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Misshapen   /mɪsʃˈeɪpən/  /mɪshˈæpən/   Listen
Misshapen

adjective
1.
So badly formed or out of shape as to be ugly.  Synonyms: deformed, distorted, ill-shapen, malformed.  "His poor distorted limbs" , "An ill-shapen vase" , "A limp caused by a malformed foot" , "Misshapen old fingers"



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"Misshapen" Quotes from Famous Books



... time Jason's servo-tracer on Lonnie hiccupped and dozed off was at 12:01 a.m., August 7th, 2008, just one day after the Diamond Throne arrived on Earth. The single, glittering diamond crystal, misshapen like an armchair and larger than one, had been mined out of the core of Tycho's crater. And it was also just two days before the Moon Throne would have been installed in the unbreakable ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro

... gone for some time. When she came back again she bore in her arms a bundle, large, knobby and misshapen. It was wrapped in newspapers which had cracked away here and there over the end of a rib; but it was enclosed in a network of strings that crossed ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray

... it, dear wife, that your son is the child of a true man, and who, in his own respect, despiseth Death, and all his misshapen and ugly forms. I cannot write much. God knows how hardly I stole this time, when all sleep; and it is time to separate my thoughts from the world. Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and either lay it at Sherborne, if the land continue [yours], or ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse

... lined with grey linen, edged with plain riband, and fastened with a simple button. How much better, how much more rational, how much more becoming, such head-dresses as these, than the gay but useless ribands, feathers, and chapeaux of the one class, or the misshapen, uncomfortable, untidy-looking bonnets of the other! According to the present system, it is almost impossible to infer the rank of a lady from her external costume—many a milliner's girl has passed for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various

... animal matter varies with age. In infancy the bones are composed almost wholly of animal matter. Hence, an infant's bones are rarely broken, but its legs may soon become misshapen if walking is allowed too early. In childhood, the bones still contain a larger percentage of animal matter than in more advanced life, and are therefore more liable to bend than to break; while in old age, they contain ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... jointed his bamboo pole, he cast a furtive glance at the poor, misshapen being, and caught a touch ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely

... troubles lay too heavily and darkly upon me, I let her go up to her garret without a word. Despondent days and nights when I cried, Shall I never pass from this lodging? shall I never be a light in that London, long, low, misshapen, that dark monumental stream flowing through the lean bridges; and what if I were a light in this umber-coloured mass,—shadows falling, barges moored midway in a monumental stream? Happiness abides only in the natural affections—in a home and a sweet wife. Would she ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... finishing touch the narrator turned back the grizzled hair on his forehead and showed a three-inch scar, souvenir of a first mate and a belaying pin. He rolled up his flannel shirtsleeve and displayed a slightly misshapen left arm, broken by a kick from a drunken captain and badly ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... could readily understand their words. Two of them sat with their faces toward the main entrance and the third man faced them. Carnes bit his lip as he looked at the man at the head of the table. He was twisted and misshapen in body, a grotesque dwarf with a hunched back, not over four feet in height. His massive head, sunken between his hunched shoulders, showed a tremendous dome of cranium and a brow wider and even higher than Dr. Bird's. The rest of his face was lined and drawn as though ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various

... and their philoprogenitiveness takes rather the character of compassion and tenderness to things that need aid or protection than of the animal love of offspring. I never met with one person deformed or misshapen. The beauty of their countenances is not only in symmetry of feature, but in a smoothness of surface, which continues without line or wrinkle to the extreme of old age, and a serene sweetness of expression, combined with that majesty ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... the screen. This misshapen monster who was his friend! Almost obscured by bands of thick-leaved kelp the yellow form moved, hands clearing a pathway through the weeds. Slowly but surely he made for ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various

... through the forest Prince Andrew turned several times to look at that oak, as if expecting something from it. Under the oak, too, were flowers and grass, but it stood among them scowling, rigid, misshapen, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... different nature is known as partial color blindness. The defects described above are due to misshapen eyes. Partial color blindness is due to a defect of the retina which makes it unable to be affected by light waves producing red and green. A person with this defect confuses red and green. While only a small percentage of the population ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle

... man of fifty, with the knotty, misshapen hands of a workman, stepped into the centre of the ring, took off his cap, and began ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone

... the features, the beauty of the eyes, the wealth of the dark, clustering hair, were all as near artistic perfection as could be. But all else spoke of deformity—the badly bent back, the twisted body, the short leg, the misshapen foot. It was as if Nature had endeavoured in some wickedly mischievous freak to show how beauty and ugliness can ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher

... before anybody else in Halifax, were going to church very proud of themselves, when they heard a girl laughing at them, on which her companion rebuked her, saying, "You shouldn't laugh; you might be struck so!" She thought the dandies were two misshapen idiots.] ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... doctors came, I held in my arms that merry baby, all lilies and roses, the blossom of my life, my pride, and my joy, lifeless as a piece of wood; and his eyes! I cannot think of them without horror. My pretty Armand was a mere mummy—black, shriveled, misshapen. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac

... delicate and vital delineations of character, its rich sympathy and depth of tragic pathos, its plea for the sacredness of human life, and its protest against the religious and social prejudice by which life is so often misshapen, this book is an epitome of all the ideas and feelings that have gone to the making of the author's personality, and have received such manifold expression in his works. It is a simple story, concerned mainly with four people, in no way outwardly conspicuous, yet here united by the poet's ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne

... him strike flint and steel and presently he lighted a candle-end by whose welcome beam I saw we stood in a roomy cave. And an evil place I thought it, full of unexpected corners, littered with all manner of odds and ends and divers misshapen bundles. Having set down the candle, the highwayman drew a dingy blanket before the cave mouth and turned to scowl at me, eyeing my shrinking person over from dripping hat to sodden boots; and well might I shrink, for surely few waking eyes have beheld such a wild and terrifying vision as he ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... difficult to summarize the legend, it varies so considerably in the versions. Marcolf in the best-known forms, which are certainly older than Zabara, is "right rude and great of body, of visage greatly misshapen and foul." Sometimes he is a dwarf, sometimes a giant; he is never normal. He appears with his counterpart, a sluttish wife, before Solomon, who, recognizing him as famous for his wit and wisdom, challenges him to a trial of wisdom, promising ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams

... and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, gray houses, the huge cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of a Continental city; where a new life had awaited her, still in connection with the misshapen scholar; a new life, but feeding itself on time-worn materials, like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall. Lastly, in lieu of these shifting scenes, came back the rude market-place of the Puritan settlement, with all the towns-people assembled and levelling their stern regards at Hester ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... made an impatient gesture with her cowering shoulders, and turned her head another way. Ugly, misshapen, peevish, ill-conditioned, ragged, dirty—but beloved! Oh yes! Florence had seen her father's look towards her, and she knew whose look it ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... may produce a misshapen mouth or fingers. It constantly stimulates the flow of saliva and certainly aggravates disturbances of digestion during which the sucking habit is likely to be practised. It may lead to thrush ...
— The Care and Feeding of Children - A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children's Nurses • L. Emmett Holt

... persecuted by the men, did they not find the black women pitiful and kind to them? Women are always kind towards our sex. What (mental) negroes do they not cherish? what (moral) hunchbacks do they not adore? what lepers, what idiots, what dull drivellers, what misshapen monsters (I speak figuratively) do they not fondle and cuddle? Gumbo was treated by the women as kindly as many people no better than himself: it was only the men in the servants'-hall who rejoiced at the Virginian lad's departure. I should like to see him taking leave. I ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... outspoken honesty and hearty frolic which her eyes saw perpetually in the old warm-hearted world. That evening, as she sat on the step of her brown frame shanty, knitting at a great blue stocking, her scarred face and misshapen body very pitiful to the passers-by, it was this light that gave to her face its homely, cheery smile. It made her eyes quick to know the message in the depths of color in the evening sky, or even the flickering ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various

... few steps objects of worship meet your view. In niches of the walls are little images, so worn by the weather and by the water poured on them by worshippers that it is difficult to determine what they are intended to represent. At your feet, close to the walls, you see misshapen stones which are regarded as sacred. As you proceed you find yourself accompanied by a crowd who have bathed, and who are going to complete their morning worship by acts of obeisance to their gods. They are seen, as they walk, bowing their heads and folding their hands before the sacred objects ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy

... too tall and straight in here," said Miss Blair, and laughed again, with genuine glee. "Beauty is only a matter of comparison, you know," said she. "If one is ugly and misshapen, all she has to do is to surround herself with things ugly and misshapen, and she gets the effect of perfect harmony, which is the highest beauty in the world. Here I am in harmony after I have been out of tune. It is a comfort. But, after all, being ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... and a merry time they had scrambling after the delicious eggs as their mother broke open more ant-galleries, and sent them and their contents rolling down the bank, till every little partridge had so crammed his little crop that he was positively misshapen ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton

... their merry evolutions, and overhear them repeatedly admonish each other to keep watch over the gleaming treasure, which their father, the Rhinegod, has intrusted to their keeping, warning them that just such a dark and misshapen creature as the dwarf would try to wrest ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber

... maiden Found a crooked ear in husking, Found a maize-ear in the husking Blighted, mildewed, or misshapen, Then they laughed and sang together, Crept and limped about the cornfields, Mimicked in their gait and gestures Some old man, bent almost double, Singing singly or together: "Wagemin, the thief of cornfields! ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow

... He would likewise know that so perverse is the nature of man that he would leave a harem filled with desirous houris more beautiful than ever danced through Mohammedan dream of Paradise, to dig pitfalls for the unwary feet of some misshapen country wench who was striving to lead an honest life. As a muley cow will turn from a manger filled with new-mown hay, and wear out her thievish tongue trying to coax a wisp of rotten straw through a crack in a neighbor's barn, so will man turn from consenting Venus' matchless ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... funniest part of the whole morning's entertainment, was undoubtedly the dancing of the little Dwarf. When he stumbled into the arena, waddling on his crooked legs and wagging his huge misshapen head from side to side, the children went off into a loud shout of delight, and the Infanta herself laughed so much that the Camerera was obliged to remind her that although there were many precedents ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde

... Buffaloes, and the He-Goats. There was the band of the local cadets, spontaneous in its enthusiasm, its zest for martial music no different, of course. Just behind these lads a strange figure walked in the procession, a bent and misshapen old man, whose face had no expression but a fixed and hypnotic stare. He was keeping time to the measure of the boys' music by snapping the spring of a mouse-trap which he held aloft. I could not find ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... both for a second, and for years it lived in Jim's memory. The ill-lit kitchen with its single lamp; the yellow rays lighting up little more than the untidy supper-table with the misshapen figure of Elia sitting on the far side of it, calmly devouring his evening meal. The rest of the room was shadowy, except where the light from the cook-stove threw its lurid rays upon the white face and crumpled figure of Eve lying ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum

... my own pure pearl, with the deformed, dwarfish, repulsive daughter, whom the Nemesis of my wrongs gave to Cuthbert, in little Maud Laurance, I almost shouted aloud in my great exultation. You so beautiful, with his own lineaments in every feature, disowned for that misshapen, imbecile heiress of his proud name. Oh, mills of the Gods! how delicious the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... to the sky. There, blazing with light, like a great misshapen moon, was a giant airship moving swiftly over the city. As it sailed along, streams of fire fell from it, and immediately there followed the terrible thunder of bursting bombs. When it passed out of sight, ...
— The Belgian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins

... far more than I did, and he was even wilder about strange countries. He had as adventurous a spirit as any lad in the school, cramped up as it was in that misshapen body. I knew he'd have liked to go round the world as well as I, and he often laughed and said—"What's more, Jack, if I'd the money I would. People are very kind to poor wretches like me all over the world. I should never want a helping hand, and the only difference between us would ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... great, and monarchs to revile. His figure such as might his soul proclaim; One eye was blinking, and one leg was lame: His mountain shoulders half his breast o'erspread, Thin hairs bestrew'd his long misshapen head. Spleen to mankind his envious heart possess'd, And much he hated all, but most the best: Ulysses or Achilles still his theme; But royal scandal his delight supreme, Long had he lived the scorn of every Greek, Vex'd when he spoke, yet still they heard him speak. Sharp was his voice; which in ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... endeavoring to live up to the thoroughbred standard. And Bronson considered anything thoroughbred that was true to type. Yet the writer had known men physically inconsequent who possessed a fine strain of courage, loyalty, honor. The shell might be misshapen, malformed, and yet the spirit burn high and clear. And Bronson reasoned that there was a divinity of blood, despite ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert

... me where in ghostly files The dead slept with their toys. Miles, miles, and never-ending miles, Along the valley's mournful aisles, The voiceless, vague, misshapen piles Of men ...
— Makers of Madness - A Play in One Act and Three Scenes • Hermann Hagedorn

... upon the river Ada, a gigantic fellow attacked him and tried to throw him into the stream. The emperor's cries for help brought his attendants to the spot, and the assailant, in his turn, was thrown into the river. On another occasion an old, misshapen man glided into the camp, bearing poisoned wares which he sought to dispose of to the emperor. Frederick, fortunately, had been forewarned, and he had the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris

... hastened by the low temperature, and disturbed by the commotion in the air. Across the broad expanse of open plains, along mountain-sides, through groves of trees, and over the smooth surface of frozen lakes and rivers, millions of misshapen and broken crystals are driven by the wind, piled up in heaps, or accumulated in confused masses under the lee of every obstruction, having been subjected on the way to such violence of agitation and collision that the characteristic beauty and ...
— Harper's Young People, February 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... reader pity me, or rather laugh at me, to tell how many awkward ways I took to raise this pastil; what odd, misshapen, ugly things I made; how many of them fell in, and how many fell out, the clay not being stiff enough to bear its own weight; how many cracked by the over violent heat of the sun, being set out too hastily; and how many fell in pieces with only removing, as well ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe

... written exercise an exercise in writing, his progress will be increased beyond your expectations, and you will soon see him looking with pleasure at the clean and symmetrical forms which flow so gracefully from his pen, as he goes from line to line over the virgin page, no half-formed or misshapen letters to embarrass, but all in every part as elegantly written ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... others, he had made the circuit of the Annex more than once, but now he was reared up again at the door, pulling at it with mighty tooth and claw. It seemed to both as they looked down the barrels of their rifles and chose the vulnerable spot that, monstrous and misshapen, he was constantly growing in size, so powerful was the effect of the moonlight and their imagination. But it was ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler

... cabbage stump. When they returned with their prizes to the house, great fun and much dirt were the result. Posy's eldest cousin had brought in a big crooked cabbage stalk, with plenty of mould hanging to its roots: he was to marry a tall, stout, misshapen wife with a large fortune. Miss Clara, the young lady of the house, brought in a tall and slender stalk, with little soil adhering to it; so by-and-by, as some one said, she would marry a tall, straight, ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... pointing to the misshapen little gold legs which were yet so designed that it could be stood up upon them, "when anyone wear Little Bonsa, tie her on head behind by these legs; look, here same old leather string. Now I put her on, for she like to be worn again," and with a quick movement he ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard

... copious secretion from the borders and the conjunctiva; the lips are tumid and the angles of the mouth ulcerated. In fact the human face divine, deprived of all lineaments and expression, is now a foul, misshapen mass. Associated with this state are swelled throat, rendering deglutition very painful—salivation, cough—occasional vomiting, delirium, sometimes phrenitical, sometimes evidencing itself in low mutterings ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various

... To say that the dark, lumbering cupboard, standing normally against the wall down there in the shadows, loomed suddenly forward and upward, bent, twisted, and stretched out the whole of one side towards him like a misshapen arm, can convey nothing of the world of new sensations that the little secretary felt while actually watching it in progress in that haunted chamber of Skale's mansion among the hills. Nor can one be thrilled with the extraordinary sense of wonder that thrilled Spinrobin when he ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood

... hurried on. Gangs of men were shovelling for the dead. Every now and then a shovel would strike a hand or a skull. Then a shout would be raised and the poor misshapen body ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... graceful. They had a kind of grand, mammoth civilization, gloomy and goblin. They seem to have floundered up out of Nile mud, like that old, slimy, pre-Adamite brood, the what's-their-name—megalosaurus, ichthyosaurus, pterodactyle, iguanodon, and other misshapen abominations, with now and then wreaths of lotus and water lilies round ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... upon the mind in almost gigantic proportions. As twilight drew on, the deception increased; and, starting occasionally from the influence of some lacerating thought, I beheld, perchance, some huge-and turreted fortress, or a pile of misshapen battlements, rising beyond the hills like the grim castles of romance, or the air-built shadows of fairy-land.... Night was fast closing; I was alone, out of the beaten track, amidst a desert and thinly-inhabited region; a perfect stranger, I had only ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... cool and ready insolence, the misshapen Superintendent from the other side stood dazed and bewildered by this volcanic outpouring. Then his dark face flushed darker, and with a snarl he clinched his fists. The Victorian, however, had turned on his heel, and now ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung

... magical world of spirits, calls up the midnight ghost, exhibits before us the witches with their unhallowed rites, peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs; and these beings, though existing only in the imagination, nevertheless possess such truth and consistency that even with such misshapen abortions as Caliban, he extorts the assenting conviction that, were there such beings, they would so conduct themselves. In a word, as he carries a bold and pregnant fancy into the kingdom of nature, on ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... and the mavis, made him sad, and pleased was Lemercier to leave behind him all such sounds of life, and reach the wild and solitary place where the obelisk stood—a grim and time-worn relic of the Druid ages or the Danish wars. A rough misshapen remnant of antiquity it still remains to mark the scene of this hostile meeting, which yet forms one of the most famous traditions of the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... that had nearly sent his rider sprawling over his head. Just at this moment a plashy tramp by the side of the bridge caught the sensitive ear of Ichabod. In the dark shadow of the grove, on the margin of the brook, he beheld something huge, misshapen, and towering. It stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom, like some gigantic monster ready to spring ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... may be the case even while the body is straight as an arrow. There are men and women whose forms are admired for their erectness, their graceful proportions, their lithe movements, their lovely features, yet whose souls are debased, whose desires are grovelling, whose characters are sadly misshapen ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller

... Rizzio, who from an errant minstrel had risen to this perilous eminence, a man of a swarthy, ill-favoured countenance redeemed by the intelligence that glowed in his dark eyes, and of a body so slight and fragile as to seem almost misshapen. His age was not above thirty, yet indifferent health, early privation, and misfortune had so set their mark upon him that he had all the appearance of a man of fifty. He was dressed with sombre magnificence, and a jewel of great price ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... few days, the skin shrank and puckered in so abominable a fashion as to render all the labour bestowed upon it of no avail. This was most unfortunately tried upon a twenty pound pike, and so utterly misshapen did it become as to necessitate the relaxing of the specimen—the removal of the clay—and the ultimate shaping up again, by the dry plaster process. [Footnote: Several correspondents have written as to the relaxing of fish skins. This is a very easy process, nothing more being done to ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne

... bones, like the rest of our bodies, are made of what we eat. If our food does not contain enough of the substances which are needed to make healthy bone, the bones will become unhealthy. They may be too soft and become bent or otherwise misshapen. This is one of the reasons why bread made from the whole grain is so much more healthful than that made from very fine white flour. In making fine white flour the miller takes out the very best part of the grain, just what is needed to make strong ...
— First Book in Physiology and Hygiene • J.H. Kellogg

... all was—Talpers. She knew of the strange partnership of the men. Likewise she felt that McFann would not have embarked upon any such crime alone. The thought of Talpers recurred so steadily that the lithe figure of the half-breed in front of her seemed to change into the broad, almost misshapen ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman

... of violent extremes of opinion in the eighteenth century, and so lightly esteemed by some that Hume could doubt if he were a poet "capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined and intelligent audience," and attribute to the rudeness of his "disproportioned and misshapen" genius the "reproach of barbarism" which the English nation had ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger

... She put her misshapen head and scarred face down on his hand, where he could see them. If it had ever hurt her to be as she was, if she had ever compared herself bitterly with fair, beloved women, she was glad now and thankful for every fault and deformity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... reader pity me, or rather laugh at me, to tell how many awkward ways I look to raise this paste, what odd misshapen ugly things I made, how many of them fell in, and how many fell out, the clay not being stiff enough to bear its own weight; how many cracked by the over-violent heat of the sun, being set out too hastily; and how many fell to pieces with only removing, as well before as after ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe

... as your boys, and I cannot think of them having nice boots and you going without, so I want you to all start equal; kindly put out your foot and let me look." In a shamefaced sort of a way she put her left foot forward; a strange, misshapen, dilapidated apology of a boot covered the left foot. "Now the right," I said. "Never mind looking at the other, it does not matter, does it?" she said. "Yes, it does," so the right foot was presented; one glance was enough! "That will do; come along ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes

... did so they dropped odd, misshapen parcels, totally unlike materials of war; but when they struck they gave off prodigious puffs of a greenish smoke, of so terribly pungent a nature that my men dropped before it like apples from a shaken tree. 'Twas a fearful sight; lucky for us that ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint

... distant interests of men than any similar establishment. It is in the highest degree hitherto realized, the seat of terrestrial perception and volition—the brain of the whole earth; and hitherto it has been in a narrow valley, misshapen even to deformity, and scarcely accessible to the few mail coaches which collect there ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... From venturing to the edge of precipice, To have a peep into some dark abyss. The hill of which I spoke has sometimes been, As was well known, the site of tragic scene. It is a solid mass of limestone rock— And there oft falls some huge misshapen block. On one occasion a poor quarryman Saw danger pending, and away he ran; 'Twas all in vain! the lately-riven stone Came thundering down, and crushed his every bone! A tale like this might well some minds appal— But WILLIAM felt, just then, ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd

... name was "Try," met us at this juncture; and by his bright example urged us on to greater tasks. But alas! there were so many weary hearts waiting for his cheery countenance that he was forced ere long to leave us. Scarce had he gone when his enemy, a misshapen gnome, called "I Forgot," sprang up in our path, and by many devices, sought to undo the good work of "Try." Finding this impossible, he, too, soon departed, but his injured lordship, not caring to retire utterly defeated, left his first cousin, "I Didn't Mean To," to pester and annoy ...
— Silver Links • Various

... knows — I flatter myself, the exercise of travelling has been of service to my health; a circumstance which encourages me to-proceed in my projected expedition to the North. But I must, in the mean time, for the benefit and amusement of my pupils, explore the depths of this chaos; this misshapen and monstrous capital, without head or tail, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... also come down and chop with me, Archie being armed with a hatchet blunt enough to be suitable for his six years. He is a most industrious small chopper, and the other day gnawed down, or as the children call it, "beavered" down, a misshapen tulip tree, which was ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt

... him that most generally out behind the barn, and under the apple trees and gambrul ruff, wuz crouchin' the monster that had sapped the life out of the hum—the bloated, misshapen form of a mortgage at six per cent, and that old, insatiable monster had devoured and drinked down every cent of the earnin's that the hull family could bring to appease ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley

... abhorrence which were excited by the shrill voice, the uncouth gestures, and the strange deformity of the Huns. These savages of Scythia were compared (and the picture had some resemblance) to the animals who walked very awkwardly on two legs, and to the misshapen figures, the Termini, which were often placed on the bridges of antiquity. They were distinguished from the rest of the human species by their broad shoulders, flat noses, and small black eyes deeply buried in the head, and as they were ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson

... performed such insanities, it was under the capricious direction of a superstitious religious system. This, again, will not hold water; for in the purely terrestrial and even sensual departments of life, such as love and lust, the medieval princes show the same mad promises and performances, the same misshapen imagination and the same monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction, to explain which it is necessary to think of the whole nature of vows from the beginning. And if we consider seriously ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... being only a little above the level of the table, as he stood. With pain and labor, lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his sticks, he took a few steps from his place,—his motions and the deadbeat of the misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and ear the malformation which is called in learned language talipes varus, or ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... there; no, there!" each of them suddenly perceived the other's phantom, and the water round the boat appeared all alive with ghastly monsters. The cry which burst from every mouth awakened Undine. Before the light of her beaming eyes the horde of misshapen faces vanished. But Huldbrand was quite exasperated by these fiendish tricks and would have burst into loud imprecations, had not Undine whispered in the most beseeching manner, "For God's sake, my own lord, be patient ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various

... masculine articles, but were nevertheless made by a man's boot-maker, and there was only one place in London where they could be made sufficiently ugly to suit her; and infinite were the pains she took to procure the heavy, thick, cumbrous, misshapen things that as much as possible concealed and disfigured her finely turned ankles and high, arched, Norman instep. Indeed, her whole attire, peculiar (and very ugly, I thought it) as it was, was so by malice prepense on her part. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... grape-vines they built a shelter, and there dwelt for many weeks. Ling wore well as a sole friend and partner. Looking at the big, devoted fellow, Parr did not feel so revolted as at their first glimpse of each other. Ling had seemed so hairy, so misshapen, like a troll out of Gothic legends. But now ... he was only big and burly, and not so hairy as Parr had once supposed. As for his face, all tusk and jaw and no brow, where had Parr gotten such an idea of it? Homely it was, ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman

... satisfied?" said my unwearied guide, with another of her smiles, "or, do you still think we are a puny misshapen race?" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various

... Pedro had still observed much. Each trifle was an event to him, and of late these trifles had gathered thick about him. With annoying frequency Ferd, the dwarf, had invaded and contaminated his solitude. The hints which the misshapen creature had dropped, though receiving no outward attention, had, nevertheless, remained in the Indian's mind to disturb it. It was to hunt for this wretched fellow, as well as to prove his "secret," that he was now in the canyon, believing that when ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond

... plentiful share of the same sort of notice. Half the youthful mob of 'the yards' used to assemble regularly to see Dominie Sampson (for he had already attained that honourable title) descend the stairs from the Greek class, with his lexicon under his arm, his long misshapen legs sprawling abroad, and keeping awkward time to the play of his immense shoulder-blades, as they raised and depressed the loose and threadbare black coat which was his constant and only wear. When he spoke, the efforts of the professor (professor of divinity ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... the old Nurse following her like a misshapen shadow. Daughter of sun and moon,—a modern Pandora endowed with the strength of a loftier nature! She was robed in creamy white; her pendants were woven pearls. Fine lines of virgin gold gleamed in her turban, and through her long veil, and along the folds of her girdle. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... abhorrence which were excited by the shrill voice, the uncouth gestures, and the strange deformity of the Huns. [56a] These savages of Scythia were compared (and the picture had some resemblance) to the animals who walk very awkwardly on two legs and to the misshapen figures, the Termini, which were often placed on the bridges of antiquity. They were distinguished from the rest of the human species by their broad shoulders, flat noses, and small black eyes, deeply buried in ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... me a country-man, said that my bones were misshapen, and then stated that glory does not go hand in hand with tuberculosis. Poor Alejandro! He was sound at heart, an eloquent child of the Mediterranean, born to orate in the lands of the sun, but he took it into his head that it was his duty to make himself ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... woman of forty-five who was admitted into the hospital with a strangulated femoral hernia. The sac was opened and its contents were returned. The woman died in a few days from peritonitis. The gall-bladder was found close to the femoral ring, and showed a marked constriction. The liver was misshapen from tight lacing, elongated and drawn downward toward the ring. There was no evidence that any portion of intestine or other structure besides the gall-bladder had passed through ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... pretentiousness, their gargantuan dimensions, throw into cruelest relief Mahler's essential sterility. They seek to be colossal and achieve vacuity chiefly. They remind one of nothing so much as the huge, ugly, misshapen "giants" that stand before the old Palace in Florence, work of the obscure sculptor who thought to outdo Michelangelo by sheer bulk. And the first four of his symphonies, though less utterly banal and pedantic, are still amorphous and fundamentally second-hand. For Mahler never ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... again void, but gives seed to the sower and bread to the eater. But so it always has been. Men used to see God and His power and glory almost exclusively in comets, auroras, earthquakes. It was not so very long ago, that the birth of monstrous or misshapen animals, and all other prodigies, as they were called, were carefully noted down, and talked of far and wide, as signs of God's anger, presages of some coming calamity.—Atheists while they are in safety, superstitious when they are in danger—Requiring ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley

... next day, I mustered assurance enough to knock at his door, having a pretext ready.—No answer.—Knock again. A door, as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and locked, and presently I heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled, misshapen boots. The bolts and the lock of the inner door were unfastened,—with unnecessary noise, I thought,—and he came into the passage. He pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one at which I stood. He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... is an excellent time to show the necessity for bone-building mineral in the diet of babies and young children. If they do not get this mineral substance during the growth period, they cannot have hard, rigid bones, and their bodies are apt to become misshapen—bow legs, curved spines, etc. This substance is also necessary ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Management • Ministry of Education

... sympathy explains one, it is, it would seem, an antipathy or the absence of sympathy which produces the other. "The thing at which we laugh," says Aristotle, "is a defect or ugliness which is not great enough to cause suffering or injury. Thus, for example, a ridiculous face is an ugly or misshapen face, but one on which suffering has not marked." Bain says likewise, "The laughable is the deformed or ugly thing which is not pushed to the point where it is painful or injurious. An occasion for laughter ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... something that had bound and imprisoned and blinded him had been rudely shattered. In one terrible, torturing revelation he saw clearly what he had been, what he had done, what a miserable wreck he had made of life, what a pitiable, dwarfed, misshapen thing his soul had become in comparison with the soul of this girl whom he had despised. He saw that he had lived a life of almost untouched egoism, setting his own wrongs above all the other wrongs in the world, counting his own griefs ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham

... ratification of peace. These are but some of the problems with which we must deal. I have no fear that our people will not find solutions. But progress is sometimes like the old-fashioned rail fence—some rails are perhaps misshapen and all look to point the wrong way; but in the end, the ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg

... on the floor and, lifting the candle, looked in at the yellowed old playthings, the flimsy, spineless paper-dolls, the faded silk rags, the discolored bits of papers, the misshapen staggering paste-board chairs and bed, which had seemed so delightful and enchanting to her then, far better than any actual room she knew. A homesickness for the past came over her. It was not only Margaret who was dead. The other little girl who had played there, who had hung so lovingly ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... of being the last man, ah! what a pang it must be to be the last boy—huge, misshapen, fourteen years of age, and "taken up" by a chap who is but six years old, and can't ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and darkness reign supreme. He unfastens the door with his skeleton key, lights a burner in the hallway and a safety lamp which he carries with him. How weird and ghostly these long passages look! The loom-rooms seem tenanted by huge, misshapen denizens of some preadamic world. He stands and looks, and fantastic ideas float through ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... knowledge shall have fixed their abode in distant continents; when the scepter shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps, travelers from distant regions shall in vain labor to decipher on some moldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief, shall hear savage hymns chanted to some misshapen idol over the ruined dome of our proudest temple, and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts,—her influence and her glory will still survive, fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg

... Braddock household was not included in the general staff, being a mere appendage of the Professor himself. This was a dwarfish, misshapen Kanaka, a pigmy in height, but a giant in breadth, with short, thick legs, and long, powerful arms. He had a large head, and a somewhat handsome face, with melancholy black eyes and a fine set of white teeth. Like most Polynesians, his skin was of a pale bronze and elaborately ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume

... potatoes, and the unfailing calabash of poi. Tea, coffee and milk were not procurable, and as the water is slimy and brackish, I offered a boy a dime to get me a cocoanut, and presently eight great, misshapen things were rolled down at the door. The outside is a smooth buff rind, underneath which is a fibrous covering, enormously strong and about an inch thick, which when stripped off reveals the nut as we see it, but of a very pale colour. Those we ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... men have such obvious littlenesses. They live in a narrow world so far as their human intercourse goes; their researches involve infinite attention and an almost monastic seclusion; and what is left over is not very much. To witness some queer, shy, misshapen, greyheaded, self-important, little discoverer of great discoveries, ridiculously adorned with the wide ribbon of some order of chivalry and holding a reception of his fellow-men, or to read the anguish of Nature at the "neglect of science" when the angel of the birthday honours passes the ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells

... him sate his favourite Norway falcon unhooded, for it had been taught the finest polish in its dainty education—viz., "to face company undisturbed." At a kind of easel at the farther end of the hall, a dwarf, misshapen in limbs, but of a face singularly acute and intelligent, was employed in the outline of that famous action at Val des Dunes, which had been the scene of one of the most brilliant of William's feats in arms—an outline intended to be transferred ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... there is one surpassingly strange relic of the past. The palace of the Farnesi, like many a haunt of upstart tyranny and beggared pride on these Italian plains, rises misshapen and disconsolate above the stream that bears the city's name. The squalor of this gray-brown edifice of formless brick, left naked like the palace of the same Farnesi at Piacenza, has something even horrid in it now that only vague memory survives of its former uses. The princely sprezzatura ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... been, and so it is with us individually, as we too well know. Ah, brethren! the seductions are omnipresent, and our poor eyes are very weak, and we turn away from the Lord to look on these misshapen monsters that are seeking by their gaze to draw us into destruction. I wonder how many professing Christians are in this audience who once saw Jesus Christ a great deal more clearly, and contemplated Him a great deal more fixedly, and turned their hearts to Him far more lovingly, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... back at the misshapen, starved, sick, stumbling hulks of men who trod the dreary round of the windlass. Mr. Pike was right. These were not the brisk, devilish, able-bodied men who manned the ships of the old clipper-ship days; who fought their officers, who had the points ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... I was not preaching the religion of Fear. But I think we shall scarcely understand the religion of Love unless we recognise that dread is a legitimate part of an unforgiven man's attitude towards God. My fear should be to me like the misshapen guide that may lead me to the fortress where I shall be safe. Oh, do not tamper with the wholesome sense of dread! Do not let it lie, generally sleeping, and now and then waking in your hearts, and bringing about nothing. Sailors that crash on with all sails set—stunsails ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... an immense Banana tree, out of which flew a cloud of blueish pigeons. The leaves of this Banana looked six or seven feet long and about one wide; the fruit was hanging in every direction, looking like large misshapen cucumbers. Benjie had taught us not to cut it crossways, but from end to end, as it tasted better when cut wrong. But it was curious when cut wrong what an exact cross was pictured in the middle. Twined in the Banana tree ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton

... sprite Ariel had nothing mischievous in his nature, except that he took rather too much pleasure in tormenting an ugly monster called Caliban, for he owed him a grudge because he was the son of his old enemy Sycorax. This Caliban, Prospero found in the woods, a strange misshapen thing, far less human in form than an ape: he took him home to his cell, and taught him to speak; and Prospero would have been very kind to him, but the bad nature which Caliban inherited from his mother Sycorax, would not let him learn anything good or useful: therefore he was employed like ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... life, and he had grown to heed it no more than he heeded the roar of desert beasts about him, when he slept in the desert or the hills, but looked dreamily out at the little shadowy square, with the sear gourd leaves and the rough, misshapen stones. His present and his future were neither much brighter than the gloomy, walled-in den on which ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... were much amused here with the latter, and stood some time on the bridge below the frowning round towers, of strange construction, which serve as a prison, to observe the manoeuvres of the washerwomen, who, in their enormous, misshapen, towering, square caps, were beating and scrubbing away at their linen. Nothing can appear so inconvenient as this head-dress when its wearer is engaged in domestic duties; yet the women are constantly to be seen with it; rarely, ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello

... while making experiments with composites, I have been struck by certain general impressions. The consumptive patients consisted of many hundred cases, including a considerable proportion of very ignoble specimens of humanity. Some were scrofulous and misshapen, or suffered from various loathsome forms of inherited disease; most were ill nourished. Nevertheless, in studying their portraits the pathetic interest prevailed, and I returned day after day to ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... clucked about her, and none of which clamored more loudly or picked up the corn faster with his beak than a poor little deformed and crippled chicken. This was precisely the one that the mother loved best. It is the way with all mothers; the weakest and most unsightly are always their favorites. This misshapen creature had but one eye, one wing, and one leg in good condition; it might have been thought that Solomon had executed his memorable sentence on Coquerico, for that was the name of the wretched chicken, and cut him in two with his famous sword. ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various

... peopled! The majestic rusa, captured in the sultry forests of Bengal, and the elegant gazelle, which has once bounded over the parching deserts of Barbary, have become intimate and make their couch with the white reindeer, brought from the icy wastes of Lapland. The misshapen but harmless kangaroo of New Holland is a fellow-lodger with the ferocious gnu of Southern Africa; and the patient llama, who has left the snowy sides and precipitous defiles of the Andes, contemplates without terror its formidable neighbours, the wolf of the Pyrenees, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various

... the station. Peering cautiously out of the carriage, I caught a glimpse of the waiter, Karl, hurrying down the platform. With him was a swarthy, massively built man who leaned heavily on a stick and limped painfully as he ran. One of his feet, I could see, was misshapen and the sweat ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams

... from lack of breath to go on. His feet had been winged by terror, and he looked back even now with fear to see the Cheap Jack's misshapen figure in pursuit. He had had no food for hours, but the pence the dark gentleman had given him were in his chalk pouch, and he turned into the first baker's shop he came to to buy a penny loaf. It was a small shop, served by a pleasant-faced ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... her face is human, and her breast fair as a maiden's to the waist down; behind she is a sea-dragon of monstrous frame, with dolphins' tails joined on her wolf-girt belly. Better to track the goal of Trinacrian Pachynus, lingering and wheeling round through long spaces, than once catch sight of misshapen Scylla deep in her dreary cavern, and of the rocks that ring to her sea-coloured hounds. Moreover, if [433-466]Helenus hath aught of foresight or his prophecy of assurance, if Apollo fills his spirit with the truth, this one thing, goddess-born, one thing for all will I foretell ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil

... red, and so misshapen, under your coarse elf-locks, that they are revolting. I am not pretty myself, but I should die of shame if mine were like them." After this last blow, the old witch, having repeated what the queen had ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various

... Bill. "Cur? Why you maul-headed, misshapen blotch on the face o' nature, what do you mean by callin' this dog a cur! I never saw this dog before to-day; but I'll bet ten to one that I can find out who his great-great-grandfather's great-great-grandfather was; an' I doubt if you know ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason

... the misshapen cook-boy. He was an odd fellow, all long limbs and broad smiles, who, when his time arrived, shambled forward, cast himself in lowliest reverence full length on the ground and blubbered out his delight—now that the princely baby could really eat—at being ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel

... built of rough logs, and the only furniture in it was of the rudest description; a couple of box-beds, two or three stools, and a bench, a gaily-painted chest in one corner, and a misshapen table was all that it contained. There was a very small door at one side, a particularly small window at the other, and a raised stone fireplace at ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne

... people that went by, in their black unseemly coats and their misshapen, monstrous, shiny hats, the beggars also blessed. And one of them said to one of these dark citizens: "O twin of Night himself, with thy specks of white at wrist and neck like to Night's scattered stars. How fearfully thou dost veil with ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]

... nought; And no man answered, out of all the throng Ofttimes addressed. But when I had my leave And was withdrawn, a man accosted me Privately—one of Rituparna's train, Vahuka named, the Raja's charioteer (Something misshapen, with a shrunken arm, But skilled in driving, very dexterous In cookery and sweetmeats). He—with groans, And tears which rolled and rolled—asked of my health, And then these ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson

... suits, it was easy to see, were a far cry from such misshapen costumes as the cork breastplates, leather jumpers, seagoing tunics, barrel helmets, etc., invented and acclaimed in ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... the Fleet Already the vast bulk of the battleships oppressed our spirits. We looked up from the cockpit of our dancing pleasure boat and saw the huge misshapen iron monsters towering over us, minatory, terrible. We swept in and out, across the sharp bows, under the gloomy sterns of the ships of the first line. Ascher gazed at them. His eyes were full of sorrow, sorrow ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham

... "good people" or fairies, who in Ireland are supposed to delight in old, crazy, deserted mansions for their midnight revels. All attempts to repair it were in vain; the fairies battled stoutly to maintain possession. A huge misshapen hobgoblin used to bestride the house every evening with an immense pair of jack-boots, which, in his efforts at hard riding, he would thrust through the roof, kicking to pieces all the work of the preceding day. The house was therefore left to its fate, ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving

... short, the clay I found; but it would occasion the most serious person to smile, to see what aukward ways I took, and what ugly misshapen things I made; how many either fell out or cracked by the violent heat of the sun, and fell in pieces when they were removed; so that I think it was two months time before I could perfect any thing: and even then but two clumsy things in ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe

... passing through the establishment the visitor finds the workmen engaged in these labors, in every conceivable attitude and position. One man is filing a curved surface with a curved file, another is hidden almost wholly from view within a great misshapen box of iron: a third is mounted upon a ladder, and is slowly boring through the wall of some monstrous formation, or cutting away excrescences of iron from some massive casting with a cold chisel. In a word, the details are so endlessly varied as to excite the wonder ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... His face worked. He stared at the misshapen, incompletely round companion of Earth as if its appearance had some extraordinary, horrifying meaning ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster

... cutlass or two, with a hacked harpoon, among some; melancholy old rigging, like a heap of poor friars' girdles. There were also two long, sharp-ribbed settees of Malacca cane, black with age, and uncomfortable to look at as inquisitors' racks, with a large, misshapen arm-chair, which, furnished with a rude barber's crotch at the back, working with a screw, seemed some grotesque engine of torment. A flag locker was in one corner, open, exposing various colored bunting, some rolled ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

... a golden box out of his waistcoat pocket, opened it, tapped it, and helped himself to a pinch of snuff. The habit explained his somewhat misshapen nose. It was tobacco, not alcohol, that lent its exaggerated lustre and hypertrophied outline ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts

... went on, her voice shaking, 'he isn't a good life, but perhaps I can—patch him up. Come here, sir.' The misshapen beast lurched toward her, squinting down his own nose till he fell over his own toes. Then, luckily, Bettina ran across the lawn and reminded Malachi of their puppyhood. All that family are as queer as Dick's hatband, and ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling

... the success of this, his first hunting in the unknown land, the wolf slept for a few hours in his bushy retreat, and then, when the misshapen moon was up, went prowling cautiously around the outskirts of the scattered little settlement. Everywhere the man-smell kept him on his guard. Once he was careless enough to get between the wind and a farmyard, whereupon a watchful cur started a barking, which was taken ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... he had stepped from the aperture through which he arose, he stood still, and, as if to show himself more distinctly, moved the lamp which he held slowly over his face and person, successively illuminating his wild and fantastic features, and his misshapen but nervous limbs. Though disproportioned in person, the dwarf was not so distorted as to argue any want of strength or activity. While Sir Kenneth gazed on this disagreeable object, the popular creed occurred ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott

... controlled—no dangerous notes or chords could be played in a world drenched with Ingredient Beta. Steadily the idea grew that peace and beauty were supremely good, that violence and ugliness were supremely evil. Even competitive sports which simulated violence; even children born ugly and misshapen.... ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire

... over, but could see nothing of the cheiromantist but a tall hat, pirouetting in an eddy of moonlit water. After a time it also sank, and no trace of Mr. Podgers was visible. Once he thought that he caught sight of the bulky misshapen figure striking out for the staircase by the bridge, and a horrible feeling of failure came over him, but it turned out to be merely a reflection, and when the moon shone out from behind a cloud it passed away. At last he seemed to have realised the ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde

... evening wood was burning in the oven, and the red glow of the fire gleamed and flickered over the walls of the bake-shop, as if silently mocking us. The giant oven was like the misshapen head of a monster in a fairy tale; it thrust itself up out of the floor, opened wide jaws, full of glowing fire, and blew hot breath upon us; it seemed to be ever watching out of its black air-holes our interminable work. Those two deep holes were like eyes: ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky

... understand," stated the hunchback with dignity. "It was but a manifestation of the wanderlust, at once the curse and the blessing of my misshapen existence. Behold in me, sir, the ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer

... Now I am Elspeth. I love her. I would give her gladness—serve her. She says, 'Let him alone! Do you not know that his own weird will bring him into dark countries and light countries, and where he is to go? Is your own tree to be made thwart and misshapen, that his may be reminded that there is rightness of growth? He is a tree—he is not a stone, nor will he become a stone. There is a law a little larger than your fretfulness that will take care of him! I like Glenfernie better when ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston

... it was a twisted smile on the mechanically misshapen lips of Larry the Bat. NEARLY over! Who knew? That "nearly" might be too late! Even tonight he had been shadowed, was skulking even now in this place as a refuge. Who knew? Another hour, and the newsboys might be shrieking their "Uxtra! ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... turn of the slaves. There were, so I understand, over seven thousand of these: scribes and carpenters, litter-bearers and sculptors, cooks and musicians; there were a quantity of young children, and some half-witted dolts and misshapen dwarfs, kept for the amusement of guests during the intervals ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... Who longed for a maiden's smile. Till once on a day in summer My soul was touched with a gleam, And I woke from my morbid fancies Like one from an evil dream, And knew that the gods in their wisdom Had made and set me apart. Lean, misshapen, and ugly.... No toy for a maiden's heart. And I felt with a heart awakened That leapt in a riot of joy, The heart of a wise man and proud Not the heart of a moody boy. Viewing the old things anew ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson

... upper camp of the Bostonians. They had profited by a hole in the rocks, and chopped away the stunted scrubs to enlarge it into a snug artificial abyss. It was snug, and so to the eye is a cell at Sing-Sing. If they were very misshapen Bostonians, they may have succeeded in lying there comfortably. I looked down ten feet into the rough chasm, and I saw, Corpo di Bacco! I saw ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various

... eyes on the toy, but there was no mistaking the crossed legs, the folded arms, the paunchy stomach, and the misshapen, leering face. The boy heard a soft warning whispered from the opposite side of the room and turned his eyes from a greedy contemplation of the Little Brass God to the figure of the man ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher

... went often in the evening to watch the plant setters at work in the moonlight on the French farm. He did not make his presence known but hid himself in a fence corner behind bushes and watched the workers. As he saw the stooped misshapen figures crawling slowly along and heard the words of the old man driving them like cattle, his heart was deeply touched and he wanted to protest. In the dim light the slowly moving figures of women appeared, and after them came the crouched crawling men. They came down the long row toward him, ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson

... the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age. He would place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the picture, and smile. He mocked the misshapen body and the ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde

... Amy washed and soothed the red, misshapen foot. The repugnance she had felt to touching it had all vanished when she saw how acute must have been the old man's suffering and his now ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond

... high and of a higher type, much in you is crooked and misshapen. There is no smith in the world that could hammer you ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... fierce-eyed, surrounded by the misshapen Spirits of the Mines, sat upon a block of pure silver, with a pile of shining gold ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott



Words linked to "Misshapen" :   malformed, ill-shapen, misshapenness, unshapely



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