"Diabolic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all steamed up and scooting through the night, with two or three hundred others of the cast of characters aboard; and there is Europe and the war in the cast of characters, and the Boche, and Fritzie and the Hun, that diabolic trinity of evil, and just back of the boat on the scenery of the first act, splattered like guinea freckles all over the American map for three thousand miles north, south, east and west, are a thousand replicas ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... less likely to have improved afterwards. This is a subject so shocking that it can be only hinted at. But as a single instance—what wonder if the early hermits of Egypt looked on the crocodile as something diabolic, after seeing it, for generations untold, petted and worshipped in many a city, simply because it was the incarnate symbol of brute strength, cruelty, and cunning? We must remember, also, that earlier ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... taken in. In the whole story, there is not one solitary hint that the destruction of the pigs was intended as a punishment of their owners, or of the swineherds. On the contrary, the concurrent testimony of the three narratives is to the effect that the catastrophe was the consequence of diabolic suggestion. And, indeed, no source could be more appropriate for an act of ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... he saw again the light, shining up there just under the crest of the ridge. He was glad the car had escaped, but he reflected that the tricky winds of the desert seldom sweep a large area. Their diabolic fury implies a concentration of force that must of necessity weaken as it flows out away from the center. Up there on the ridge they may not have experienced ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... practice that threatened his rival's good will. Helen Barton, the doctor's young daughter, perversely kept company with her father's rival. Every one felt sorry for the father but secretly admired Dr. Smelter's diabolic tactics. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... paid, and the sermon still preached, or has it fallen into disuse now that it is unpopular to believe in witchcraft and diabolic possession? Have any of the ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... literary history who is well out of his novitiate. Such a person should see at once that Chateaubriand's elaborate adoption, from Tasso and Milton, of the system of interspersed scenes of Divine and diabolic conclaves and interferences with the story, is an important, if not a wholly happy, instance of that general Romantic reversion to earlier literary devices, and even atmospheres, of which the still rather enigmatic personage who rests enisled off Saint-Malo was so great an apostle. And ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... astonished Stair. He clutched at the thing which happened to be nearest. This chanced to be the arm of Godfrey McCulloch, who seemed to wear a smile of diabolic ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... more terribly felt than by men facing a great fire; for here not only have they to deal with a power out of all proportion to humanity, but they confront a power perverse, saturnine, malignant, diabolic. A conflagration is wantonly cruel; not content with the simple panoply of its might, it summons to its aid the evil whims of an enraged elephant. It plays, like a kitten, with hope before it crushes and kills ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... sharp black eyes shaded by the heaviest of black brows, and it was his notion to trim his mustaches and beard after the fashion set by the third Napoleon and imitated faithfully by those who sing the part of Mephistopheles in Faust. Hence, his grin was handsomely diabolic. ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... disappeared, taking with them wager after wager. Glenister became conscious of a raging, red fury which he had hard shift to master. It was not his money—what if he did lose? He would stay until he won. He would win. This luck would not, could not, last—and yet with diabolic persistence he continued to choose the losing cards. The other men fared better till be yielded to their judgment, when the ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... a satirical sketch of the loose and easy Venetian society in which he was actually living. Here, again, his somewhat ribald letters from Venice do his romantic poetry some wrong; but in fact he had a diabolic pleasure in betraying himself, and his Memoires d'Outre Tombe, if they had been preserved, would have been very different from Chateaubriand's ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... proud to the point of forgetting he is, after all, but a pawn upon the board, but the sport and plaything of destiny and the vast purposes of God—all was not quite well with Brockhurst. At a given moment of time, the diabolic element had of necessity obtruded itself. And, in the chronicles of this delightful dwelling-place, even as in those of Eden itself, the angels are proven not to have had things altogether their ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... because at the end of the rush of water stood up many rocks, which drove the water back again and eventually switched it off, curling over itself at a very sharp angle on one side and on the other. A diabolic-looking whirlpool of great depth formed on the other ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... theirs near El Outaya. All this was long before the Tsar visited Paris, and our Parisians had never before seen the dashing Spahis, had only heard of them, of their magnificent horses, their turbans and flowing Arab robes, their gorgeous figures, lustrous eyes, and diabolic horsemanship. You know how they ride? No cavalry to touch them—not even the Cossacks! Well, our French friends were struck. The unmarried sister, more especially, was bouleversee by these glorious demons. As they caracoled beneath the balcony on which she was leaning she clapped ...
— The Figure In The Mirage - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... the voice of all the Wildest West, the Patti of the Plains; I'm a wild Wagnerian opera of diabolic strains; I'm a roaring, ranting orchestra with lunatics be-crammed; I'm a vocalized tornado—I'm the shrieking of ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... catch the 5:02 train. The trees of the Mall are shaking their heavy tears upon me. Drays thunder afar off. Bells tinkle.—How simple, quiet, almost village-like this city of my vision seems in contrast with the Boston of today with its diabolic subways, its roaring overhead trains, its electric cars ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... lost crystal. But there are some indulgences which can be bought at too high a price, and along with the temptation to gratify her curiosity came an intensification of superstitious alarm. What if she had sinned, and trafficked with diabolic agencies, in trying to read the future? Payment of an actively disagreeable character might be exacted for that, and would not such payment risk disastrous augmentation if she gratified her curiosity thus further? Helen ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... symbol of Christian faith this malignant, grotesque, and inhuman monster of Louis Raemaekers. Indeed, our inclination is to thrust the green demon himself into the pulpit of the Fatherland; for his wrinkled skull could hatch and his evil mouth utter no more diabolic sentiments than those recorded and applauded from Lutheran Leipsic, or from the University and the ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... the incidental music of the highways and byways, but as a perennial stimulant for the emotions we call for Music's aid in many circumstances. Does not the villain of the piece enter and take the stage to a suggestively diabolic tremolo in the orchestra, and is not the lovemaking also conducted to an appropriately sensuous accompaniment, sufficiently subdued, to keep the emotions susceptible and fluid? Could the villain enter with the same eclat to a stony silence, or the lovemaking thrill in ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... of the age, and forthwith a mighty imagination leaped upon it, claimed it for its own. There had been but a grain of sand, an inexplicable fact—lo! now, a rounded pearl shot with all the hues of the morning, a miracle of grace or an evidence of diabolic power, to doubt which ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... glimmering hope that perhaps we do better than we think: that to scramble through this random business with hands reasonably clean to have played the part of a man or woman with some reasonable fulness, to have often resisted the diabolic, and at the end to be still resisting it, is for the poor human soldier to have done right well. To ask to see some fruit of our endeavour is but a transcendental way of serving for reward; and what we take to be contempt of self is only greed ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Nature, of an ultimate of knowledge, not contained, even in fragments, in her isolated truths; the sense of failure which haunts his most valuable attainments; his tampering with the lower or diabolic magic, when the divine has failed; the ascetic exaltation in which he begins his career; the sudden awakening to the spiritual sterility which has been consequent on it; all these find their place, if not always their counterpart, in ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... lot with those who held the Reformed faith; but had he ever had any secret doubts and leanings towards the faith in which he had been reared, the revelations of that night would have proved enough for him. He knew—none better—that this diabolic deed was planned and executed with the full consent, approbation, and blessing of the Romanist priests, and might even be known to the Pope himself. Sorrowful and indignant as Cuthbert had often been for the persecuted Romanists, and keenly as his sympathies would have been stirred ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... took the apologetic side of the dispute; in fact, he was in the secret. Nobody else, barring the author, knew at first whose good name was at stake. The scene must have been high. The company kicked about the poor diabolic writer's head as though it had been a tennis-ball. Coleridge, the yet unknown criminal, absolutely perspired and fumed in pleading for the defendant; the company demurred; the orator grew urgent; wits began to smoke the case as an active ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... over his heart, and observe all the secret reflections of it, all the comparisons it makes, all the desires of applause and favour among men, all the surmises and stirrings of spirit upon any affront, O how would they discover diabolic pride! This sin is the more natural and inbred, for that it is our mother-sin that brought us down from our excellency. This weed grows upon a glass window, and upon a dunghill. It lodges in palaces and cottages. Nay, it will spring and grow out of a pretended humility, and low carriage. In ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... words the magistrates all said Amen, and invoked blessings on her Majesty. And most certainly, Elizabeth was sincerely desirous of peace; even at greater sacrifices than the Duke could well have imagined; but there was something almost diabolic in the cold dissimulation by which her honest compassion was mocked, and the tears of a whole people in its agony made the laughingstock of a despot and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and his vast jungle of mane was the mane of a lion. His eyes, by reason of this intolerable and unshorn mane, one did not often see, except as lights that sparkled in the rear of a thicket; but, once seen they were not easily forgotten, for their malignity was diabolic. A few miles more of less being a matter of indifference to one who was so well mounted, O. would sometimes ride out with us to the field of battle; and, by manoeuvring so as to menace the enemy of the flanks, in skirmishes ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... natural theory of ghosts and wraiths is that they are spirits, yet not so immaterial but that they can fill space, be seen, heard, touched, and affect material objects. Mediaeval and other theologians preferred to regard them as angelic or diabolic manifestations, made out of compressed air, or by aid of bodies of the dead, or begotten by the action of angel or devil on the substance of the brain. Modern science looks on them as hallucinations, sometimes morbid, as in ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... judgement upon the contents of what claims to be a revelation. Untrue thoughts and wicked thoughts sometimes arise equally unaccountably: the fact that they do so is even now accounted for by some as a sufficient proof of direct diabolic suggestion. When we have judged the {148} thought to be true or the suggestion to be good, then we, who on other grounds believe in God, may see in it a piece of divine ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... diabolic striving To intensify slave-driving Could not slay the soul surviving In a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various
... transmigration of souls into animals, plants, and other objects. The Tasmanians believed that their souls would ascend to the stars and abide there; and all savages hold the demoniac possession of inspired persons, of madmen, and of the sick, which has led to what may be called a diabolic pathology. The general conception of the world as a living animal, with all the tendencies ascribed to it by Plato, is only the primeval fact of the animation and personification of phenomena applied to the general idea of the universe. Hence it is easy to ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... it, he was free to select a third course and to accomplish it in such a way that the result would not be evil, but unmixed good. In this case it would hardly seem possible to exonerate the doer from a charge of wanton malice, diabolic in degree. And such is the position in which many theologians seem—to those who view things in the light of reason—to have placed God Himself. It was open to Him, they maintain, to create or to refrain from ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... down to a belief that there is another world in the moon; but Sir Thomas takes little trouble to provide us with an Ithuriel's spear, and, indeed, we have a faint suspicion that he will overlook at times the diabolic agency in sheer enthusiasm at the marvellous results. The logical design is little more than ostensible; and Sir Thomas, though he knew it not himself, is really satisfied with any line of inquiry that will bring him in sight of some freak of nature or of opinion suitable to ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... a feature of the Circumlocution Office, not previously mentioned in the present record. When that admirable Department got into trouble, and was, by some infuriated members of Parliament whom the smaller Barnacles almost suspected of labouring under diabolic possession, attacked on the merits of no individual case, but as an Institution wholly abominable and Bedlamite; then the noble or right honourable Barnacle who represented it in the House, would smite that member and cleave him asunder, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... influenced his bloodthirsty followers. His chief traits were treachery and cruelty, and his pre-eminence in these qualities commanded their respect. His conduct of the siege of Detroit, as we shall see, was marked by duplicity and diabolic savagery. He has often been extolled for his skill as a military leader, and there is a good deal in his siege of Detroit and in the murderous ingenuity of some of his raids to support this view. But his principal claim to distinction is due ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... some relationship that we can be his judges, even to condemn. Feelings which we share and understand enter for us into the tissue of the man's character; those to which we are strangers in our own experience we are inclined to regard as blots, exceptions, inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we conceive them with repugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise our hands to heaven in wonder when we find them in conjunction with talents that we respect or virtues that we admire. David, king of Israel, would pass a sounder judgment on ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... close,—things which, if any of us could see clear through darkness, you should be told in all the truth of them. But we never can know the truth of Sin; for its nature is to deceive alike on the one side the Sinner, on the other the Judge. Diabolic—betraying whether we yield to it, or condemn: Here is Gibbon's sneer—if you care for it; but I gather first from the confused paragraphs which conduct to it, the sentences of praise, less niggard than the Sage of Lausanne usually grants ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... also hit off a few lines in the name of Burton, being a conceit of "Diabolic Possession." Burton was a man often assailed by deepest melancholy, and at other times much given to laughing and jesting, as is the way with melancholy men. I will send them you: they were almost extempore, and no great things; but you will indulge them. Robert Lloyd is come ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... signs of nobility in it, and loves them—hates whatever is diseased, frightful, sinful, or designant of decay. All ugliness, and abortion, and fading away; all signs of vice and foulness, he turns away from, as inherently diabolic and horrible; all signs of unconquered emotion he regrets, as weaknesses. He looks only for the calm purity of the human creature, in living conquests of its passions and of fate. That is idealism; but you cannot teach anyone else that preference. ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... fitting tools for the purposes of rebellion have these hated 'poor whites' proved themselves!—their ignorance, their vices, their brutality rendering them all the more appropriate instruments for the work in hand. It would seem, almost, as if a diabolic providence had prepared them for this ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of everything. Love is the first house servant in the world, so the table is set with positively diabolic coquetry. There is the white damask cloth, the little blue service, the silver gilt urn, the chiseled milk pitcher, and ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... good-nature, took the apologetic side of the dispute. In fact, he was in the secret. Nobody else, barring the author, knew at first whose good name was at stake. The scene must have been high. The company kicked about the poor diabolic writer's head as if it had been a tennis-ball. Coleridge, the yet unknown criminal, absolutely perspired and fumed in pleading for the defendant; the company demurred; the orator grew urgent; wits began to smoke the case, as active verbs; the advocate to smoke, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... hundred and fifty miles of almost solid ice—ice of all shapes and sizes, mountainous ice, flat ice, ragged and tortured ice, ice that, for every foot of height revealed above the surface of the water, hides seven feet below—a theater of action which for diabolic and Titanic struggle makes Dante's frozen circle of the Inferno ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... well-enduring Job. But the scriptural word does not go to say that these things happened; but that certain emissaries said they happened. I think the devil missed his mark—that the messengers were scared by some abortive diabolic efforts; and that (with a natural increase of camels, &c., meanwhile) the patriarch's paternal heart was more than compensated at the last by the restoration of his own dear children. They were dead, and are alive again; they were lost, and are found. Like Abraham returning ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... would keep, and could be slept upon; while with emotions such as mine, a quiet heart was out of the question. She whom I loved was not only in danger of being lost to me for ever, but in danger of becoming the victim of a dastard coquin—diabolic as dastard! Suffering under the sting of such a fearful apprehension, it required me to exert all the self-restraining power of which I was possessed. Had I but known where to go, I should have rushed to horse, and ridden on upon the instant. Not knowing, I was fortunately possessed of sufficient ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... had at last put himself beyond the mercy of the chosen people. They had twaddled and stormed about his immorality, but his praise of Napoleon sent them into diabolic frenzy. He was proclaimed an outlaw and hounded out of the country. The beautiful and rich Lady Jersey, a leader of society, convinced that he was misunderstood and was being treated with unreasonable severity, defended him with all the strength of her resolute character, but ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... morning he produced his famous "Devil's Sonata," with its double shakes and sinister laugh, a favorite of the violinist, but to the composer ever inferior to the music of his dreams. It is rather curious that anything of a diabolic nature should be associated with this man of amiable and gentle disposition, whose care of his scholars, according to Dr. Burney, was constantly paternal. Nardini, his favorite and most famous pupil, ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... Hell, struggling into new life from the clinging clay, standing beneath the footstool of the Judge, floating with lute and viol on the winds of Paradise, kneeling in prayer, or clasping "inseparable hands with joy and bliss in overmeasure for ever"—these multitudes of living beings, angelic, diabolic, bestial, human, crowd the huge spaces of the chapel walls. What makes the impression of controlling doom the more appalling, is that we comprehend the drama in its several scenes, while the chief actor, the divine Judge, at whose bidding the cherubs sound their clarions, and the ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... are something else first. Homer chose for his groundwork War, clinching, tearing, tugging war; in Dante, it is Hell; in Milton, Satan and the Fall; in Shakespeare, it is the fierce Feudal world, with its towering and kingly personalities; in Byron, it is Revolt and diabolic passion. When we get to Tennyson, the lion is a good deal tamed, but he is still there in the shape of the proud, haughty, and manly Norman, and in many ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... dabbling in other forbidden things. Half believing in her own impostures, she regarded La Corriveau with a feeling akin to worship, who in return for this devotion imparted to her a few secrets of minor importance in her diabolic arts. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of your fustian and rhodomontade, your diabolic attitudes, your grandiose battles between the hosts of evil and the light of the Tree, your interminable fanfares, was due the age in which you grew. The externality, the pompousness of intention, the theatrical postures, was part of the romantic ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Kenny choked back his anger and faced his fate. He could not lock the door. Either he must stay or go back with the haunting conviction that this hungry-eyed old fiend who could strum with diabolic skill upon the sensitive strings of his very soul, would propel himself in his wheel-chair to the stairway, there to sit like a ghoul at the top. Rain beat in Kenny's ears like a trumpet of doom. He felt sick and dizzy. No! with the memory of that last wonderful moment when ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... With his white moustache, pink and white complexion, and large bright blue eyes, his dandified dress, his eyeglass and buttonhole, he had the fresh, fair look of an Englishman, the dry brilliance of a Parisian, the naivete of a genius, the manners of a courtier, and behind it all the diabolic humour of the Neapolitan. He was small, thin and slight, with a curious ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... evil is as subject to general statement as is good, and there is in the strict sense an idealization of evil, a universal statement of it, as in Mephistopheles, or in more partial ways in Iago, Macbeth, Richard III. In the emotional sphere also there is the throb of evil, felt as diabolic energy and presented as the element in which these characters have their being. Even in the sphere of the will, who shall say that man does not knowingly choose evil as his portion? So, too, as the method of idealism in the world of the good tends to erect man above himself, ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... very picturesque and barbaric and malevolent. And though he posed heavily, he yet had that Satanic fascination which the beautiful of the masculine and the sinister of the devil cannot help having. His battered magnificence of a charro garb fitted well the diabolic character which Jacqueline assigned him. Spurs as bright as dollars jangled on high russet heels. His breeches closed to the flesh like a glove, so that his limbs were as sleek as some glossy forest animal's. The cloth ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... totally depraved negative,—where it might almost seem as if some magic and diabolic power had wrenched all things from their proprieties, where the light of the eye was darkness, and the deepest blackness was gilded with the brightest glare,—is to come the true end of all this series of operations, a copy of Nature in all her sweet gradations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... words he had intended to say to her when he came to tell her that he and Esther loved each other. He thought of his own high mood of the morning, of the tender regret which he had laid away with the dead of the dead past. It seemed as if all the world were rocking with diabolic ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... scene out of a madman's dream, this dim-lit cavern with its circling, dancing pigmies, the human figure lying sidewise on the ground, the rattling, savage chant and the metallic tattoo of Darl's hopeless message. A diabolic orgy of weird ...
— The Great Dome on Mercury • Arthur Leo Zagat
... annihilation for Germany, but better so—and yet I go on as Director of Information; Dr. Zimmern goes on as Chief Eugenist; and you go on seeking to increase the food supply, and so we all go on as part of the diabolic system, because as individuals we cannot destroy it, but must go on or be destroyed by it. We have riches here and privileges. We keep the labourers subdued below us, Royalty enthroned above us, and the World State at bay about us, ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... that underneath the whole affair there was some diabolic intrigue. If Miss Brandon had really procured this order to active service, was it not likely that she would have taken her measures, so that he could not possibly avoid going? Were all these men in citizen's dress whom he saw there really navy officers? The young ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... its delectable waters, which have immense credit as of tonic and digestive value. I do not distinctly recall all the nasty tastes which have afflicted my palate, but I am quite sure this was one of the vilest. It was a combination of acid, sulphur and saline, like a diabolic julep of lucifer-matches, bad eggs, vinegar and magnesia. I presume its horrible taste has secured it a reputation for being good when it is down. Close by it kindly Nature has placed a stream ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... from whatever side, was no less irksome than ignoble. One misfortune was with diabolic ingenuity dovetailed into another. It was bad enough to have killed a man; but the victim was his own uncle, and the father—at least the foster-father—of Gnulemah. And she, forsooth, must idolize the murderer; and, finally, his heart ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... was half turned, one cheek in the sand, but the slack mouth, the closed eyes were those, Travis believed, of a dead man. By some action of his diabolic machine the Red must have snuffed out his four captives—perhaps in the belief that they were ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... turned his head and stared sharply at me —then went off into peals of diabolic laughter. He had not a word to offer. He simply utterly, absolutely, unqualifiedly disbelieved me—or else chose ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... we admire intellect when it is united with even diabolic disregard of moral laws? Partly because it stands out more prominently; partly because it triumphs over obstacles; but mainly because we are all more or less in sympathy with insurrection and the ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... All the diabolic inventions of the highwaymen of the Middle Ages to extort gold from their captives were renewed here and there to secure conversions: the feet of the victims were scorched, they were strappadoed, suspended by the feet; young mothers were tied to the bedposts, while their infants at the breast ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... of the human fingers, or of a hair, will have, perhaps, reminded them of some sort of sorcery, or of some diabolic art worthy of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... sent up by our parties and sects, and by the suffering and bewildered crowds of the laboring people. Our politics make my heart ache, whenever I think of them. The base selfish frenzies of factions seem to me, at this distance, half diabolic; and I am out of the way of knowing anything that may be quietly a-doing to elevate the standard of wise and temperate manhood in the country, and to diffuse the means of physical and moral well-being among all the people.... I will write to my Father as soon as I can after ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... were in their turn deposed from their high estate, and became the nucleus around which the Christian belief in demonology formed itself. The gods who under the old theologies reigned paramount in the lower regions became pre-eminently diabolic in character in the new system, and it was Hecate who to the last retained her position of active patroness and encourager of witchcraft; a practice which became almost indissolubly connected with her name. Numerous instances of the completeness ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... that milk is needed for our infant girls and boys; That it aids adult dyspeptics to regain "digestive poise"; But I've never comprehended Why its transport is attended By the maximum of diabolic noise. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... on—in a few minutes more Maina will be a mother. Frederick, by some invisible impulse, has chosen from among the laces of his wife a rich Mechlin, which she wore round her neck on her wedding-day. It is now to be the diabolic standard, and he goes with it towards the door of his house, pensive and sad. When he got to the threshold he stopped—he raised his eyes to heaven, and from his heart and from his lips, there gushed out prayers, warm, deep, sincere—the first for many years. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... beauty and might. They are aristocrats of intellect and conscience,—the noblest aristocracy, but also the haughtiest and most exclusive. They can sympathize with great energies, whether celestial or diabolic, but their attitude towards the feeble and the low is apt to be that of indifference, or contempt. Milton can do justice to the Devil, though not, like Shakespeare, to "poor devils." But it may be doubted if the wise and good have the right to cut the Providential ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... small leather bag of another kind, which flamed like a candle, and following it in, we found there were but four people left, who, it seems, were two men and two women, and, as we supposed, had been about some of their diabolic sacrifices. They appeared, in short, frighted to death, at least so as to sit trembling and stupid, and not able to speak neither, for ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... accomplished! How her face was glowing with delight! How deep a blush was burning on her cheeks! How her eyes were sparkling with diabolic exultation! ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... I exclaimed, 'partner in my paradise, where art thou? Much failing thou wilt not be found, nor much deceived; innocent in any case thou art; but, alas! too surely by this time hapless, and the victim of some diabolic wickedness.' Thus I murmured to myself; thus I ejaculated; thus I apostrophized my Agnes; then again came a stormier mood. I could not sit still; I could not stand in quiet; I threw the book from me with violence against the wall; I began to hurry backwards and forwards in a ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... And, anyway, who could have foreseen this woman's "informant" stumbling upon that particular slum, of all the slums awaiting destruction in the purifying flame of social revolution? Who could have foreseen? Nobody! "It's a perfect, diabolic surprise," thought Razumov, calm-faced in his attitude of inscrutable superiority, nodding assent to Sophia Antonovna's remarks upon the psychology of "the people," "Oh yes—certainly," rather coldly, but with a nervous longing ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... a crazy hovel, takes in stuffing guineas into old stockings and filling earthen pots with sovereigns, and every now and then visiting his hoards and fingering the fat pieces, and thinking ever all that they represent of earthly and angelic and diabolic energy. A miser pouring out his guineas into his palm and bathing his shrivelled and trembling hands in the yellow heaps before him, is not the prosaic being we are in the habit of thinking him. He is a dreamer, almost a poet. You and I read a novel or a poem to help our imaginations to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... named the day, the events, the mutual attack, and the conflicts of the two armies. Whether such things are exhibited by the spirit, let the reader more particularly inquire; I do not assert they are the acts of a Pythonic or a diabolic spirit; for as foreknowledge is the property of God alone, so is it in his power to confer knowledge of future events. There are differences of gifts, says the Apostle, but one and the same spirit; whence Peter, in his second Epistle, writes, "For the prophecy came not in the old ...
— The Description of Wales • Geraldus Cambrensis
... account of the tortures of souls; in which a fiery wheel is turned a thousand times a day by an evil angel, and at each turn a thousand souls are burnt upon it. After this he beheld a horrible river, in which were many diabolic beasts, like fishes in the midst of the sea, which devour the souls of sinners; and over that river there is a bridge, across which righteous souls pass without dread, while the souls of sinners suffer each one according ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... at the face of the world sees evidence on all sides of the presence of something blighting and poisonous, something diabolic and malign in the way things are now organised. He traces the cause of this to the wilful evil in the heart of man, and he finds the only cure for it in ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... would of critics—the hypers and all. I suspect he himself, indeed, dabbles in rhyme, Which, for imps diabolic, is not the first time; As I've heard uncle Bob say, 'twas known among Gnostics, That the Devil on Two Sticks was ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... away, knocked discreetly on the window of the lodge and waited some seconds. Ermolai came out and opened the gate for him. Matrena moved to the threshold of the little sitting-room and watched Natacha's door with horror. She felt her legs give under her, she could not stand up under the diabolic thought of such a crime. Ah, that arm, that arm! reaching out, making its way, with a little shining phial in its hand. Pains of Christ! What could there be in the damnable books over which Natacha and her companions pored ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... split with a terrific, rending crash, and the whole place stood pitilessly revealed to her, as if a spotlight had been turned on. Lorraine stood aghast. The buildings were not buildings at all. They were rocks, great, black, forbidding boulders standing there on a narrow ridge, having a diabolic likeness to houses. ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... the minds of men an instinctive awe of anything that appertains to the insane. In olden times a disordered mind was considered of divine or diabolic origin as it evinced good or evil tendencies. This belief lasted even until the present century. Many old women who were the victims of senile dementia and kindred ills, were accused of witchcraft ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... that thy books taught thee, they did not open to thee much of the depths of that human heart which thy dogmas taught thee to despise as diabolic. ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... those on whom his revenge and perfidy had entailed such a crushing load of misery. It is, indeed, impossible to guess what the nature of that feeling must be which arises from the full gratification of mean and diabolic malignity. Every action of the heart at variance with virtue and truth is forced to keep up so many minute and fearful precautions, all of which are felt to be of vast moment at the time, that we question if ever the greatest glut ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... extraordinary, Bertie, if you remember that it is not so very long ago since people at home believed in witches who sailed through the air to take part in diabolic ceremonies, and brought about the death of anyone by sticking pins into a little waxen image, and that even now the peasantry in out-of-the-way parts of the country still hold that some old women bewitch cows, and prevent milk ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... thus disengaged her brother and pushed the poor girl a little further off as it were—isn't women's cleverness perfectly diabolic when they are really put on their mettle?—after having done these things and also made me feel that I was no match for her, she went on scrupulously: "One doesn't like to use that word either. The claim is very small. It's so little one ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... revealed, and the diabolic wickedness of Lady William did not pass unpunished, for she was burnt, and the cook was condemned to stand in boiling lead. A ballad in the Pepys' collection, entitled, "The Lady Isabella's Tragedy, or ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... retreat, until once within the compass of his fell swoop they fall victims to their temerity. I have often watched a cat act thus. Whatever explanation may be received, the fact cannot be questioned, and is ever attributed by the unreflecting, to some diabolic spell cast upon them by the animal. They have the same strange susceptibility to the influence of certain sounds as the vipers, in which lies the secret of snake charming. Most of the Indian magicians were familiar with this ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... at a switchboard. Jones fearing, if he addressed her, that she might curse him, went on and up, higher, still higher, and began to feel quite birdlike. On the successive landings were doors and he wondered what tragedies, what comedies, what aims, lofty, mean or merely diabolic, they concealed. They were all labelled with names, Hun or Hebrew, usually both. But ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... maid-servants come at last to the net upshot of their anarchies; of these, or of the like incurable phenomena, I hear nothing in Berlin; and can believe that, under this King, Indigence itself may still have something of a human aspect, not a brutal or diabolic as is commoner in some places.—This is one of Friedrich's first acts, this opening of the Corn-magazines, and arrangements for the Destitute; [Helden-Geschichte, i. 367. Rodenbeck, Tagebuch aus Friedrichs ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... half-hour, the two women had sat over the table facing each other, with Tanqueray's empty place between them. There had been moments when their sense of his ironic, immaterial presence had struck them dumb. It was as if this were the final, consummate stroke of the diabolic master. It had been as impossible to talk about him as if he had been sitting there and ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... filed out and gone about its leisurely business, the minister and his wife came forward to greet us. They were a bit nervous, remembering the diabolic uproar about Faith, Hope, and Charity. Mr. Haile was a mild-mannered little man of the saved-sheep type, with box-plaited teeth and a bleating voice. His wife had the worried face and the anxious eyes of the minister's helpmeet, and the painfully ready smile for newcomers who ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... at a "camp-robber" that had flown down and taken a pick at a plate on a stump which contained the lunch he had saved for Mr. Stott, and his expression was so diabolic that it was the first time for many days ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... Bordeaux Museum an ancient picture of a young girl holding a cat, on a tomb of the Gallo-Roman Epoch, and cats appeared in the heraldry of that date; but writers of those ages speak rather slightingly of them. Then for centuries the cat was looked upon as a diabolic creature, ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... rejects the figure of a witch with her profile in dark relief against the moon and her broomstick cutting a constellation. No undiscovered natural laws, no names of "respectable" witnesses, are invoked to make us feel our presumption in questioning the diabolic intimacies of that obsolete old woman, for it is known now that the undiscovered laws, and the witnesses qualified by the payment of income tax, are all in favor of a different conception—the image of a heavy gentleman in boots and black coat-tails foreshortened against the ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... closed to the girl, other houses in the serenely moral In-Place would inevitably slam their doors. The cunning of the half-breed was diabolic in its sureness. Anton Farwell could not assume responsibility for Priscilla if all Kenmore turned its back on her, and in that hour the girl would, of course, come running ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... there was never a more rigorous test of Doctor James's greatness. Trapped by the diabolic humor of his victim into a position both ridiculous and unsafe, he maintained his dignity as well as his presence of mind. Taking out his watch, he waited for the ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... bed-room. The clock had just struck midnight, gravely and slowly, as though to emphasize the solemnity of that confidential and conjugal moment which is both the tete-a-tete of wedded life and the secret council of the household—that moment of transformation and magic which is both bourgeois and diabolic, and which reminds one of that story of the woman metamorphosed into a cat. The shadow of the bed falls mysteriously over the wife, and as she lies down there is a sort of charm about her. Something ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... stump-orator in the world, standing too on the highest stump,—for the time." A sorrowful spectacle to men of reflection, during the time he lasted, that poor M. de Lamartine; with nothing in him but melodious wind and soft sawder, which he and others took for something divine and not diabolic! Sad enough; the eloquent latest impersonation of Chaos-come-again; able to talk for itself, and declare persuasively that it is Cosmos! However, you have but to wait a little, in such cases; all balloons do and must give up ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... grey, rather small, not unpleasant in good-humour, diabolic in a passion, but worst when a little suspicious; then they watch you as though you were a young rattle-snake, to ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... masculine consumption by precisely the same inefficiency or gross negligence, or whatever one likes to call it. Nor was that all. The coffee had been thin, feeble, uninteresting. The feminine excuse for this last diabolic iniquity had been that the kitchen at the last moment had discovered itself to be short of coffee. An entirely commonplace episode! Yes, but it is out of commonplace episodes that martyrs are made, and Omicron had been made a martyr. He, if none else, was fully aware that evening that ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... the black side of the supernatural his pencil grows more daring and incisive. He has many true inventions in the perilous and diabolic; he has many startling nightmares realised. It is not easy to select the best; some may like one and some another; the nude, depilated devil bounding and casting darts against the Wicket Gate; the scroll of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... strange rumors and suspicions. There were young writers, who had developed a new technique, and had carried poetic utterance to undreamed of heights; and in this poetry were cryptic allusions, hints of diabolic things. A Socialist paper printed the menu of a banquet given by these "Neo-Nietzscheans", and demanded to know what one was to understand by filet de mouton blanc, and wherein lay the subtle humor of pate de petit bete. And at last the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Autobiography. On more than one occasion, he declared that the Autobiography was going to be something awful—as caustic, fiendish, and devilish as he could make it. Actually, he was in the habit of jotting on the margin of the page, opposite to some startling characterization or diabolic joke: "Not to be published until ten (or twenty, or thirty) years after my death." One day I heard him vent his pent-up rage, in bitter and caustic words, upon a certain strenuous, limelight American politician. I could ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson |
