"Uncanny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with old people (when he was in more advanced life) who had no doubt of the existence of witches and spirits, good and bad, visiting the earth, and performing acts of benevolence or malevolence, according to the inclination or caprice of the uncanny or unearthly agent, we cannot say; but of one thing there can be no doubt, that even in years of maturity he believed there were spirits that appeared to men, and assisted them to perform actions they could not have done without superhuman aid, and that ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... closer, Mr. Choate, who seemed to have uncanny eyesight plus long experience with subsea life, added greatly to the nervousness of his guests by suddenly exclaiming: "Stand by, men; it's the biggest ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... a highly specialized art, involving the appraisal not only of intrinsic qualities, but of the appeal which the stone will make to the buying public. In marking a sale price for some exceptional stone not commonly handled in the trade, experts in different parts of the world often reach an almost uncanny ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... Walter, nervously, "this thing is getting positively uncanny. I declare I am beginning to feel a sympathy ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... of the half-sunken Doraine was scraping ominously on the bed of the channel. She shivered and swerved from frequent contact with submerged rocks, but held her course with uncanny steadiness, while every soul on board gazed with stark, despairing eyes at the land which mocked them as they passed. Far on ahead loomed the lofty hills, and ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... might arouse her fears. Perhaps, after all, she had been fortunate to fall into the hands of these strange people, who might not only protect her from harm, but even aid her in returning to Helium. That they were repulsive and uncanny she could not forget, but if they meant her no harm she could, at least, overlook their repulsiveness. Renewed hope aroused within her a spirit of greater cheerfulness, and it was almost blithely now that she moved at the side of her ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... appear. Not a leaf rustled, not a twig bent, though the strange medley kept on for fifteen minutes, then ceased as abruptly as it had begun, and not a whisper more could be heard. The whole thing seemed uncanny. Was it a bird at all, or a mere "wandering voice"? It seemed to come from a piece of rather swampy ground, overgrown with clumps of willow and low shrubs; but what bird of earthly mould could come and go, and make no sign that ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... of them was in the Prologue, when he wrote in the student's book, "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." He never looked at the book, and the nature of the spirit appeared suddenly in a most uncanny fashion. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... had the uncanny certainty of having had the answer to this situation almost in her grasp. An answer which appeared to involve the world of Jontarou, Tick-Tock, and of all ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... angry thrust to his horse, which had grown restive under him, and plunged into the water, heading for the deepest part where the current was swift. Hundreds of Uhlans galloped in after him. It was cold and uncanny in the rapid current in the middle of the stream, and the Uhlans caught hold of one another as they fell off their horses. Some of the horses were drowned and some of the men; the others tried to swim on, some in the saddle and some clinging to their horses' manes. They tried to make ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... transformation of Aunt Jen, the hard crabapple of our family, after the entrance of the Maitland children into the household of Heathknowes. Not that my aunt had much faith in Irma. She had an art, which my aunt counted uncanny, indeed savouring of the sin of witchcraft. It mattered not at all what Irma was given to wear—an old tartan of my grandmother's Highland Mary days when she was a shepherdess by the banks of Cluden, a severe gown designed ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... quickly that evening, and I believe I was unusually industrious in stirring it. There went the first shot — I am not a nervous man, but I must admit that I gave a start. Shot now followed upon shot — they had an uncanny sound over the great plain. A trusty servant lost his life each time. It was long before the first man reported that he had finished; they were all to open their dogs, and take out the entrails to prevent ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... a smile; "the psychologist can tell with almost mathematical accuracy just how your mental mechanism is working. I admit it sounds uncanny, but it can be proved. In fact, it has been proved, time ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... warm summer night without a cat's-paw of breeze. Through the dark curtain of the sky in a parabola rising from the German trenches swept the brilliant sputter of red light of a German flare. It was coming as straight toward us as if it had been aimed at us. It cast a searching, uncanny glare over the tall wheat in head between ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... into silence. The Death Mist went on, draining from the roadway to follow the tall, prismatically-colored cloud. It moved swiftly and blindly. To the circling planes above it, it seemed like a blind thing imagining itself confined, and searching for the edges of its prison. It gave an uncanny impression of being directed by intelligence. But the Death Mist, itself, was ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... something so weird and uncanny about the whole thing that it gave me a turn and made me feel quite faint. I began to wish, for the first time, that I had taken Johann's advice. Here a thought struck me, which came under almost mysterious ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... in the house save the ticking of an invisible clock. It might have been a place bewitched, so intense and so uncanny was the silence, broken only by that grim ticking that sounded somehow as if it had gone on exactly the ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... this strange letter over carefully twice, and laid it down. For a moment I hardly knew what to say. It was certainly the most uncanny thing I had ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... given it to better him or bother him? If the pointless groan in which Peter exhaled a part of his humiliation had been translated into words, these words would have been as heavily charged with a genuine British mistrust of the uncanny principle as if the poor fellow speaking them had never quitted his island. Several acquired perceptions had struck a deep root in him, but an immemorial, compact formation lay deeper still. He tried at the present hour to rest on it spiritually, but found it ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... we seemed to come to Golden Gate Park. It seemed as if we had started for there. By this time the darkness was settling. But it was a weird twilight. The glare from the burning city threw a kind of red flame and shadow about us. It seemed uncanny; the figures about ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... until they have solved the mystery of that ledge. They searched it, no doubt, as soon as they found the rock was empty, and at daybreak they will set about tracing the trail up. That will be easy enough for them when they have once got rid of the idea that there was something uncanny about it, and then we shall have them on our heels again and on the chief's too. The first thing for us to do will be to make along the hill till we get to the edge of the canon, where Leaping Horse has gone for your ponies, and to follow it ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty
... on. Where were those uncanny, guardian powers that had formerly rendered him immune from the dangers of surprise? Could this dull sleeper be the alert, sensitive Tarzan ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... his composure rapidly. The first uncanny shock was wearing off and he was confessing to himself that there was nothing to fear in ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... a time, but there was more in the cookies—she bent such a look on you, so fierce and intolerant of vacillation. She belonged to the group of odd characters, rarer now than they used to be, etched upon the vague consciousness of small towns as in a way mysterious and uncanny; some said that Mother Beggarlegs was connected with the aristocracy and some that she had been "let off" being hanged. The alternative was allowed full swing, but in any case it was clear that ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... feelings are probably the reverse of your own. If you are bold, he is timid as a rabbit; if you are panic-stricken, he knows exactly what to do; if you are fearful, he has no fear; if you are inquisitive, he is instantly shy; and, like all other wild creatures, he has an almost uncanny way of understanding your thought. It is as if, in that intent, penetrating gaze of his, he saw your soul turned inside out for his inspection. The only exception is when you meet him without fear or curiosity, with the desire ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... whether I should change the title. The word "Ghost" has to a great extent in modern times lost its true meaning to the majority and is generally associated in many minds with something uncanny—with haunted houses and weird apparitions filling with terror those who come ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... Mignon. Her black eyes sparkled with triumph. At last she had found a way to even her score with Marjorie Dean. With almost uncanny shrewdness she had divined what Marjorie herself had not discovered. This blue-eyed baby of a girl, for Mignon mentally characterized her as such, was jealous of Marjorie's friendship with the Stevens girl. Very ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... birds. I think they regard him as a half reptile, who has not yet climbed high enough in the bird scale to deserve recognition; so they let him severely alone. Even the goshawk hesitates before taking a swoop at him, not knowing quite whether the gaudy creature is dangerous or only uncanny. I saw a great hawk once drop like a bolt upon a kingfisher that hung on quivering wings, rattling softly, before his hole in the bank. But the robber lost his nerve at the instant when he should have dropped his claws to strike. He swerved aside and shot upward in a ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... dark wings across the road and perched on an oak bough. It cocked its head, and watched him wisely. James whistled at it, but it did not stir. It remained with its head cocked in that attitude of uncanny wisdom. ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... I miss Jack Emory," she said. "He half lived with us, you know, and I am always expecting to meet him in the hall. When I was writing my invitations I caught myself beginning a note, 'Dear Jack.' It is uncanny." ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... Where the cannon were I don't know—all a considerable distance away, I suppose, because the only sign of shell were the little breaking puffs of smoke in the blue sky with just a pin-flash of light as they broke; but really amongst that welter of wooded hill the sounds were uncanny. They'd be under one's feet, over one's head, in one's ear, up against one's stomach, straight in the small of one's back. Since my night with Nikitin physical fear really seems to have left me—the whole outward paraphernalia of the war has become an entirely commonplace thing, ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... was wanting in alertness and initiative. He lacked the proper campaigning spirit, and they found it chilling that he should be so distant in his manners after so long a time together. Another said that Lieutenant Eynhardt went into action like a sleep-walker, and his calmness had something uncanny about it. The captain was not pleased with him, because he had no knowledge of business; as far as example went he was the worst forager in the whole regiment. If a peasant's wife complained to him, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... hand. Then there was the dastardly attempt on Sherburne, the steel magnate. Not a trace of the assailant except this same clutching fist. So it has gone, Jameson—the most alarming and most inexplicable series of murders that has ever happened in this country. And nothing but this uncanny hand to ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... the armchair by the fire and spread a bony hand to the blaze, as if he had been at home in that particular corner for months. Robert, sitting opposite to him, and watching his guest's eyes travel round the room, with its medicine shelves, its rods and nets, and preparations of uncanny beasts, its parish litter, and its teeming bookcases, felt that the Mile End matter was turning out ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this, as in other businesses, the call of the markets is the law. The factory floors are made slippery with the tread of bare-footed coolies, who shout as the tea whirls through its transformations. The over-note to the clamour—an uncanny thing too—is the soft rustle-down of the tea itself—stacked in heaps, carried in baskets, dumped through chutes, rising and falling in the long troughs where it is polished, and disappearing at last into ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... stream of world-history and the great duties imposed upon us by it. Even to-day, as then, the same "super-terrestrial pride, the same super-clever irresolution" spreads among us "which in our history follows with uncanny regularity the great epochs ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... herd. The conventionality of little boys is constant; the colour of their traditions is uniform. At the same time, although I made no friends, I found no enemies. In class, except in my extraordinary aptitude for geography, which was looked upon as incomprehensible and almost uncanny, I was rather behind than in front of the others. I, therefore, awakened no jealousies, and, intent on my own dreams, I think my little shadowy presence escaped the notice of most ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... served in analyzing this uncanny, chaotic mass, even were it possible to do so. Miss Tyler placed herself amid French revolutionary surroundings, and was seen as a remarkable "romantic" French woman, with a strong American accent and an emphatic New York manner. She ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... stronger in the darkness, trembled, wavered, and floated over the paper, in rhythm with the snapping of the discharge. Through the metal plate, the paper, myself, and the tin box, the invisible rays were flying, with an effect strange, interesting and uncanny. The metal plate seemed to offer no appreciable resistance to the flying force, and the light was as rich and full as if nothing lay between ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... largest cabin, and there was evidently to be a meeting of some very mournful—or at any rate solemn—character, for they came quietly, shook hands silently, and crept into their places with a stealthy gliding motion. It was a weird, uncanny scene. The moon rose slowly behind the great black mountains, and cast its rays upon the tree-tops and shimmered its light on the whitewashed cabins, and only half revealed the dark figures that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... unlighted at night, it is an uncanny experience to walk through a great city which is absolutely dark. The Champs-Elysees is probably at present the darkest avenue on earth. All those monumental lamp-posts which used to stand like beacons in the midst of the stream of traffic now shine no more. ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... you be seated?" she said, with a politeness and a softness of tone that sounded almost uncanny ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... It was uncanny. It shook the mayor's nerve. 'My dear Mrs Halloran, if you will let me have a word or two with ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Besides these and other shows, there were the wandering minstrels, most of whom were "Waterloo veterans" wanting arms or a leg. I remember one whose arms had been "smashed by a thunderbolt at Jamaica." Queer, bent old dames, who superintended "lucky bags" or told fortunes, supplied the uncanny element, but hesitated to call themselves witches, for there can still be seen near Thrums the pool where these unfortunates used to be drowned, and in the session book of the Glen Quharity kirk can be read an old minute announcing that on a certain Sabbath there ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... last act may be given in a few words. It begins as if Wagner had felt that he had not made sufficient use of the uncanny effects to be got out of the phantom ship, and we get a long string of choruses not necessary to the drama. At the last Vanderdecken, he, too, rises to the full height of his character, and, determining that he will not sacrifice Senta, renounces her and goes ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... as something "uncanny," and it leads us at once to another class of men, whose supernatural strength was regarded as a curse to the community. These were the Baresarks. What the hamrammir men were when they were in their fits the Baresarks almost always were. They are described as being always of exceeding, and ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... pulling the wires to be appointed Commissioner of the Docks. The white clothes situation, however, is serious. It seems that every spare moment I have I am either washing or thinking of washing or just after having washed, and to one who possesses as I do the uncanny faculty of being able to get dirtier in more places in the shortest space of time than any ten street children picked at random could ever equal, life presents one long ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... but it didn't smell like it, and long bits of it floated in the air just like golden threads; besides, there was something uncanny about it which sent thrills into the roots of his rough hair, causing it to rise in ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... not know exactly what he felt or what he wanted, when he heard Joe Lorey's startling imitation of the panther's cry, outside, and, rising, presently, when careful listening revealed the fact that the less obtrusive sound of human voices followed what had seemed to be the weird, uncanny call of the wild-beast, he went to the door and opened it, so that he could ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... ingenuity the plan was being laid, for well I knew the amazing and quite uncanny fascination for women of all classes possessed by ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... the difference evidently goes far deeper than that. In some parts of Australia there are actually sex-totems, signifying that each sex is all-one-flesh, a mystic corporation. And, all the savage world over, there is a feeling that woman is uncanny, a thing apart, which feeling is probably responsible for most of the special disabilities—and the special privileges—that are the lot of woman at ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... or temperature, and to do battle with the same, in very inadequate apparel. The circumstances which attend Mrs. B.'s alarms are generally of the following kind. I am awakened by the mention of my baptismal name in that peculiar species of whisper which has something uncanny in its very nature, besides the dismal associations which belong to it, from the fact of its being used only in melodramas ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... new hours came, one by one, and Long Jim came with none of them. The night remained fairly light, with a good moon, but the light that it threw over the forest was gray and uncanny. Henry's feeling of mystery and danger deepened. Once he thought he heard a rustling in the thicket and, finger on the trigger of his rifle, he stole among the bushes to discover what caused it. He found nothing and, returning to his lonely ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and ran nimbly, in a shower of fragile color, up the trunks, along the branches, of the trees. Jack always afterward associated the soft, falling purple, the soft, languorous fragrance, the almost uncanny beauty of the ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... start that frightened me more than anything else that has happened me in France: In the gleam of a distant flare, the white faces of two women peered around the corner of the building, looking at me through the open door. There was something so damnably uncanny in their appearance, and so startling, that a cold sweat broke out over me, and I snapped my rifle to the present. Had they not been women they would not have lived; a loiterer around headquarters takes his ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... is another of the almost miraculous features of the park. The basin of the geyser has been described as a weird, uncanny place, and the words seem well chosen. Of vegetation there is practically none, because the underground heat keeps the ground always warm, and steam breaks out into the atmosphere at several points. The general aspect is drear and desolate, gray and ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... in a half whisper, "I wish she binna uncanny! [*Mad] her words dinna seem to come in God's name, or like other folk's. Odd, they threep [*Declare] in our country that there are ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... storekeeper. Naturally, Pete did not appreciate the value of this until later—when his familiarity with the language helped him out of many a tight place. But what Pete did appreciate was the old herder's skill with the six-gun—his uncanny ability to shoot from any position on the instant and to use the gun with either hand with equal facility. In one of the desert towns Pete had traded a mountain-lion skin for a belt and holster and several ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... flaming high against the sunset purple of the eastern skies. Finally, even this great light paled to a ghostly white, as the supporting foundation of mountain ridges dropped into the darkness of the long northern twilight, until the snowy summit seemed no longer a part of earth, but a veil of uncanny mist, caught up by the winds from the Pacific and floating far above the black sky-line ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... of the telephone men were focussed upon this problem—how to reduce the expenditure on copper. One uncanny device, which would seem to be a mere inventor's fantasy if it had not already saved the telephone companies four million dollars or more, is known as the "phantom circuit." It enables three messages to run at the same time, where only two ran before. A double track of wires is made to ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... was, the old Paris coachman crossed himself and, as he entered the uncanny neighborhood, felt around for the sacred amulet that every good Frenchman wears next ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... aloud. I wonder if I shall ever be stirred again as Mademoiselle Reisz's playing moved me to-night. I wonder if any night on earth will ever again be like this one. It is like a night in a dream. The people about me are like some uncanny, half-human beings. There ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... sundry misgivings as to the unhallowed nature of the characters I had so unwittingly opened upon, coupled with the strange hints and mystical language of the old gentleman, crept through my disordered imagination. Certainly, to say no worse of it, the whole thing looked UNCANNY! I was about, precipitately, to hurry the papers into my desk, with a pious determination to have nothing more to do with them, when my eye fell upon a book, neatly bound in blue morocco, and which, in my eagerness, I had hitherto ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... afraid to speak; the silence of the room, save for the ticking of the little clock, and the occasional rustle of papers, together with the experiences through which he had been passing, almost unnerved him; besides, there was something uncanny, almost ghostly, about the ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... the right, passed a row of cottages with long gardens at the back running down to the brow of the bank that overhung the Beck. In most of these cottages she was an object of suspicion because of her uncanny words and ways, and she knew it, and the thought of it was a grief to her. She wanted the people to like her as she would have liked them had they let her. The wish to win them fired her imagination. She looked on ahead into futurity, and was a beautiful lady, driving a ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... blossoms, the fantastic Clistoyucca arborescens, or Joshua tree, being more in harmony with the archaic landscape than any other plant there. As the traveller crosses one of the open forests of this tree, which is often twenty-five feet high, the more distant ones appear to beckon like some uncanny desert octopus yearning to draw him within reach of those scrawny arms. The blossom of this monstrous growth is a revelation, so unexpected is it. A group as large as one's head, pure white, on the extremity of a dagger-covered bough, it is like an angel amidst ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... sort of miraculous power, according to the logic of simple peasant folk - the Druids had counted it among their sacred plants. "When the dog-star arose from unsunned spots" the priests gathered it. Did not Shakespeare's witches learn some of their uncanny rites from these reverend men of old? One is impressed with the striking similarity of many customs recorded of both. Two of the most frequently used ingredients in witches' cauldrons were the vervain and the rue. "The former probably derived its notoriety from the fact of its being sacred ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... in beneficent streams from his rail-head tons of stuff every day. Every day he sent out two hundred and eighty bags of postal matter to the men beyond. The polish on the metallic portions of his numerous motor-lorries was uncanny. You might lift a bonnet and see the bright parts of the engine glittering like the brass of a yacht. Dandyism of the ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... and who was sent with the despatch," demanded the general of the new-comer, upon whom the Hualpai looked in recognition, but with neither light nor welcome in his piercing eyes. Question and answer in halting, uncanny speech progressed fitfully a moment. ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... southward they encountered cold and wind beyond that of the North Sea in January. The nights grew long; the battering of the gales never ceased; the ships lost sight of one another. It was whispered that not only had the uncanny brothers foretold the evil weather, but Thomas Doughty had boasted of having brought it about. "We'll ha' no luck till we get rid of our prophet," said blunt Tom Moone, "and the Lord don't provide no whales for the ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... spoke a word, but as we now cautiously advanced with Kennedy and peered over the steel plate we instinctively turned to Craig for an explanation. Carton seemed to regard him as if he were some uncanny mortal. For, there in the steel plate, was a hole. As I looked at the clean-cut edges, I saw that it was smaller but identical in nature with that which we had seen in the ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... like a book than a man," she had often thought, and the fancy seized her now that the great leather-bound book upon his knees, and all those leather-bound books against his walls, had somehow possessed him with an uncanny ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... uncanny, after all, about London, in its relation to his contemplated marriage. When she had first come up she was easier with him than now. And yet his bringing her there had helped his cause; the house had decidedly impressed her—almost overawed her, and though he owned that ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... descend to those deepest depths where it is reported that the people on the other side of the world, in America, may be heard crying, "Hurrah for Lafayette!" Between ourselves, where I did go seemed to me deep enough in all conscience; there was an endless roaring and rattling, uncanny sounds of machinery, the rush of subterranean streams, sickening clouds of ore-dust continually rising, water dripping on all sides, and the miner's lamp gradually growing dimmer and dimmer. The effect was really benumbing, I breathed with difficulty, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... have read my thoughts already," she said; "your intuitive knowledge of what goes on in other people's minds is positively uncanny." ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... more as evidences of his lofty mission. His father and mother regarded him as an oracle, for the simple reason that he always answered just as they expected. A curious or superstitious neighbor was added from time to time to the circle, and their reports heightened the half-uncanny interest with which ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... the swift, sharp, saw-like cutting among the stones and the slime, the scrape, scrape of the hundred of knives into the moist earth. This ceaseless scraping, lunging, digging, made a new world of sound—strange, sinister, uncanny. It was neither of the sea nor yet of the land—it was a noise that seemed inseparable from this tongue of mud, that also appeared to be neither of the heavens above nor of the earth, from the bowels out of which it ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... ran through him and he stepped out from his concealment as he realized that this uncanny figure was not standing but hanging just clear ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... of Ramoni rose an awful revulsion against the old man. Instantly, with a memory of that first day in the cloister garden, of those following days that gave him the unexpected, uncanny glimpses of the priest, he centered all his bitterness upon Denfili. So fearful was his anger as he held it back with the rein of years of self-control, that he wondered to see Father ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... aversion toward the members of alien races, to magnify greatly the reality and importance of it. What seems race-aversion is frequently something else, namely, revulsion aroused by the presence of the strange, the unusual, the uncanny, the not-understood. Such revulsion is aroused, not only by the members of alien races, alien and unfamiliar, but as certainly by strange animals of not more terrifying appearance than the well-loved cow and ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... all the heavy doors in Montreal—and closed them upon all but those he wanted inside. He tried the same thing in England. His audacity was inspired. Something had to be done. Somebody must be the middleman. Aitken had an uncanny faculty for sizing up situations; for manipulating men; for interpreting ambition—because no man in England had an ambition surpassing his own. He could play political chess and absorb superficial culture at the same time. ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... been here once; sometimes she could fancy she saw dark shadows moving amidst the trees, and the whisper of the foliage seemed to her to hide voices at times, even as its shadow concealed forms. It was indeed an uncanny place to be alone in even under the broad light of day. All across the Pacific for thousands of miles you find relics of the past, like these ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... man," said Mr. Brewster, still with the same uncanny amiability. "He's a dabbler in a good many things—science, phrenology, antiques. I asked him to bid for me at a sale yesterday. There was a ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... was, his head up, his wide nostrils visibly drinking in that smell. Then he moved with the silent, uncanny speed which was the heritage of his race, darting down the narrow aisle toward a mass of ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... Maxon was busy educating Number Thirteen. He found the young man intelligent far beyond his most sanguine hopes, so that the progress made was little short of uncanny. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... this moment, lying with my cheek against Mother Earth, that I heard it,—a strange, uncanny sound that brought me to my hands and knees, peering fearfully into the shadows that seemed to be deepening about me moment ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... transformed pebbles. By this we used to lie for hours, watching the silver-scaled minnows as they sailed on. At the far end there was watercress, and over the hedge a strange field, good for mushrooms, but which bore with us a somewhat uncanny reputation. ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... crying? Is't the salamander pushes, Bloated-bellied, through the bushes? And the roots, like serpents twisted, Through the sand and boulders toiling, Fright us, weirdest links uncoiling To entrap us, unresisted: Living knots and gnarls uncanny Feel with polypus-antennae For the wanderer. Mice are flying, Thousand-colored, herd-wise hieing Through the moss and through ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... old pot on the broomstick, made the nose of a bit of glass, and painted in the eyes and mouth red. He wrapped the body in coloured rags, according to his instructions, and all the time he thought with a shudder that it was now in his power to bring this uncanny creature to life, and that he must remain with him till his end. But when he thought of the riches and treasures, all his horror vanished. At length the creature was finished, and on the following Thursday the farmer carried it after nightfall to the cross-roads ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... stirred visibly under her pallor. "It was not an infliction. Your writing's wonderful. Quite uncanny—the way you get inside people and things. If ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... dear Miss Wellington. Surely not uncanny. Let us ascribe it to the genius of Sargent; to the inspiration ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... is strange! I dreamed I know not what, It seemed that certain apparitions were, Which sang uncanny words, significant And yet ambiguous—half-understood— Portending evil; and an awful spook, Even as I stood with my accomplices, Counted me out, as children do in play. Is ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... guard, staring at me, and I at him. He is some sort of crab, but he stands on two legs like a caricature of a man; he has two big weapons upraised for battle, and staring black eyes stuck out on long tubes. He is an uncanny thing to look at; but then suddenly the idea comes, How do I seem to him? I realize that he is alive; a tiny mite of hunger for life, of fear and resolution. I think, How lonely he must be! And I want to tell him ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... person of Mr Devlin, one of great organising gifts and considerable eloquence, who had now obtained control of the United Irish League and all its machinery and who knew how to manipulate it as no other living person could. Without Mr Devlin's uncanny genius for organisation Mr Dillon's idiosyncrasies could have been easily combated. Mr Dillon's diatribes against "the black-blooded Cromwellians" at a time when the best of the landlord class were steadily veering in the Nationalist direction, I could never understand. Mr Devlin's detestation ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... Upon no account would a Chinaman think of taking either of these peculiar delicacies home, for it appears that mesdames, much to their credit, have serious objections to their use. They draw the line here, and the husband must confine the indulgence of his uncanny longings to restaurants, and say nothing about it, or his lady friends might mark him as one of whom "'twas said he ate strange flesh." Contrary to the statement of travellers, I find this food is not confined to the poorer ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... whirled down the avenue of Beauleys and up along the narrow country lane, wreathed with honeysuckle and wild roses, to Blackbird's Nest. He leaned back in the great car, his unseeing eyes travelling over the quiet landscape. There was something out of keeping, a little uncanny, even, in the flight of the motor-car with its solitary passenger along the country lane, past the hay carts, and the villagers resting after their long day's toil. The man who leaned back amongst the cushions, with his pale, drawn face, ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... frequently proclaimed the doctrine that the business belonged to them. They hated Rockefeller as much as they feared him, yet at the very moment when the Titusville operators were hanging him in effigy and posting the hoardings with cabalistic signs against his corporation, this mysterious, almost uncanny power was encircling them: Men who one night were addressing public meetings denouncing the Standard influence would suddenly sell out their holdings the next day. In 1875 John D. Archbold, a brilliant young refiner who had grown up in the oil regions and who had gained much local fame ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... Manassas. With the miserable speed of six knots, to which, however, the current of the river gave a very important addition, and with a protection scarcely stronger than the buckram armor of the stage, the Manassas, by her uncanny appearance and by the persistent trumpeting of the enemy, had obtained a very formidable reputation with the United States officers, who could get no reliable information ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... was quick to offer valuable suggestions. I remember Pennell condemning anything but scientific learning in dealing with the problems round us; 'no guesswork' was his argument. But he emphatically made an exception of Scott, who had an uncanny knack of hitting upon a solution. Over and over again in his diary we can read of the interest he took in pure and applied science, and it is doubtful whether this side of an expedition in high northern or southern latitudes has ever been ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... nothing uncanny in Martha Eggers' deduction that a young man who wears white hose, miraculously darned, is a self-respecting young man, brought up by a worshiping mother who knows about ginger cookies and winter underwear, and ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... first instantly, and the torch dropped from the uplifted hand of the evil-faced man who was carrying it in the lead. An intense, uncanny darkness followed the extinction of the torch, and the two boys took advantage of it to edge around the face of the rock which had blocked their progress. Without the help of the dog, and without the torch, the pursuers could do ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... was as good as his word, and we had scarcely breakfasted and arrived at Craig's scientific workshop before that official appeared, accompanied by a man who carried in uncanny jars the necessary materials for an ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... at long last, the ponderous, inert, uncanny thing lay balanced across the balustrade and sill, the legs sticking into the room. Breathing hard, Bullard grasped the ankles. A heave, a jerk, a twist, a push.... Hands pressed hard over his ears, Bullard waited for an age of thirty seconds. ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... sign to them, mockingly indifferent to them—mockingly so, indeed; for when the leaders of the Wingate wagons paused the riders of the ghostly train paused also, biding their time with no action to indicate their intent. When the advance was resumed the uncanny pari passu again went on, the rival caravan going forward as fast, no faster than those who regarded it in a fascinated interest that began to become fear. Yonder caravan could bode no good. Without doubt it planned an ambush ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... slightest attention to her when she wandered about among them. We are camped on the edge of a lake. This morning before breakfast I had a good swim in it, the water being warmer than the air, and this evening I rowed on it in the moonlight. Every night we hear the great owls hoot and laugh in uncanny fashion. ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... the suburban house is a crisis and turning-point in your life, for it will make of you either a city man or a suburban, and it will surely save you from being, for all the rest of your days, that hideous betwixt-and-between thing, that uncanny creation of modern days of rapid transit, who fluctuates helplessly between one town and another; between town and city, and between town and city again, seeking an impossible and unattainable perfection, and scattering remonstrant ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... in his prose and poetry are the surnames that he did not make. That is exactly where Macaulay is great. He is almost Homeric. The whole triumph turns upon mere names.' We have all wondered at the uncanny ingenuity that Bunyan and Dickens displayed in the manufacture of names to suit their droll and striking characters; but we are compelled to confess that Homer and Milton and Macaulay reveal a still higher phase of genius, for they ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... sleep, and she knew it. Scrambling out of her bed and wrapping a mantle about her, she sat beside the window and peered into the night. There was not a breeze to break the solemn silence, not a sound to distract her from her reverie. Two black and uncanny pine trees stood like armed guards near by the corner of the house to challenge the interloper from disturbing her meditation. Overhead the stars blinked and glistened through the treetops in their lace of foliage and delicate branches, and resembled for all the world ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... at the thing, wondering whether to smash it, or kill himself. Then an idea struck him. In feverish haste he took the whole mechanism to pieces again, sitting up all night. And as the morning sun rose, he discovered in the very heart of the creature, to which by now he attributed an uncanny and independent life, the most elementary blunder—a vital connection missed between the power-supplying mechanism and the cylinders containing the records. He set it right; and nearly dead with fatigue and excitement, unlocked his door, and called his ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 767). See also the experience of Haskett Smith among the Druses, already referred to (A. Q. C., iv, 11). Kipling has a rollicking story with the Masonic sign-code for a theme, entitled The Man Who Would be King, and his imagination is positively uncanny. If not a little of the old sign-language of the race lives to this day in Masonic Lodges, it is due not only to the exigencies of the craft, but also to the instinct of the order for the old, the universal, the human; its genius for making use of all the ways ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... room was filled with the uncanny figures. Apparently every man had a place assigned him, and in less time than one could think, every entrance to the hotel bar room was guarded by armed men. As the two men leveled their guns at me I put up my hands, and I want ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... you?" he laughed, and glanced at my unfinished MS. "A story, eh? From which I gather that the district is beastly healthy—what, Petrie? Well, I can put some material in your way that, if sheer uncanny mystery is a marketable commodity, ought to make you independent of influenza and broken legs and shattered nerves and all ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... by some mechanism of counterbalances responding to the weight of the hand. It must have been some vibration of the thunder which had loosed that mechanism and had closed the panel upon the heels of our entrance—so I thought—then seeing again in memory that uncanny, deliberate shutting was not at all convinced that it had been ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... populations. Naturally the natives were hostile to our work. They thought that we were measuring them for their coffins; that they would be forced into the army; that disease would result; that an uncanny influence was laid upon them; that witchcraft might be worked against them. After having had a lot of trouble with many of our subjects, we were surprised one day to have the oldest man of the village, Antonio Calistro, born in 1813, still so hale and hearty that he works his own fields, ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... Mr. White unprepared to receive him, for he had previously got a commission to examine him and take his deposition: but then an agent likes to know what a witness will say before he cites him; and the canny Scotchman, of all men in the world, is the most uncanny if brought to swear without some hope of being benefited by his oath. There was, therefore, need of tact as well as delicacy; and Mr. White contrived in the first place to get his man to take up his quarters in the house in Mill's Court. A good supper and chambers formed the first demulcent—we ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... devil is all this? What am I saying? What are you saying? Have you hypnotised me? Curse your uncanny blue eyes! Let me go. Give me back my sense of humour. Give it me back—give ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... startled. It seemed as if the old African were standing at my shoulder, saying, "What did Ah told you, hey?" The cook had used almost those very words. Where, I wondered, had he got them? It was almost uncanny. ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... tugging at their cords, young Samson South—who should, by their prejudiced convictions, be hiding out in some secret stronghold—sat at the top step of the stile, smoking his pipe, and regarded them with a lack-luster absence of interest. Such a calm reception was uncanny. The trailers felt sure that in a moment more the dogs would fall into accusing excitement. Logically, these men should be waiting to receive them behind barricaded doors. There must be some hidden significance. Possibly, it was an invitation to walk into ambuscade. No doubt, unseen rifles covered ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... It was beyond credence that either detective should put the one question to which he was now firmly resolved to give a misleading answer, and in this belief he was justified, since not even Furneaux's uncanny intelligence could suggest the fantastic notion that the man who walked through the rain the previous night and the man with whom Theydon had dined that evening were one and ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... to feel as if he were entangled in a strange and uncanny dream. Philip seemed more and more to retire within himself, and Wynne felt that he must do something to attract ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... these Lives—that of St. Columba by Adamnan—has been annotated by Dr. Reeves with such amazing lore that it really looks as if the Editor had acquired his wondrous knowledge of ancient Iona and Scotland by some such "uncanny" aids as ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... there. Her lips were thin and dry, and moved perpetually in a silent chattering, as if her mind were talking and her voice were already dead. The tide of life was retreating from her body. I could almost see it visibly ebb away. The failing waves made no sound upon the shore. Death is uncanny, ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... Already it gave them quite a shock to look back upon the time when there was no Peggy Saville to occupy their thoughts, and life without the interest of her presence would have seemed unspeakably flat and uninteresting. She was a bundle of mystery. Even her looks seemed to exercise an uncanny fascination. On the evening of her arrival the unanimous opinion had been that she was decidedly plain, but there was something about the pale little face which always seemed to invite a second glance, and the more closely you gazed, the more complete ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... coming out unexpectedly from a piece of bush, found ourselves face to face with a sight that froze all movement out of us for a moment—the living, moving head of a horse, standing upright from the turf on a few inches of neck: a grey, uncanny, bodyless head, nickering piteously at us as it stood on the turf at our feet. I have never seen a ghost, but I know exactly how I will feel if ever ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... his gun ostentatiously, and Anna moved away. Guns were uncertain things, especially in Simeon's hands, and Anna preferred to examine some of the caves. But when she went to the opening of the nearest, there was something so uncanny, so drippy, so clammy about it, with the little pools of water dimpled with drops from above, and the spume-balls rolled by the wind into the crevices, that she was glad to turn again and fall to gathering ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... from the old Sublician bridge at Rome, had originally the same significance; that is, they may have been designed to purge the city from demoniac influence by diverting the attention of the demons from human beings to the puppets and then toppling the whole uncanny crew, neck and crop, into the river, which would soon sweep them far out to sea. In precisely the same way the natives of Old Calabar used periodically to rid their town of the devils which infested it by luring the unwary demons into a number of lamentable scarecrows, which they ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... morbid perversity. Mrs. Touchett easily remembered that the girl had refused an English peer; and that a young lady with whom Lord Warburton had not successfully wrestled should content herself with an obscure American dilettante, a middle-aged widower with an uncanny child and an ambiguous income, this answered to nothing in Mrs. Touchett's conception of success. She took, it will be observed, not the sentimental, but the political, view of matrimony—a view which has always had much ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James |
