"Grotesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and stamens are curved or bent, the stigma and anthers are thus brought into the pathway leading to the nectary. There are a few cases which seem to be exceptions to this rule, but they are not so in truth; for instance, in the Gloriosa lily, the stigma of the grotesque and rectangularly bent pistil is brought, not into any pathway from the outside towards the nectar-secreting recesses of the flower, but into the circular route which insects follow in proceeding from one nectary to ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... substitute which fate and philosophy had found for Lenny Fairfield. Instead of the weeping, crushed, broken-hearted captive whom he had reluctantly come to deliver, he stared, speechless and aghast, upon the grotesque but tranquil figure of the Doctor, enjoying his pipe and cooling himself under his umbrella, with a sang-froid that was truly appalling and diabolical. Indeed, considering that Stirn always suspected the Papisher of having had ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... prophecies, did the best she could to enlighten her own mind, and should be honored for so doing; but what is to be said of the women who in this day, in cool print, are willing to show that they have no comprehension of her grotesque errors or of the difficulties that beset a real scholar in his noble task? Protest at woman's educational deprivation comes with ill-grace from those who have thus revealed their own lack of knowledge of ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... when quite a small boy. My mother took me to hear a famous preacher. As he sat on the platform during the preliminaries he seemed to me quite the ugliest man I had ever seen. He reminded me of a grotesque gorilla, and I dreaded the moment when he should rise up and face us and give out a text. It seemed to me there ought to be bars between, and that we should want to throw nuts and oranges. But when he rose to speak, his face was transfigured. Goodness and inspiration shone ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... laughed—a laugh that sounded hideously grotesque at such a moment; then he took up his hat and gloves; but he ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... examine in what manner the glimmering lamp of knowledge was sustained when it was all but ready to die out. By the Arabians it was handed down to us. The grotesque forms of some of those who took charge of it are not without interest. They exhibit a strange mixture of the Neo-platonist, the Pantheist, the Mohammedan, the Christian. In such untoward times, it was perhaps needful that the strongest passions of men should be excited ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... chariot-wheels is crushed? Certainly not. Do you suppose that a woman like Medea feels the smallest ill-will against a poor, craven Duchess Maddalena? Why, she ignores her very existence. To suppose Medea a cruel woman is as grotesque as to call her an immoral woman. Her fate is, sooner or later, to triumph over her enemies, at all events to make their victory almost a defeat; her magic faculty is to enslave all the men who come across ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... actually left a bad taste in his mouth. He could not compose his features into anything like a decently amiable expression, but went about with a bitter smile upon his lips. Every time some new aspect of his grotesque and humiliating mistake occurred to him he suffered a nervous twinge. That afternoon a card was brought to him bearing the ornate inscription in ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... various incumbencies, and was Divinity Lecturer, and minor canon of St. Paul's. It is not, however, as a churchman that he is remembered, but as the author of the Ingoldsby Legends, a series of comic and serio-comic pieces in verse, sparkling with wit, and full of striking and often grotesque turns of expression, which appeared first in Bentley's Miscellany. He also wrote, in Blackwood's Magazine, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... or proving the truth of Immortality in a long string of limericks. Browning certainly had no such indifference. Almost every poem of Browning, especially the shortest and most successful ones, was moulded or graven in some special style, generally grotesque, but invariably deliberate. In most cases whenever he wrote a new song he wrote a new kind of song. The new lyric is not only of a different metre, but of a different shape. No one, not even Browning, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... be inferred from the ducal accounts, which are eloquent with information about the creators of all this mimic pomp. About six sous a day was the wage earned by a painter, while the plumbers received eight. These latter were called upon to coax pliable lead into all sorts of shapes, often more grotesque than graceful. ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... I would, and we continued our walk to the porticos of the palace, where I pointed to the statues of blue chalcedony, and begged her to inform me by whom they had been executed, and why they were all in such grotesque and absurd positions. ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... conical mound. Eventually, the leader may get a strong headway, and grows beyond the reach of the browsers. As it rises out of grasp, it sends off its side shoots, forming a head. The cattle browse the under side of this head, as far as they are able to reach, causing the tree to assume a grotesque hour-glass shape, flat on the under part of the head, with a cone of green herbage at the ground. Sometimes pastures are full of little hummocks of trees that have not yet been ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... broke from Clarence's lips was so sincere and unaffected that the man was disconcerted, and at last joined in it, a little shamefacedly. The grotesque blunder of being taken as a fugitive from justice relieved Clarence's mind from its acute tension,—he was momentarily diverted,—and it was not until the boatman had departed, and he was again alone, ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... light of my lamp into a warm and cheerful refuge from the darkness of the lower floor. The purring of the cat, comfortably settled on the telephone-stand, was as cheering as the singing of a kettle on a stove. On the rack near me my garden hat and an old Paisley shawl made a grotesque ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... eye, but wears a uniform of ancient bonnet and shawl, both of which represent the extremity of dejection. She clings to this bonnet as the type and suggestion of respectability and to the shawl no less; but the first has reached a point wherein it is not only grotesque but pitiful, the remnants of flowers and ribbons and any shadowy hint of ornamentation having long ago yielded to weather and age and other agents of destruction. The shawl or cloak is no less abject and forlorn, both being the badge ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... woman who had determined to give herself without love lay staring into the dusk. But she did not see the darkness. She did not see the grotesque and ghostly objects in the gloom. Nor did she see the somber shadows that came and went as the dying fire gained fitful strength. The woman saw the bright sun shining on the meadows and fields of the ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... overestimate of a man's work; not to speak of the kind of fame which Hegel enjoyed, and which Lichtenberg describes as trumpeted forth by a clique of admiring undergraduates—the resounding echo of empty heads;—such a fame as will make posterity smile when it lights upon a grotesque architecture of words, a fine nest with the birds long ago flown; it will knock at the door of this decayed structure of conventionalities and find it utterly empty!—not even a trace of thought there to invite ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... snorting like whales. Evelyn, who was not without a sense of humor, would have enjoyed it all, and laughed at them, even if she could not laugh with them, if she could have forgotten that they were her husband's brothers, but it is very hard to see the humorous in the grotesque behavior of those to whom we are "bound by the ties of duty," if ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... it was grotesque, and not to be taken at all seriously as people did take it. And then, maybe—maybe I thought it funny that you should have employed Mr. Harwood to pull the lever that sent the big hammer smashing down ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... of the city there stood a brownstone house, with grotesque turrets, winding steps, and glaring polished red tiles. There was a touch of the Gothic, of the Renaissance, of the old English manor; just a touch, however, a kind of blind-man's-buff of a house. A very rich man lived here, but for ten months in the year he and his family fluttered about the ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... much talked about and who was sitting in darkest Austria turning out songs like a Hottentot, made a number of derogatory remarks about a fountain that was being erected in the city, said that a company of dancers had just appeared at the Cultural Club in a repertory of grotesque pantomimes, remarked that as he was coming over he learned that there was an institution in the city that loaned potato sacks, and that there had just been a fearful ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Hall a vivid description of his grotesque guest. "Looks a bit like a disguise, don't it? I'd like to see a man's face if I had him stopping in my place," said Henfrey. "But women are that trustful—where strangers are concerned. He's took your rooms and he ain't even given ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... its population rebellious, has a larger portion disloyal and discontented, but has a still larger portion dissatisfied with the Imperial rule. Now I must say—I hope the noble Lord will not think I am saying anything uncivil—but I must say that his proposition appears to be at once grotesque and imbecile, and I think at the same time—though I do not like to use unpleasant words— that to a certain extent it must be held to be—in fact, I think the hon. Gentleman the Member for North Warwickshire hinted as much—not only very wrong, but very dishonest. At this moment it seems ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... of the story-teller and his auditors. The Russian muzhik often brings God and the angels into his folk-tales, and does so without the least idea of treating them disrespectfully. He makes them talk in his own language because he has no other language; and if the talk seems a little grotesque and irreverent, it is due to the low level of the narrator's literary culture, and not to any intention, on his part, of treating God and the angels with levity. The whole aim of the story is a moral and religious one. The narrator is trying to show that ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... ballads. It is impossible to give any adequate account of them here, and it is especially difficult to convey an adequate idea of the genuine poetry and happy phrasing which are often interwoven with absurdities approaching the grotesque. ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... each to consider as his personal property all the fish he obtains. These gatherings afford much delight to the children, of whom a great number accompanied their elders in the prahus. Women and children were in holiday attire, and, in spite of the grotesque ornaments of big rings in the split, distended ear-lobes, the latter were unusually charming. They had bracelets of brass and silver around their wrists and ankles; some of them wore necklaces of antique beads in ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... street doors. There were beasts of all sorts; horses, in particular, of every breed, from the spotted barrel on four pegs, with a small tippet for a mane, to the thoroughbred rocker on his highest mettle. As it would have been hard to count the dozens upon dozens of grotesque figures that were ever ready to commit all sorts of absurdities on the turning of a handle, so it would have been no easy task to mention any human folly, vice, or weakness, that had not its type, immediate or remote, in Caleb Plummer's room. And not in an exaggerated ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... wooden collars; the beauteous Fiammetta and her lover, thronging amongst the saints; the little house, where the Holy Ghost is sitting, with the purified saints listening at the door, with strings tied to their heads to lift them into paradise; it is all so quaint, so childlike, so pathetic, so grotesque,—like a set of wooden figures from its Noah's Ark that a dying child has set out on its little bed, and that are so stiff and ludicrous, and yet which no one well can look at and be unmoved, by reason of the little cold hand that has found ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... thing is," said Mr. Skimpole with a quickened sense of the ludicrous, "that my chairs and tables were not paid for, and yet my landlord walks off with them as composedly as possible. Now, that seems droll! There is something grotesque in it. The chair and table merchant never engaged to pay my landlord my rent. Why should my landlord quarrel with HIM? If I have a pimple on my nose which is disagreeable to my landlord's peculiar ideas of beauty, my landlord has no business ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... life. But we can recognize real conviction and the deepest feeling beneath his scornful rhetoric and his bitter laugh. He was no more a mere dilettante than Swift himself, but now and then in the midst of his most serious thought some absurd or grotesque image will obtrude itself, and one is reminded of the lines on the monument of Gay rather than of the fierce epitaph of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to bed! You hear me? Go to bed!" He reached, cursing, for his cane. There was a grotesque familiarity in the act. With that very cane he had sought to coerce me into the straight and narrow road, as he conceived it, how many ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... silence surveying each other. Of the two Gitanos one was an elderly man, tall and bony, with lean, skinny, and whimsical features, though perfectly those of a Gypsy; he spoke little, and his expressions were generally singular and grotesque. His companion, who was the man whom I had first noticed in the street, differed from him in many respects; he could be scarcely thirty, and his figure, which was about the middle height, was of Herculean proportions; shaggy ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... heads of the mob—from the bench of the slope—rose grotesque structures of new-hewn lumber. On a platform stood black, motionless men in awful contrast with a dangling object that doubled up and curled upon itself in terrible convulsions. It lengthened while it swayed; it slowed its action ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... captain, knew nothing, and his Navigator, if possible, less. From the bestial recriminations and the indeterminate chaos of the grand deck, I ascended—always with a whisky-and-soda in my hands—to a scene truly grotesque. Behold my captain in plain sea, at issue with his Navigator! A crisis of nerves due to the enormous quantity of alcohol which he had swallowed up to then, has filled for him the ocean with dangers, imaginary and fantastic. Incapable of judgment, ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... United Kingdom, how much more would the misuse of the same food in a semi-tropical climate like Australia be disapproved of! Indeed, I am perfectly certain, that were those who have given attention to food and dietetics in possession of the facts, they would unhesitatingly condemn the grotesque inversion of food-habits at present in vogue throughout Australia. There is one very important matter which unquestionably requires to have special attention drawn to it. I refer to the customary Australian mid-day meal. Strange to say, all through the hot season, as well as ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... Buren was a severe one. "An obscure painter of the Flemish school," wrote Clinton to his friend and confidant, Henry Post, "has made a very ludicrous and grotesque representation of Jonah immediately after he was ejected from the whale's belly. He is represented as having a very bewildered and dismal physiognomy, not knowing from whence he came nor to what place bound. Just so looks Van Buren, the leader of the opposition party."[189] ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Fa-hien tells his readers of Buddhist miracles and legends is indeed unreliable and grotesque; but we have from him the truth as to what he ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... sparkling of water. The course of the river could be traced clear back to the mountains by the winding line of woods that followed its bed. The trees themselves were not like any Kieran had seen before. There seemed to be several varieties, all grotesque in shape and exotic in color. There were even some green ones, with long sharp leaves that looked ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... fact, was bending in two and falling on his knees like a disjointed doll. Under the action of the chloroform, the fearsome brute sank into impotence, became harmless and grotesque. ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... powder and shot. A cap with a short pointed brim extending over the eyes, rude shoes of cowhide or pigskin made all of one piece bound over the foot, and a short, large-bore musket, completed the hunter's grotesque outfit. Often he carried wound about his waist a sack of netting into which he crawled at night to keep off the pestiferous mosquitoes. With creditable regularity he and his apprentices arose early in the morning and ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... He wanted to run. He wanted to flee the mountain, flee the incredible breathing bulk of this grotesque giant. But he was a white hunter, he was a man, and a man is not a beast; a man does not run away from life ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... Straits of Messina, so famous for being the terror of the ancients. An old pilot is just come on board, who reminds me more of the poet's description of old Charon than of a modern human being. I hope he is not come to ferry us across the Styx. The whole of his crew have the same grotesque appearance. We can now discern the famous AEtna disgorging columns of smoke. Some distance below its summit it appears covered with snow, whilst we are here melting with heat. It has indeed a most stately appearance; and the whole country ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... fact establishes a resemblance just about as much as the fact that Jobson in "Rob Roy" and George Warrington in "Pendennis" were both lawyers; or that Antonio and Mr. Pickwick were both merchants; or that Sir Galahad and Sir Willoughby Patten were both knights. Tony Weller is a magnificent grotesque. He is a gargoyle, and his mouth, like the mouths of so many gargoyles, is always open. He is garrulous, exuberant, flowery, preposterously sociable. He holds that great creed of the convivial, the creed which is at the back of ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... those grotesque eyes like those of a sea-monster, fixed on him, with an ironical gleam behind the heavy lenses. The grafter! He had already heard of that studio, as splendid as a palace, behind the Retire What Renovales had in such plenty ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... from the Tertiary period. Long after the cave was formed, and after many stalactites had been hung on those spacious halls with their down-grown crystals, it was completely filled with glacial mud charged with acid, whereby the dripstones were eroded in singular grotesque shapes. The eroded forms remained after the mud had been mostly removed by flowing water. Massive columns have been wrenched from the ceiling by this aqueous energy and lie prostrate on the floor; a hollow column, forty feet high and thirty feet in diameter, stands erect, but has ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... wide vision is very likely to be edited by a man. It is a question, however, whether the day of the woman's magazine, as we have known it, is not passing. Already the day has gone for the woman's magazine built on the old lines which now seem so grotesque and feeble in the light of modern growth. The interests of women and of men are being brought closer with the years, and it will not be long before they will entirely merge. This means a constantly diminishing necessity for the ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... having drawn a handful of curious small jade figures from another and pushed them along the edge of the study table, without comment, for his friend to look at. Some of them were so finely carved that they looked like a heap of grotesque insects struggling together as they lay there, but though Dr. Leslie's eyes brightened as he glanced at them, he gave no other sign of interest at that time, and answered his guest's ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... horrible sight presented itself to the eyes of the two explorers when they walked inland with about eighteen most obliging and courteous natives—an open space with four hollowed trunks of trees surrounding two stones, the trees carved into the shape of grotesque human heads, and among them, a sort of temple, made of sloping bamboos and pandanus leaves meeting at the top, from whence hung a dead man, with his face painted in stripes of red and yellow, procured, ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... some way down Ratcliffe Highway, D'Arcy said, 'Here we are then,' and pointed to a shop, or rather two shops, on the opposite side of the street. One window was filled with caged birds; the other with specimens of beautiful Oriental pottery and grotesque curiosities in the shape of Chinese and ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the cabin was like the others on the plantation, the interior had a rude, grotesque elegance about it far in advance of any negro hut I had ever seen. The logs were chinked with clay, and the one window, though destitute of glass, and ornamented with the inevitable board-shutter, had a green moreen curtain, which kept out the wind and the rain. A worn ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... far from perfection. Schiller's style in the Robbers is partly of a kind with the incidents and feelings which it represents; strong and astonishing, and sometimes wildly grand; but likewise inartificial, coarse, and grotesque. His sentences, in their rude emphasis, come down like the club of Hercules; the stroke is often of a crushing force, but its sweep is irregular and awkward. When Moor is involved in the deepest intricacies of the old question, necessity and free will, and has ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... worse than before. But man is a desperately conservative creature, and the extravagant novelty of this outrage upon his purse distressed his sensibilities. Everybody around him was being robbed by the grotesque and murderous bands that played their game of governments and revolutions after the death of Guzman Bento. His experience had taught him that, however short the plunder might fall of their legitimate expectations, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... indignantly rejected. Religion was to him a theory based on revelation vouchsafed thousands of years ago; it was now a system of stereotyped belief and conduct, strangely removed from the perplexities and anguish of the individual soul. His academic mind recoiled from the grotesque and trivial messages associated with seances and the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... thoroughly characteristic of the age that this very human device should have existed, and, secondly, that these ledges were carved and ornamented. These misericords, as they are called, were usually curiously, even grotesquely carved. Some of these carvings were founded on natural objects, some were grotesque heads, others represented subjects with man and animals. There were pews for the nobility, but, apart from the few old and weak people who used the rough bench or two in the body of the church, or the stone bench that ran along the ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... the house one warrior threw up his arms and fell forward, sprawling with arms and legs extended; another pitched to one side and rolled over twice before he lay still; the legs of the third collapsed and threw him headlong, bunched up in a grotesque pile of lifeless flesh; the fourth leaped high into the air and turned a somersault before he struck the sand, badly wounded, and out of the fight. Holden, steadying himself against the wall, leaned in a window on the other side of the shack and emptied his Colt in a dazed ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... same band I had seen in Milwaukie, on a begging dance. The effect of this was wild and grotesque. They wore much paint and feather head-dresses. "Indians without paint are poor coots," said a gentleman who had been a great deal with, and really liked, them; and I like the effect of the paint on them; it reminds of the gay fantasies of nature. With them in Milwaukie, was a chief, the finest ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... avoid the grotesque and the extremes of mere animal vivacity. Incessant gesture and action, undue emphasizing with hand and head, and all suggestion of self-sufficiency in attitude or manner should be guarded against. All the various instruments of expression should be made ready and ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... house was of rough-hewn red sandstone, combining solid dignity and some artistic merit, for Benham had not stood still architecturally speaking. The River Drive was a grotesque, yet on the whole encouraging exhibit. Most of the residences had been designed by native talent, but under the spur of experiment even the plain, hard-headed builders had been constrained to dub themselves "architects," and adopt modern ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... from all quarters at once there appeared to my dazzled eyes forests of minarets with gilded peaks, thousands of cupolas blazing in the light, hills covered with many-coloured houses, surrounded by verdure; an immense succession of palaces with grotesque windows, blue-roofed mosques, groves of cypress-trees and sycamores, gardens full of flowers, a port filled as far as the eye could discern with ships, masts, and flags; in a word, the whole of that enchanted city, which resembles less ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... must not be dissolved, at every random provocation, into ecstacy, laughter, or sorrow. There is too much to be done in business, government, mechanics, and the laboratory, to allow one's attention to wander dreamingly over the tragic, the beautiful, the pathetic, the comic, and the grotesque qualities of the day's work. To take an extreme case, it would, as Jane Harrison observes, be a monstrosity, when our friend was drowning, to note with lingering appreciation the fluent white curve of his arm in the glimmering waters of the late afternoon. The man to whom ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... grave revelations that had been made, although they had been sufficient to have paralyzed one of less courage and resolution than himself, he outwits his companions by banter, treating the apparition with intentional and grotesque disrespect and jocularity at a moment when an irresolute mind would have been terrified ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... circulating it in cups to each of the rustic company, to be eaten with bread.' At these churn-suppers the masters and their families attend the entertainment, and share in the general mirth. The men mask themselves, and dress in a grotesque manner, and are allowed the privilege of playing harmless practical jokes on their employers, &c. The churn-supper song varies in different dales, but the following used to be the most popular version. ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... French traffic; it had all at once assumed the aspect of dramatic complication. It had only been necessary for us to stop on our lounging stroll along the stone wharves, diverting our gaze for a moment from the grotesque assortment of old houses that, before now, had looked down on so many naval engagements, and innocently to ask a brief question of a nautical gentleman, picturesquely attired in a blue shirt and a scarlet ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... modern muse will see things in a higher and broader light. It will realize that everything in creation is not humanly beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light. It will ask itself if the narrow and relative sense of the artist should prevail over the infinite, absolute sense of the Creator; if it is for man to correct God; if a mutilated ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... lent words and images to the most refined sensibility to nature, struggling for expression: his descriptions are identical with the things themselves, seen through the fine medium of passion: strip them of that connexion, and try them by ordinary conceptions and ordinary rules, and they are as grotesque and barbarous as you please!—By thus lowering Shakespeare's genius to the standard of common-place invention, it was easy to show that his faults were as great as his beauties; for the excellence, which consists merely in a conformity to rules, is counterbalanced by the technical violation of ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... forms of those in whom they were most interested. A group of some half dozen men, apparently common sailors, and those, in all probability, whose services had been compelled in the working of the vessel, were the only evidences that civilised man formed a portion of that grotesque assemblage. These, with their arms evidently bound behind their backs, and placed on one of the gangways, were only visible at intervals, as the band of savages that surrounded them, brandishing their tomahawks around their heads, occasionally left an opening in ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... similar evil straits,—with Marc Antony, with King Arthur in Gwendolen's enchanted castle, and with Geraint the strong but slothful,—rather far-fetched this last comparison,—and of all the rest. It was a grotesque variety, but amid it all he really suffered. And he would make good resolves and, for the moment, firm ones, and return to town when the dew was falling and the moonlight coming, and the tale was but retold. And the woman was wise, as women are, and conscienceless, ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... true I did not come to argue this point; I came to ask advice, and you tell me to bow before grotesque idols." ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... is taken from a work published a few years ago. It is not a work of any importance, but it had some circulation in its day; and like many other works then published, was calculated to do immense mischief, by quoting the false statements of Cambrensis as authority, and by giving grotesque sketches of Irish character, which were equally untrue. The writer says: "They [the Irish chieftains] opposed the introduction of English law, because they had a direct interest in encouraging murder and theft." The fact was, as we have shown, that ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... convulsion of nature had been used as an excuse for one of the wildest freaks of extravagance that Carquinez Springs had ever known. Perhaps that quick sense of humor which dominates the American male in exigencies of this kind kept the extravagances from being merely bizarre and grotesque, and it was presently known that the hotel and its menage were to be appropriately burlesqued by some of the guests, who, attired as Indians, would personate the staff, from the oracular hotel proprietor himself down to the ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... yellow old woman, with a quiver on her shoulder, a bow in her hand; her grey hair is covered by a helmet and she wears great military boots. The picture is magical. There is infinite pathos in the sight of the two withered, crippled, grotesque forms from which all the glamour of manhood and beauty have departed, and infinite awe in the thought of the holy communion of the unconquerable and passionate souls. I wonder it has not come down to us as one of the great ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... nothing else, and two others with voices that might not have been unpopular in a decent minstrel show were rendering a popular air. They wore battered straw hats and a make-up which was intended to be grotesque. ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... the very earliest opportunity." At this she turned and looked at me with her direct, unswerving gaze, so that I grew suddenly uncomfortable. "You don't doubt my word, do you, Diana?" I questioned, glancing down at my grotesque attire. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... again, it shall one day rise up terribly to avenge that horror of the past. Unless Earth and Time remember, O Children of the Sun! for men have forgotten, and on the soil of your Paradise the African negro, learned in the vices of Europe, erects his monstrous effigy of civilisation and his grotesque mockery of freedom; unless it be through his brutish body, into which the blood and hatred with which the soil of Espanola was soaked have now passed, that they shall dreadfully strike at ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... whilst he was in the ark,[47] the adventures of Jonah inside the whale are related with an extraordinary wealth of imagination,[48] whilst the beautiful story of Elisha and the Shunnamite woman is travestied in the most grotesque manner.[49] ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... their elaborate cookery and nice taste in wines; their interest in the cut and material of their clothes and the luxury of their bed coverlets: the extravagance of the furniture in their chapels, and even the grotesque architecture of their buildings. He especially censures the magnificent state in which the abbots live and with which they travel about, and he declares himself emphatically against that exemption of monasteries from episcopal control which was one of the most ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... shape—a young man's. It was in the dress of the last century, or rather in a likeness of such dress (for both the male shape and the female, though defined, were evidently unsubstantial, impalpable—simulacra—phantasms); and there was something incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful, in the contrast between the elaborate finery, the courtly precision of that old-fashioned garb, with its ruffles and lace and buckles, and the corpse-like aspect and ghost-like stillness of the flitting wearer. Just as the ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... none of that discipline and restraint which made their predecessors, the Buccaneers, both formidable and respectable. These Ishmaels of the sea rendered an account to no man, and treated their prisoners according to the drunken whim of the moment. Flashes of grotesque generosity alternated with longer stretches of inconceivable ferocity, and the skipper who fell into their hands might find himself dismissed with his cargo, after serving as boon companion in some hideous debauch, ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... These remarkable and grotesque appearing birds attain a length of about 48 inches. The plumage varies from white to a deep rosy red. It requires several years for them to attain the perfect adult plumage, and unlike most birds, they are in the best of plumage during the winter, the colors ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... of the formalism of the affair. For this dance in an earthen hovel on a plank floor was the degenerate but lineal descendant of the splendid and formal balls which the Dons had held in the old days, when New Spain belonged to its proud and wealthy conquerors; it was the wistful and grotesque ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... consists in covering the whole tusk with a succession of boldly carved grotesque figures—human, animal, and symbolic—giving the tusk a rich embroidered-like look, the thick ends being finished off with a suitable diamond pattern belt and the tip finished with an equally appropriate series of carvings in the shape of a mascle studded foolscap, or a capsule ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... pipe back in her mouth and began to smoke fiercely. The candle wick burned long, and was topped by a little cap of fiery red that seemed to wink at us like an impish gnome. The most grotesque shadow of Peg flickered over the wall behind her. The one-eyed cat remitted his grim watch and went to sleep. Outside the wind screamed like a ravening beast at the window. Suddenly Peg removed her pipe from her mouth, bent forward, gripped my wrist with her sinewy fingers until I ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the father, "you're indulgent to-day, Azemia; you should say grotesque and buffoonish; that it should be possible to push bad taste so far! It is not enough that their mysteries are incomprehensible; here they're ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... spectacle. Whatever the object which gathers together a mob of the lowest class, they will soon begin to relieve the tedium of expectation by coarse jests, drunkenness, and brawling. Yet these descriptive logicians are never weary of painting to us the grotesque and disgusting scenes which the mass of spectators exhibit on these occasions, as if this were quite decisive of the question. That ragged children, who have never thought of death at all, play their usual pranks at the foot of the gallows—that pickpockets ply their trade in this as in every ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... said she, "your fashionable comedies would be too absurd to make the lowest of our audiences at the Boulevards laugh; you have excluded sentiment and wit, and what have you in their place? Characters out of drawing and out of nature; grotesque figures, such as you see in a child's magic lantern. Then you talk of English humour—I wish I could understand it; but I cannot be diverted with seeing a tailor turned gentleman pricking his father with ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... popular recognition of the ethical intelligence underlying his humor. It was, of course, funny; but under the fun it was an impassioned study of the human conscience. Hawthorne or Bunyan might have been proud to imagine that powerful allegory, which had a grotesque force far beyond either of them.... Yet it quite failed of the response I had hoped for it, and I shall not insist here upon Mark Twain as a moralist; though I warn the reader that if he leaves out of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... detail, not from books but from things, all that is necessary in such a case. Let him think he is Robinson himself; let him see himself clad in skins, wearing a tall cap, a great cutlass, all the grotesque get-up of Robinson Crusoe, even to the umbrella which he will scarcely need. He should anxiously consider what steps to take; will this or that be wanting. He should examine his hero's conduct; has he omitted nothing; is there nothing ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... spiritual and intellectual tyranny which would in no wise have been preferable to that of Rome. And of all Laud's dreams, surely that of the Archbishop of Canterbury exercising a perpetual dictatorship over English literature is not the least absurd and grotesque. ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... way, that this appearance of moral ugliness was due in part to the physical ugliness of features, which were nearly without exception coarse, irregular, exaggerated, grotesque, and in some cases more like ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... and Chippewas, Pottawatomies, Sacs, and Foxes, and others belonging to tribes whose very names have perished. The straggling streets of the dismayed little town were thronged with many hundreds of dark-browed, sullen-looking savages, grotesque in look and terrible in possibility. They strutted to and fro in their dirty finery, or lounged round the houses, inquisitive, importunate, and insolent, hardly concealing a lust for bloodshed and plunder that the slightest mishap was certain to ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the bottom, do not weary of the ladder ere they climb high. Few of such, or of others more enthusiastic, recall the early associations of "the office" with pleasure. Yet there is no world more grotesque, none, at least in America, more capable of fictitious illustration. Around a newspaper all the dramatis personae of the world congregate; within it there are staid idiosyncratic folk who ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... is the only thing that can crow. Can anything be more absurd than the idea of a man cheering alone in his back bedroom? But I think that reverence is better expressed by one man than a million. There is something unnatural and impossible, even grotesque, in the idea of a vast crowd of human beings all assuming an air of delicacy. All the same, my dear, this is a great and serious hour and it is felt so completely by all England that I cannot deny the enduring wish I have, quite apart from certain more private sentiments, that the noblest Englishwoman ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... some alterations) translated into German. This version is prose and probably either the work of W. H. von Dalberg or von Eisenthal. It has little merit, but proved popular and was printed in 1789 with a somewhat grotesque frontispiece of Oroonoko and Imoinda, both of whom are black 'as ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... humiliated pride; men do not take pleasure in revisiting the scenes of a disastrous rout, and it must be admitted that the possibility of summoning a lost love to his presence when he rang for boiling water, had in it something of the grotesque. He had no difficulty in finding other lodgings by correspondence, and he spared himself the necessity of returning at all to his former abode by writing to ask Clerk Janaway to move ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... in the fugitive pages of that day are grotesque. A little girl in Punch improves on the talk of her dowdy mother with the maids. An inordinate baby stares; a little boy flies, hideous, from some ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... still staring. Minnie felt absolutely convinced now that he was mad, and directed the cabman home on her own responsibility. "Put on my shoes? Certainly dear," said he, as the cab began to turn, and hid the strutting black figure, now small in the distance, from his eyes. Then suddenly something grotesque struck him, and he laughed. Then he remarked, "It ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the row of gargoyles have an almost humorous appearance. The drips upon the pavement and shops below were evidently a nuisance, and rain water-spouts, with plain pipes leading diagonally from them, have been attached to each grotesque head, making it seem that the grinning monsters have developed a great and unquenchable thirst. Inside, the church is dark and impressive. There are double rows of pillars in the aisles, and a huge ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... had drawn back across the moat, and was sitting on her haunches as though ready to spring. Indeed, the very instant she saw him she did spring, and with a blind unreasoning fury, which would have been grotesque, only that it was so frightfully real. She did not try to run up the wall, but simply launched herself at him as though hate and fury could lend her wings to pass straight through the great distance between them. Amelia, womanlike, got quite concerned, ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... flock screamed and sang and raved over Tommy for several hours, making such a noise as set Lady Eleanor's peacocks screaming till they could scream no more. The boy was at first rather terrified, but as his helpers became more vehement and their antics more grotesque, he lost his fright and was intensely amused. Finally the whole congregation rose and, headed by the preacher, rushed out of the house with wild cries that the evil spirit had left Tommy and that they ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... Commons was remarkable in many respects, but most of all for Grattan's debut. A lively curiosity to hear one of whom so much had been said in his own country, pervaded the whole House, as Grattan rose. His grotesque little figure, his eccentric action, and his strangely cadenced sentences rather surprised than attracted attention, but as he warmed with the march of ideas, men of both parties warmed to the genial and enlarged philosophy, embodied in the interfused ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... You remember that I told you, in my Sixth Introductory Lecture (Sec. 151), that the mythic accounts of Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the family of Tantalus; and especially in the most grotesque legend of them all, the inlaying of the ivory shoulder of Pelops. At that story Pindar pauses—not, indeed, without admiration, nor alleging any impossibility in the circumstances themselves, but doubting the careless hunger of Demeter—and gives his own reading of the event, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... after the great saurians had been swept from the scene, we might first have considered the lemurs or apes. They had hands. Aesthetically viewed, the poor simians were simply grotesque; but travelers who knew other planets might have known what beauty may spring from an uncouth beginning in this ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... oligarchs, guilds and corporations, had hampered the movements of commerce; it was natural that fashion should instinctively rebel against restraint. The honest burgher's vrow of Middelburg or Enkhuyzen claimed the right to make herself as grotesque as Queen Elizabeth in all her glory. Sumptuary laws were an unwholesome part of feudal tyranny, and, as such, were naturally dropping into oblivion on the free soil of the Netherlands. It was the complaint therefore of moralists that unproductive consumption ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... which concluded the trial," says Hazlitt, "lasted seventy-two hours. It might naturally be supposed that silence, restraint, a sort of religious awe, would have pervaded the scene. On the contrary, everything bore the marks of gaiety, dissipation, and the most grotesque confusion. The farther end of the hall was converted into boxes, where ladies, in a studied deshabille, swallowed ices, oranges, liqueurs, and received the salutations of the members who went and came, as on ordinary occasions. Here the doorkeepers on the Mountain ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... excessively in his heart, for he had imbibed from the mild and sage Buddha a befitting contempt for these grotesque and cadaverous fanatics. The emergency, however, left him no resource, and he followed his guide to a charnel house, which the latter had selected as his domicile. There, with many lamentations over the smoothness of his hair and the brevity of his nails, the Jogi ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... engraved—illustrations for books, being as clever with the engraver's tools as with the pencil; sometimes he cut out those odd, fantastic "initials," "ornaments," "finials," which are now so commonly seen in publications, catching the classical grotesque of the Renaissance to perfection, and deceiving the experienced; sometimes he worked in the press-room in the House of Flamma, Fleet Street, pulling artists' proofs, or printing expensively illustrated volumes—numbered, and the plates destroyed—actual ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... my father patiently, "we have had enough of the grotesque this evening. It is growing late, my son. Put ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... any fanciful shape of which he could think. It might become a part of a beautifully executed miniature. It might be surrounded by a mass of gorgeous ornamentation extending to the bottom or the other margin of the page and enriched by everything beautiful or grotesque of which the writer could think. All this ornamentation was often executed in gold and colors and was one of the chief methods of artistic expression ...
— Books Before Typography - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... I said. "For I ought to have owned my fault as soon as I got here, before he had fired a shot, before leading him into a great and deadly sin; but we have made our life so grotesque, that to act in that way would have been almost impossible, for only after I have faced his shot at the distance of twelve paces could my words have any significance for him, and if I had spoken before, he would have said, 'He is a coward, the ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... him there—this grotesque object with the chalky face and coal-black eyebrows that ran up in tall triangles to meet a still chalkier pate—this figure with the red and black crescents on his cheeks and the baggy, spotted suit ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... girls and boys, and defenceless men and women, has adroitly sought to obscure a situation concerning which all honest people are entirely clear, by saying that vice cannot be wholly suppressed. Nobody has made upon the authorities of New York any such grotesque demand. All that our citizens have asked is that the government of the city shall not be employed to protect a trade in vice, which is carried on for the benefit of a political organization. The case is entirely clear. No Mephistophelian cunning can obscure it, and I thank ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... Faces too grotesque for laughter, Faces too shattered by pain for tears, Faces of such ugliness That the ugliness ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher
... burlesque of shipcraft? To renew the past in such a fixture, to work oneself up to the old glow of flight and action, and then, while one stamped and rocked maniacally, to feel the refusal of so much as a timber to respond to one's fervour of animation! It was a grotesque picture. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... Among the messes there was a great contest to have the best decorations, and some astonishing results were achieved with little more than brightly coloured papers, a pair of scissors and a pot of paste. On each table stood a grotesque figure or fanciful erection of ice, which was cunningly lighted up by candles from within and sent out shafts of sparkling light. 'If,' Scott wrote in his diary, 'the light-hearted scenes of to-day can end the first period of our ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... to the gay and grotesque life deployed in an evening at the dancing-place of the Parisian students in the Closerie des lilas, it was instructive to compare this with a low English dancing-house, the Holborn Casino, which was merely sad, stiff, ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... is a vague tradition, that, in this grotesque dress, (for the brims of the hat were as broad as a cart-wheel,) Nell Gwyn had the good fortune first to attract the attention of her royal lover. Where the jest lay, is difficult to discover: it seems to have originated with the ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden |
