the face of a monkey and also of a fox; the eye was penetrating. His yellowish complexion was varied with pimples; and his nose, covered with them completely, might indicate too great a love for the bottle. His neglected ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... seemed to be heaving forth one vast long sigh of happy content. The corn was long ready for the knife, green sprouts of winter wheat were feathering their way above the rich brown soil, and the cut upturned tobacco stalks, but dimly seen through the mists, looked like little hunchbacked witches poised on broomsticks, and ready for flight at dawn. Vast deviltry those witches had done, for every cut field, every poor field, recovering from the drastic visit of years before was rough, weedy, shaggy, ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... Muhammadan form of the name, Kâl is the Hindu form. The belief is that every living being has attached to him a 'Lord of Death.' He is represented in the 'passion plays' so common at the Dasahra and other festivals by a hunchbacked dwarf, quite black, with scarlet lips, fastened to a 'keeper' by a black chain and twirling about a black wand. The idea is that until this chain is loosened or broken the life which he is to kill is safe. The notion is probably of Hindu origin. For a ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... of souls back to evolution through earthly experiences. The Sontals, Somalis, and Zulus, the Dyaks of Borneo and Sumatra, and the Powhatans of Mexico have similar traditions. In Central Africa, slaves who are hunchbacked or maimed forestall the hour of death by voluntary self-immolation, in the hope of being reborn in the bodies of men who will be free ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... bewitched, and caressed him. They showed him all the wonders of the wood under the tree-stumps, the bushes, the dry leaves—little wood-sprites with rustling little voices, with spider-webby hair, straight ones and hunchbacked ones; little old men of the wood; the shadow-sprites and little companion spirits; bantering little sprites in green coats, midnight ones and daylight ones, grey ones and black ones; little jokers-pokers with shaggy little paws; fabulous birds and animals—everything that ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... me to do so. I like to threep a man that is my equal in his head piece. Yorke is nobbut a hunchbacked dwarf and he talks a lot of nonsense, but he feels all he says. He's just a bit of crooked humanity on fire ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... whose barrow is hunchbacked with a barrel, has sold several liters to the men on guard duty. He disappears round the bend in the road, with his face flat and yellow as a Camembert, his scanty, thin hair frayed into dusty flakes, and so emaciated ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... producing one from his coat pocket and handing it over to the old man. "The rooms are nominally occupied by a certain Maitre Turandot, maker of violins, and not even the concierge of the place knows that the hunchbacked and snuffy violin-maker and the meddlesome Scarlet Pimpernel, whom the Committee of Public Safety would so love to lay by the heels, are one and the same person. The apartment, then, is mine; one of the many which I occupy in Paris at different times," he went on. "Let yourself ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... person who calls himself Li Ting. Truthfully, it is that of a dog in the act of being dragged to the river because his sores and diseases render him objectionable in the house of his master. So will this hunchbacked person be dragged to the place of execution, and be bowstrung, to the great relief of all who respect the five senses; A Respectful Physiognomy, Passionless Reflexion, Soft Speech, Acute Hearing, ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... a second dais stood. Facing the central dais was a long table at which men were seated on the side looking towards the dais. Two men sat also at the head of this table, facing the jury. As Sabre entered they were in deep conversation with a stunted, hunchbacked man who sat next ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... carpet the emotions that he got from a cathedral tower. Over all the exquisite ornament of Arabia and India there is the presence of something stiff and heartless, of something tortured and silent. Dwarfed trees and crooked serpents, heavy flowers and hunchbacked birds accentuate by the very splendour and contrast of their colour the servility and monotony of their shapes. It is like the vision of a sneering sage, who sees the whole universe as a pattern. Certainly no one ever felt like this ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... His host drained his glass and settled back comfortably. "I judge it about that, for I've been pretty much over this whole country and it's only around these parts that you hear of the Lost Souls' Pool. I got the tale from a hunchbacked half-breed and he got it from ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... was the drink," said a little hunchbacked man, pushing his way in beside the Cure. "It must have been the drink; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Limerick, Eily O'Connor, the beautiful daughter of Mihil O'Connor, the rope-maker, first met Hardress Cregan, a young gentleman fresh from college; and on the same night, as she and her father were returning homeward, they were attacked by a rabble of men and boys, and rescued by the stranger and his hunchbacked companion, Danny Mann. A few days afterwards Danny Mann visited the rope-walk, and had a long conversation with Eily, and from that time the girl's character seemed to have undergone a change. Her recreations and her attire became gayer; but her cheerfulness of mind was gone. Her lover, Myles ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... worth, in ordinary times, a thousand livres of yearly rent, yielded as much as twelve or sixteen thousand. A cobbler, who had a stall in it, gained about two hundred livres a day by letting it out, and furnishing writing materials to brokers and their clients. The story goes, that a hunchbacked man who stood in the street gained considerable sums by lending his hump as a writing-desk to the eager speculators! The great concourse of persons who assembled to do business brought a still greater concourse of spectators. These again drew all the thieves and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... photographic evidence of an otherwise incredible civilisation, corrupted in the infernal fact of it, down to the genesis of such figures as the Vicomte d'Augival, the Stabber,[155] the Skeleton, and the She-wolf. But the effectual head of the whole cretinous school is the renowned novel in which the hunchbacked lover watches the execution of his mistress from the tower of Notre-Dame; and its strength passes gradually away into the anatomical preparations, for the general market, of novels like Poor Miss Finch, in which the heroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... was a monster, the most grotesque monster he had ever beheld. Not properly shaped, as all other people were, but hunchbacked, and crooked-limbed, with huge lolling head and mane of black hair. The little Dwarf frowned, and the monster frowned also. He laughed, and it laughed with him, and held its hands to its sides, just as he himself was doing. He made it ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... into the hut. He was met by a lean hunchbacked old woman with a sharp chin. She stood holding a tallow candle in her hands, screwing up her ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... would indeed have been impossible had not Orme's conjecture that some passage had once run from the extremity of the cave toward the idol proved to be perfectly accurate. Such a passage indeed was found walled up at the back of the chair containing the bones of the hunchbacked king. It descended very sharply for a distance of several hundred yards, after which for another hundred yards or more its walls and roof were so riven and shaky that, for fear of accidents, we found it necessary to timber them ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... a panic. "A man, a prisoner, old and white and terrible! But it was in his youth! He told me! And the one in Ephesus, a red-beard, hunchbacked and half-blind and even more terrible than the first! He saw Him after ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... Petrovskoe in the night time, and I was then so soundly asleep that I saw nothing of the house as we approached it, nor yet of the avenue of birch trees, nor yet of the household—all of whom had long ago betaken themselves to bed and to slumber. Only old hunchbacked Foka—bare-footed, clad in some sort of a woman's wadded nightdress, and carrying a candlestick—opened the door to us. As soon as he saw who we were, he trembled all over with joy, kissed us on the shoulders, hurriedly put on his felt slippers, and started to dress himself properly. I passed ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... which we found ourselves was such that we decided to leave it with all possible haste. A very friendly little hunchbacked Jew from Hamburg suggested better quarters in the West End, and I remember vividly our drive there, in one of the tiny narrow cabs then in use, the journey lasting fully an hour. They were built to carry two people, who ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the blessed manna!" squealed Caliban, a hunchbacked terror, who kept his maimed carcass secure by virtue of his viperish temper, coupled with an uncanny skill of the cutlas. "Milo's our ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... (an aunt of the lad unlawfully taken) was the first to catch hold of the bridle of the horse on which he was being carried off. The other, who sat doing nothing, was a kindly, grey-haired old woman, hunchbacked and with a flat bosom. She sat behind the stove on the bedshelf, and pretended to catch a fat four-year-old boy, who ran backwards and forwards in front of her, laughing gaily. This boy had only a little shirt on and his hair was cut short. As he ran past ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... "Reich's-Governor of Philipsburg;" very ill with Austria, no wonder; and striving to be well with the new Kaiser. Doubtless old Seckendorf made his visit too (being of Baireuth kin withal), and snuffled his respects: much unworthy of mention; not lovely to Wilhelmina. Prince of Orange, hunchbacked, but sprightly and much the Prince, bore me faithful company all the Coronation time; nor was George of Hessen-Cassel wanting, good ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... he found, a matter of some difficulty; for he would marry none who was not distinguished by beauty and gentle birth. The dwarfish daughter of Lord Bemboro he refused on the ground that besides being a pigmy she was hunchbacked; while another young lady, an orphan belonging to a very good family in Hampshire, was rejected by him because her face, like that of so many dwarfs, was wizened and repulsive. Finally, when he was almost despairing of success, he heard from a reliable source that Count Titimalo, a Venetian ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley |
