"Ghostlike" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stood motionless for five minutes in the presence of his creation. He was ghostlike and frightful in that fixed attitude, and Bog wished that he would move. He did so, nodding his head, and smiling, as he bent down and detached some part of the machine. All but his head and his right shoulder then disappeared from view; but Bog knew, by the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... in a future life, as entertained by Paul's hearers on Mars Hill, was shadowy and dashed with much unbelief. Disembodied spirits wandered ghostlike and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... dark when we reached it, and for three hours after dark, bending under our packs, walking in Indian file, we pushed on in silence through the knee-deep snow upon which the moon, half hidden by flying clouds, cast a weird ghostlike light. Finally the Eskimos stopped in a gully by a little patch of spruce brush four or five feet high, and while Iksialook foraged for handfuls of brush that was dry enough to burn, Potokomik and Kumuk cut snow blocks, which they built into a circular wall ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... 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 into the sky as something real, but fluid and of infinite ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... at the foot of the stairs, and heard a voice singing. It seemed strange and ghostlike in that dreary old house, perhaps because of the already tremulous state of his nerves. Hark! ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... for 'teacher,' whom 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 ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... streams from the wings of the vanishing sleep. It seemed almost as if her spirit, instead of having come back to the world of its former abode, had been borne across the parting waters and landed on the shore of the immortals. There was the ghostlike harbor of the spirit-land, the water gleaming betwixt its dark walls, one solitary boat motionless upon it, the men moving about like shadows in the star twilight. Here stood three women and a man ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... answered her but a sound behind him made him turn. He wheeled round and saw his father standing almost up against him. He had only time for a horrified vision of the ghostlike figure, the staring eyes, the open mouth, the white cheeks. The old ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... gave him a start, but he continued his journey, hoping that it was his imagination that had invested some natural object with a ghostly shape. But the nearer he approached, the more ghostlike and mysterious did the ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... swiftly, 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 Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... ever fish with the fly from a birch-bark canoe on absolutely still water? You do not seem to move. But far below you, gliding, silent, ghostlike, the bottom slips beneath. Like a weather-vane in an imperceptible current of air, your bow turns to right or left in apparent obedience to the mere will of your companion. And the flies drop softly like down. Then the silence becomes sacred. You whisper— although there is no ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... Everywhere, in a great circle, the country is lighted up by camp fires which send their flames toward heaven in a cloud of smoke. These little red spots throw everywhere a fiery glow over the snow, and down upon this wonderful color symphony the moon pours its weak, ghostlike light through a curtain of clouds so that people seem to float away as in a dream. In the foggy twilight three battalions march to the front.... The noise of the gunfire penetrates to us in separate, spasmodic outbreaks. Flashes of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Maud to leave home. It was but seldom now that his thoughts busied themselves with Maud; the unreal importance which she had for a time assumed in his life was only a recollection; her very face was ghostlike in his mind's eye, dim, always vanishing. If the news of her departure from England moved him at all, it was with a slight sense of satisfaction; it would be so much easier to write letters to her than to speak face to face. Yet, in the days that followed, ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... not be that bad!" exclaimed Enoch. "Are you cold, Diana? I thought you shivered. What a strange, ghostlike country it is! It would be horrible ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... porch, in its French windows, and the white muslin curtains that kept out the fierce California sun by day, and were now touched with silver in the gracious moonlight. Culpepper leaned against the low fence, and gazed long and earnestly at the building. Then the moonlight vanished ghostlike from one of the windows, a material glow took its place, and a girlish figure, holding a candle, drew the white curtains together. To Culpepper it was a vestal virgin standing before a hallowed shrine; to the prosaic observer I fear it was only a fair-haired young woman, ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the 2nd of August, about two hours before daylight, the shadowy outline of a ship was seen dead to leeward between us and the land, the wind being somewhere from the south-west. Now she was there, ghostlike and indistinct, a spirit gliding over the face of the waters; now as I looked she had disappeared and I could scarcely believe ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... more the carriage halted again, before a building which looked white and ghostlike through the mist. The driver dismounted, opened with a latch-key a window-door, entered for a moment to light the candles in a solitary room from a fire that blazed on the hearth, reappeared, and ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... chill in the air, and to Frances Durkin, sitting beside Keenan on the promenade deck, there seemed something restless and phantasmal and ghostlike in the thin, North Atlantic sunlight, after the mellow and opulent gold of the Mediterranean calms. It seemed to her to be a presage of the restless movement and tumult which she ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... by us all alone, she is an angel clad in light and strength; but when Love touches her she drops her sword, and fades away, ghostlike ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... a wretched picture that might have won pity from the ghostlike shrouds and spars which hedged it in as with ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... their places and lit their cigars. The train swayed gently along, its rattle muffled by the storm. Polished black squares represented the windows across which drifted hazy lights and ghostlike suggestions of snowflakes. Bob watched this ebony nothingness in great idleness of spirit. Presently one of the half-dozen men arose from his place, walked the length of the car, and ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... shivered under his feet. Huge waves roared by, of such vastness that Madden could hear their crests crashing and thundering high above the level of the bridge. These moving mountains shook tons of black water into dim, ghostlike spray, and sent it hissing down into cavernous troughs. The weight of the wind-swept spume flashing out of darkness through the binnacle light almost took the boy off his feet. It pounded his oilskin, stung his face. The enormous iron dock groaned ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... 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, ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... 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 ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... was so silent, ghostlike, far away, imagination scarce could picture it. Was this black slumberous water to be the scene at dawn of a combat beside which that of Hector and Achilles under Troy would be only as a tale that is told? And was he, Glaucon, son of Conon the Alcmaeonid, sitting there in the skiff ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... writing, when he suddenly became aware of a voice speaking in a low and sad tone, "Let no murderer occupy the presidential chair for a third term. Avenge my death!" He felt a light touch upon his left shoulder, and turning, saw the face of former President McKinley. It bore a ghostlike aspect. This experience had a decisive effect in fixing in his mind the iniquity of the third term, and from this time he questioned as to his duty in the matter, and he finally regarded this vision and its connection with ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... in the garden with him! Good night, or, 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
... but gazed and gazed, and remembered and realized and dreamt: it all gave him unspeakable excitement, and a strange tender wistful melancholy delight for which there is no name. Je connais ca! I also, ghostlike, have paced round the haunts of ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... about seeing Paganini in Paris, where he used to spend an hour every day sitting in a publisher's shop, "a striking, awe-inspiring, ghostlike figure." Halle was introduced to him, but conversation was difficult, for Paganini sat there taciturn, rigid, hardly ever moving a muscle of his face. He made the young pianist play for him frequently, indicating his desire by pointing at the piano with his long, bony ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... miles, it seemed, below the sound of the unearthly hurricane I heard Larry's voice, thin and ghostlike, beneath its clamour. ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... between her father and John Vernon, and the leaping light of the fire showed up her face and figure in varying shades of colour. Now she was a rose-maiden, dress, hair, and face glowing in a warm pink hue; anon, the rose changed into a faint metallic blue, which gave a ghostlike effect to the slim form; again, she was all white—a dazzling, unbroken white, in which the little oval face assumed an air of childlike fragility and pathos. As she sat with her hands folded on her knee, and her ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... French say. How are we to render it in English? By the beautiful but artificial word "yester-year"? Yester-year perhaps, for a sorrow clings about it; it conveys a sense of autumn, of "the long decline of roses." There is something ghostlike in the out-of-date. The landscape about Plessy had transported us back into antiquity, making us dream of nymphs and dryads, but the gilt cornices and damask hangings and the salon at Orelay had made us dream of a generation ago, of the youth of our parents. Ancient conveys no personal meaning, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... the war was beginning to yield to the slower but more certain industry and discipline of our Northern men. It was to me manifest that the soldiers and people of the South entertained an undue fear of our Western men, and, like children, they had invented such ghostlike stories of our prowess in Georgia, that they were scared by their own inventions. Still, this was a power, and I intended to utilize it. Somehow, our men had got the idea that South Carolina was the cause of all our troubles; her people were the first to fire on Fort Sumter, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... Steals coldly around the chamber bright, Where those lifeless lovers be; Swinging with it, in the light 150 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, 155 With his pack round him, and delays. He stares and stares, with troubled face, At this huge, gleam-lit fireplace, At that bright, iron-figured ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... heavy dark curls and white cheeks, but doubted, nevertheless, when you came to meet her great eyes, so dreamy that you wondered which was alive, you or she. Her hand, usually held up to her cheek, was absolutely ghostlike. Her form was so small, and deeply imbedded in a reclining-chair or couch-corner, that it amounted to nothing. The dead Galileo could not possibly have had a wiser or more doubtfully attested being as a neighbor. If the poor scientist had been there to assert that ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop |
