"Grotesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... grotesque heads and other scribbles are found in Erasmus's manuscript copy of the Scholia to the Letters of St. Jerome, preserved in the Library of Basle University and published by Emil Major (Handzeichnungen des Erasmus von Rotterdam, Basle, 1933). ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... resistance by the Church of England. Yet his priests could not keep him from Arabella Sedley. While he was risking his crown for the sake of his soul, he was risking his soul for the sake of an ugly, dirty mistress. There is something delightfully grotesque in the spectacle of a man who, while living in the habitual violation of his own known duties, is unable to believe that any temptation can draw any other person aside from the path ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Colonel Bosley said he knew there was a joke up, and humored it; and after putting all sorts of grotesque questions to the man, he was allowed to go on his ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... lamplight the paint on her cheeks made startling unnatural patches of—paint. The reflections slid over the liquid black mass of her hair, died in the lustrous creamy folds of her garment. She was at once grotesque and impressive, like a figure in a Chinese pantomime watched from the western auditorium of his inheritance. His fondness for her, his admiration, had not lessened. He surveyed his position, the presence here, in his room at Java Head, of Taou Yuen, with amazement; all the ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... finished, graceful and truly classical. It would be hard to find a living author who had displayed such varied powers. As an example of his style we would refer to one of his tales, "The House of Usher," in the first volume of his "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque." It has a singular charm for us, and we think that no one could read it without being strongly moved by its serene and sombre beauty. Had its author written nothing else, it would alone have been ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... without further conversation; they were all hungry, and the boys were still very fagged. As they approached the blazing mass, the figure seemed to leap more wildly still among the flames, the cries to grow hoarser and more grotesque. All about was heavy blackness. The slender branches of the burning pine writhed and hissed; they might have been a pyramid of rattlesnakes caught in spouting flame. Overhead the stars had disappeared beyond a heavy cloud of smoke. It was a sight to strike terror to ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... the mark as usual, Corinna reflected. It was his way, she had observed, to cover a mental disturbance with pretended hilarity. There was, as always when he was unnatural and ill at ease, a touch of coarseness in his humour, a grotesque exaggeration of his rhetorical style. With his mind obviously distracted he told several anecdotes of dubious wit; and while he related them Miss Spencer sat primly silent with her gaze on her plate. Only Corinna laughed, as she ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... language. To all who understand the ways of the East, it is as witty, and as full of what is popularly called "chaff" as it is possible to be. There is not a dull page in it, and it will especially please those who delight in the weird and supernatural, the grotesque, and ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... carved wood of quaint pattern, and some of them quite ancient, were to be had at very moderate prices; pipes and pipe-bowls of the weirdest description; halibut fish-hooks, looking like anything at all but fish-hooks; Shaman rattles, grotesque in design; Thlinket baskets, beautifully plaited and stained with subdued dyes—the most popular of souvenirs; spoons with bone bowls and handles carved from the horns of the mountain goat or musk-ox; even the ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... Railroad corporation extended to him all graces. A special car, the Pullman in embryo in reality, was at his beck, and a train for his numerous friends if he spoke. On the other hand, his rival, becoming more and more democratic in his leaning to the grotesque, gloried in traveling even in the caboose of a freight-train. He had no brass bands and no canteen for all comers; on one occasion his humble "freighter" was side-tracked to let the palace-cars sweep majestically by, a calliope playing ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... expressions, and difficult allusions, he imperils his clearness. In the presence of genuine emotion, he is always as simple in style as he is serious in attitude; but there are times when he seems to revel in the extravagant and grotesque. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... there, we were interested in and enjoyed the gathering of ten or fifteen native boys around the ship diving for centimes or francs thrown by the passengers, their dexterity as divers, securing every penny, was as clever as grotesque. They remained in the water six or eight hours during the ship's stay. A few hours brought us to Aden, a very strongly fortified appendage to the British Empire at the south end of the Red Sea. For armament and strategical locality it is the Gibraltar ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... the chimney, afforded a kind of screen; and presently he stood within a chamber which the dark and painful genius of Crabbe might have delighted to portray. The walls were whitewashed, and at sundry places strange figures and grotesque characters had been traced by some mirthful inmate, in such sable outline as the end of a smoked stick or the edge of a piece of charcoal is wont to produce. The wan and flickering light afforded ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... crouched in a position of grotesque fright, the fear-sweat streaming down his face, Frederik Grimm peered about him through the flickering gloom. The place seemed peopled with elusive Shapes. His teeth clicked together as his loosened jaw was nerve-racked. He shivered from ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... ladies, who were retiring. Miss Peyton detained him for a moment, to inquire into the welfare of Captain Singleton. Frances smiled with something of natural archness of manner, as she contemplated the grotesque appearance of the bald-headed practitioner; but Sarah was too much agitated, with the surprise of the unexpected interview with the British colonel, to observe him. It has already been intimated that Colonel Wellmere was an old acquaintance of the family. ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of those of antecedent and succeeding generations. It has a naked material relation to the other fact, that he uses legal phrases oftener than any other dramatist or poet; but with his plastic power over those grotesque and rugged modes of speech it has nought to do whatever. That was his inborn mastery. Legal phrases did nothing for him; but he much for them. Chance cast their uncouth forms around him, and the golden overflow from the furnace of his glowing thought fell ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... in the light of a bonfire this dance is most grotesque and terrible. The naked black bodies, gleaming in the fire, the blood-curdling yells, and the demoniacal figures of the howling, leaping dancers, remind one ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... shelving rock, on the surface of which were still visible some old Bushman paintings, their red and black pigments having been preserved through long years from wind and rain by the overhanging ledge; grotesque oxen, elephants, rhinoceroses, and a one-horned beast, such as no man ever ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... subdued city, satiated with victory and peace. After him came Jess, now white from age, with her cart; and in it a woman, carefully wrapped up—the carrier leading the horse anxiously, and looking back. When he saw me, James (for his name was James Noble) made a curt and grotesque "boo," and said, "Maister John, this is the mistress; she's got a trouble in her breest—some kind of an ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... as he rowed, looked down at the two men sleeping under-foot. The cook's arm was around the oiler's shoulders, and, with their fragmentary clothing and haggard faces, they were the babes of the sea, a grotesque rendering of the old ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... with which the sand was strewn. It was a wretched repast, but still it was better than nothing. The opposite coast formed one vast bay, terminating on the south by a very sharp point, which was destitute of all vegetation, and was of a very wild aspect. This point abutted on the shore in a grotesque outline of high granite rocks. Towards the north, on the contrary, the bay widened, and a more rounded coast appeared, trending from the southwest to the northeast, and terminating in a slender cape. The distance between these two extremities, which made the bow of the bay, was about ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... and earth were united in a state of chaos until a divine man, whom they call P'an-ku, the "ancient founder," rent them asunder. Pictures show him wielding his sledge-hammer and disengaging sun and moon from overlying hills—a grotesque conception in strong contrast with the simple and sublime statement, "God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light." P'an-ku was followed by a divine being named Nue-wa, in regard to whom it [Page 71] is doubtful whether to speak in the feminine ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... grieve your mistress?" remonstrated Major Favraud, lifting at the same time an admonitory finger, at which recognized signal, a part of past instructions probably, the parrot burst forth at once in a series of the most grotesque and outre oaths ear ever heard, ending (by the aid of some prompting from his teacher) by dismally croaking the fragment of a popular song ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... writers of the past century, especially by Hoffmann and his fantastic Kreisleriana, their influence upon the writing of Old Fogy is not difficult to detect. He loved the fantastic, the bizarre, the grotesque—for the latter quality he endured the literary work of Berlioz, hating all the while his music. And this is a curious crack in his mental make-up; his admiration for the exotic in literature and his abhorrence of the same quality when it manifested itself in tone. I never entirely understood ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... did Jay Gould see? He saw, in the first place, that society, as it was organized, had neither patience nor compassion for the very poverty its grotesque system created. Prate its higher classes might of the blessings of poverty; and they might spread broadcast their prolix homilies on the virtues of a useful life, "rounded by an honorable poverty." But all of these teachings were, in one sense, chatter and nonsense; ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... under the shadow of this too prepotent monarchy. There are certain limiting restrictions imposed upon Germans through the Imperial activity, that must finally be bad for the intellectual atmosphere which is Germany's ultimate strength. For example, the Emperor professes a violent and grotesque Christianity with a ferocious pro-Teutonic Father and a negligible Son, and the public mind is warped into conformity with the finally impossible cant of this eccentric creed. His Imperial Majesty's disposition to regard ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... a wide interval between the grotesque effrontery that wears the Hellenic crown and the undeviatingly decorous self-effacement of the Dutch sovereign; and yet there is something of a common complexion runs through the whole range of ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... was as inarticulate as Cromwell. Like the great Protector he "lived silent," and like him he was often misunderstood. Stories which have been repeated by writer after writer attribute to him the most grotesque eccentricities of manner, and exhibit his lofty piety as the harsh intolerance of a fanatic. He has been represented as the narrowest of Calvinists; and so general was the belief in his stern and merciless nature that a great poet did not scruple to link his name ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... a tall person clothed in what seemed to be a magnificent feather cloak, and, walking around and about him, a number of grotesque forms adorned with hideous masks and basket-like head-dresses ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... deeply absorbed as a spectator. The crash and swing of the great drama made him lean forward, intent-eyed, his face working in small contortions. Sometimes he prattled, words coming unconsciously from him in grotesque exclamations. He did not know that he breathed; that the flag hung silently over ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... It was a grotesque, old-fashioned, castellated sort of a sentry-box, made of a smoky-colored wood, and with a grating in front, that lifted up like a portcullis. And here would this Danby sit all the day long; and when ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... plumber's wooden triangle. This preliminary operation having been completed, there then began a regular riot all over the ship. The yards were suddenly manned with red devils, black monkeys, and every kind of grotesque monster, while the whole ship's company, officers and men promiscuously mingled, danced the cancan upon deck. In order that the warmth of the day should not make us forget that we had arrived in his dominions, ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... sketched. Garbed appropriately, in shawl and sabots, she would have passed for some European plowwoman of Amazonian proportions. Allegheny! It was a suitable name, indeed, for such a mountainous person. Her size was truly heroic; she would have been grotesque, ridiculous, except for a certain youthful plasticity and a suggestion of tremendous vigor and strength that gave her dignity. Her ample, ill-fitting dress failed to hide the fact that her robust body was ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... one arm across his purple, bloated face. Only the weak, helpless, open mouth could be seen. His muscular hands were relaxed, and the whole prostrate figure was pathetic in its unconsciousness of will and grotesque unhumanness. Fate had been too strong for Tom Davis. His birth and all the circumstances of his useless life had brought him with resistless certainty to this level, and his progress in the future could only be an ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... sickly. For nights, in spite of fatigue, he could not sleep. His mates sang and talked and bandied jests and sarcasms of esoteric meaning. Some of the recruits from factories or farms satirized their officers for peculiarities common to their social caste and gave grotesque imitations of their mode of speech. Doggie wondered, but held his peace. The deadly stupidity and weariness of it all! And when the talk stopped and they settled to sleep, the snorings and mutterings and coughings began and kept poor Doggie awake most of the night. The irremediable, ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... trifles to present to the queen of the occasion. There was a time when Pauline would have been highly delighted with these gifts, but that time was not now. She felt the impossible tidies, the ugly pin-cushions, the hideous toilet-covers, the grotesque night-dress bags to be more burdens than treasures. What could she possibly do with them? The gold chain and locket were another matter. She felt very proud of her chain and her little heart-shaped locket. She was even mad enough to fasten the chain round her neck that morning ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... not been struck quite dumb by Aunt Maria's grotesque face, with its wrinkles, they must surely have shouted aloud! The third little mouse had sought ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... myself to this imperative though inglorious course, my heart warmed once more to the jovial young squire. He would laugh, but not unkindly, at my grotesque dilemma; at the thought of his laughter I began to smile myself. If he gave me another chance I would smoke that cigar with him before starting home afresh, and remove, front my own mind no less than from his, all ill impressions. ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... room, lighted only by the embers of a fire that was dying on the large hearth at its farther extremity; the walls curiously papered, and the flickering firelight bringing out its grotesque pattern; someone sitting in a large armchair by the fireplace. All this we saw as we crowded together into the room after the driver and expressman. "Hello! be you Miggles?" said Yuba Bill to ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... side of Lagny, and then stood on this side of the Marne, and whistled and shrieked a long time before we began to wiggle across the unfinished bridge, with workmen hanging up on the derricks and scaffoldings in all sorts of perilous positions, and all sorts of grotesque attitudes. I was glad when ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... strange song of the same name in the Scottish Gallovidean Encyclopaedia, from which I borrow some of the maledictory epithets. Grotesque they may be, but they are justified by the vocabulary of our old witch-sibyls used in curses and incantations, as we find in ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... old, strange, mysterious creeds and faiths, shrouded in the mists of antiquity, and stalk dimly and undefined along the line which divides Time from Eternity; and forms of strange, wild, startling beauty mingled in the vast throngs of figures with shapes monstrous, grotesque, and hideous. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... events, the Orang-outang has a certain sense of humor which is not possessed by animals in general. He is very fond of imitating people, and sometimes acts in the most grotesque and amusing way, but, like many human wits of whom we read, his manner is always very solemn, even ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... to his plane, leaped in, and soared southward. His face was a grotesque mask of madness, and his cries rang ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... giving one a higher idea of the possibilities of the human race: but to lump a vast and complex system together, to concentrate unknown races, dead and living, negroes, Chinamen, Homeric heroes and palaeolithic men, into one definite conception, and to worship it, seemed to Hugh an almost grotesque thought. He could conceive of a species of Pantheism, in which the object of one's awe and worship was the vast force underlying all existing things; but even so it seemed necessary to Hugh to focus it all into one personal force. ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the dull, flame-shot obscurity, the Legionaries ran about like ghouls in their hoods and round, hollow eye-holes; masked faces, indistinct in the smoke, loomed grotesque and horrible as Ku-Klux where the bayonets were at work digging out the enemy from blind burrows, turning them up from their ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... each minute, pressed against the still locked front doors. Those in the van flattened their noses against the glass in grotesque fashion. ...
— The Diamond Cross Mystery - Being a Somewhat Different Detective Story • Chester K. Steele
... a happiness that never altogether failed, vanish into a snug cottage in Hampstead or Surbiton. She saw the rain of her independence, of her delicious solitariness, of the life that began and ended in her sense of the strange, and the beautiful and the grotesque in a world of curious slaveries, of which it suited her to be an alien spectator, amused and free. She foresaw long conflicts and discussions, pryings which she could, not resent, justifications which would be forced upon her, obligations which she ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... exterior of the cabin was like the others on the plantation, the interior had a rude, grotesque elegance about it far in advance of any negro hut I had ever seen. The logs were chinked with clay, and the one window, though destitute of glass, and ornamented with the inevitable board-shutter, had a green moreen curtain, which kept ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... and ate as he felt inclined. He forbade all pruning of trees as an act of insubordination to Nature, and delighted in rain but cowered in terror from thunder and lightning. He peered curiously at clouds to find strange shapes in them, and in his pursuit of the grotesque examined the spittle of sick persons on the walls or ground, hoping for suggestions of monsters, combats of horses, or fantastic landscapes. But why this should have been thought madness in Cosimo when Leonardo in his directions to artists explicitly ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... to find that you, at least, have hit on another than Sir Everard Valletort: one, in fact, who will render the promotion more general than it would otherwise have been. Seriously, I should be sorry if any thing happened to our worthy Major, who, with all his bustling and grotesque manner, is as good an officer and as brave a soldier as any his Majesty's army in Canada can boast. For my part, I say, perish all promotion for ever, if it is only to be obtained over the dead bodies of ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... methods of verbal jugglery which cannot be explained without the help of numerous examples. The collection published by Takumi includes a good deal of matter in which a Western reader can discover no merit; but the best of it has a distinctly grotesque quality that reminds one of Hood's weird cleverness in playing with grim subjects. This quality, and the peculiar Japanese method of mingling the playful with the terrific, can be suggested and explained only by reproducing in Romaji the ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... was so uncouth and grotesque as to filch from death its rightful dignity, and his ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... perhaps, less responsive to the will of the people than that of almost any of the civilized nations. Our Constitution and our laws served us well for the first hundred years of our existence, but under the conditions of to-day they are not only obsolete, but even grotesque. It is nearly impossible for the desires of our people to find expression into law. In the latter part of the last century many will remember that an income tax was wanted. After many vicissitudes, a measure embodying ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... interior of the cottage was lighted up by a lurid glow, coming from what I afterward discovered to be a chemical furnace. By its rich light I could distinguish a great litter of retorts, test tubes and condensers, which sparkled over the table, and threw strange, grotesque shadows on the wall. On the further side of the room was a wooden framework resembling a hencoop, and in this, still absorbed in prayer, knelt the man whose voice I heard. The red glow beating upon his upturned face made it stand out from the shadow like ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... within an old and venerable cathedral, where the dim yellow light fell with a rich but solemn glow upon the fretted capitals, or the grotesque tracings of the oaken carvings, lighting up the fading gildings of the stately monuments, and tinting the varied hues of time-worn banners. The mellow notes of a deep organ filled the air, and seemed to attune the sense to all the awe and reverence of the place, where the very ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... North Africa, and to this meager diet ethnologists have ascribed many of the peculiar characteristics of the people who live upon it. Buckle, who finds in the constant consumption of rice among the Hindoos a reason for the inclination to the prodigious and grotesque, the depression of spirits, and the weariness of life manifest in that nation, likewise considers that the morbid temperament of the Arab is a sequence of vegetarianism. He points out that rice contains an unusual amount of starch, ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... lay sleeping in various easy, off-hand attitudes on the schooner's deck, was one who merits special attention—not only because of the grotesque appearance of his person, but also because he is one of the principal ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... impassioned beauty in the speaker—who, as she crossed the illumined square of the window-frame, showed as a tall, thin woman of forty years, with squinting eyes, and a face whose misshapen features stood out like the hasty drawing for a grotesque. When she reached him Christopher turned from the porch, and they walked together slowly out into the moonlight, passing under the aspen where the turkeys stirred and ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... began to be a little restive, when over he went into the tub, where he floundered for some short time. He was drawn out, the bandage removed from his eyes, and he appeared not a little surprised to see so many grotesque figures around him. He soon recovered himself and entered into ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... semi-paralysed eels, over the chancel arch and round the East window. The latter, off which Jimmy could hardly take his eyes, was a veritable triumph of the Victorian tradition. Its colouring was gruesome, its design grotesque; and yet it was a source of great pride to the congregation as a whole, having been put in to the memory of a banker who had left nearly a million. They no more dreamed of doubting its artistic merits than they did of questioning the religion ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... children, and sing to him every day, especially the song of Clontarf and his own death; treating him very much, in fact, as English royalty, during the last generation, treated another Irish bard whose song was even more sweet, and his notions of Irish history even more grotesque, than ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... been aroused by arguments a little less profitable than those of an assembly of deaf persons convoked to decide upon the merits of the work of some distinguished musician. Here she imbibed a fund of ideas, which, applied to the forms of society of to-day, are as grotesque as would be those of a child shut up until twenty years of age in an ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... in grotesque man-trousers, reefed and rolled, intruded himself and his baby-charge in her way. Gloria gazed down into the boy's face with a sort of fascination. He was so small, yet had such a protecting way ...
— Gloria and Treeless Street • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... entered softly. She went towards the bed, and saw that the mysterious and awful change, which tells that the inexorable decree is gone forth, and the "arrow fastened," was fast settling on old Mabel's features. Yet there was nothing uncouth or grotesque in that shrivelled and swarthy face, because FAITH, which leads death captive, had shed over them a supernatural calm, which ennobled them with a solemn sweetness. Her poor old hand, so long withered and helpless, dropped beside her; the other, around which her rosary was wrapped, ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... ambassador himself reaching the land with much difficulty. The vessel was plundered of her whole cargo by the neighbouring peasantry; but the ambassador and his train were hospitably entertained by the queen-regent of Scotland, and forwarded on their way to London, where their grotesque figures and the barbaric pomp of their dress and equipage ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... surrounded by the soft forest beauty; ate our dinner in the midst of grotesque ant-hill scenery, and spent the afternoon looking for ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... constantly crosses. It is on that account that we see the taste, still coarse, seize that which is new and startling, the disordered, the adventurous and the strange, the violent and the savage, and fly from nothing so much as from calm and simplicity. It invents grotesque figures, it likes rapid transitions, luxurious forms, sharply-marked changes, acute tones, a pathetic song. That which man calls beautiful at this time is that which excites him, that which gives him matter; but that which excites him to give ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... numerous wooden bridges, and were much struck with the brilliant fire-flies which were flitting about among the trees. On re-entering the town, we passed large arched gateways leading to particular quarters, and remarked in that inhabited by the Chinese, the grotesque-looking houses, lit up with large paper-lanterns, of gaudy colours, and Chinese inscriptions or monsters on them, and the long rows of Chinese characters up and down the door-posts, or over the windows. After the quiet of the sea, our senses ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... weep for a little while, and drink a great deal to drown her tears, and then forget. They were nearly at the hut now. She could see it, a grotesque shadow thrown ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... beyond. Most arithmetically minute are all the Brahman's pictures, and he never stops to hint at a doubt. His hells are twenty-two in number, each applying a new variety of physical and moral pain. We men of the West smile at the grotesque dogmatism of the Orientals; and yet we have no right to smile. In our way we are as keen about the great question as the Brahmans are, and for us the problem of problems may be stated in few words—"Is there a future life?" All our philosophy, all our laws, all our hopes and fears are concerned with ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... quarter of the city there stood a brownstone house, with grotesque turrets, winding steps, and glaring polished red tiles. There was a touch of the Gothic, of the Renaissance, of the old English manor; just a touch, however, a kind of blind-man's-buff of a house. A very rich man lived here, but for ten months in the year he and his family ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... singular people. Their literature is neglected, but it has some of the German vein in its strata,—the patience, the learning, the homely delineation, and even some traces of the mixture of the humorous and the terrible which form that genius for the grotesque so especially German—you find this in their legends and ghost-stories. But in Holland activity destroys, ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... shiny and thick with grease, stretched over a small round body, that contrasted strangely with his lean and bony face. And all this formed a jovial, grotesque ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... have been as well to try to train woodbine to draw water or to educate cattails to write Greek. The little boy spent all of the day idling; it was a curious, Oriental sort of idling. Callers at Heartholm grew disapprovingly accustomed to the sight of the grotesque face and figure peering through the shrubberies; they shrugged their shoulders impatiently, coming upon the recumbent child dreamily gazing at his own reflection in the lily-pond, looking necromantically out from the molten purple of a wind-blown beech, or standing ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of the existence of worlds—worlds occupied by an impracticability called "man." It will be recollected how the wiser spirit William cast well-merited ridicule upon this insanely impossible phantasy of a disordered mind; nay, even condescended to crush, by perspicuous and irrefutable logic, the grotesque ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... itself these grotesque fallacies till it lost sight of plain and simple truths. Seven o'clock in the morning is too early for any rational human being to be herded into a factory at the call of a steam whistle. Ten hours a day of mechanical task is too long: nine hours is too long: eight hours is ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... expressed his gratitude to Dr. Johnson for having once got him permission from Dr. Taylor at Ashbourne to play there upon moderate terms. Garrick's name was soon introduced. JOHNSON. 'Garrick's conversation is gay and grotesque. It is a dish of all sorts, but all good things. There is no solid meat in it: there is a want of sentiment in it. Not but that he has sentiment sometimes, and sentiment, too, very powerful and very pleasing: but it has not its full proportion ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... contemplating with closed eyes upon the height of his Patmos rock, the sublime visions of the Apocalypse; but as soon as the face of the good priest became animated, the charm was broken. It was but an expressive mask, flexible, at times grotesque, where were predicted the fugitive and shallow impressions of a soul gentle, innocent, and easy, but not imaginative or exalted. It was then that the monk and the anchorite suddenly disappeared, and there remained but a child sixty years old, whose countenance, ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... Why grotesque; why amazing? [Sitting in the low-backed arm-chair.] All that is amazing about it is that Philip should lack the superior courage which enables a man, in special circumstances, to sink his pride and ignore ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... In many parts, the recent restorations are quite evident; but other, and much the larger portions, can scarcely have been touched for centuries: for there are still the gargoyles, perfect, or with broken noses, as the case may be, but showing that variety and fertility of grotesque extravagance which no modern imitation can effect. There are innumerable niches, too, up the whole height of the towers, above and around the entrance, and all over the walls: most of them empty, but a few containing the lamentable remnants of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... dismal croak he flew off to the skeoe, and, seating himself on the topmost point of its ruinous gable, commented in very uncomplimentary terms upon the ways of mankind. As his opinions were expressed aloud, and accompanied by many grotesque and expressive gestures, he created a good deal of amusement, although Mr. Adiesen remarked gravely enough, "We ought not to have allowed Thor ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... was one of the workers who had slipped noiselessly round the corner of the pile and now stood, grotesque and menacing, his uncovered eyes glowering at the intruder, the black barrel of his Browning pistol covering ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... him were of great merit. The room, without being inconveniently crowded, was amply stored with furniture, every article of which bespoke a refined and luxurious taste: easy chairs of all descriptions, most inviting couches, cabinets of choice inlay, and grotesque tables covered with articles of vertu; all those charming infinite nothings, which a person of taste might some time back have easily collected during a long residence on the continent. A large lamp of Dresden china was ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... swallow her up, and the men who watched wondered more and more what had become of the elegant figure, grotesque in such a setting, which had vanished into the narrow doorway—and which did not reappear. Even Inspector Kelly, who knew so much about Chinatown, did not know that the cellars of the three houses left and right of Ah-Fang-Fu's were connected ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... preacher, whose determined conviction that he himself is right in every act and word is as a triple defence around him. This conviction keeps Knox from perceiving what he is by no means incapable by nature of seeing, the grotesque conceit, for instance, which is in his prayer for the Queen. During the course of the controversy he repeats the form of prayer which he is in the habit of using—being far too courageous a soul to veil any supposed fault. And this is the ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... literary art; and if we are to let hymnology witness, it has received as little as it has asked in times past. To call upon Christ's name, to bless God for goodness and mercy, suffice it; and no form of words enabling it to do this seems to be found too feeble, or affected, or grotesque. For anything more, the inarticulate tones of music are as adequate to devotion as the sublimest formula that Milton or Dante could have shaped. It is only since religion has been so much philosophized, and has in so great degree ceased to be a passion, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... that instinctively broke from Clarence's lips was so sincere and unaffected that the man was disconcerted, and at last joined in it, a little shamefacedly. The grotesque blunder of being taken as a fugitive from justice relieved Clarence's mind from its acute tension,—he was momentarily diverted,—and it was not until the boatman had departed, and he was again alone, that it seemed to have any collateral significance. Then an uneasy recollection ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... of rough-hewn red sandstone, combining solid dignity and some artistic merit, for Benham had not stood still architecturally speaking. The River Drive was a grotesque, yet on the whole encouraging exhibit. Most of the residences had been designed by native talent, but under the spur of experiment even the plain, hard-headed builders had been constrained to dub themselves "architects," and adopt modern methods; and here and there stood evidences that the ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... Sally dear! You in the snow and I in fairyland! It's a comic opera Christmas here, but a very fetching one,—the pretty processions of singing children through the streets, the gay, grotesque pinatis—huge paper dolls filled with dulces, the childish and merry little people, the color, the music, the smile and the ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... the part of the village where the revelers were making merry about a fire. As she approached she saw the villagers and their guests squatting in a large circle about the blaze before which a half-dozen naked warriors leaped and bent and stamped in some grotesque dance. Pots of food and gourds of drink were being passed about among the audience. Dirty hands were plunged into the food pots and the captured portions devoured so greedily that one might have thought ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... remote date, and evidently formed from the relics of some monastery or religious house. Here and there, the fancy or interest of the owner had induced him to remodel the structure; and an ill-designed and ungraceful mixture of the modern with the ancient gave to the whole somewhat of a grotesque appearance, that was heightened by the noble trees, which had once towered in majesty and beauty, being in many places lopped and docked, as if even the exuberance of nature was a crime in the eyes of the present ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... Rome, compared with ours, was narrow and superficial; their ideas of Nature were crude and often grotesque; they lacked sympathy; the Greek had no sense of sin; the Roman none of the mercy which tempers justice. In their eyes the child was not holy, woman was not sacred, the slave was not man. Their notion of liberty was political and patriotic merely; the human ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... frog-fish, sea-devil (Lophius piscatorius), a fish well known off the coasts of Great Britain and Europe generally, the grotesque shape of its body and its singular habits having attracted the attention of naturalists of all ages. To the North Sea fishermen this fish is known as the "monk," a name which more properly belongs to Rhina squatina, a fish allied to the skates. Its head is of enormous size, broad, flat and depressed, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... artificial heat is employed to promote the drying of the precipitated dye; but this is not essential to the manufacture. Marco's account, though grotesque in its baldness, does describe the chief features of the manufacture of Indigo by fermentation. The branches are cut and placed stem upwards in the vat till it is three parts full; they are loaded, and then the vat is filled with water. Fermentation soon begins and goes on till in 24 ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... mirth and tears, of the tragic and grotesque, of cap and crown, of Socrates and Rabelais, of AEsop and Marcus Aurelius, of all that is gentle and just, humorous and honest, merciful, wise, laughable, lovable and divine, and all consecrated to the use of man; while through all, and over all, an overwhelming sense of obligation, of chivalric ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... manual work and of the rule of silence; their elaborate cookery and nice taste in wines; their interest in the cut and material of their clothes and the luxury of their bed coverlets: the extravagance of the furniture in their chapels, and even the grotesque architecture of their buildings. He especially censures the magnificent state in which the abbots live and with which they travel about, and he declares himself emphatically against that exemption of monasteries from episcopal control which was one of the most prized privileges of the Cluniac Order. ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... however, that the conclusion of the Adelphi, in which a certain magician summoned a black-robed, steeple-hatted demon from the nether world, who, after commanding a minion to give a pickle-back to sundry grotesque personages, did castigate their ulterior portions severely with a large switch, was a striking amelioration and betterment upon the preceding scenes, and evinced that TERENCE possessed no deficiency ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... little sister, but I knew that Ellen Ember, with her crown of bright hair, went about Friendship streets singing aloud, and leaping up to catch at the low branches of the curb elms, and that she was as picturesque as a beautiful grotesque on a page of sober text. I had not learned where the Oldmoxons had moved, but I knew of them that they had left me a huge fireplace in every room of my house. I could have repeated little about Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, save that her black week-day ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... Lebeau, the boatman, the trapper, the hunter, the fighter, From the unlucky French of Gallipolis he descended, Heir to Old-World want and New-World love of adventure. Vague was the life he led, and vague and grotesque were the rumors Wherethrough he loomed on the people, the hero of mythical hearsay,— Quick of hand and of heart, insouciant, generous, Western,— Taking the thought of the young in secret love and in envy. Not less the elders shook their heads and held him for outcast, Reprobate, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... aims also at fun; laughter mingles with agility; grotesque yet graceful gestures are flung in, and ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... have more sense in this particular direction. On the other hand, color may be large, but appreciation of form, size, etc., may be deficient. The individual may try to paint a picture and get the colors all right, but if form is deficient his figures will be grotesque in their absurdity; or he may have good sense as to form and color, and get the sizes of his objects all wrong. Mechanical skill depends in a great measure upon these "Perceptive Faculties," as they are called: that is, those portions of the brain that comprehend and give ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... what Sims or Bateman ever imagined weirder caricature than the grotesque larva of the Oniticella, with its extravagant dorsal hump; or the fantastic and alarming silhouette of the Empusa, with its scaly belly raised crozierwise and mounted on four long stilts, its pointed face, turned-up moustaches, great prominent eyes, and a "stupendous ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... stationed himself where he could see all avenues of approach to the house, and waited. Twenty minutes went by, and then Sam became suddenly alert and attentive, for the arc-light revealed a small, grotesque figure slowly approaching along the sidewalk. It was brown in colour, shaggy and indefinite in form; it limped excessively, and paused to rub ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... bleak Labrador coast and there in saving life made expiation. In dignity, simplicity, humor, in sympathetic etching of a sturdy fisher people, and above all in the echoes of the sea, Doctor Luke is worthy of great praise. Character, humor, poignant pathos, and the sad grotesque conjunctions of old and new civilizations are expressed through the medium of a style that has distinction and strikes a note ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... traditionary language, which, giving play to the lighter fancy, chilled the imagination, and singularly limited the view. Indeed, it so amused and allured the fancy by its diversity that the mind scarcely cared to rise from this fantastic and grotesque world to seek the sublime principles of Infinity, of Unity. If the ancients had regarded nature as a vast system of signs designed to manifest the ideas of the Great Artist; if they had at all understood the marvellous Unity of the Divine Works, it would have been worse than idle ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... mysterious light moving about the yard,—a light that fell now on the bare wall, now on the front steps, making threads of gold of the twisted iron railings, then on the posts of the leaning fence, against which hung three feathery objects,—grotesque and curious in the changing shadows,—and again on some barrels and ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... one might love San Marco!" Caterina said, as she turned her glowing face frankly to the old man; "he was never a person, but just a grotesque image ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... residence, adjoining the Premier's palace, bloomed the most charming garden I saw in Siam, with shrubberies, fountains, and nooks, designed by a true artist; though the work of the native florists is usually fantastic and grotesque, with an excess of dwarfed trees in Chinese vases. There was, besides, a cool, shaded walk, leading to a more extensive garden, adorned with curious lattice-work, and abounding in shrubs of great variety and beauty. Koon Ying Phan had a lively love for flowers, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... were monkeys, learning tricks of all kinds, another source of amusement. Some were most tenderly loved and even kissed extravagantly, as they nestled against the callous bosoms of their masters, gazing fondly at them with womanish eyes, half-grotesque and half-touching. ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... half inclined to suggest that "there may be something in it." Here is a character who suddenly discovers that by concentrating his mind on certain ideas he can inject or project them into others. And forthwith he sets half a dozen couples making love to each other in most grotesque surroundings. They climb trees and become engaged. They put on strange Panlike costumes and prance about the woods—always charming, always well bred, always with a touch of romance that makes the reader read on to the end and finally ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... cause in this brainless world, a world rotten with hypocrisy. A poet polishes words until they glitter with beauty, charging them with fulminating meaning—straightway he is called mad by men who sweat and toil on the stock exchange. Have you ever, my dear Quell, watched those little, grotesque brokers on a busy day? No? Well, you will say that no lunatic grimacing beneath the horns of the moon ever made such ludicrous, such useless, gestures. And for what? Money! Money to spend as idiotically as it is garnered. The world is crazy, I tell you, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... than any other dinosaurs, of the great quadrupeds of Tertiary and modern times, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, titanotheres and elephants, as in the horns they suggest the bison. For this reason although less gigantic than the Brontosaurus or Tyrannosaurus, less grotesque perhaps, than the Stegosaurus, they are more interesting than any other dinosaurs. While thus departing far from the earlier type of the beaked dinosaurs (the Iguanodonts) they are evidently descended ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... every face and form in the assemblage. The fantastic magician of the fire threw humps on to straight backs, flattened good round breasts, wrote wrinkles on smooth faces, turned eyes and lips into shining gems, made white teeth yellow, cast a grotesque spell of the unreal on young shapes, of the horrible upon old ones. A sort of monkey coarseness crept into the red, upturned faces; their proportions were distorted, their delicacy destroyed. Essential lines of figures were concealed by the inky shadows; unimportant features ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... piece of human machinery that ever responded to the impulses of youth and health. But then, his face! What pencil could faithfully delineate features at once so comical and lugubrious—features that one moment expressed the most solemn seriousness, and the next, the most grotesque and absurd abandonment to mirth? In him, all extremes appeared to meet; the man was a contradiction to himself. Tom was a person of few words, and so intensely lazy that it required a strong effort of will to enable him to answer the questions of inquiring friends; ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie |
