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lurid
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  • Instead, she was carried back each time to the weir, where she clung to a rusty iron ring, waiting for him, her white face vivid against the lurid mossy walls and greenish cement.†   (source)
  • Puzzled brown eyes looked into lurid, red-veined, green ones.†   (source)
  • Look," said Boris—sweating and pale in the lurid tail lights of the car in front of us; more cars had pulled up behind, we were trapped —"who knows how long we will be here.†   (source)
  • She showed me the lurid lines on her wrists, like bracelets.†   (source)
  • I did not want to miss a single lurid detail.†   (source)
  • The narrator narrowly escapes before the house itself pulls apart and crashes into the "black and lurid tarn" at its base.†   (source)
  • I think Rome at its worst had nothing on Chicago during those lurid days.†   (source)
  • It alternately whined in tones of selfpity and rose in lurid screams; it reminded her chillingly of the screams that sometimes rose in the geriatrics ward of the hospital where she had worked summers as a high school kid.†   (source)
  • I was about to mention the importance of reflection, and here we are, presented with this lurid imbecility.†   (source)
  • He was at a serious disadvantage with Michael, however, because Michael had already visited LSU and been entertained for a lurid evening by a few of LSU's star football players.†   (source)
  • And Hire is off into the lurid main avenue of the Towne Hall, a tunnel of flickering and pulsating loglo through which black creatures sprint like benighted sperm up the old fallopians, sharp angular things clenched in their hands.†   (source)
  • Artists demonized John Wilkes Booth with lurid pictures of him as the devil's disciple.†   (source)
  • The rippling veil of black and crimson smoke filtered the sun's rays in such a way that everything below was bathed in a lurid orange.†   (source)
  • I had the impression it wasn't night and it wasn't day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.†   (source)
  • Gideon, in turn, had said that Wendy was "a vulgarian, who lacks the nuance to know why it's not good manners to grace everybody with lurid details of one's menstrual problems at the dinner table."†   (source)
  • Last night, Annie could see, it had been a skunk and some lurid dragon-creature Robert had once brought back from-Hong Kong.†   (source)
  • I saw the figures dancing luridly, the lights flashing, the band going.†   (source)
  • The P.T. Barnum-like talk shows-at their lurid peak in the fall of 1995-are a staple.†   (source)
  • Megamoney, lurid sex, drugs, betrayal, infidelity, assassination, and an illegitimate child.†   (source)
  • It is clear to Edgar that the page is from Life and he tries to work up an anger, he asks himself why a magazine called Life would want to reproduce a painting of such lurid and dreadful dimensions.†   (source)
  • Because of the lurid tales we read and our vivid imaginations and, probably, memories of our brief but hectic lives, Bailey and I were afflicted—he physically and I mentally.†   (source)
  • No other country in the world had been subjected to as much "idiotic commentary," he said, and it would have been hard to argue the point, given the fact that, for instance, the name of Haiti's indigenous religion had long since become the synonym for crazy ideas and sheer luridness.†   (source)
  • Then he let out a piercing shriek suddenly and bolted toward the door in a headlong dash back toward the enlisted men's apartment for his camera, only to be halted in his tracks with another frantic shriek by the dreadful, freezing premonition that this whole lovely, lurid, rich and colorful pagan paradise would be snatched away from him irredeemably if he were to let it out of his sight for even an instant.†   (source)
  • I would write the most overwritten crap of my life, I decided, something so purple and lurid that the editors would feel bad about sending me on the story.†   (source)
  • With your involvement, and now potentially two others, it could turn the Hollow into some sort of lurid or ridiculous caption in the tourist guides.†   (source)
  • In lurid prose, the article details a school in Wales where a few girls went out walking "and were never heard from again!"†   (source)
  • Before she left for the drug program, Nina gave me a little heart-shaped compact, the kind you might find at a dollar store, and I experimented with lurid eye shadow colors.†   (source)
  • Well after JFK's death, Hoover continued his practice of providing presidents with lurid classified files containing the personal indiscretions of high-ranking and influential individuals.†   (source)
  • THE NEWSPAPERS, meanwhile, were filled with increasingly lurid news from Paris.†   (source)
  • The sky seemed as close as the tops of the trees, covered with still cloud and flushed on the morning side with a lurid, foxy glow.†   (source)
  • At night the island was bathed in the lurid light of flares.†   (source)
  • Most of the brilliantly colored designs, in lime, gold, and lurid scarlet, were curlicues and arabesques consistent with Islam's prohibition against representative art.†   (source)
  • Dawn breaks, the sun's rays tracing the sky above Blackcliff's ebony belltower like bloodied fingers, tingeing everyone in the courtyard a lurid red.†   (source)
  • When he finds a new word in one of these rather lurid magazines, does that mean that the dictionary will adopt, or recognize, the word?†   (source)
  • He lunged forward on the bleeding leg, blew past the entire field in ten leaps, and charged on, a lurid spray of blood flying out behind him as he ran.†   (source)
  • In the corner, a neat stack of American magazines features page after page of luridly sculpted men in contorted poses.†   (source)
  • An act of high imagination—daring and lurid and impossible.†   (source)
  • The cold knife of the wind stirred and swirled the flames, so the lurid orange light was always shifting.†   (source)
  • Besides her many cuts and bruises, though — some of them luridly three-dimensional — Helen had a concussion.†   (source)
  • I should have understood the corporal's strange behavior to be an alarm—for example, he had placed among the photographs of his elders in the small shrine next to his bed several of the newly traded pictures, and actually cut out certain lurid forms and applied them in a most dishonoring fashion beside the portraits of his stolid-faced grandparents.†   (source)
  • Overhead was the great patch of lurid light on the roof of the Underworld.†   (source)
  • It would have been odd indeed if I had not fallen victim to some of the more lurid fantasies of the military mythology.†   (source)
  • I felt restless, a little goatish, and in order to keep the curtain drawn down over my brain's ever-handy peep show of lewd apparitions—harmless, but in relation to work distracting—I got up and paced the room, which the summer sun bathed in a lurid flamingo light.†   (source)
  • It seemed that he ended every lurid verse with, "Alas, Babylon!" in a voice so resonant you could feel it, if you rested your fingertips gently on the warped pine boards of the church.†   (source)
  • This apparently referred to an obscure episode in Dishonest Abe's lurid career which no one had ever succeeded in peeping, but which never failed to make Powell blush.†   (source)
  • The man swore luridly, as if she'd hit his hand with a hammer.†   (source)
  • Lockhart, wearing lurid pink robes to match the decorations, was waving for silence.   (source)
    lurid = surprisingly brightly colored
  • He had not noticed her at first because she was wearing a luridly flowered set of robes that blended only too well with the tablecloth on the desk behind her.†   (source)
  • Dickens, who could be very suggestive, was aware that his novels were often read around the family breakfast table, and he wanted to protect children from anything luridly sexual, as well as to provide wives with plausible deniability.†   (source)
  • I didn't need to know the topic to know what he'd seen; for the most part, they all featured the same disgusting topics, told as luridly as possible by guests whose single goal, it seemed, was to be on television, no matter how degraded they were made to look.†   (source)
  • I can still remember the cobalt of his cheek, the lurid cranberry of his fingers.†   (source)
  • Tonight there's a lurid sunset, taking its time to fade.†   (source)
  • Winifred had been coloured a lurid green, as had Richard.†   (source)
  • Even then with lurid thoughts occupying him.†   (source)
  • Contrary to almost everything he'd read about their luridness, he found them long and boring.†   (source)
  • The tarn, is it 'black and lurid' enough?†   (source)
  • They went into Gladrags Wizardwear to buy a present for Dobby, where they had fun selecting the most lurid socks they could find, including a pair patterned with flashing gold and silver stars, and another that screamed loudly when they became too smelly.†   (source)
  • In this light I must look lurid.†   (source)
  • It was knowledge they craved; yet they could not admit to craving it, because it was forbidden knowledge; knowledge with a lurid glare to it; knowledge gained through a descent into the pit.†   (source)
  • And then the hand tightened on her neck, tightened, until Carrie saw red, lurid dots in front of her eyes and felt her brain go fuzzy and far-off.†   (source)
  • The students in Botanical Transgenics (Ornamental Division) had created a whole array of drought-and-flood-resistant tropical blends, with flowers or leaves in lurid shades of chrome yellow and brilliant flame red and phosphorescent blue and neon purple.†   (source)
  • Even as Eragon watched, an ominous figure detached itself from the horizon in the north and rose up in the lurid sky over the Burning Plains.†   (source)
  • I thought there was a touch of the stage villain here—the gaunt figure, the black coat, the lurid lips.†   (source)
  • On the wall behind him there was a benign, mouse-haired calendar-Jesus with lipstick and rouge, and a lurid, jeweled heart glowing through his clothes.†   (source)
  • It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.†   (source)
  • At the front of the group stood Mr and Mrs Weasley, dressed in their Muggle best, and Fred and George, who were both wearing brand-new jackets in some lurid green, scaly material.†   (source)
  • A lurid melodrama, of shackled beauties and doomed romances and pervasive oppression, all told in such breathless, high-spirited fashion.†   (source)
  • Then another hoarse scream erupted, sudden and desperate and just as suddenly silenced, broken off by lurid, ripping bone snap.†   (source)
  • Cherry," he said, slumping back in his seat in visible relief and beginning to babble hoarsely in Ukrainian as I exited the car—feeling lurid and exposed in the ghastly wash of headlights from the stalled vehicles—and walked back over the bridge, the way we'd come.†   (source)
  • Everybody in a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction.†   (source)
  • He treats us to "a singularly dreary tract of country," to "a few rank sedges" and "white trunks of decayed trees," to "the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn," so that we're ready for the "bleak walls" of the house with its "vacant eye-like windows" and its "barely perceptible fissure" zigzagging its way down the wall right down to "the sullen waters of the tarn."†   (source)
  • She had been imagining the scene of a crime, a Gothic cathedral, whose flamboyant vaulting would be flooded with brazen light of scarlet and indigo from a stained-glass backdrop of lurid suffering.†   (source)
  • Lurid, but also furtive.†   (source)
  • The head doctor, who was supervising Will, kept saying to the woman, "Push down, Mrs. Tomolillo, push down, that's a good girl, push down," and finally through the split, shaven place between her legs, lurid with disinfectant, I saw a dark fuzzy thing appear.†   (source)
  • With laughing hands, he placed a sliver of strawberry on each bright yellow and red square of toast—making the whole thing look like a lurid snack that an old woman might serve at a bridge party.†   (source)
  • When I shut my eyes, I was struck by clinically sharp flashes of memory that the fever brought bursting up from nowhere, like tracer rounds going off in the jungle, lurid flares of highly detailed and emotionally complex material.†   (source)
  • look at — a pair of terra-cotta griffins, Victorian beadwork pictures, even a crystal ball the dark brown walls, their deep dry texture like cocoa powder, soaked me through and through with a sense of Hobie's voice and also of Welty's, a friendly brown that saturated me to the core and spoke in warm old-fashioned tones, so that drifting in a lurid stream of fever I felt wrapped and reassured by their presence whereas Pippa had cast a shifting, colored nimbus of her own, I was thinking in a mixed-up way about scarlet leaves and bonfire sparks flying up in darkness and also my painting, how it would look against such a rich, dark, light-absorbing ground.†   (source)
  • I was so shaken that I had to look around to get my bearings — frothy gray facade of the Alwyn, like some lurid dementia of the Baroque—and the floodlights on the cut-work, the Christmas decorations on the door of Petrossian struck some deep-embedded memory gong: December, my mother in a snow hat: here baby, let me run around the corner and buy some croissants for breakfast ... I was so distracted that a man coming fast round the corner whacked straight into me: "Watch it!"†   (source)
  • They didn't make the people seem more real; rather they became ultra-real: citizens of an odd half-country, lurid yet muted, where realism was beside the point.†   (source)
  • Lurid isn't your style.†   (source)
  • It was nothing I hadn't thought of plenty, and in far less taxing circumstances; the urge shook me grandly and unpredictably, a poisonous whisper that never wholly left me, that on some days lingered just on the threshold of my hearing but on others roared up uncontrollably into a sort of lurid visionary frenzy, why I wasn't sure, sometimes even a bad movie or a gruesome dinner party could trigger it, short term boredom and long term pain, temporary panic and permanent desperation striking all at once and flaring up in such an ashen desolate light that I saw, really saw, looking back down the years and with all clear-headed an†   (source)
  • The panoply of rays outlining Eragon's hand faded into oblivion, leaving behind lurid pink afterimages streaked across his field of vision.†   (source)
  • I felt it, too: the dread, the weight of the horrors we'd seen, which replayed themselves in an endless, lurid loop in my mind.†   (source)
  • I think of them glowing in the dark, with a lurid sulfur-yellow light; I think of curling wisps of mist coining out of them and materializing on top of my bureau.†   (source)
  • Up until now I hadn't fully understood the difference: that even his most lurid dreams weren't weirder or more frightening than what inspired them.†   (source)
  • Matt used to do consequence analysis, figuring out the lurid mathematics of a nuclear accident or limited exchange.†   (source)
  • —Joyce Reardon, November 2000 ellen rimbauer the diary of 17 april 1907-seattle Dear Diary: I find it a somewhat daunting task to endeavor to place my thoughts here inside your trusted pages, I scarcely know if I am up to the task, but as my head is filled with lurid thoughts, and my heart with romance and possibility, I find I must confide in someone, and so it is to your pages I now turn.†   (source)
  • I hated and dreaded the long winter nights when late customers came to the Store to sit around the heater roasting peanuts and trying to best each other in telling lurid tales of ghosts and hants, banshees and juju, voodoo and other anti-life stories.†   (source)
  • Then she opened its gutted belly and sluiced the blood from its clotted membranous flesh till it glistened a lurid pink.†   (source)
  • He's polite and ill at ease and he giggles frequently, looking with what I sense is terror at the array of food spread out before him, the mashed potatoes, the gravy, the lurid green and red Jell-O salad, the enormous turkey: my mother has said that the food is different there.†   (source)
  • Farmer would write, "The most striking thing about move san disorder is the lurid extremity of its symbolism: two of the body's most vital constituents, blood and milk, are turned to poisons.†   (source)
  • There was a massive casino standing on its own and as she looked, its neon sign flickered on, red and lurid in the fading light.†   (source)
  • And the lights themselves, as always happens with lights when you have to have them at the wrong time of day, looked lurid and unnatural.†   (source)
  • Panic blossomed in grotesque and lurid forms among the freshmen in the sinking half-light of a luminous and mysterious dusk.†   (source)
  • I was so overcome by excitement that the entire sunny seascape—bathers, white-capped waves, even a droning airplane with its trailing banner THRILLS NIGHTLY AT AQUEDUCT RACETRACK—was suddenly steeped in a pornographic glow, as if seen through a filter of lurid blue.†   (source)
  • Most incredibly black and lurid.†   (source)
  • There is always a lurid sense of menace to Southern forests at night, especially when the oak trees are centenarians and their branches, braceleted with thick vines and draped with their scarves of moss, bend low to the earth to make the darkness darker.†   (source)
  • It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit.†   (source)
  • He swore luridly, for he felt that it was degradation for one who aimed to be some vague soldier, or a man of blood with a sort of sublime license, to be taken home by a father.†   (source)
  • "Did you see this?" he asked, pointing to a lurid cartoon.†   (source)
  • Lurid reflections appear on the walls in odd, sinuous shapes.†   (source)
  • Blanche: Don't come in here [Lurid reflections appear on the walls around Blanche.†   (source)
  • The shadows and lurid reflections move sinuously as flames along the wall spaces.†   (source)
  • The atmosphere of the kitchen is now the same raw, lurid one of the disastrous poker night.†   (source)
  • Their cheeks in the vitriolic glare of the photography-shop window were flinty yet sagging; green light glazed the velvet powder, scummed the hectic rouge, livid over lurid.†   (source)
  • A new religious faith could have been founded on the energy of spirit which he spent upon collecting lurid stories and smearing them across sheets of paper.†   (source)
  • The sky was a hideous lurid color and great swirls of black smoke went twisting up to hand in billowy clouds above the flames.†   (source)
  • I cannot see Kensington Gardens as I saw it as a child because I saw it only two days ago —on a chill afternoon, all the cherry trees lurid in the cold yellow light of a hail storm.†   (source)
  • After the earthquake in San Francisco there was a book describing it, its cheap green cover lurid with crumbling towers, shaken spires, toppling many-storied houses plunging into the splitting flame-jawed earth.†   (source)
  • The kitchen now suggests that sort of lurid nocturnal brilliance, the raw colours of childhood's spectrum.†   (source)
  • How can I, I asked myself, make the picture of what has happened to this boy show plain and powerful upon a screen of sober reason, when a thousand newspaper and magazine artists have already drawn it in lurid ink upon a million sheets of public print?†   (source)
  • She hobbled to the bed on her crippled legs and picked up a copy of the Masses that carried a lurid May Day cartoon.†   (source)
  • He saw plainly by this time that their poverty, the threat of the poorhouse, the lurid references to the pauper's grave, belonged to the insensate mythology of hoarding; anger smouldered like a brand in him at their sorry greed.†   (source)
  • He stopped at a ledge and looked back" he saw in the lurid glare of the slashing lances of light a man stumbling over the snow.†   (source)
  • He rested his black fingers on the edge of the white table and a silent laugh burst from his parted lips as he saw himself for a split second in a lurid objective light: he had killed a rich white girl and had burned her body after cutting her head off and had lied to throw the blame on someone else and had written a kidnap note demanding ten thousand dollars and yet he stood here afraid to touch food on the table, food which undoubtedly was his own.†   (source)
  • The lurid reflections fade from the walls, the inhuman cries and noises die out and her own hoarse crying is calmed.†   (source)
  • His busy mind had drawn for him large pictures extravagant in color, lurid with breathless deeds.†   (source)
  • It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.†   (source)
  • He could no longer appear respectable to her, so he defended himself instead in a lurid past.†   (source)
  • At first it was but a lurid spark upon the stone pavement.†   (source)
  • With lurid face and tossing hair she cursed and destroyed furniture all Friday afternoon.†   (source)
  • There were Burne and Fred Sloane arrayed to the last dot like the lurid figures on college posters.†   (source)
  • "Well, then!" bawled the man in a lurid rage.†   (source)
  • Dark blood flushed into Pete's face, and he shot a lurid glance at Jimmie.†   (source)
  • He was listening with eagerness and much humility to the lurid descriptions of a bearded sergeant.†   (source)
  • The command went painfully forward until an open space interposed between them and the lurid lines.†   (source)
  • The family picture stood out in lurid colors.†   (source)
  • A lurid colour seemed to fill the tent, and change the aspect of all therein.†   (source)
  • Isabel's eyes expanded as she gazed at this lurid scene.†   (source)
  • For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it.†   (source)
  • The moon, as seen through these films, had a lurid metallic look.†   (source)
  • Soon lurid lights began to penetrate the vertical gallery which widened as we went up.†   (source)
  • Isabel stood staring; she seemed to-day to live in a world illumined by lurid flashes.†   (source)
  • "His hatred of you burns with a lurid flame—the flame that never dies," she wrote.†   (source)
  • Did it contain water, reddened by the lurid light?†   (source)
  • The very unconsciousness of a looming drama which is shown in such innocent first epistles from women to men, or vice versa, makes them, when such a drama follows, and they are read over by the purple or lurid light of it, all the more impressive, solemn, and in cases, terrible.†   (source)
  • The two young men were both bending over the fire for the blaze had died down, and only a red glow from the dying embers cast a lurid light on a narrow semicircle in front of the hearth.†   (source)
  • And in the meantime his eyes—the pupils of the same growing momentarily larger and more lurid; his face and body and hands tense and contracted—the stillness of his position, the balanced immobility of the mood more and more ominous, yet in truth not suggesting a brutal, courageous power to destroy, but the imminence of trance or spasm.†   (source)
  • Yesterday I was almost willing to accept Van Helsing's monstrous ideas, but now they seem to start out lurid before me as outrages on common sense.†   (source)
  • Of course this novice's report lacked whoop and crash and lurid description, and therefore wanted the true ring; but its antique wording was quaint and sweet and simple, and full of the fragrances and flavors of the time, and these little merits made up in a measure for its more important lacks.†   (source)
  • And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.†   (source)
  • There's nothing to tell,' she said truthfully, but in such a manner as to convey that three volumes would scarcely have contained the lurid facts.†   (source)
  • It sharpened, it refined them, the yellow-blue evening light; and on the leaves in the square shone lurid, livid—they looked as if dipped in sea water—the foliage of a submerged city.†   (source)
  • His real detachment from her had taken place, not at the lurid moment of disenchantment, but now, in the sober after-light of discrimination, where he saw her definitely divided from him by the crudeness of a choice which seemed to deny the very differences he felt in her.†   (source)
  • And along the margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick incrustation of salt—pink under the lurid sky.†   (source)
  • what are they doing now down there?" he asked, pointing to the floor with fantastic precautions of voice and gesture, whose meaning, borne upon my mind in a lurid flash, made me very sick of my cleverness.†   (source)
  • I had made her a receptacle of lurid things, but there was an odd recognition of my superiority—my accomplishments and my function—in her patience under my pain.†   (source)
  • The sun, shining through the smoke that drove up from the tops of the trees, seemed blood red, and threw an unfamiliar lurid light upon everything.†   (source)
  • The lurid presentment so powerfully affected her imagination in the silence of the sleeping house that her nightgown became damp with perspiration, and the bedstead shook with each throb of her heart.†   (source)
  • Right here, I think, entered the austere conscience of my Puritan ancestry, impelling me toward lurid deeds and sanctioning even murder as right conduct.†   (source)
  • A great chocolate-coloured pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapours; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld a marvellous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be dark like the back-end of evening; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration; and here, for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths.†   (source)
  • And according to one branch of science, whose notions of reality were equally unflattering and lurid, the embryo's development seemed to be a hasty recapitulation of zoological genealogy.†   (source)
  • But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur.†   (source)
  • Then it was withdrawn as suddenly as it appeared, and all was dark again save the single lurid spark which marked a chink between the stones.†   (source)
  • Even as I beheld this a lurid green glare lit the road about me and showed the distant woods towards Addlestone.†   (source)
  • It was a shock to me to turn from the wonderful smoky beauty of a sunset over London, with its lurid lights and inky shadows and all the marvellous tints that come on foul clouds even as on foul water, and to realize all the grim sternness of my own cold stone building, with its wealth of breathing misery, and my own desolate heart to endure it all.†   (source)
  • Imagination might have beheld a Last Day luridness in this red-coaled glow, which fell on his face and hand, and on hers, peering into the loose hair about her brow, and firing the delicate skin underneath.†   (source)
  • Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.†   (source)
  • Armand, whose life was in the most imminent danger, and who seemed to be looking at her from a background upon which were dimly painted the seething crowd of Paris, the bare walls of the Tribunal of Public Safety, with Foucquier-Tinville, the Public Prosecutor, demanding Armand's life in the name of the people of France, and the lurid guillotine with its stained knife waiting for another victim ... Armand!†   (source)
  • He pushed violently; the door swung with a creak and a clatter, disclosing to his intense astonishment the low dungeon-like interior illuminated by a lurid, wavering glare.†   (source)
  • I had expected to see Sheen in ruins—I found about me the landscape, weird and lurid, of another planet.†   (source)
  • He went to bed a little after midnight, and was awakened from lurid dreams in the small hours of Monday by the sound of door knockers, feet running in the street, distant drumming, and a clamour of bells.†   (source)
  • His eyes were fixed in a lurid glare.†   (source)
  • Dense black smoke was leaping up to mingle with the steam from the river, and as the Heat-Ray went to and fro over Weybridge its impact was marked by flashes of incandescent white, that gave place at once to a smoky dance of lurid flames.†   (source)
  • Swift pictures of himself, apart, yet in himself, came to him—a blue desperate figure leading lurid charges with one knee forward and a broken blade high—a blue, determined figure standing before a crimson and steel assault, getting calmly killed on a high place before the eyes of all.†   (source)
  • Above the temples, amidst wreathed turban folds of black drapery, vague in its character and consistency as cloud, gleamed a ring of white flame, gemmed with sparkles of a more lurid tinge.†   (source)
  • Swarthy boys and dark-eyed Madonnas, staring at you from one corner of the studio, suggested Murillo; oily brown shadows of faces with a lurid streak in the wrong place, meant Rembrandt; buxom ladies and dropiscal infants, Rubens; and Turner appeared in tempests of blue thunder, orange lightning, brown rain, and purple clouds, with a tomato-colored splash in the middle, which might be the sun or a bouy, a sailor's shirt or a king's robe, as the spectator pleased.†   (source)
  • She gave him an affectionate good-night, and went out with him to the door, whence the fires of Coketown could be seen, making the distance lurid.†   (source)
  • It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.†   (source)
  • He would have talked with him, and tried to comfort him, but remembering that he had nothing but his shirt on, he changed his mind and sat down again at the open pane to bathe in the cold air and gaze at the exquisite lines of the cross, silent, but full of meaning for him, and the mounting lurid yellow star.†   (source)
  • She took off her handkerchief turban and dressed her glossy wealth of hair "like white folks"; she added some odds and ends of rather lurid ribbon and a spray of atrocious artificial flowers; finally she threw over her shoulders a fluffy thing called a "cloud" in that day, which was of a blazing red complexion.†   (source)
  • It was whispered by those who peered after her that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the dark passage-way of the interior.†   (source)
  • There was a full moon overhead, yet the vault of the sky at the moment was lurid with light cast up from the fires burning in the streets and open places of the city, and the chanting and chorusing of the old psalmody of Israel filled it with plaintive harmonies to which he could not but listen.†   (source)
  • Thus sped the demoniac on his course, until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of midnight.†   (source)
  • Towards London a lurid glare overhung the whole dark waste, and the contrast between these two lights, and the fancy which the redder light engendered of an unearthly fire, gleaming on all the unseen buildings of the city and on all the faces of its many thousands of wondering inhabitants, was as solemn as might be.†   (source)
  • A January day was drawing to its close; the cold evening was more keen than ever in the motionless air, and a lurid sunset was rapidly dying away.†   (source)
  • Excess had brought on that frightful disease that seems to throw the lurid shadows of a coming retribution back into the present life.†   (source)
  • When he drew nearer he perceived it to be a spring van, ordinary in shape, but singular in colour, this being a lurid red.†   (source)
  • This, however, must be a mistake, inasmuch as Mr. Smooth-it-away, while we remained in the smoky and lurid cavern, took occasion to prove that Tophet has not even a metaphorical existence.†   (source)
  • Speaking of the properties of flame, methought Shelley's poetry emitted a purer light than almost any other productions of his day, contrasting beautifully with the fitful and lurid gleams and gushes of black vapor that flashed and eddied from the volumes of Lord Byron.†   (source)
  • Here and there, some early lamps were seen to twinkle in the distant city; and in the eastern quarter of the sky the lurid light still hovered.†   (source)
  • He caught the color of what was passing about him, and threw it back more vividly than he received it, but mixed, nevertheless, with a lurid and portentous hue.†   (source)
  • Demon eyes, of a wild and ghastly vivacity, glared upon me in a thousand directions, where none had been visible before, and gleamed with the lurid lustre of a fire that I could not force my imagination to regard as unreal.†   (source)
  • It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.†   (source)
  • Thus, instead of two rival and contending flames, a larger and a lesser, each burning with a lurid and uncertain glare, we had a blended and a softened light whose genial ray diffused an equable warmth throughout the land.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Tristram's glance at her husband had more of a spark; she turned to Newman with a slightly lurid smile.†   (source)
  • Here and there, a red and fiery star struggled through the drifting vapor, furnishing a lurid gleam of brightness to the dull aspect of the heavens.†   (source)
  • Stephen, watching her with that look of desperation which had come over him like a lurid light, approached slowly from the door, seated himself close beside her, and grasped her hand.†   (source)
  • Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there's another in the sky—lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch black.†   (source)
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