"Ghostlike" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... kind of silence, profound, tense, ghostlike. We walked through street after street, from one end of the town to the other, and saw only one light, a faint glimmer which came from a slit of a cellar window almost on the level of the pavement. We were curious, no doubt. At any rate, we looked in. A woman was sitting on a cot bed with her arms ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... white wings, ere they dipped below the horizon's rim. Hence, though the old, exhilarating, briny odor was the same, I felt that, as an ocean, this was unfamiliar. The Atlantic's waves are haunted by historic memories, but few reminders of antiquity rise ghostlike from the dreary waste of the Pacific. Few battles have been fought, few conquests made upon these shores. On the Atlantic coast one feels that he is looking off toward civilized and friendly lands, across a sea which ocean greyhounds have ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... which the caretaker and the Boy Scouts met was in the breaker. There was no fire in the great heater, and the tables and chairs were black with dust. A single electric light shone down from the ceiling, creating long, ghostlike shadows as it swayed about in a gentle wind blowing ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... go"—is a fine line of Charles Lloyd's. But no bird skims, no arrow pierces the air, without producing some change in the Universe, which will last to the day of doom. No coming and going is absolutely trackless; nor irrecoverable by Nature's law is any consciousness, however ghostlike; though many a one, even the most blissful, never does return, but seems to be buried among the dead. But they are not dead—but only sleep; though to us who recall them not, they are as they had never been, and we, wretched ingrates, let ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... entered, Elizabeth swiftly closed and locked the door behind him, handed him the candle with a low "Good night," and fled silently, ghostlike, up the stairs, disappearing ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... lay deep, before a passing circuit-rider held a burial service over her grave. Tradition has it that the boy Abraham brought this about very likely, at ten years old, he felt that her troubled spirit could not have peace till this was done. Shadowy as she is, ghostlike across the page of history, it is plain that she was a reality to her son. He not only loved her but revered her. He believed that from her he had inherited the better part of his genius. Many years after her death he said, "God bless ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... air of the December-night Steals coldly around the chamber bright, Where those lifeless lovers be; Swinging with it, in the light Flaps the ghostlike tapestry. And on the arras wrought you see A stately Huntsman, clad in green, And round him a fresh forest-scene. On that clear forest-knoll he stays, With his pack round him, and delays. He stares and stares, with troubled face, At this huge, gleam-lit fireplace, At that ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... him go; there was about his progress in state something ghostlike and royal, an old-time, decayed majesty. It was as if he had arisen before me after a hundred years' sleep in his retreat—that man who, in his wild and passionate youth, had endangered the wealth of the Riegos, had been the idol of the Madrid populace, and ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... formed a species of rainbow in the west, bestriding my intended road like a gigantic portal. I had never known before that a bow could be generated between the sunshine and the morning mist. It had no brilliancy, no perceptible hues, but was a mere unpainted framework, as white and ghostlike as the lunar rainbow, which is deemed ominous of evil. But, with a light heart, to which all omens were propitious, I advanced beneath the ...
— Passages From a Relinquised Work (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... wretched picture that might have won pity from the ghostlike shrouds and spars which hedged it in as with a forest ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... line of irregular houses, of projecting ilex roundings and pointed cypresses marking the separation between hill and sky, the one scarcely more solid, corporeal than the other; the hill almost as blue as the sky, the sky almost as vaporous as the hill; the tangible often more ghostlike than the intangible. But the sun has smitten the higher hills, and the vapours have partially rolled down, in a scarcely visible fold, to their feet; and the high hill, not yet rock or earth, swells up ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... himself above the rail and peered down upon dark, mysterious decks, untouched by a single ray of relieving light. And his breath stopped painfully at the shadowy sight that struck upon his senses out of the darkness: silent, ghostlike shapes that moved as noiselessly as shadows themselves, vanishing over the open main hatchway,—two score even as he watched. And vague as it all was, he knew that they were no sailors, nor even Mission ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... pathetic expression. The lips were thin, energetic; the under-lip protruding, as if pushed forward by the inspiration of his feelings; the chin strong; cheeks pale, rather hollow than full, freckly; the eyelids a little inflamed; the bushy hair of the head dark red; the whole head rather ghostlike than manlike, but impressive even in repose, and all expression when Schiller declaimed. Neither the features nor the somewhat shrieky voice could he subdue. Dannecker,' adds the satirical Witness, 'has unsurpassably cut this ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... a few months, by the solid majesty of marble. But, on this memorable and melancholy night, the ornaments bore, to me, the look of those sad frivolities with which France is fond of ornamenting her tombs. The chandeliers burned dim; the busts and statues looked ghostlike; the chief part of the members had thrown themselves drowsily on the benches; and the debate had languished into the murmurs of a speech, to which no one listened. If the loaded table, with its pile of petitions and ordonnances, in the midst of the hall, could ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... speaker, standing stockstill in the cloven path below him, not twenty feet away. In his relief, he laughed. He beheld a slim figure in riding-togs. Nothing formidable or ghostlike in that! Nevertheless, a pair of dark blue eyes transfixed him with indignation. They looked out from under the rim of a black sailor hat, and ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... the open door of his room. He had walked slowly but steadily with his usual gait, and his head bent slightly; though his eyes were wide open, he seemed to see nothing, yet he did not stumble or even hesitate. Ida followed behind him with absolute noiselessness. They were both ghostlike in their movements, and the dogs stood and watched them intently, ears erect, and with that gravity in their eyes which dogs wear when ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... crept far across the lake and the darkening waters were still that we rose reluctantly to put the dishes in the tea basket and start on our homeward journey. The tawny fires of the sunset were dying down behind us, the mist stealing, ghostlike, into the valleys below; in the sky a little moon curled like a freshly cut silver shaving, that presently turned to gold, the white ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... have gone into water when you come to take it out. And the truth that you do not live by, whose relations and large harmonies and controlling power are not being increasingly realised in your lives; that truth is becoming less and less real, more and more shadowy, and ghostlike to you. Truth which is not growing is becoming fossilised. 'The things most surely believed' are often the things which have least power. Unquestioned truth too often lies 'bedridden in the dormitory ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... all until you're sane enough to know what you're doing. Give them to me." He took them back and crept quietly, ghostlike, about the room until he found a receptacle in which he knew they would be safe; then, removing one hundred francs from the amount, he brought it back and thrust it in his friend's pocket. "There—that's enough for you to throw ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... of what comes next after this world, with its seeming muddle of injustice and disappointment, its joys and broken aspirations. "Why! it was like this with me when we had our accident in the Golden Eagle!" I thought. And even as the remembrance flitted ghostlike through my brain, I saw tearing through the sky, far above the big bulk of the Zeppelin, a monoplane etched in black against ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... small circle. Something of what he gains fortunately sticks by him: he does not quite forget the mountain language; his eye still recognises the space and the height and the glory of the lofty mountains. And yet there is some pain in wandering ghostlike among the scenes of his earlier pleasures. For my part, I try in vain to hug myself in a sense of comfort. I turn over in bed when I hear the stamping of heavily nailed shoes along the passage of an inn about 2 A.M. I feel ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... wind had abated somewhat, the Tiger still ploughed along into the obscurity at a fair rate of speed. Jeremy stayed forward with the lookout, peering constantly into the gloom ahead, and half expecting to see the ghostlike sails of the Revenge whenever for a moment a gray aisle opened in the mist. But there were only the grim, uneasy seas and ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... from the city, and those ghostlike forms made a deep impression, replied in a voice somewhat uncertain,—"I know not, lord; I have never been in Ostrianum. But they might praise God in some spot nearer ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... curtains of the window, and the outlines of the room showing through the blue dusk frightened her, so ghostlike did they appear. The cradle stood under the window, the child's face just visible on the pallor of the pillow. 'Baby is asleep,' she said; 'that's a good sign,' and watched the cradle, trying to ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... bonfire is a breath of the heaven that is about us in our infancy. Though it be but a heap of rubbish, revealed by the removal of the mantle of snow, lighting up with flickering, changing glow a rectangular door yard, the children stand and gaze into the dancing flame, their vast, distorted, ghostlike shadows lost in the night, their faces reflecting every evanescent glare, and their spirits charmed by the same spell that took form in the fire-worship of their ancestors. How they delight in stirring up the embers and sending up a fountain spray of sparks! What joy in seeing the big ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... knees. Slowly the shadows were falling about him, and to the man every shade had an entity of its own. First there trooped before him all the old memories of the many yesterdays—of Peg—his little dead lad—and Jinnie. And lastly, ghostlike, came the shattered hopes of to-morrow, and with these ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... whir of wings told of a flight. From jagged rents in the cliffs, through which the horses passed, their hoofs ringing echoes from the iron-veined rock, they came to sleepy hollows where the Quaker Aspens stood ghostlike as sentinels on ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... as my ancestors—don't forget, MY ANCESTORS—used to say: 'Buena noche—hasta manana!'" She lingered over the Spanish syllables with an imitation of Dona Anna's lisp, and with another smile, but more faint and more ghostlike than ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... entreaties to lengthen the life that has blighted my own? How did you even learn the home in which I sought unavailing refuge? How—as your hint to Faber clearly revealed—were you aware that, in yon house, where the sorrow is veiled, where the groan is suppressed, where the foot-tread falls ghostlike, there struggles now between life and death my heart's twin, my world's sunshine? Ah! through my terror for her, is it a demon that tells you how to bribe my abhorrence into submission, and supple my reason into use to ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... perceive the actual forms of the cocoanuts, mango- and purau-trees which bordered the banks and climbed the hills into the distance. The puraus often seemed like banians, stretching far over the water in strange and ghostlike shapes, with twisting branches and gnarled trunks that in the obscurity gave a startling suggestion of the fetish growths of the ancients. I felt a faint touch of fear as I groped through the stream, now and again falling into a deep hole or stumbling ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... blood. There was no cessation of the monotonous, dismal chanting of the priests, as these newcomers,—whose sinister purpose no one could doubt,—moving with the silence of spectres, their bodies draped in shapeless robes of skin, appearing ghostlike beneath the uncertain flickering of flame, moved forward like a great writhing snake, passed along the southern wall beneath the face of the flying dragon overhead, until they found seats on the hard ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... part of the British Empire. But English is at a discount here; Cree and French and a mixture of these are spoken on all sides. The swart boatmen are the most interesting feature of the place,—tall, silent, moccasined men, followed at the heel by ghostlike dogs. From this point north dogs are the beasts of burden; the camel may be the ship of the desert, but the dog is the automobile of the silences. The wise missionary translates his Bible stories into the language of the latitude. As Count von Hammerstein ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... light or air, where Beatrice Cenci was confined before her execution. According to the abbe, she spent a whole year in this dreadful pit, her trial having dragged on through that length of time. How ghostlike she must have looked when she came forth! Guido never painted that beautiful picture from her blanched face, as it appeared after this confinement. And how rejoiced she must have been to die at last, having already been in a ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the southward, and Menehwehna took it, walking ahead and rapidly. Twice he turned about and looked John in the face with a searching gaze, but held on his way again without speaking. They walked in a dawn which as yet resembled night rather than day; a night grown diaphanous and ghostlike, a summer night surprised in its sleep and vanishing before their footfall. The flicker of fire-flies hurrying into deeper shades seemed, by a trick of eyesight, to pass into the glint of dew. The birds had not yet broken into ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... hear my fairy footsteps," she broke in, with a quiet laugh. "Do not apologize for that. I am wearing list slippers, so my ghostlike approach is easily accounted for. And I am really very greatly relieved at having found you at all. I was afraid you had left the ship ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... are we to put up beside Him? Is it to be these dim figures of religious reformers that are gliding, ghostlike, to their doom, being wrapped round and round about by ever thicker and thicker folds of the inevitable oblivion that swallows all that is human? Brethren, by common consent it is Christ or nobody. Aaron dies upon Hor; Moses dies upon Pisgah; the teachers, the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... cautiously crawling towards us. In a moment I was outside on my bare feet, running towards them and shouting at the top of my voice, "Pila tedau tedang!" ("Look out, look out!") which caused a stampede among our ghostlike visitors. There were, apparently, numbers of them hidden behind rocks, for when the panic seized them, the number of runaways was double or even treble that of the phantoms I had at first seen approaching. At one moment there seemed to be black ghosts springing out from everywhere, only, ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... gaze for a week, I see the steading of Waster Lunny sunk deeper into the waste. The schoolhouse, I suppose, serves similarly as a snowmark for the people at the farm. Unless that is Waster Lunny's grieve foddering the cattle in the snow, not a living thing is visible. The ghostlike hills that pen in the glen have ceased to echo to the sharp crack of the sportsman's gun (so clear in the frosty air as to be a warning to every rabbit and partridge in the valley); and only giant Catlaw shows here and there a black ridge, rearing its head at the entrance to the glen and struggling ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... deep, sweet, hollow, ghostlike voice of the bell in the steeple, tolling for a funeral, was borne to his ears. In a moment his fevered imagination associated the tolling with the absence of his divinity from her pew, and in ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... went to bed to listen tremblingly while the dare-devil dance of the flute tripped ghostlike through the corridors. And falling asleep with the laughing demon of wind and melody cascading wildly through the mad scene from Lucia, she dreamt that Carl had captured an Esquimau with his flute and weaving a suit of basket armor for him, had dispatched him by aeroplane ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... duty and very clean-faced when going on duty. They never looked at anybody, and one never had occasion to address them directly. Their appearances in the light of day were very regular, and yet somewhat ghostlike in their detachment ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... by now. Torches burned in great sockets in the vast hall and along the massive oak stairway, and hundreds of candles flickered ghostlike in the vast apartments of ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... had on light-colored outing shirts, and these, with the handkerchiefs over their faces, made them look quite ghostlike in ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... only after some moments that I realised that the spectre wore my features, was a liquid presentation of my own proportions colossally enlarged; that I stood in the centre of a lunar rainbow, and that I was gazing on the reflection of myself in the mist. As I moved my arms, my body, or my head, the ghostlike figure moved, and I felt myself irresistibly changing my postures—oddly and nervously at first—then, with an awakening sense of the ridiculous in my actions—so as to make my image change and do as I did. I felt like a child placed for the first time in front ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... of humanity could have entered the paddock with the ghostlike glide of that mysterious figure. They were a woman and a gipsy man. A woman was out of the question in such an occupation at this hour, and the comer could be no less than a thief, who might probably have known the weakness of the household on this particular night, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... a white, ghostlike figure. In the middle of the lawn she stopped short once as if in doubt what to do—as a thought-reader pauses in his search for the mental scent again, ere he rushes upon the object of his search with the certainty ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... gathered on the bank of the stream, waiting for the boat from the Santa Teresa. The lady whom we sought lay like a fallen flower on the dark ground beneath a pine. She did not move, and her eyes were shut. At her head crouched the negress, her white garments showing ghostlike through the gloom. Beneath the next tree sat Diccon, his hands tied behind him, and around him my Lord Carnal's four knaves. It was Diccon's voice that we had heard. He was still speaking, and now we could distinguish ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston |
