"Ghostlike" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... say that you intend doing so, for you know you have no intention of the kind; nor indeed have I, either. As for you, you will take your vows where they will result in something more substantial than the pursuit of such a ghostlike, ghastly love ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... in a low and sad tone, "Let no murderer occupy the presidential chair for a third term. Avenge my death!" He felt a light touch upon his left shoulder, and turning, saw the face of former President McKinley. It bore a ghostlike aspect. This experience had a decisive effect in fixing in his mind the iniquity of the third term, and from this time he questioned as to his duty in the matter, and he finally regarded this vision and its connection with the exact anniversary of the dream as a command to ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... went, past the churchyard, with its marble slabs indistinctly outlined in the darkness, like a phantom graveyard, as immaterial and ghostlike itself as the spirits of the earliest settlers at rest there beneath the sod. This was the last indication of the presence of the town, the final impression to carry away into the wide country, where the road ran through field and forest. As they sped along, they plunged into a chasm of blackness, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... this is the most ethereal. What head conceived those harmonies, so ghostlike? Every ten minutes, if you lie wakeful, they wind you up in a net of silver wirework, and swing you in the clouds; and the next time they swing you higher, and the next higher, and when the round hour ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... horizon's rim. Hence, though the old, exhilarating, briny odor was the same, I felt that, as an ocean, this was unfamiliar. The Atlantic's waves are haunted by historic memories, but few reminders of antiquity rise ghostlike from the dreary waste of the Pacific. Few battles have been fought, few conquests made upon these shores. On the Atlantic coast one feels that he is looking off toward civilized and friendly lands, across a sea which ocean greyhounds have made narrow; but here three purple ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... the back-drifting smoke the long battle line of the Excelsiors wavered like phantoms in the mist. Six flags flapped ghostlike above them, behind them men writhed in the trampled, bloody grass; before them the sheeted volleys rushed outward into darkness, where the dull battle ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... presently, as if by magic carpet, he had left all that sunlight and glitter and cheerful noise and stood alone in the shadowy, narrow street of a frontier town. There was no bustle here, only an intense stillness. The street was deserted, the shop doors closed. There was a ghostlike, chilling effect that left him uneasy. He called upon himself to remember that he was not actually in a remote and desolate frontier town from which the inhabitants had fled; that back of him but a few steps was abounding life, that outside was the prosaic world ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... The Vanity of Knowledge; and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, the names were apt; but the second part was never attempted, and the first part was written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghostlike, from its ashes) no less than three times: first in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin,[4] who had cast on me a passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne. So with my other ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my own? How did you even learn the home in which I sought unavailing refuge? How—as your hint to Faber clearly revealed—were you aware that, in yon house, where the sorrow is veiled, where the groan is suppressed, where the foot-tread falls ghostlike, there struggles now between life and death my heart's twin, my world's sunshine? Ah! through my terror for her, is it a demon that tells you how to bribe my abhorrence into submission, and supple my reason into use to ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... matchets, bayonets, and wooden swords. Their faces and necks, bodies and arms, are ghastly white with chalk or ashes; the hair is left in its original jet, and the dingy lower limbs contrast violently with the ghostlike absence of colour above. The dress is a crinoline of palm-fronds, some fresh and green, others sere and brown; a band of strong mid-rib like a yellow hoop passed round the waist spreads out the petticoat ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... He raised himself above the rail and peered down upon dark, mysterious decks, untouched by a single ray of relieving light. And his breath stopped painfully at the shadowy sight that struck upon his senses out of the darkness: silent, ghostlike shapes that moved as noiselessly as shadows themselves, vanishing over the open main hatchway,—two score even as he watched. And vague as it all was, he knew that they were no sailors, nor even Mission natives; their headdress and crouching gait betrayed ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... of humanity could have entered the paddock with the ghostlike glide of that mysterious figure. They were a woman and a gipsy man. A woman was out of the question in such an occupation at this hour, and the comer could be no less than a thief, who might probably have known the weakness of the household on this particular night, and have chosen it on ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... the heavy silence of the crypt, he heard the turning of the key in the lock, his heart stood still, and every emotion hung suspended, as the first veiled figure—shadowy and ghostlike—moved into view. ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... crept far across the lake and the darkening waters were still that we rose reluctantly to put the dishes in the tea basket and start on our homeward journey. The tawny fires of the sunset were dying down behind us, the mist stealing, ghostlike, into the valleys below; in the sky a little moon curled like a freshly cut silver shaving, that presently turned to gold, the white star ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a suit of borrowed oilskins, leaned against the deck-house and grinned at the breaking day. Like a fire opal the sun rose out of the sea, its first rays dissipating the ghostlike wisps of fog that drifted over the water. The "Felice" was shouldering her way up channel against the slap of a running tide and the greeny-black waves, as yet undyed by the morning blue, spumed and spattered over the bows and wetted her decks with ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... figures with rolled-up pigtails, very dirty when coming off duty and very clean-faced when going on duty. They never looked at anybody, and one never had occasion to address them directly. Their appearances in the light of day were very regular, and yet somewhat ghostlike in their detachment ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... certain sort of ecclesiastical scene, a chapel buried in spring-woods, seen in the clear and fresh light of the early morning, the fragrant air, with perhaps a hint of dewy chilliness about it, stealing in and swaying the flames of the lighted tapers, made ghostlike and dusky by the touch of dawn; the priest, solemnly vested, moves about with a quiet deliberateness, and the words of the Eucharist seem to fall on the ear with a soft and delicate precision, as from the lips of one who is discharging a task of almost overwhelming ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and swelling masses beneath, and then, as though to veil the majestic sight from our curious eyes, strange vapours and clouds gathered and increased around the mountains, till presently we could only trace their pure and gigantic outlines, showing ghostlike through the fleecy envelope. Indeed, as we afterwards discovered, usually they were wrapped in this gauze-like mist, which doubtless accounted for our not having seen ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... stage-setting, ready to be blown down at the first gusts from the north. A forlorn bird here and there made a thin piping, as it flitted homelessly amid the bleached long grasses, and the frail silk of the milkweed pods came floating along ghostlike on the evening breeze. ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... was no sleep that night. At the first signs of dawn he was up and out, directing his steps toward the park, as a criminal returns to the haunts of his crime. No faces of any kind now greeted him there; only trees confronted him, gaunt, ghostlike in the early morning mists. Even the squirrels were yet abed in their miniature Swiss chalets in the air. The sun rose at last, red and threatening. He now met a policeman who looked at him questioningly. Mr. Heatherbloom greeted him with ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... became a little accustomed to the reflections in the weed, Colin was able to see ghostlike brown forms that seemed to slide rather than swim ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Maud to leave home. It was but seldom now that his thoughts busied themselves with Maud; the unreal importance which she had for a time assumed in his life was only a recollection; her very face was ghostlike in his mind's eye, dim, always vanishing. If the news of her departure from England moved him at all, it was with a slight sense of satisfaction; it would be so much easier to write letters to her than to speak face to face. Yet, in the days that followed, the ghostlike countenance ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... slumberer. And the face of the female was unutterably calm and sweet (though with a something of severe); there was no line nor wrinkle in the hueless brow; care never wrote its defacing characters upon that everlasting beauty. It knew no sorrow or change; ghostlike and shadowy floated on that Shape through the abyss of Time, governing the world with an unquestioned and noiseless sway. And the children of the green solitudes of the earth, the lovely fairies of my tale, ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rollers came from the reefs. Through the blanketing fog they could discern, on the north, island after island, ghostlike through the mist, rocky, towering, majestic, with a thunder of surf among the caves, a dim outline of mountains above, like Loki, Spirit of Evil, smiling stonily at the dark forces closing round ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... the pool he listened to its turmoil, for the shadows were gathering so fast that, with some ghostlike shapes of foam excepted, he could not even see ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... strong perfume—confined in the high, hot walls—at first made him giddy. This was followed by an inexplicable languor; he turned instinctively towards the stone bench and sank upon it. The long rows of calla lilies against the opposite wall looked ghostlike in the darkness, and seemed to have turned their white faces towards him. Then he fancied that ONE had detached itself from the rank and was moving away. He looked again: surely there was something ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... so the boy was kept locked up, but after that the Jew left him at liberty to wander about the house; which was a weird, ghostlike place, with the mouldering shutters fast closed, and no evidence from outside that it sheltered human creatures. Oliver was constantly with Charley Bates and the Dodger, who played the old game with the Jew every day. At times Fagin entertained ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... her rifle, but the whir of wings told of a flight. From jagged rents in the cliffs, through which the horses passed, their hoofs ringing echoes from the iron-veined rock, they came to sleepy hollows where the Quaker Aspens stood ghostlike as sentinels on guard ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... too. Greene led the way to a park-like enclosure, where, under shaded electric lights that lit the ground fully but were so screened that no betraying flashes showed from above, a dozen aeroplanes stood, gaunt and ghostlike in ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Trail • George Durston
... about seeing Paganini in Paris, where he used to spend an hour every day sitting in a publisher's shop, "a striking, awe-inspiring, ghostlike figure." Halle was introduced to him, but conversation was difficult, for Paganini sat there taciturn, rigid, hardly ever moving a muscle of his face. He made the young pianist play for him frequently, indicating his desire by pointing at the piano with his long, bony hand, without ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... Copeland's voice far away. He could see the returning figure of the servant, but it seemed as gray and ghostlike as the entire room about him. In his shaking fingers he took the official papers which Copeland handed over to him. He could read the words, he could see the signatures, but they seemed unable to ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... so silent, ghostlike, far away, imagination scarce could picture it. Was this black slumberous water to be the scene at dawn of a combat beside which that of Hector and Achilles under Troy would be only as a tale that is told? And was he, Glaucon, son of Conon the Alcmaeonid, sitting ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... war was beginning to yield to the slower but more certain industry and discipline of our Northern men. It was to me manifest that the soldiers and people of the South entertained an undue fear of our Western men, and, like children, they had invented such ghostlike stories of our prowess in Georgia, that they were scared by their own inventions. Still, this was a power, and I intended to utilize it. Somehow, our men had got the idea that South Carolina was the cause of all our troubles; her people were the ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... quickened their pace with it. Faster and faster the notes rang out, and faster and faster in the ruddy firelight, the cats, like living shadows, whirled round the still black figure in the chair, with the ancient harp on its knee. Anything so weird, wild, and ghostlike I never imagined before even in a dream! The music changed, and the whirling cats began to leap. One perched itself at a bound on the pedestal of the harp. Four sprung up together, and assumed their places, two on each of her shoulders. The last and smallest of ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... hundred feet in the air, with her nose pointing in the direction of M'Bongwele's village, and her propeller driving her ahead at full speed. The electric lights of the ship were all called into requisition for the illumination of the landscape, producing a weird and ghostlike effect as the trees and clumps of bush first caught the light and then brightened into full radiance as they flashed past, to instantly fade again into obscurity. A startled howl or two smote upon the ears of the travellers, and the forms of hastily retreating ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... of Ypres gleamed ghostlike in the distant haze. The city had the wistful fragility of some beautiful mirage, and looking at it across the pleasant landscape I thought of the Pilgrim's vision of the Golden City shining in the ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... ancestors—don't forget, MY ANCESTORS—used to say: 'Buena noche—hasta manana!'" She lingered over the Spanish syllables with an imitation of Dona Anna's lisp, and with another smile, but more faint and more ghostlike than ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... approached this degree of sovereignty. His kingdom pervades the world. It is a fact that challenges thought. No world conqueror has ever had such an empire. Beside this the royalty of men like Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, and more modern aspirants is shadowy and ghostlike. His is an ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... the moonlight the lamps on the fishing-boats and on the bridge, now locked against the outside world, burned mistily, and the deck of the steamer moored directly below him was as deserted and bare, as uncanny and ghostlike, as the deck of the ship of the Ancient Mariner. Except for the chiming of ships' bells, the whisper of the running tide, and the sleepy murmur of the longshoremen, the town of Willemstad was steeped in sleep and silence. Roddy, finding he could arrive at no satisfactory explanation of the note, ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... them all until you're sane enough to know what you're doing. Give them to me." He took them back and crept quietly, ghostlike, about the room until he found a receptacle in which he knew they would be safe; then, removing one hundred francs from the amount, he brought it back and thrust it in his friend's pocket. "There—that's enough for you to throw away on us to-night. Why are you taking ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... a chill in the air, and to Frances Durkin, sitting beside Keenan on the promenade deck, there seemed something restless and phantasmal and ghostlike in the thin, North Atlantic sunlight, after the mellow and opulent gold of the Mediterranean calms. It seemed to her to be a presage of the restless movement and tumult which she felt ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer |
