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noun
Vampire  n.  (Written also vampyre)  
1.
A blood-sucking ghost; a soul of a dead person superstitiously believed to come from the grave and wander about by night sucking the blood of persons asleep, thus causing their death. This superstition was once prevalent in parts of Eastern Europe, and was especially current in Hungary about the year 1730. The vampire was often said to have the ability to transform itself into the form of a bat, as presented in the novel depicting the legend of Dracula published by Bram Stoker in 1897, which has inspired several movies. "The persons who turn vampires are generally wizards, witches, suicides, and persons who have come to a violent end, or have been cursed by their parents or by the church,"
2.
Fig.: One who lives by preying on others; an extortioner; a bloodsucker.
3.
(Zool.) Either one of two or more species of South American blood-sucking bats belonging to the genera Desmodus and Diphylla; also called vampire bat. These bats are destitute of molar teeth, but have strong, sharp cutting incisors with which they make punctured wounds from which they suck the blood of horses, cattle, and other animals, as well as man, chiefly during sleep. They have a caecal appendage to the stomach, in which the blood with which they gorge themselves is stored.
4.
(Zool.) Any one of several species of harmless tropical American bats of the genus Vampyrus, especially Vampyrus spectrum. These bats feed upon insects and fruit, but were formerly erroneously supposed to suck the blood of man and animals. Called also false vampire.
Vampire bat (Zool.), a vampire, 3.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Vampire" Quotes from Famous Books



... or blasts from hell," but in the native air of some middle region. In these two or three brief hours of his power out of a lifetime, Coleridge is literally a wizard. People have wanted to know what "Christabel" means, and how it was to have ended, and whether Geraldine was a vampire (as I am inclined to think) or had eyes in her breasts (as Shelley thought). They have wondered that a poem so transparent in every line should be, as a whole, the most enigmatical in English. But does it matter very much whether "Christabel" means this or that, and whether Coleridge ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons

... him with the disdain he deserves, else, he will force his way into your very drawing room. Never, never, never, extend to him the courtesies due to an equal. He is not an equal, he is not a man at all; he is a fat, sleek, leering, ruminating animal, at his best; he is a wolf, a vampire, a devil, at other times; ignorant, vain, avaricious, gross. Rather than see him force himself upon you, as he has forced himself upon us here, I will myself sever our friendship, I will never see, never speak with you again. John Burrill shall find a limit, ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch

... and spread them on their knees. Who knew what gouts might drop, what filthy flakes of grease, Now that o'er every shoulder, through the coiling steam, Inhuman faces peered, with wolfish eyes a-gleam, And grey-faced vampire Lusts that whinneyed in each ear Hints of ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... should not work upon me again. With such as she, a vampire and yet a woman, a man's safety lay not in ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... part lumpy with the tops of the great trees. Some of the trees were bright green, and some red, and the sand of the beach as black as your shoes. Many birds hovered round the bay, some of them snow-white; and the flying-fox (or vampire) flew there in broad daylight, gnashing ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson

... me, the moment you thought me in your power didn't you leap upon my shoulders like a catamount and cling there, shouting to all the world to come and help you, for you had caught Black Donald and would die before you would give him up? Ah! you little vampire, how you thirsted for my blood! And you pretended to like me!" said Black Donald, eying her from head to ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... you or your boasts," remarked Alixe, in her most conventionally amused manner. "You are trying to scare me, and with this hypnotic joke about Richard you have only hypnotized yourself. I mean to tell Mr. Van Kuyp every bit of our conversation. I'm not frightened by your vampire tales. You critics are ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... however, that he did not in the least wish to visit Nyo any more. The wonders of its underground palaces and temples had no charms for him. Also he did not think he could do any good by going, since after "sucking him as dry as an orange" with reference to religious matters "that old vampire-bat Oro had just thrown him away like the rind," and, he might add, "seemed no better for the ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard

... sour the milk, or pull your hair, if you wander about at night in certain well-known uncanny places. A more dangerous demon is heard in the crackling of the dry leaves of the date-tree in the night wind; and some trees are haunted by a vampire, who will drag you up and devour you, if you venture near them in the darkness.' (N.W.P. Gazetteer, 1st ed., vol. vii. Supplement, p. 4.) See also the same author's work Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, 2nd ed., ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... were the only person in the world she ever really cared for. She does, you know. All this year you've been with her, she's seemed so different, more like a real woman. Maybe she's had her troubles too. Maybe she's been deathly lonely. Don't you go back on her too hard. Madrina's no vampire. That's just old Saunders' addled wits. She's one of the nicest people in the world to live with, if you don't need her for anything. And she really does care a lot for you, Sylvia. That time out in Chicago, when we were all kids, when I wanted to go to live with your mother, I remember ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... shall we then act in the true interests of the patient, but we shall also confer on those near to her an inestimable benefit. An hysterical girl is, as Wendell Holmes has said in his decisive phrase, a vampire who sucks the blood of the healthy people about her; and I may add that pretty surely where there is one hysterical girl there will be soon or late two sick women. If circumstances oblige us to treat such a person in her own home, let us at least ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell

... Burden, to Bond, to Tax, to Tribute, to Impoverish, to Grind, to Pillage, to Oppress, to Afflict, to Plunder, to Vampire the Life Labouring to Create Wealth is the ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... not think, dear Roger, from this funereal introduction, that your friend became the prey of a ghoul or a vampire. The Marquise is handsome enough, after all. Her features are noble, regular, but a little Jewish, which induces her to wear a turban earlier and oftener than is necessary. She would not be so pale, if instead of white she put on ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin

... should you be afraid? It is true one doesn't often see a woman with the eyes of a vampire-bat; but there is nothing to be frightened about. I have dissected the eyes of a vampire-bat—very interesting work, very. The Princess has them— only, of course, hers are larger and finer; but there is exactly the same expression in ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli

... was a terrific clamour. The square resounded with confused voices. "Bravo!" "Dog!" "Dog's murderer!" "Traitor!" "Long live David Rossi!" "Down with the Vampire!" ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine

... a man be ever shadowed by the vampire wing of his past? Have I not a right to be happy? Money, estate, name, are mine, all that means an open sesame to the magic door. Others go in, but I beat against its flinty portals with hands that bleed. No! I have no right to be happy. The ways of the world are open; ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... lodging house and I had to make my spoon, and there'd be plenty to say I only spoiled a horn or an honest man. And if a struggling man staggers a bit over the line in his youth, in the lower parts of the law which are pretty dingy, anyhow, there's always some old vampire to hang on to him all his life ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton

... the Pater Noster, the hail would destroy our crops. And you need not try to bestow him on any other village. Wherever he came from, nobody wants him, for he's sure to bring a hail-storm this season before the vintage is over—the farmer's last hope; and then next year a vampire will rise from a corpse so buried, which will suck up all the rain ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... the special object of his hatred. He had made himself believe that all women were alike. Was there, then, only one kind of woman in a world filled with many kinds of men? Because he had been a fool, because he had been deceived by one woman, he had concluded, in his folly, that every woman was a vampire or a parasite,—"a rag and a bone and a ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham

... not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating, blood-sucking; both have an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that stands up, and is great, and has durability, and promises life a future.... Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum,—overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the soil for a great culture that could await its time. Can it be that this fact is not yet understood? The imperium Romanum that we know, ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche

... as a mighty vampire, continually sucking the strongest blood of the country to keep up the abnormal supply of energy it has to give out in the excitement of a too fast and unwholesome life. Whether the science of the future may not supply ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... after their enfranchisement united themselves. It was a fearful misnomer. The Republican party in the South, composed of ninety-nine ignorant negroes to one renegade white, about as truly represented the progressive party of Lincoln as a black vampire the ornithology of all lands. Indeed, since the war, there has never been in the South either a Republican or a Democratic party. The party line is not drawn on belief but on race and color. The white men, believing everything they please from free trade to protection, vote ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore

... all the serpent deadly brood appears; First the dull Asp its swelling neck uprears; The huge Hemor'rho[:i]s, vampire of the blood; Chersy'ders, that pollute both field and flood; The Water-serpent, tyrant of the lake; The hooded Cobra; and the Plantain snake; Here with distended jaws the Prester strays; And Seps, whose bite both flesh and bone ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... descriptive epithets of a general class of demons. At the same time it appears likely that at one time they were differentiated with a greater degree of preciseness. So the ekimmu appears to be the shadowy demon that hovers around graves, a species of ghost or vampire that attacks people in the dead of night and lays them prostrate. Lilu and lilitu are the spirits that flit by in the night. Of a specific character likewise are the conceptions connected with a demon known as ardat lili, 'maid of the night,' a strange female 'will-o'-the-wisp,' who approaches ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow

... the first flush of enthusiasm, somewhat moderately. There was no disguising the penalty of his deed of kindness. To Ann Jimmy Crocker was no rescuer, but a sort of blend of ogre and vampire. She must never learn his real identity—or not until he had succeeded by assiduous toil, as he hoped he would, in neutralising that ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... night came, and, as in a dream, Antony found himself in the dark spring night hastening with lantern and spade to Silencieux's grave. It was only just to look on her face again, to see if she really lived like a vampire in the earth; and were she to be alive, he vowed to kill her where she lay—for into his life again he ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne

... for he got into trouble not only with the moralists, not only with the Restoration government, but with the Academy, which he attacked; and he is rather fond of "scratchy" references such as "On peut meriter encore quelque interet sans etre un Amadis, un Vic-van-Vor [poor Fergus!], un Han, ou un Vampire." But his intrinsic merit as a novelist did not at first seem to me great. A book worse charpente than that just quoted from, L'Artiste et le Soldat, I have seldom read. The first of its five volumes is entirely occupied ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... we do not meet at present!" ejaculated the foiled advocate; "for if we did, I might so far exceed a parent's punitory privilege, that I should win but blame from the blind world instead of sympathy. Begone, vampire," and she vanished like a ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege

... wanted, says the voluble young hustler in the firm, who alone seems to know anything of the business, is real actresses as distinguished from members of the directors' families, and above all a good vampire. A vampire is the very immoral and under-dressed type of woman that wrecks hearts and homes, and without which no film with a high moral purpose is conceivable. You must have shadows to throw up the light. And on this principle all the uplift and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various

... her feet, dancing before this areopagus of idiots, with their lanky locks and pot hats. What a shock when she turns round! She wears over her face the horribly grinning, deathly mask of a specter or vampire. The mask unfastened, falls. And behold! a darling little fairy of about twelve or fifteen years of age, slim, and already a coquette, already a woman,—dressed in a long robe of shaded dark blue china crape, covered with embroidery ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti

... discussion, and the sea is a great place for a fellow to do some quiet, sane, uninterrupted thinking. The sea, at night particularly, is productive of much introspection and speculation on the various aspects of life, and in order to make Joey forget this vampire in a hurry all that is necessary is to have a real woman round him for a while. The first thing he knows he'll be making comparisons and ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... he could rise and slay and eat, vampire-like, as in the tale of Asmund and Aswit. He must in such case be mastered and prevented doing further harm by decapitation and thigh-forking, or by staking and burning. So criminals' bodies were often burnt to ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... this belated act of justice to the country cannot atone for all the deadly disasters, will not remove the fearful responsibility from Lincoln-Seward-Blair, for having so long sustained this horrible vampire. Now ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski

... whose cold loveliness he had once kissed, was enough to outweigh with Malcolm all the prejudices of Duncan's instillation, and he was proud to take up even her shame. To pass from Mrs Stewart to her, was to escape from the clutches of a vampire demon to the arms of a ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... of the country,' 'foundation of the State,' 'the only real, and true, and substantial being;' while, on the other hand, those who presumed to differ from those sentiments were in the habit of styling him 'the dead weight,' 'the vampire,' 'the night-mare,' and other titles equally complimentary. They also maintained that, instead of being either real or substantial, he was, in fact, the most flimsy and fictitious personage in the whole island; and then, lashing themselves ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli

... that we do not so much look on as move amidst the throng. In the first-named novel, assuredly a very great book, the figure of the quaint old connoisseur is one of fiction's superlative successes: to know him is to love him in all his weakness. In the second book, Bette is a female vampire and the story around her as terrible as the other is heart-warming and sweet. And you know that both are true, true as they would not have been apart: "helpless each ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... had ever imagined in connection with Desolation. Its power to kill with its own hand. To gently destroy, sucking the vitality like a vampire and fanning the victim to dullness ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... wrecking his life in New York and letting her watch their mine alone! A wave of resentment rose up at the thought—it was the old hatred that she tried to fight down—and she clasped her hands and gazed straight ahead as she beheld in a vision, the woman! A lank rag of a woman, a Kipling's vampire, who lived by the blood of strong men! And to think that she should have fastened on Rimrock, who was once so faithful ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge

... in a Levantine Family" chapt. xi. Since the able author found his "family" firmly believing in The Nights, much has been changed in Alexandria; but the faith in Jinn and Ifrit, ghost and vampire ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... Solino's submarine carries two American soldiers of fortune to startling adventure among the Vampire Heads of Apex.] ...
— The Heads of Apex • Francis Flagg

... meeting-house, by the commotion around, flew blindly about in the sunshine, and alighted on a man's sleeve. I looked at him,—a droll, winged, beast-insect, creeping up the man's arm, not over-clean, and scattering dust on the man's coat from his vampire wings. The man stared at him, and let the spectators stare for a minute, and then shook him gently off; and the poor devil took a flight across the green to the meeting-house, and then, I believe, alighted on somebody ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... is arrayed against brother; thus it is that the people come to consider—not how they can promote each other's interests, but how they may successfully war upon them. And the political agitator like the vampire fans the victim to which he clings ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis

... on a human face seems to have found its highest modern exponent in Aubrey Beardsley. With him man is an animal, and woman a beast. Aye, she is worse than a beast—she is a vampire. Kipling's summing up of woman as "a rag and a bone and a hank of hair" gives no clue to the possibilities in way of subtle, reckless reaches of deviltry compared with a single, simple, outline drawing by Beardsley. Beardsley's heroines are the kind of women who can kill a man with a million ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... sent Tony to his rest and went home with a heavy heart, to wake and think through the night long what he should do to save Starr, his bright beautiful Starr, from the clutches of this human vampire. ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill

... suggest the male and female occupants of the grave, and would therefore assign the production to the later rather than the earlier date. The two bones are not often found in so lateral a position, and the vampire wings are clumsy in the extreme. I have collected varieties of the skull and crossbone character in many places, and seen the eccentricities of many masons in the way of wings, but have met with very few so far astray as these. While I am engaged in transferring the specimen to my book, our epitaph ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent

... certainly impalpable object, the fragile glass flies into fragments, the source of future colds and curtain lectures without number. The immediate author of so much mischief, it is true, is the diminutive vampire which is now making its escape with cold-blooded indifference through a very considerable fracture in one of the panes; but surely the person who saved from destruction, and may thus be considered ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various

... dishevelled vampire in her place right enough, stretched at full length, but looking always as if she were about to leap up; and straightway I meet the sidelong glance of her enamelled pupils, shining out of half-closed eyelids, with lashes ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... delighted with unconscious cruelty in awakening. She had an insane passion for relating these dreadful legends, whose indulgence seemed necessary to her existence, and the happiness of the narrator was commensurate with the credulity of the auditor. Without knowing it, she was a vampire, feeding on the life-blood of a young and innocent heart, and drying up ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz

... much utility in the conversion of the brutal schoolmaster of the earlier scenes into the tender Middlesex magistrate at the close. Nor is the humour anywhere more subtle than in the country undertaker, who makes up in fullness of heart for scantness of breath, and has so little of the vampire propensity of the town undertaker in Chuzzlewit, that he dares not even inquire after friends who are ill for fear of unkindly misconstruction. The test of a master in creative fiction, according to Hazlitt, is less in contrasting characters ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... changes Pluto and Proserpine into Oberon and Titania, and makes friends with unseen powers as Good Folk; the other is a bird of night, whose shadow sends a chill among the roots of the hair: it sucks with the vampire, gorges with the ghoule, is choked by the night-hag, pines away under the witch's charm, and commits uncleanness with the embodied Principle of Evil, giving up the fair realm of innocent belief to a murky throng from the slums and ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... served for the gala-dress of an emperor. There have always been very strange stories told of this Clarimonde, and all her lovers came to a violent or miserable end. They used to say that she was a ghoul, a female vampire; but I believe she was none other than ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier

... stone. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, from this hour out, I am your implacable enemy; look out for the head on your shoulders, for my hand is raised against it, and in my hand is a sword! Guard well the secret that sleeps in your breast; for you have transformed me to a vampire that will suck your heart's blood. You have reviled my mother, and I will go hence and tell her of it. She will believe me; for she well knows that you hate her, and that you are a genuine son of your father; that is to say, a canting hypocrite, ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach

... time, having amused themselves with reading German ghost-stories, they agreed, at last, to write something in imitation of them. "You and I," said Lord Byron to Mrs. Shelley, "will publish ours together." He then began his tale of the Vampire; and, having the whole arranged in his head, repeated to them a sketch of the story[120] one evening,—but, from the narrative being in prose, made but little progress in filling up his outline. The most memorable result, indeed, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... peaked head-dresses, Mock religious costumes also form a striking element in the general tone of the display,—Franciscan, Dominican, or Penitent habits,—usually crimson or yellow, rarely sky-blue. There are no historical costumes, few eccentricities or monsters: only a few "vampire-bat" head-dresses abruptly break the effect of the peaked caps and the hoods.... Still there are some decidedly local ideas in dress which deserve notice,—the congo, the bb (or ti-manmaille), the ti ngue gouos- sirop ("little ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... picture. Remember, I have sometimes travelled over a dusty road as far as my feet could go. At a sudden turn I have stepped upon starved, ignoble weeds, and reaching out my hands, I have touched a fair tree out of which a parasite had taken the life like a vampire. I have touched a pretty bird whose soft wings hung limp, whose little heart beat no more. I have wept over the feebleness and deformity of a child, lame, or born blind, or, worse still, mindless. If I had the genius of Thomson, I, too, could depict a ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller

... captain of the hags; Jourdan, red-grizzled mule-son blotched with blood, Headsman forever "famous-infamous;" Keen, hag-whelped journalist Camille Desmoulins, Who with a hundred other of his ilk Hissed on the hounds and smeared his bread with blood; Lebon, man-fiend, that vampire-ghoul who drank Hot blood of headless victims, and compelled Mothers to view the murder of their babes; At whose red guillotine, in Arras raised, The pipe and fiddle played at every fall Of ghastly head the ribald "Ca Ira;" And fiends unnamed ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... art, therefore better not lay down laws or adduce supposed facts regarding them, but do our utmost to build up something as noble, and each one of us leave art no worse than he found it, casting reproach and scorn on the utterly indifferent, or the detestable pander or the vampire. ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson

... fashioned for her by the civilization that had brought her into being, her slippers the lustrous waters of the Bay itself. Later I came to know that she, too, was a goddess of moods, and dangerous moods; a coquette to some, a love to others, and to many a heartless vampire that sucked from them their hard-wrung dust, scattered their gold to the four winds of avarice that ever circled enticingly about the vortex of shallow joys that the City harbored, and, after intoxicating them with her beauty and her wine, flung them aside to make ready for the next comer. ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady

... thoughtful. "Yes," he observed, "there is something in what you say." Then, pacing the room nervously, he exclaimed: "And still I find it impossible to believe your explanation. Reginald a vampire! It seems so ludicrous. If you had told me that such creatures exist somewhere, far away, I might have discussed the matter; but in this great city, in the shadow of the ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck

... same, declaring that the wench had never been one of them, but had joined herself unawares to their company last midsummer eve, without saying whence, or whither she would go. She had flown off some hours since in the form of a monstrous vampire, but had fallen upon them first with tooth and nail; and albeit they were an evil-disposed crew their tale seemed truthful, whereas they were covered with many scratches which were ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... sit still, and never cease the eternal twirl of our dexter around our sinister thumb, while other scribes hand down to future ages the paltry feats of beardless Meltonians, and try to shame old Father Thames himself with muddy Whissendine's foul stream? Away! thou vampire, Indolence, that suckest the marrow of imagination, and fattenest on the cream of idea ere yet it float on the milk of reflection. Hence! slug-begotten hag, thy power is gone—the murky veil thou'st drawn o'er ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees

... literary lower empire, Where the praetorian bands take up the matter;— A 'dreadful trade,' like his who 'gathers samphire,' The insolent soldiery to soothe and flatter, With the same feelings as you 'd coax a vampire. Now, were I once at home, and in good satire, I 'd try conclusions with those Janizaries, And show them what an intellectual ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... worst to happen, what exchange had she to bestow? Her beauty? She was reputed beautiful. It had made a madman of one man; and in her poverty of endowments to be generous with, she hovered over Mr. Morsfield like a cruel vampire, for the certification that she had a much-prized gift to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... I sat down to my dinner that day, in the kitchen of the old farm-house. Such was my condition when I lay on my bed in the old farm-house that night, stretched out opposite the narrow mullioned window, in the cold light of the moon, like a young vampire. ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens

... spoiling the plans of patient ones, irreparably; just as things go on in the world. And sometimes you may see hypocritical crystals taking the shape of others, though they are nothing like in their minds; and vampire crystals eating out the hearts of others; and hermit-crab crystals living in the shells of others; and parasite crystals living on the means of others; and courtier crystals glittering in attendance upon others; and all these, besides the two great companies of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... found out any more ways at solitaire? Has Cloe left off evening prayer on account of the damp evenings? How is Miss Rice's cold and coachman? Is Miss Granville better? Has Mrs. Masham made a brave hand of this bad season, and lived upon carcases like any vampire? Adieu! I am just going to see Mrs. Muscovy,(1307) and will be sure not to laugh if my old lady should talk of Mr. Draper's white skin, and tickle his bosom ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... ear which is a stumbling-block to the simple theory-monger. It is in fashion among a tribe of bats to which belongs the so-called vampire of India. This monster is fond of coming into your bedroom at midnight through the open windows, but not to suck your blood, for it has little in common with the true vampire of South America. It brings its dinner with it and hangs ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)

... beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with its maladies has passed!... She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... film dramas of the moving picture houses. Unreal extravagance of imagination, accompanied by the debauch of the aesthetic and moral judgment, frequently distinguishes them. In screenland, it is the vampire, the villain, the superman, the saccharine angel child, who reign almost undisputed. Noble convicts, virtuous courtesans, attractive murderers, good bad men, and ridiculous good men, flit across the canvas haloed with cheap sentimentality. Opposed ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... half-way to meet them; likewise serpents and alligators proffered them the freedom of the forests and exhibited a hospitality almost excessive. Snakes twenty feet long hung their seductive length from the trees; jaguars volunteered their society through almost impenetrable marshes; vampire bats perched by night with lulling endearments upon their toes. When Stedman describes himself as killing thirty-eight mosquitoes at one stroke, we must perhaps pardon something to the spirit of martyrdom. But ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various

... faster To the feet of their old master! Heaven keep him well and hearty, Both him and all his party! From the sun that broils and smites, From the centipede that bites, From the hail-storm and the thunder, From the vampire and the condor, From the gust upon the river, From the sudden earthquake shiver, From the trip of mule or donkey, From the midnight howling monkey, From the stroke of knife or dagger, From the puma and the jaguar, From the horrid boa-constrictor That ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... the philosophers. But the vessels of gold, the cup-bearers, the cooks, the attendants, disappeared; the roof flew away; the walls fell in; and Apollonius remained alone, standing with this woman all in tears at his feet. It was a vampire, who satisfied the handsome young men in order to devour their flesh—because nothing is better for phantoms of this kind than ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert

... 'I will eat you,' it would have been much nearer the mark, for he was no Brâhman, but a dreadful vampire, who loved to devour handsome young men and slender girls. But, knowing nothing of all this, the couple went home with him quite cheerfully. He was most polite, and when they arrived at his house, said, 'Please get ready whatever you want to eat, for I have no cook. Here are my keys; open ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel

... shrouded the place with a higher degree of horror and with a deeper hue of fantastical gloom. It looked like the favorite ballroom of the witches of hell. The wind sighed so mournfully through the shrivelled-up pines, those vampire heads seemed incessantly to bow to some invisible and grisly visitors: the footsteps of the stranger emitted such an awful and supernatural sound, when trampling on the skulls which strewed his path, that it was impossible for the coldest imagination not to labor under some crude and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson

... shapes—aggravated by thirst and hunger—that all the impulses of nature and affection were not merely banished from the heart, but superseded by the most frightful peals of insane mirth, cruelty, and the horrible appetite of the ghoul and vampire. Some were found tearing the flesh from the bodies of the carcasses that were stretched beside them. Mothers tottered off under the woful excitement of misery and frenzy, and threw their wretched children on the sides of the highways, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... climates remain in a torpid condition, and only spread their wings of stretched skin when the songbirds report the advent of the warmth of spring. The visitor will notice amongst the varieties in the three first cases, the Brazilian bats, including the vampire bat (which has been known to attack a man in his sleep and suck blood from him), the remarkable leaf-nosed bats which are ranged upon the upper shelves, and the Indian and African varieties; and underneath are grouped the well-known horse-shoe bats of the eastern hemisphere. In the next case ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold

... Did she come at all out of Hamdi Effendi's harem? Is she not rather some strange sea-creature that clambered on board the vessel and bewitched the miserable boy, sucked the soul out of him, and drove him to destruction? Or is she a Vampire? Or a Succubus? Or a ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... millennium of democracy had come. Reporters and photographers swarmed to the island. The papers printed half-page pictures of him as short-stop stopping a hot grounder. The Toadies' Magazine got out a Bat and Ball number that covered the subject historically, beginning with the vampire bat and ending with the Patriarchs' ball—illustrated with interior views of the Van Plushvelt country seat. Ministers, educators and sociologists everywhere hailed the event as the tocsin call that proclaimed the universal ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... alligators Scrambled through the marshy brake, And the vampire leeches gaily Sucked the garfish ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun

... are told that we may entertain "angels unawares," so we may pass the world's avatars upon the street, and judging from the external, the physical environment, we may not know them from the vampire souls that contact them. ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... alouates, jaguars, cougars, pacaris, sloths, curassows, parraquas, etcetera, broke forth from time to time with such fury, that sleep was almost unattainable; then a thunderstorm came on which wet them to the skin; after that a large vampire-bat bit Bunco on the nose, causing that worthy to add his noise to the general concert; and, finally, a soft hairy animal dropt from a branch into Larry O'Hale's hammock. The Irishman received it with open arms and a yell of terror. ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne

... have in Europe stories of a similar complexion; and the Polynesian varua ino or aitu o le vao is clearly the near kinsman of the Transylvanian vampire. Here is a tale in which the kinship appears broadly marked. On the atoll of Penrhyn, then still partly savage, a certain chief was long the salutary terror of the natives. He died, he was buried; and his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... back behind those smiling lips, And down within those laughing eyes, And underneath the soft caress Of hand and voice and purring sighs, The shadow of the panther lurks, The spirit of the vampire lies. ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson

... my imagination was busy in scenes of evil and despair. I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror, such as the deed which he had now done, nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley

... called. That is why we fought in '48 and lost. And that is why we came here, to the Republic. Ach! I fear I will never be the great lawyer —but the striver, yes, always. We must fight once more to be rid of the black monster that sucks the blood of freedom—vampire. Is it not so ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... death, or does there lurk behind it the mocking cunning of a miser? Is that a mortal who in the agony of death stands before the public in the art arena, and, like a dying gladiator, bids for their applause in his last convulsions? or is it some phantom arisen from the grave, a vampire with a violin, who comes to suck, if not the blood from our hearts, at least the money from our pockets? Questions such as these kept chasing each other through the brain while Paganini continued his apparently interminable series of complimentary bows; but ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris

... this moment raging in the Province of San-Paulo. The frightened inhabitants are leaving their houses, deserting their villages, abandoning their land, saying that they are pursued, possessed, governed like human cattle by invisible, though tangible beings, a species of vampire, which feed on their life while they are asleep, and who, besides, drink water and milk without appearing ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various

... down came a north wind and put nature under its thumb for two months; the drone-fly hid himself, the bees went home, everything became shrivelled, dry, inhuman. The local direction of the wind might vary, but it was still the same polar draught, the blood-sucker; for, like a vampire, it sucks the very blood and moisture out of delicate human life, just as it dries up the sap in the branch. While this lasted there were no notes to make, the changes were slower than the hour hand of a clock; still it was interesting to ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... failing that, she tried sweet stimulants that soothed and excited, but did not nourish: tales that caused chords of pleasurable emotion to vibrate while they fanned the higher faculties into inaction—vampire things inducing that fatal repose which enables them to drain the soul of its life blood and compass its destruction. But Evadne escaped without permanent injury, for, fortunately for herself, among much ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... The Vampire Bat.—Bishop Heber's opinion of the innocence of this creature by no means agrees with what one has read of his bloodthirsty habits; and particularly the instances given by Captain Stedman, in his Travels of Surinam, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various

... by this time become in the last degree maudlin, and wept abundantly, inferred from the foregoing avowal, that it was his mission to communicate to others the blight which had fallen on himself; and that, being a kind of unintentional Vampire, he had had Miss Pecksniff assigned to him by the Fates, as Victim Number One. Miss Pecksniff controverting this opinion as sinful, Moddle was goaded on to ask whether she could be contented with a blighted heart; and it appearing ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... had reached the Pacific coast his haggard hound's eyes were more haggard than ever. His skin hung loose on his great body, as though a vampire bat had drained it of its blood. But to his own appearance he gave scant thought. For new life came to him when he found definite traces of Binhart. These traces he followed up, one by one, until he found himself circling back eastward along the valley of the ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer

... Nebuchadnezzar on all fours, eating painted grass, with a huge gold crown on his head, which he bobs for a bite every other bar. In the right-hand corner is a sort of cavern, the abode of some supernatural and mysterious being of the fiend or vampire school, who gives an occasional fitful start, and turns an ominous-looking green glass-eye out upon the spectators. All these are in the background. In the front of the stage stands Napoleon, wearing a long sword ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various

... of the jugglers followed at a brisk trot. In this manner they traversed a frightful desert, plunged into a forest of brushwood, finally forded a stream, and after two hours arrived at an open clearing, in the centre of which was a hut. An ape occupied the threshold, a vampire bat hung from a convenient beam, a cobra was curled underneath, and a black cat welcomed them with arched back. The ape spoke Tamil freely and then marched off, reflecting upon which circumstance, the doctor thought that it was quite the ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... that in November died, How come they thus again adream with pride? I saw the Red Rose lying in her tomb, Yet comes she lovelier back, a redder rose; What paints upon her cheek this vampire bloom? Beloved, when to the dark thy beauty goes, Thee too will ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne

... could swing herself up to the window on which Hermas' gaze was fixed, and clutch Sirona's golden hair and tear her down to the ground, and suck the very blood from her red lips like a vampire, till she lay at her feet as pale as the corpse of a man dead of thirst in the desert. Then she saw the light mantle slip from Sirona's shoulders, and observed Hermas start and press his hand ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... certainly will not. If you wish to please them, you must sell yourself to some rich vampire of the factories or great landlord. If you give yourself away to a poor poet who loves you, their disgust will be unbounded. If a woman wishes to honor her father and mother to their own satisfaction nowadays she must ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw

... on the eaves of the house-tops you'll see her, In form of a vampire; 'tis then you must flee her; A crow of ill-omen she often is roaming, Or else as an owl that flits by in ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon

... Vampire, n. [vmpair] Vampiro. Mult raw na umiitit ng dug ng buhy; bayakan na umiitit daw ng dug ng ...
— Dictionary English-Spanish-Tagalog • Sofronio G. Calderon

... that were made to her. She saw that Hester, always delicate, was making an enormous effort under conditions which would be certain to entail disastrous effects on her health. The book was sapping her strength like a vampire, and the Gresleys were evidently exhausting it still further by unconsciously strewing her path with difficulties. Rachel did not know them, but she supposed they belonged to that large class whose eyes ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley

... people, Henry to his wife, —In him the double tyrant starts to life: Justice and Death have mixed their dust in vain, Each royal Vampire wakes to life again. Ah, what can tombs avail!—since these disgorge The blood and dust ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron

... minds in Middlemarch whose reflective scales could only weigh things in the lump; and they had a strong suspicion that since Mr. Bulstrode could not enjoy life in their fashion, eating and drinking so little as he did, and worreting himself about everything, he must have a sort of vampire's feast in the ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... any other assistance. This method is more inexcusable than the other. For there is no egotism or vanity so hateful as that which strikes at our satisfaction in everything else, and derives its nourishment from preying, like the vampire, on the carcase of others' reputation. I would rather, in a word, that a man should talk for ever of himself with vapid, senseless assurance, than preserve a malignant, heartless silence when the merit of a rival is mentioned. I have seen ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... girl! My daughter!" But by this time Buck was three steps from the bottom, and the back of the burglar was toward him as he crouched over the struggling girl, choking the screams in her delicate throat. Like a vampire, Buck sprang from the third stair, landing on the man's back, his legs worked inside the man's elbows, pinioning the scoundrel's arms back like a trussed turkey, his arms went round the bull-like neck, and his tough young fingers closed on ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... every profiteering pirate, every food vulture, every exploiter of labor, every robber and oppressor of the poor, every hog under a silk tile, every vampire in human form will tell you that the A. F. of L. under Gompers is a great and patriotic organization and that the I. W. W. under Haywood is a gang of traitors in the ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... flying around them in all directions,—they could even land on the various small islands situated between Jala-Jala and the isle of Talem. There they could find a sort of sport utterly unknown in Europe—that is, immense bats, a species of vampire, designated by naturalists by the name of roussettes. During six months in the year, at the period of the eastern monsoon, every tree on these little isles is covered, from the topmost down to the lowest ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere

... conscience uncoiled at last in Cuthbert Laurance's hardened soul that the blood so suddenly ebbed from his lips, and he drew his breath like one overshadowed by a vampire? Only once had he caught the full gleam of her indignant eyes, but that long look had awakened torture's that would never entirely slumber again, until the solemn hush of the shroud and the cemetery was his portion. No suspicion of the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... inhabited districts of South America, where I had the right to believe that he who was weary of the pains of civilization might rest in the shade of the palm trees and there study nature. Well, there even, more than elsewhere, I have seen capital come, like a vampire, to suck the last drop of blood of the ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... foundation for that rabid and unreasonable dread of the night air which we fresh-air crusaders find the bitterest and most tenacious foe we have to fight. We have literally discovered the Powers of Darkness in both visible and audible form, and they have wings and bite, just like the vampire. ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... became a harpy, a Moloch, a Jonah, a vampire, to my acquaintances. Anxious, haggard, greedy, I stood among them like a veritable killjoy. Let a bright saying, a witty comparison, a piquant phrase fall from their lips and I was after it like a hound springing upon a bone. I dared not trust my memory; ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry

... death. He shall ignominiously disappear; he shall die slowly on some barren island in the ocean; die amid the tortures of solitude, of weariness, of powerless rage. This must be the vengeance of Europe; this must be the end of the vampire who has drunk her ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach

... to truth in a fictitious piece, Nor treat belief as matter of caprice. If on a child you make a vampire sup, It must not be alive when she's ripped up. Dry seniors scout an uninstructive strain; Young lordlings treat grave verse with tall disdain: But he who, mixing grave and gay, can teach And yet give pleasure, gains a vote from each: His works enrich the vendor, cross the sea, And ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... ovens of the Hana-uaua people. They could not defeat the Hana-uaua, for they were small in number and the Hana-uaua were great. The best fighters were dead. The gods only could save the last of the tribe from the veinahae, the vampire ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... fiesta of the unusual occasion. Miss Bailey, a small, round, efficient person with nice eyes and good manners, moved about among her guests, all of whom she seemed to know. The best cheese sandwiches in New York went round. A girl in a vampire costume of grey—hooded and with long trailing sleeves—got up from her solitary place in the corner. She seemed to be wearing, beneath the theatrical garment, a kimono and bedroom slippers. Obviously she had simply ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... pointing to the furthest glimmering hill, The Indian led, till, on Itata's side, The Spanish camp and night-fires they descried: Then on the stranger's neck that wild maid fell, And said, Thy own gods prosper thee, farewell! The owl[224] is hooting overhead; below, On dusky wing, the vampire-bat sails slow. Ongolmo stood before the cave of night, 90 Where the great wizard sat:—a lurid light Was on his face; twelve giant shadows frowned, His mute and dreadful ministers, around. Each eye-ball, as in life, was seen to roll, Each lip to move; but ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles

... Mrs. Appleditch made a courtesy. She was a very tall woman — a head beyond her husband, extremely thin, with sharp nose, hollow cheeks, and good eyes. In fact, she was partly pretty, and might have been pleasant-looking, but for a large, thin-lipped, vampire-like mouth, and a general expression of greed and contempt. She was meant for a lady, and had made herself a money-maggot. She was richly and plainly dressed; and until she began to be at her ease, might have passed for an unpleasant lady. Master Appleditch, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald

... wooden gag in its mouth and a battered black derby hangs over its end. Umpah ump from the trombone, the bull fiddle and the bassoon. Tangled lyrics from the clarinet. And the cornet cakewalks like a hoyden vampire, the cornet whinnies like an odalisque expiring in the arms of the ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... When he clos'd his gay career, Hope fled for ever, and with Hope fled Fear, Blest with each gift indulgent Fortune sends, Birth and its rights, wealth and its train of friends, Star-like he shone! Now beggar'd, and alone, Danger he woo'd, and claim'd her for his own. O'er him a Vampire [Footnote 1] his dark wings display'd. 'Twas MERION'S self, covering with dreadful shade. [d] He came, and, couch'd on ROLDAN'S ample breast, Each secret pore of breathing life possess'd, Fanning the sleep that seem'd his final rest; Then, inly gliding ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers

... creditors. The farmers of hops, wine and tobacco in Southern Germany; the truck farmers on the Rhine; the small farmers in Central Germany—all are in that plight. The mortgagee sucks them dry; he leaves them, apparent owners of a field, that, in point of fact, is theirs no longer. The capitalist vampire often finds it more profitable to farm in this way than, by seizing the land itself and selling it, or himself doing the farming. Thus many thousand farmers are carried on the registers as proprietors, who, in fact, are no longer such. Thus, again, many a large farmer—unskilled in his ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... unaccountably, there fell over his eagerness a chilling gloom. The delightful sprite named Expectation, who had whispered so piquantly of this same eventful morn, had basely changed herself into a hideous vampire, and she muttered at him, in frightful, raucous tones. Yet the hag's snarls were true promises. There was to come, surely, inexorably, a certain other eventful morn, and he would awake, and without his mother's calling him, he would ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... Vampire, drain not From my loved one The life-current red. O Demon, art breaking My heart while I plead? Ah, babe! Art thou waking? Lilith, I live! Closer ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier

... absolute certainty; but the opinion of the learned tends to the former conclusion. Naturally a Japanese child, when sent in the dusk to draw water, will do so with fear and trembling, for this limp, floppy apparition might scare the boldest. Another bogie, a terrible creation of fancy, I take to be a vampire, about which the curious can read in Dom Calmet, who will tell them how whole villages in Hungary have been depopulated by vampires; or he may study in Fauriel's 'Chansons de la Grece Moderne' the vampires ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang

... They can't be censored. The book would go through the mails. Yet they are deadly! Look at my heroine in these two pictures. In one she is like—like violets! In the other she looks capable of any crime! What is she? A vampire, if there is such a thing? A witch? I can almost believe in demonology since I made these ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... the literary lower empire, Where the praetorian bands take up the matter;— A "dreadful trade," like his who "gathers samphire,"[595] The insolent soldiery to soothe and flatter, With the same feelings as you'd coax a vampire. Now, were I once at home, and in good satire, I'd try conclusions with those Janizaries, And show them what an intellectual ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... men. This is the true motive of the conquest of civilisation; and under the banner of such a cause, it is a question whether war and anarchy and confusion be not preferable to the deceptive peace and apparent prosperity of despotism, that, like the death-dealing vampire, soothes while it destroys. ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid

... neighbours had to watch to fend him off. At last he took to walking even in the day, "terrible to all, but visible only to a few." The clergy were called; the archdeacon took the chair. It was a clear case of Vampire. The man must be dug up, cut to bits, and burnt. But the bishop was very particular about the dead, and when they asked his leave he was indignant at the proposal. He wrote instead a letter with his own hand, which absolved ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson

... "those poor nurses yonder in the foundling asylum, which forms the lower end of the lane as you go to the river, just beside Monseigneur the bishop! what if this little monster were to be carried to them to suckle? I'd rather give suck to a vampire." ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... that "Captain Molineux must be satisfied with knowing she bore a charmed life." Then again it was that the young soldier's feelings underwent another reaction, and as he caught the words and look which accompanied them, he scarcely could persuade himself she was not the almost vampire and sorceress that ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson

... connected, his own first cousin having been married en secondes noces to the Sieur de Bulkeley, from whom, as every one knows, the Dukes of Cheshire are lineally descended. Accordingly, he made arrangements for appearing to Virginia's little lover in his celebrated impersonation of 'The Vampire Monk, or, the Bloodless Benedictine,' a performance so horrible that when old Lady Startup saw it, which she did on one fatal New Year's Eve, in the year 1764, she went off into the most piercing shrieks, which culminated in violent apoplexy, and died in three days, after disinheriting the ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde

... News Items Latest about "Lo." Letter from a Friend Letter of Advice, A Letter from a Japanese Student Letter from a Croaker, A Leaven of Leavenworth Literary Vampire Lines by a Hapless Swain Long Shot, A "Lot" on a Lot of Proverbs Love in a ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various

... parents being saturated with poison, half the children are born dead, and of the rest not one in four lives to be five—tell them to hold fast to their share of the blessings of our glorious civilisation. Or go to the sweaters' victims, living, eating, working, dying in one room, for which a vampire landlord will take in rent one-half of all the family can earn by working day and night—talk to them of individual liberty and warn them of the tyranny of the coming Socialism. Or go on a bitterly cold winter morning to the dock gates of one of our great ports ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... pretended. If it were, I could forgive them. But not even that cloak could they cast upon their foulness. Oh, no; there was no mistake. I was convicted for what I did, neither more nor less. That bloody vampire Jeffreys—bad cess to him!—sentenced me to death, and his worthy master James Stuart afterwards sent me into slavery, because I had performed an act of mercy; because compassionately and without thought for creed or politics I had sought to relieve the sufferings ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... another Niagara through the land, is destined to flow on down to the latest posterity, and it will bear on its mighty bosom our virtues, or our vices, our glory, or our shame, or whatever else we may transmit as an inheritance. Thus it depends upon ourselves whether the moth of immortality and the vampire of luxury shall prove the overthrow of this country, or whether knowledge and virtue, like pillars, shall support her against the whirlwinds of war, ambition, corruption, and the remorseless tooth of time. And while assembled here to-night, in this, the very cradle ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson

... to the travellers to see the moon, which now, rising above the horizon, lit up the plains with her white beams, and flung her silvery effulgence over the trees. From the direction of the woods came the mournful notes of the great horned owl, and the sound of flapping wings, caused by the vampire bat, as it glided through the aisles of the forest. No other sounds appeared to indicate the presence of living thing except those made by the horses ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid

... at the floor. He was only a youngster, and the significance of his remarks was as plain to him as it was to the rest of us. If these monsters from the void were truly feeding on the skin of our ship, vampire-like, it would not be long before it would be weakened; weakened to the danger point, weakened until we would explode in space like a gigantic bomb, to leave our fragments to whirl onward forever through the darkness and the silence ...
— Vampires of Space • Sewell Peaslee Wright

... Gandharvavivaha form of marriage, see note to page 28 of Captain R. F. Burton's "Vickram and the Vampire; or Tales of Hindu Devilry." Longman, Green & Co., London, 1870. This form of matrimony was recognised by the ancient Hindus, and is frequent in books. It is a kind of Scotch Wedding—ultra-Caledonian—taking place by mutual consent without ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana

... You'll never get away with that vampire stuff. Talons are things you have to be born with. You'll never learn to grab with these." He reached over, and picked up her left hand lying inertly in her lap, and brought it up to his lips, and kissed it, glove ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber

... M. Bonaparte, like those pretty Creoles who show off their beauty by juxtaposition with some frightful Hottentot, took as his competitor in this election a phantom, a vision, a socialistic monster of Nuremberg, with long teeth and talons, and a live coal in its eyes, the ogre of Tom Thumb, the vampire of Porte Saint-Martin, the hydra of Theramenes, the great sea-serpent of the Constitutionnel, which the shareholders have had the kindness to impute to it, the dragon of the Apocalypse, the Tarask, the Dree, the Gra-ouili, a scarecrow. Aided by a Ruggieri of his own, M. ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo

... of which, it has been stated, so appalled the late Lord Strathmore on entering the room, that he had it walled up. Some assert that, owing to some hereditary curse, like those described in a previous chapter, at certain intervals a kind of vampire is born into the family of the Strathmore Lyons, and that as no one would like to destroy this monstrosity, it is kept concealed till its term of life is run. But, whatever the mystery may be, such rooms, like the locked chamber of Blue Beard, are not open to vulgar gaze, a circumstance which ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer

... her she was a sinful woman to treat her husband so; but I couldn't hold her back. She broke out at him one day and told him he was like a jailor to her, and that he suffocated her talent and that he hung on her like a vampire and sucked her youth, and that she loved the other man. I can see her now, rushing up and down that long saloon on that afternoon, with the white blinds drawn down and the sun filtering through them, snatching with her hands at her dress and waving her arms up and down in the air. And the Baron ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... main rather than Buddhist. Side by side with ethics and ceremony, a native stream of bold and weird imagination has never ceased to flow in China and there was no need to import tales of the Genii, immortal saints and vampire beauties. But when any coherency unites these ideas of the supernatural, that I think is the work of Buddhism and so far as Taoism itself has any coherency it is an imitation of Buddhism. Thus the idea of metempsychosis as one of many passing fancies may be indigenous to China but its prevalence ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... said. "Paranoid?" He had always thought Senator Lefferts was slightly on the batty side, and the idea of real paranoia didn't come as too much of a surprise. After all, when a man was batty to start out with ... and he even looked like a vampire, ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett

... great dainty. Horrible wretches! They wear no clothes; the women just have a girdle of fibrous bark, and the men sometimes encircle their heads with a fillet of sewed net-work or leaves, and the hair of the vampire bat. Their houses are in the form of beehives, and the ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne

... d'ailes; L'eau gronde, et tout ce groupe enorme vogue, et fuit, Et s'enfle et roule avec un prodigieux bruit. Et le lugubre roi sourit de voir groupees Sur quatre cents navires quatre-vingt mille epees. O rictus du vampire assouvissant sa faim! Cette pale Angleterre, il la tient donc enfin! Qui pourrait la sauver? Le feu va prendre aux poudres. Philippe dans sa droite a la gerbe des foudres; Qui pourrait delier ce faisceau dans son poing? N'est-il pas le ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo

... allures him From virtue and truth. He holds by the throat The servants who wait To hear his excuses; And sad is their fate, For insidious smile Is his only excuse To victims who suffer Defeat and abuse. So sly are his movements, So stealthy his tread, Like a vampire, on blood He is frequently fed, While his victim, unconscious, Makes no defence; He steals mind and honor And good common sense. If you meet him, my boy, Beware of his grasp, For his smiles are so sweet; But on you he will clasp The shackles he carries Forever ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite

... clay vessel with a picture of a vampire-headed deity; in Bureau of Ethnology, Bulletin 28, pp. 665-666, Washington. (Translation of German edition published in Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen

... which he had at first thought—the simple throwing up of every scrap of his property, including all but a bare subsistence out of his official incomes, which could not have been touched without difficulty. Had he done, or been able to do this, had he shaken off the vampire in stone and lime and hungry soil which had so long sucked his blood, had he sold the library, and the 'Gabions of Jonathan Oldbuck,'[35] and the Japanese papers, and the Byron vase, and the armour, had he mortgaged his incomes by help of insurance, sold ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury

... object was subserved by the possession of the dead villain's body, I have not learned. But a very curious story, in which a vampire resuscitation of Crooke the sexton figures, may throw a light upon ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... two modern Icelandic cases, for the purpose of leading up to the famous Icelandic legend of Grettir and Glam the Vampire, from the Grettis Saga. It is plain that such incidents as those in the two modern Icelandic cases (however the effects were produced) might easily be swollen into the prodigious tale of Glam in the course of two ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang

... down went Miss Vespertila behind the bed crying. Polly crept up to her; and caught her in a towel. What black beads of eyes had Miss Vespertila from Servia, where her grandfather, General Vampire, still commands a brigade of rascals! Her teeth were sharp, and white as pearls. Polly held her up, and she cunningly combed her furry wings with her hind ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various

... instances from more modern folklore, wherein a mistress or wife dies, or seems to die, and is buried, yet is afterwards recovered from the tomb, and lives to wed, if a maiden, and to bear children. He supports these by references to the vampire superstitions, and to the case of Osiris, who returned after death to Isis and became the father of Horus. And, following Uhland, he compares the sleep-thorn, with which Odin pricked the Valkyrie, Brynhild, and so put her into a magic slumber, to the stake which was driven ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... at the summit. There was a copper pail, that went in at the waist, holding holy water, and a little hand-besom to sprinkle it far and wide; and a long, narrow, but massive oak table, and a dwarf sticking to its rim by his teeth, his eyes glaring, and his claws in the air like a pouncing vampire. Nature, it would seem, did not make Giles a dwarf out of malice prepense; she constructed a head and torso with her usual care; but just then her attention was distracted, and she left the rest to chance; the result was a human wedge, an inverted cone. ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... the scamp go to the States and find himself instead of worrying old Jerry's very life out of him—the vampire!" ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock

... you, then," said Sepia, "I would not lie still; I would get up and bite—I mean, be a vampire." ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... But I wish you would tell me what you meant by that other more fearful—apparition—or what did you call it? Were you alluding to the vampire?" ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald

... a time they were happy; then little by little it became clear that this woman, Gomer, did not really love him as he loved her. She only wanted his money. And when she could get nothing more from him, or could get more elsewhere, she left him. She was like the woman in Kipling's poem, "The Vampire," "she did not care." It hurt Hosea. For a time the light of the whole world ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting

... befit a "star," but an actress of genius and discernment might prefer the dumb part of Miss Y. One thing is certain: that the latter character has few equals in its demand on the performer's tact and skill and imagination. This wordless opponent of Mrs. X. is another of those vampire characters which Strindberg was so fond of drawing, and it is on her the limelight is directed with ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg

... noticed, were ever straying As if impatient to be playing 85 Upon this pipe, as low it dangled Over his vesture so old-fangled.) "Yet," said he, "poor piper as I am, In Tartary I freed the Cham, Last June, from his huge swarms of gnats; 90 I eased in Asia the Nizam Of a monstrous brood of vampire-bats: And as for what your brain bewilders, If I can rid your town of rats Will you give me a thousand guilders?" 95 "One? fifty thousand!"—was the exclamation Of ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... The Vampire of Staffa may seem rather far from the range of Scott's imagination; but his contributions to Lewis's Tales of Wonder show the risk that he ran, while the White Lady of Avenel in The Monastery proves that even in his best years he was exposed to ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker

... beheld in terror and surprise This gruesome shape which mocked before his eyes He could distinguish in its haughty mien A bearing, something as his own had been; Nor had its withered visage quite the look Of vampire, ghoul or evanescent spook; And as the apparition o'er him bent, He saw that every seam or lineament, Contour of feature, prominence of bone, Bore all a striking semblance ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King

... cruel step-mother and hard To thy poor naked, fenceless child, the bard! No horns but those by luckless Hymen worn, And those, alas! not Amalthaea's horn! With naked feelings, and with aching pride, He bears the unbroken blast on every side; Vampire booksellers drain him to the heart, And scorpion critics ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull



Words linked to "Vampire" :   true vampire bat, false vampire, false vampire bat, vampire bat, evil spirit, folklore



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