|
|
|
More "Ironic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... office, with his dead body at my feet, I wrote a note to Josephine," he finished. "I told her what I had done, and again I swore my innocence. I wrote her that some day she might hear from me, but not under my right name, as the law would always be watching for me. It was ironic that on that human cobra's desk there lay an open Bible, open at the Book of Peter, and involuntarily I wrote the words to Josephine—PETER GOD. She has kept my secret, while the law has hunted for me. ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... some personal magnetism. Jolly wavered. His father, too, seemed doubtful in his views. And though, as was proper at the age of twenty, he kept a sharp eye on his father, watchful for defects which might still be remedied, still that father had an 'air' which gave a sort of glamour to his creed of ironic tolerance. Artists of course; were notoriously Hamlet-like, and to this extent one must discount for one's father, even if one loved him. But Jolyon's original view, that to 'put your nose in where you aren't ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... bending over the well looking down, then suddenly flinging her head back, laughing as we stood behind her, the sunlight through the apple-trees flashing in her eyes.... That fortnight must be to many of us of how ironic, of how tragic ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... Armine might guess at a bitter truth of his nature, and shrink from him, despite the powerful attraction he possessed for her, despite her own freedom from scruple, her own ironic and even cruel outlook ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... royal highness. I should have had myself announced and craved an audience, I reckon," was Bucky's ironic retort; and swiftly on the heels of it he added. "You make ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... and busied himself writing, he looked from the stone face to the face of flesh with fascinated repulsion—the man and the "familiar" were so ghastly alike. Then he suddenly understood that this was a quaint double jest of the eccentric physician's—his grim fling at his lack of physical charm, his ironic jeer at the superstitions of ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... half-buried experiments in rhyme, assonance and polyphony. This part of the paper will examine Jurgen and call attention to the distorted sonnet printed as a prose soliloquy on page 97 of that exquisite and ironic volume. It will pass to the subsequent Figures of Earth and, after showing how the greater gravity of this volume is accompanied by a greater profusion of poetry per se it will unravel the scheme of Cabell's ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... Macklin had been the most admired Shylock of his century. His specialty was the performance of character parts, often dialect roles, either broadly comic or cruel and ironic. The central figure of this, his best comedy, is such a part. It combines those features that the author could portray so effectively, the broad dialect, the callous selfishness, the hypocrisy, the passionate resistance to all appeals to sentiment and the imperviousness ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... grimly ironic philosophy, the topography, the earthy quality—'take of English earth as much as either hand may rightly clutch'—of the Wessex master's work makes it indigestible reading for an exile of more than thirty or forty; unless, of course, he is of the fine and robust type, whose ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... with a manner of servility in which there was an ironic suggestion, while their eyes examined him shrewdly. They were bearded, aquiline persons, soft-spoken and withal formidable. He had a notion that they found him amusing, but ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... aught be more Piteous than to Witness a proud and haughty Income tottering along the Street, searching in vain for a Workingman's Appetite? When one with a spending possibility of $2 a Minute is told by a Specialist to drink plenty of Hot Water, the Words seem almost Ironic. ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... struck you merely as an insignificant little man with hollow cheeks and a thin grey beard; for the weariness of expression which was habitual to him vanished before the charming sympathy of his smile. His sunken eyes glittered with a kindly but ironic good-humour. Now passed a guard in the romantic cloak of a brigand in comic opera and a peaked cap like that of an alguacil. A group of telegraph boys in blue stood round a painter, who was making a sketch—notwithstanding half-frozen ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... was being confronted and challenged and mocked by this call to him from half way round the world. It maddened and sickened him, the very thought of his helplessness, so Aeschylean in its torturing complications, so ironic in its refinement of cruelty. It stung him into a spirit of blind revolt. It was unfair, too utterly unfair, he told himself, as he paced the faded carpet of his cheap hotel-room, and the mild Riviera sunlight crept in through the window-square ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... These were ironic aspects Joe hadn't thought about before, just as he hadn't thought about the need to defend the Platform while it was being built. Defending it was Sally's father's job, and he wouldn't have a popular time. Joe wondered ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... cleared away the tea, and brought in a paraffin lamp, small but cheerful. She was a middle-aged woman, much younger than her husband—with an ironic half-dreamy eye, and a native intelligence much superior to her surroundings. She was suffering from a chronic abscess in the neck, which had strange periodic swellings and subsidences, all of which were endlessly interesting to its possessor. Mrs. Halsey, indeed, called ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... effect of these decorations ironic, curiously depressing. She was not usually so ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... above, if artistically led up to and crisply told in a story of twenty to fifty pages, might have some; but ditchwatered out as they are, I have no use for them. The letter-form is particularly unfortunate, because, at least as used, it excludes the ironic presentation which permits one almost to fall in love with Becky Sharp, and quite to enjoy Jonathan Wild. Of course, if anybody says (and apologists do say that Laclos was, as a man, proper in morals ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... a prey to ironic laughter. He would have spoken, but Mr. Wilding plucked a paper from his pocket, ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... by mitigating their last agonies. No shelter either, for the sight of buildings might delay the final phase. But high above the doomed there floated the flag of the Federation, on a lofty pole, a touch of ironic sentimentality that had commended itself to some ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... change had come over her since the day of our first meeting. She had grown younger, more girlish, and more gentle. At first she had seemed much older than I; a sad-faced woman, weary, solemn, enigmatic, almost gloomy, with a bitter, ironic humour and a bearing distant and cold. Now she was only maidenly and sweet; tinged, it is true, with a certain seriousness, but frank and ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... it was proving a rather wearisome affair it was doubtless his own fault, and yet this finding of himself alone at forty was hardly what he had intended. There was something actually comic about it. That for which he had striven had been secured, but for what? Success unshared is of all things ironic, and soon not even General would be here to greet him when the day's work was done. He blew out a thin thread of smoke and followed its curvings with half-shut eyes. He had made money, made it honestly, and it had brought him that which it brought others, but if this were all ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... is trying to follow what we say. In the first place, we obscure our meaning. For example, we have; been speaking ironically and suddenly swerve into serious utterance; or we have been speaking seriously and then incongruously adopt an ironic tone. How are our listeners, our readers to take us? They are puzzled; they do not know. In the second place, we offend—perhaps in insidious, indefinable fashion—the esthetic proprieties; we violate the natural fitness ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... he returned, and he still wore his ironic smile—"Well, I know what you mean all the time. You say I only know Oriental women, but, by Allah, there's not a pin to choose between the lot of you, except that there's less humbug about them, and over here you're a ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... the Ghetto is a singular mixture. It is half-ironic gaiety and half-melancholy. But it has not the depressing sadness of the Russian Quarter. Its temper is more akin to that of the Irish colony that has settled around Southwark and Bermondsey. There is sadness, but no misery. There is gloom, but no despair. There is hilarity, but no frivolity. ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... himself extremely gracious to him. Renouard guessed in him a man whom an incurable habit of investigation and analysis had made gentle and indulgent; inapt for action, and more sensitive to the thoughts than to the events of existence. Withal not crushed, sub-ironic without a trace of acidity, and with a simple manner which put people at ease quickly. They had a long conversation on the terrace commanding an extended view of the ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... later Mr. Gladstone, once more chancellor of the exchequer, again produced a budget. Semi-ironic cheers met his semi-ironic expression of an expectation that he would be asked the question: what had become of the calculations of 1853? The succession duty proved a woeful disappointment, and instead of producing two million pounds, produced ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... now to me. "They are here, Jac Hallen. Almost here. And I am at their mercy." His tone was ironic; then it hardened into grimness. He was addressing me, but I knew it was for Elza's ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... not believe me," she said in an ironic tone, blinking her little eyes. "You are right. Old women, you know, seldom talk sense. Samuel Brohl never existed, and I had the pleasure of dining last night with the most authentic of all the Larinskis. Pardon me, and accept my best wishes for ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... of all beholders. His eye was full of fire and meaning, of laughter and friendliness; his mouth curved into the finest sweet smile in the world, as also it could curl into a look of scorn which could scathe as finely. He had a keen wit, and could be ironic and biting when he chose, but 'twas not his habit to use his power malevolently. Even those who envied his great fortunes, and whose spite would have maligned him had he been of different nature, were in a measure ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ironic and cutting edge when speaking of the Celts, inhabitants of the lands of the South. They had retarded the progress of Humanity, deflecting it in the wrong direction. The Celt is individualistic and consequently an ungovernable revolutionary who tends to socialism. Furthermore, he ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... to the enemy I am bound to admit that Mr. Bennett's case, which is the German case, is a very strong one and that his ironic comment on the case against Germany, "We have here an example of Mr. Shaw's aptitude for practical politics," is a comment that the Kaiser will probably make and that the average "practical man" ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... it was not a happy smile, but there was a certain ironic humor in the situation. The idea of anyone's seeking my "permission" in any matter concerning Frances Morley. He noticed the smile and was, I think, inclined ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... dazzling relief the irony which governs the being of kings. Want of logic and defiance of ethical principle underlie their pride in magnificent ceremonial and pageantry. The ironic contrast between the pretensions of a king and the actual limits of human destiny is a text which Shakespeare repeatedly clothes ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... had swooned; his eyes were closed, his face like a carving. But gradually the suggestion of a tender and ironic smile appeared on his lips. With a slow effort he raised his arm and his eyelids, in an appeal of all his weariness for my ear. I made a movement to stoop over him, and the floor, the great bed, the ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... forces itself in the midst of all this "ironic" waiting on the part of the Persians in Spartan durance for a future apotheosis of splendour and luxuriance,—what is the moral? "Hunger now and thirst, for ye shall be filled"—is that it? Well, anyhow it's parallel to the modern popular Christianity, ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... however, one of the few gifts which nature had denied to Luis de Leon. He was aware of this himself, to judge from his statement that he had nothing of the jester or scoffer in him.[161] But if Luis de Leon was relatively poor in humour, he had an abundant store of mordant sarcasm and a faculty for ironic banter, as Medina and Castro learned to their chagrin.[162] Pacheco's opinion of Luis de Leon's versatile talent is borne out by the scrap of evidence given at the trial by Francisco de Salinas—the sightless dedicatee ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... George Coppard, proud in his bearing, handsome, and rather bitter; who preferred theology in reading, and who drew near in sympathy only to one man, the Apostle Paul; who was harsh in government, and in familiarity ironic; who ignored all sensuous pleasure:—he was very different from the miner. Gertrude herself was rather contemptuous of dancing; she had not the slightest inclination towards that accomplishment, and had never ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... out for silence; and that he could not hear his Christian King likened to the heathen emperor. Monk after monk would rise; one following his Prior, and disclaiming personal learning and responsibility; another with ironic deference saying that a man's soul was his own, and that not even a Religious Superior could release from the biddings of conscience; another would balance himself between the parties, declaring that the distinction of duties was insoluble; that ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... sincere expression of her curiosity and not doubtful or ironic challenge of an educated woman to a man of the forest. But as a challenge he ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... self-enrichment and the life of self-expenditure. They are interdependent, and rule the ancient order of gnosis and praxis. Whether we go to nature or religion or science for replenishment, we must be filled. And the ironic power which presides over our feasts compels the most inveterate egoist amongst us to share his treasures. Mind is for ever craving to give to mind. If we want nothing better than to boast of our superiority, the boasting imparts a lesson to others and is ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... describe the uproar which arose: the anguish of the Gorgonites—the shrieks, jeers, cheers, ironic cries of "Swipes!" etc., which proceeded from the less genteel but more ...
— The Bedford-Row Conspiracy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this familiar use of the term of relationship Tom Clark's attitude was respectful enough, more humorous than anything else, as if the news Adelle had given him merely completed his ironic philosophy of life. ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... chuckle. "I really must trouble you to obey my wishes," he replied, with ironic courtesy. "Otherwise I shall be compelled to do some damage to that car of yours, a proceeding I always try to ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... late, she knew, to do anything for Jane. The only thing that seemed possible to her in her simple reasoning, was to prevent such catastrophes for the future. It was not that pity was misplaced when shipwreck came, nor that charity ever failed. She understood, without being conscious of it, the ironic severity of Jesus, who would have no sudden pity and heart-searching on account of His poor. He had come into the world for righteousness and for judgment, and the judgment and righteousness both declared, not ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... in the boy's devotion seemed to move him, for his eyes were very kindly though his laugh was ironic. "You'll have an almighty awakening one of these days, my son," he said. "By the way, if we are going to be brothers, you had better call me by my ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... educational goals and, above all else, to the mission of the Christian religion. The work's two-part structure is a clue to a proper understanding of the genesis of The Reformed Librarie-Keeper and to its meaning and puts in ironic perspective its usefulness for later ...
— The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) • John Dury
... you do ask!" Her companion looked at her with an eye half affectionate, half ironic. "Most exclusive of women! I sometimes wish I might unveil your real opinions to the Radical fellows who ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The lieutenant was startled out of his ironic exultation. "You mean the guy that was stung by them forged letters—the complainant who's making it ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... most ironic strength of these kinds of archival electronic resources is that many of the teachers AM interviewed were desperate, it is no exaggeration to say, not only for primary materials but for unstructured primary materials. These would, they thought, ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... been in her momentary silence a hint of acceptance of it as a practical contribution to their problem, and there were indeed several lights in which it could be considered. Mrs. Brook, on a quick survey, selected the ironic. "I see, I see. I might by the same law arrange somehow that Lady Fanny should find herself in love with Edward. That would 'prove' HER purity. And you could be quite at ease," she laughed—"he ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... feared and fascinated. Whenever he was not looking, she could not take her eyes away. In the pictures in her mind, it showed itself most often in ironic rage; yet he could look at her with an expression that wooed the softest of thoughts in her heart. Then she felt a slave, and would have given him the world, held in her fingers, the gift would have ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... I feel the situation to be, that I was almost vexed to be challenged to renew our interrupted debate. The challenge, rather to my surprise, came from Audubon, who suddenly said to me, a propos of nothing, in a tone at once ironic and genial: ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... a failure; he stood for nothing in the world of achievement; for all the difference that his going made, he might never have been born. Then a thought as startling as the tangible appearance of some ironic, grinning imp flashed to his mind. Who was he, Bruce Burt, to criticise his partner, Slim? What more had he accomplished? How much more difference would his own death make in anybody's life? His mother's labored words came back with painful distinctness: ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... best at the real estimate of Burns, I think, by conceiving his work as having truth of matter and truth of manner, but not the accent or the poetic virtue of the highest masters. His genuine criticism of life, when the sheer poet in him speaks, is ironic; it ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... them sprang out like an army at the reveille, they were aloof and cold, and they rode above in an ironic disdain too ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... had not, he reflected, reconciled her to the frontiersman's necessarily simple mode of living—which was ironic, considering that one of her original attractions for him had been her apparent suitability for the pioneer life. She was a big girl, radiantly healthy, even though a ...
— The Venus Trap • Evelyn E. Smith
... not just be possible," he said, in his old half-pedantic, half-ironic intonation, "to find a locality less exposed to the roar of traffic and the rude jostling of pedestrians and the inclemency of the elements, in which we can enjoy the amenities of a ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... newspapers," his tone took on a tinge of ironic resentment, "when they learn the broad character of the credentials that I shall give you in order that you may meet the crowned heads of Europe, will say that I am again lowering the dignity of my office. But I consider, Mr. Edestone, that I am, in reality, giving more dignity ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... such a neighbourhood. It seemed as though the demon builder of the fantastic town, sporting with man's architectural ideals before his appearance on the earth, had hewn the red and yellow rocks above the Dourbie into the ironic semblance of ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensees?" He articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. "And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years," he went on, shewing that contempt for the things of this world which some men of the world like to affect, "we should read that the Queen of the Hellenes had arrived ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... these books is exclusively ironic. Never does the writer overtly state that he seeks to drag down a system which he hates by laughter. In Emmanuel Burden, that extraordinary book, the severity of the method is extreme, almost overwhelming. The author supposes himself to be writing ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... S- the elder passed me on the other side of the street with a wave of the hand and an ironic smile. The younger brother, the one they had married to an elderly shrew, he, on the strength of an older friendship and as if paying a debt of gratitude, took the liberty to utter a word ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... received when christened. They were young, rich, lovely and apparently heart-whole. Charley Whistler, being newly-wedded, wanted every one else in the world to get married. He was continually saying that there was "nothing like it," and resented some of the ironic rejoinders of men who had been married all their lives, to hear them talk about it. So he made haste to introduce the twins to ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... delicacy in interfering in a province not strictly his own. I have not been without my suspicions, that he was not altogether displeased at the contrast we presented to his end of the school. We were a sort of Helots to his young Spartans. He would sometimes, with ironic deference, send to borrow a rod of the Under Master, and then, with Sardonic grin, observe to one of his upper boys, "how neat and fresh the twigs looked." While his pale students were battering their brains over Xenophon and Plato, with a silence as deep as ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Senhor Jose," spoke the coronel, with ironic politeness, "that you may not go so soon. You have killed two men recently. You refuse to reveal some things which should be known about the German. Perhaps ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... are in vain. The male devil is fairly matched by the female devil: Tophet will furnish them of all genders. Caroline has Mephistopheles on her side, the demon who causes tables to spurt forth fire, and who, with his ironic finger points out the hiding place of ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... words the cripple fixed upon the speaker the hard ironic eye of one toughened and defiant in misery, and, in the end, grinned upon him with his unshaven face ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... was lost he knew! A single glance at his judges made him certain of it, and from this moment his features wore a calm and contemptuous smile, an unchangeable expression of scorn. With an ironic curiosity he followed his judges through the labyrinth of artfully contrived captious questions by which they hoped to entangle him; occasionally he gave himself, as it were for his own amusement, the appearance ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... thrust upon us a new internationalism. To-day the world is united by starvation, disease and misery. We are enjoying the ironic internationalism of hatred. The victors are forced to shoulder the burden of the vanquished. International philanthropies and charities are organized. The great flux of immigration and emigration has recommenced. Prosperity is ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... course, JERRY!" exclaimed Mrs. Carew in ironic scorn. "But why stop with Jerry? I'm sure Jerry has hosts of friends who would ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... doubtful. But Tiberius cannot be acquitted of all blame. The cynical humour with which it pleased him to mark the steady advance of autocracy, the lentae maxillae which Augustus attributed to his adopted son,[3] the icy and ironic cruelty which was—on the most favourable estimate—a not inconsiderable element in his character, no doubt all exercised a chilling influence, not only on politics but on all spontaneous expression of human character. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... true, actor and actress have been treated increasingly as human beings, less as puppets who walk about on the stage. This volume contains two stories illustrating the statement: "The Urge," by Maryland Allen, which marshalls the grimly ironic reasons for the success of the heroine who is the most famous comedienne of her day; "Fifty-Two Weeks for Florette," which touches with a pathos that gave the story instant recognition the lives of vaudeville Florette and her son. It is not without ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... witnesses to his shame—secret commentators upon his weakness. He recalled pictures of men held in pillories for communities to gibe at—and he felt that his position was not unlike theirs. He had at times a frantic realization that he had unconquerable strength, but that by some ironic circumstance he could ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... I won a prize. A cynic watched me, with ironic eyes; An open foe, in open hatred, sneered; I cared for neither. Then my friend appeared. Eager, I listened for his glad 'Well done.' But sudden shadow seemed to shroud my sun. He praised me: yet each slow, unwilling word Forced from its ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... day Methuen tried by every rule he knew to draw the enemy; vainly, the Lancers rode recklessly to induce those human rock limpets to come out and cut them off. Cronje knew the mettle of our men, and an ironic laugh played round his iron mouth, and still he stayed within his native fastness; but Death sat ever at his elbow, for our gunners dropped the lyddite shells and the howling shrapnel all along his lines, until the trenches ran blood, and many of his guns were silenced. In the valley behind ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... told the most droll stories of his life in London. It appeared that he had lived there in a hotbed of exiled radicals; but he, himself, seemed to have no convictions. Everything he described was touched with a certain ironic humor. When he rose to go he ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Ancient Spirit and Chorus of the Years, the Spirit and Chorus of the Pities, the Spirit Ironic, the Spirit Sinister, Rumours, Spirit-Messengers, and ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... His wrinkled features, ironic but benevolent, intimated that he knew she wished to take an unfair advantage of the gifts which Nature had bestowed on her, and that ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... until after the freight was paid over in gold sovereigns; and with an air of ostentatious authority he gave instructions to have all the muskets and revolvers loaded and ready in case they should be required. The hideous scoundrel fixed his eye on the captain, and with ironic accent intimated he could not help being filled with concern when he heard the orders given ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... men's minds, against whatever odds. On one side of the throne great Walsingham, A lion of England, couchant, watchful, calm, Was now the master of opinion: all Drew to him. Even the hunchback Burleigh smiled With half-ironic admiration now, As in the presence of the Queen they met Amid the sweeping splendours of her court, A cynic smile that seemed to say, "I, too, Would fain regain that forthright heart of fire; Yet statesmanship is but a smoother name For the superior cunning which ensures Victory." And the Queen, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... a clean-minded little person, her people were of the clean-minded type, therefore she did not understand all that this ironic speech implied, but she gathered enough of its significance to cause her to turn first red and then pale and then to burst into tears. She was crying and trying to conceal the fact when Hannah returned. She bent her head and touched her eyes ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... unread if they deal with a phase of human evolution that does not please him. I mean the critic who drags his victim back to Aristotle or Matthew Arnold and slays him on a text whose application Aristotle or Arnold would have been the first to deny. I mean the teacher who by ironic thrust and visible contempt destroys the faith of youth in the literary present without imparting more than a pallid interest in the past. I mean the essayist who in 1911 described Masefield as an unsound ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Thackeray was marked in his manner, and showed impulse and energy in small utterances. I may err, but I do not think he could have endured solitude or too much of himself. He was eminently social, and rather given at times to reckless (not deliberate or spiteful), sarcastic or "ironic" sallies, in which he did not, with Americans, generally come off "first best." There was a very beautiful lady in Boston with whom the great novelist was much struck, and whom he greatly admired, as he sent her two magnificent bronzes. Having dined one evening at her house, he remarked ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... it will be enough to know that as a seducer he was the most perfect thing that the devil had succeeded in inventing in this progressive century. The prince was dressed out for the occasion in a sufficiently grotesque costume, which he wore with ironic gravity and cavalier ease. A black satin doublet, knee breeches, embroidered stockings, and shoes with gold buckles, formed the main portions of his dress, over which trailed a long brocaded open-sleeved robe ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to throw off stuff at escape velocity, but it's a matter of energy and we can't handle one percent of what we'd need. Even if you could generate it fast enough, your conduits would melt under the current." He got up and walked a few steps, then sat down again. "Ironic, isn't it? All we can do is ...
— Tulan • Carroll Mather Capps
... Argus office with slow steps and bowed head, while I went thoughtfully abroad to ease my nerves by watching the splendid death of summer. Above the hills, now royally colored, as by great rugs of brown and crimson velvet flung over their flanks, I seemed to hear the echoes of ironic laughter—the laughter of perverse gods who had chosen to avenge the slight put upon an ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... life that was so sunburnt and wine-sweetened and woman-kissed, my life that seemed to me as bright, every second of it, as bright ducats rushing in a pleasant plenteous stream from one hand to another, was after all intended to be no more than a kind of ironic commentary on, and petty contrast to, ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... it is not easy for the perceptive critic to doubt this permanence. One might as sensibly deny a future to Ecclesiastes, The Golden Ass, Gulliver's Travels, and the works of Rabelais as to predict oblivion for such a thesaurus of ironic wit and fine fantasy, mellow wisdom and strange beauty as Jurgen. But to appreciate the tales of Chivalry is, it seems, a gift more frequently reserved for the general reader than for the professional literary evaluator. Certainly years before ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... been coupled in Hester's mind with the Biblical words—'ruddy and of a cheerful countenance'; and as he sat there flushed with air and exercise, they fitted him even better than usual. Yet there was modern subtlety too in his restless eyes, and mouth alternately sensitive and ironic. ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "It's ironic, isn't it?" Nora said slowly. "We left here so long ago, looking for worlds with life, and we come back to find ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... see you? Why should you have thought that?" There was a trace of ironic amusement in ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... he was not the latter, for while they are lively they do not reveal much literary ability. But their writer saw with open eyes, eyes that were disposed to caricature the peculiarities of others. This trait, much clarified and spiritualized in later life, became a distinct, ironic note in his character. Possibly it attracted Heine, although his irony was on a more ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... that they, in payment of their debt to Fate, ought to occupy the time that is on their hands by becoming ornamental, and increasing the world's store of beauty. In a sense, certainly, they are ornamental. It is a strange fact, and an ironic, that they spend quite five times the annual amount that was spent by their grandmothers on personal adornment. If they can afford it, well and good: let us have no sumptuary law. But plenty of pretty dresses will not suffice. Pretty manners ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... evening opposition paper had come out with a red-hot article condemning the administration for reckless extravagance. It had especially condemned Dugan for burdening the city with new bonds to create an unneeded park, and the whole thing had ended with a screech of ironic laughter over the—so the editor called it—fitting capstone of the whole business, the purchase of two dongola goats at ...
— The Water Goats and Other Troubles • Ellis Parker Butler
... appointment, found a stranger standing there—a tall, aristocratic-looking Personage with silky, grey sidewhiskers. The bald-headed, sly little lawyer-fellow called out, "Come in—come in, Mr. Razumov," with a sort of ironic heartiness. Then turning deferentially to the stranger with the grand air, "A ward of mine, your Excellency. One of the most promising students of his faculty in the ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... in a fine blue surtout and a wide-brimmed hat, who sat upon the shaft of a cart and puffed slowly at a great pipe. And as he puffed, he listened intently to the quack-salver's address, and from time to time his eyes would twinkle and his lips curve in an ironic smile. The cart, upon the shaft of which he sat, stood close to a very small, dirty, and disreputable-looking tent, towards which the old gentleman's back was turned. Now, as I watched, I saw the point ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... us!" exclaimed Miss Ingate, partly afraid, and partly ironic at her own fear. "I'm sure he's coming down on us. Audrey, I liked that man at first, but now I tremble before him. And I'm sure his moustache is dyed. Can't ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... difficult to read at the best of times, and undecipherable in hard pencil on thin paper, handed the letter over to the faithful Bakkus, who read it aloud with a running commentary of ironic humour. This Andrew did not know till ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... wonder how his mother would take this visit; but he welcomed Mr. Langhope's departure, hoping that the withdrawal of his ironic smile would leave his daughter open to gentler influences. Mr. Tredegar, meanwhile, was projecting his dry glance over the scene, trying to converse by signs with the overseers of the different rooms, and pausing now and then to contemplate, not so much the workers themselves as the ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... go into retirement. She was always leaving abruptly for Europe, and every once in a while she did something quite uncanonical; enjoying wickedly the consternation she caused among the serenely regulated, and betraying to the keen eyes of the New Yorker an ironic appreciation of the immense wealth which enabled her to do as she chose, answerable to no one. Her husband was uxorious and she had no children. She had seemed to Price more restless than usual of late and showing unmistakable signs ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... An ironic traveler, passing through Dry Bottom in its younger days, before civic spirit had definitely centered its efforts upon things nomenclatural, had hinted that the town should be known as "dry" because of the fact that while it boasted seven buildings, four were saloons; and that "bottom" ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... By humorous inversion, he points the sound moral and vivifies the right principle for the youth to whom the dawning consciousness of morality is the first real psychological discovery of life. With hearty laughter at the stupid irritations of self-conscious virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid Puritanism of mechanical morality, Mark Twain enraptures that innumerable company of the sophisticated who have chafed under the omnipresent influence of a "good example" and stilled the painless pangs of an unruly conscience. With splendid satire for the base, with shrill ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... difficulties, he hid from bailiffs, he did many other things that tarnish honour, more or less, and things for which he had to beg Prue's special pardon; but yet he is not a fit subject for the unhandsome incredulity which is proud to be always at hand with an ironic commentary on ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... as Bill calls them. I even tried to learn something of the language from the "boy" who was our servant in San Francisco. He was not a scholarly boy, and he told lies in English, so that it is possible his tuition was of no value. I remember Bill was ironic because, when Nakamura was dismissed in ignominy, and wrote on the kitchen wall for the benefit of his successor, I was unable to decipher ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... Montagu kissed it where it lay. For a minute she did not lift the hand, what time I lay in a dream of warm happiness. A chuckle from the opposite seat aroused me. The eyes in the colourless face had opened, and Volney sat looking at us with an ironic smile. ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... hopelessly and unreasonably complicated his existence for him. One absurdity more or less in the development did not matter. All absurdity was distasteful to him; but, urbane as ever, he produced a faintly ironic smile and said ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... screened window across the garden. They said he was very interesting, of course, but painfully shy and bashful. As for him, he was as horribly afraid of them as they would have been of him, had they known. I could not always save myself from the sin of smiling at an ironic situation. ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... to inundate. inusitado unusual. inutil useless. invadir to invade. invasor m. invader. inventar to invent. invierno winter. invitar to invite. ir to go; vr. to go away, depart; ir (with present part.), to go on —ing. iris m. rainbow. ironia irony. ironico ironic. irrealizable unrealizable. irritar to irritate. isla island. islamita m. Mohammedan. Italia Italy. italiano Italian. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... had been talking so familiarly, was no other than the successor of St. James, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem. I had supposed him some sub-prior or domestic chaplain. His Beatitude acknowledged my surprise by an ironic grin. ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... accepted the foreman's attitude with a wave of the hand that dismissed any counterargument. But there was an ironic gleam ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... part of "Marquise," of "Bel-a-faire-peur," and of such wanderers like them, who had buried their sixteen quarterings under the black shield of the Battalion of Africa. With a word here and a touch there,—tender, soft, and bright,—since, however ironic her mood, she never brought anything except sunshine to those who lay in such sore need of it, beholding the sun in the heavens only through the narrow chink of a hospital window; at last she reached the bed she came most specially to visit—a bed on which was stretched the ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... to multiply these instances. Our own knowledge supplies them by the score. Our personal lives are full of them. God's Will, God's Love, God's Mercy, become strangely ironic forces, grim beyond any open enmity. They remind us of the "love," the "pity," the "mercy," in which the orthodox sent the heretic to the hangman or the stake, destroying the ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... great Clamour against some late Performances of Authorship, and the unprecedented Criticisms introduc'd" make such an essay as he writes "absolutely necessary." Yet there is no clear indication of just what works occasion this necessity. The ironic reference to Mr. Dennis at the end of the first paragraph, taken together with the praise of Mr. Pope's translation of Homer and the allusion to "the malicious and violent Criticisms of a certain Gentleman in its Disfavour" [p. 23], might ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... to the theme that women should be handled with the rod. Gil Campos proceeded to laugh, being gifted with an ironic vein, and made fun of him. For my part, I was tired of it, so ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... me before and they wouldn't take my word for my blameless past. They told me to keep my story for trial when they took me over to the court. Meanwhile they gave me a free lodging in their pen. Miss Arundel—" Hilliard dropped his ironic tone and spoke in a low, tense voice of child-like horror. His face stiffened and paled. "That was awful. To be locked in. Not to be able to get fresh breath in your lungs. Not to be able to go where you please, when you please. I can't tell you what it's like ... I can't stand it! I can't stand ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... and des hypocrites et routinieres jeunes filles. If women but knew they would prostrate themselves before him as did the weeping ones upon the body of the dead Adonis! The key of this discourse is high-pitched and cutting. Laforgue, a philosopher, a pessimist, makes his art the canvas for his ironic temperament. The Prince's interview with Ophelia is full of soundless mirth. And how he lavishes upon his own deranged head offensive abuse: "Piteous provincial! Cabotin! Pedicure!" This last is ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... jongleurs; and one of not the least amusing[134] deals with the half-clumsy, half-satiric boasts of two members of the order, who misquote the titles of their repertoire, make by accident or intention ironic comments on its contents, and in short do not magnify their office in a very modern spirit ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... are most wondrous—yet who will dare to say they take precedence over the wondrous ways of the stomach? And the ways are ironic; is it not conceivable that the two should align in devious fruition? For Gral found answer, not in his groping hands, but tangled ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... junior journalist. But latterly (since his marriage with a rich City merchant's daughter) an insidious seriousness had overtaken him; he began first to tolerate, then to respect, then to revere the sources of his affluence. The old ironic spirit was there to chastise him whenever he caught himself doing it; but that spirit made discord with the elegant respectability which was now the ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... shelf devoted to her poets; there was no addition that I could see. Over it hung the fine photograph of Watts's "Hope," an ironic emblem, and elsewhere one of that intolerably sad picture, his "Paolo and Francesca": how I remembered the wet Sunday when Catherine took me to see the original in Melbury Road! The old piano which was never touched, the one which had been in St. Helena with Napoleon's doctor, there it ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... and Kitty decided that the younger man had gone on. Silence; or rather, she no longer heard the speakers. Then a low chuckle came to her and this chuckle broadened into ironic laughter; and she knew that Mephisto was abroad. What had been the wager; and what was the meaning of the six months? It is instinctive in woman to interpret the human voice correctly, especially when the eyes are not distracted by physical presentations. This man outside, whoever and ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... The summer sun was dying in a splendid riot of colour among the rose trees. Its last rays, falling on the face of the god Pan, illuminated his fantastic features and seemed to lend them the life of an ironic leer. The warm air was rich with the blended odours of a thousand blossoms, and from the palace, faint and far off, came the sound of joyous voices. It was almost the moment when the rose garden was to be thrown ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Swinburne—of middle height or below it, inclined to be stout; the face well-featured, with forehead domed to reverence and quick, pointed chin; a face lighted with hazel-clear vivid eyes and charming with sensuous-full mobile lips that curve easily to kisses or gay ironic laughter; an exceedingly sensitive, eager speaking face that mirrors every fleeting ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... one evening, when a Turkish aeroplane arrived and dropped bombs first on the horse-lines and then on us. Fortunately his aim was as bad as his taste was deplorable in coming at a time when decent folk were having a meal. Neither men nor horses were hit and we had the ironic satisfaction of sheltering from his bombs in the trenches his countrymen had made. Even that failed to ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... the police come to arrest him. And while his friend tries desperately to resist the agents of the force, he contemplates the brutal scene with an ironic smile. ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... invents a legend to which it then attaches a fanatical belief. It is the protest of romance against the commonplace of life. The incidents of the legend become the hero's surest passport to immortality. The ironic philosopher reflects with a smile that Sir Walter Raleigh is more safely inshrined in the memory of mankind because he set his cloak for the Virgin Queen to walk on than because he carried the English ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... kettle-holder. At the head of each bed she would sit down and rummage in the bag, speaking in her slow but quite good French, to explain the use of the acidulated drops, or to give a lesson in cat's cradles. And the poilus would listen with their polite, ironic patience, and be left smiling, and curiously fascinated, as if they had been visited by a creature from another world. She would move on to other beds, quite unconscious of the effect she had produced ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... and children huddled shoulder to shoulder in the cramping quarters. An ironic picture came to me of the crowding masses of Quabos stuffed into the protection of the outer cave, waiting the outcome of the fight being waged by their warriors. Here were we in a similar circumstance, waiting for the battle to be decided. Though there was little doubt in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... vanished and was lost. After a year of pre-med at the University of Southern Cal, he had given up medicine; he had become discouraged and quit college to take a laborer's job with a construction company. How ironic that this move should have saved his life! He'd wanted to work with his hands, to sweat and labor with the muscles of his body. He'd wanted to earn enough to marry Joan and then, later perhaps, he would have returned to finish his courses. It all seemed so far away now, ...
— Small World • William F. Nolan
... have been considered ingratiating. He sauntered up to the three younger men, who stood in a group smoking as they waited for their hostess, and introduced himself with a little too evident assurance—nevertheless it is to be doubted whether he received the intended impression of faint and ironic chill: there was no hint of ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... change was owing to disappointment: life had not become so highly cultured, literature had not prospered so much, nor displayed so broad a diffusion of intelligence and taste, as had been expected. Pope's Dunciad, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and ironic satire on the state of literature under "Augustus" (George II, the "snuffy old drone from the German hive"), brilliantly express this indignation with the intellectual and literary ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... is invested with the tribunitian power. M. Anatole France is something of a Socialist; and in that respect he seems to depart from his sceptical philosophy. But as an illustrious statesman, now no more, a great prince too, with an ironic mind and a literary gift, has sarcastically remarked in one of his public speeches: "We are all Socialists now." And in the sense in which it may be said that we all in Europe are Christians that is true enough. To many of us Socialism is merely an emotion. An emotion is much and is ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... was, "English industry" seemed tolerably active amid its "ruins." The clumsy falsehoods of the German official reports and the German newspapers affect me strangely! It is not so much their lack of truth as their lack of the ironic, the satiric sense, which is a certain protection, after all, even amid the tragedy of war. We have a tolerable British conceit of ourselves, no doubt, and in war we make foolish or boasting statements about the future, because, ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... good Liberal of that day. What was to be done about it? He took the Lays and rewrote them in an excellent imitation of Aytoun, but on the opposite side. In view of his own later developments such a line as "Drive the trembling Papists backwards" has an ironic humour. But one wonders what Aytoun himself would have made of a small boy who took his rhythm and sometimes his very words, turned his hero into a traitor ("false Montrose") and his traitor Argyll into a hero! I ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... to crudely geometrize. Now it is not necessary to assume that we are to revert to the conditions of savagery in order to believe that in this matter of a sound aesthetic we must begin where art has always begun—with number and geometry. Nevertheless there is a subtly ironic view which one is justified in holding in regard to quite obvious aspects of American life, in the light of which that life appears to have rather more in common ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... to occasion me much inward edification. What contradictory attributes of character we sometimes find ascribed to us, according to the eye with which we are viewed! Madame Beck esteemed me learned and blue; Miss Fanshawe, caustic, ironic, and cynical; Mr. Home, a model teacher, the essence of the sedate and discreet: somewhat conventional, perhaps, too strict, limited, and scrupulous, but still the pink and pattern of governess-correctness; whilst another person, Professor Paul ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... some twenty-five years ago—a young farmer who broke his neck out hunting on the eve of the wedding day. She had the unmoved countenance of the deaf, spoke very seldom, and her lips, thin like her father's, astonished one sometimes by a mysteriously ironic curl. ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... of Faure, the atmosphere and impressionistic tendencies of Debussy and the exoticism of the Neo-Russians—yet he is indeed no empty reflection of these men, for he has his own bold, fantastic style and has been a daring experimenter in freedom of harmony and structure. One finds a power of ironic brilliance and of unexpected harmonic transformations certainly new in modern literature. Ravel[302] is one of the most versatile and prolific of all the younger Frenchmen having composed significant works in at least four fields: songs, particularly the set entitled Histoires Naturelles, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... anxiously. Not for the first time there occurred to him a thought which suited only too well with his ironic habits of mind. What if this hypocritic comedy were altogether superfluous? What if Mr. Warricombe would have received him no less cordially had he avowed his sincere position, and contented himself with guarding against offensiveness? ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Defence of a Letter (1704), and again in A Reply to Mr. Palmer's Vindication (1707). It is scarcely to Wesley's credit that in this quarrel he stood shoulder to shoulder with that most hot-headed of all contemporary bigots, Henry Sacheverell. His prominence in the controversy earned him the ironic compliments of Defoe, who recalled that our "Mighty Champion of this very High-Church Cause" had once written a poem to satirize frenzied Tories (Review, II, no. 87, Sept. 22, 1705). About a week later Defoe, having got wind of a collection being taken up for Wesley—who in consequence of ...
— Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) and the Essay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697) • Samuel Wesley
... memorized the energy-mass equation in an attempt to justify his new status in life, but he hasn't the remotest notion of what it means. It's ironic in a way that Pfleugersville should have been discovered by someone with an IQ of less ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
... felt an ironic slant in the words or not, he paused a moment before he said: "Want to start her ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... group of poets, novelists, and dramatists, who, as men and women, are a most interesting company—a fact to which even George Moore's Hail and Farewell, with its quick eye for defects and foibles and its ironic wit, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... itself a poisoned thing, a thing penetrated by the spirit of evil. It is because the universe is always penetrated by the malice of the various visions whose "universe" it is, that we suffer so cruelly from its ironic "diablerie." A universe entirely composed of the bodies and souls of beings whose primordial emotion is so largely made up of malice is naturally a malicious universe. The age-old tradition of the witchery ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... Heidegger, which Hogarth had not long before stigmatised pictorially in the plate known to collectors as the "large Masquerade Ticket." As verse this performance is worthless, and it is not very forcibly on the side of good manners; but the ironic dedication has a certain touch of Fielding's later fashion. Two other poetical pieces, afterwards included in the Miscellanies of 1743, also bear the date of 1728. One is A Description of U—n G— (alias New Hog's Norton) in Com. Hants, which Mr. Keightley has identified ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... enemy I am bound to admit that Mr. Bennett's case, which is the German case, is a very strong one and that his ironic comment on the case against Germany, "We have here an example of Mr. Shaw's aptitude for practical politics," is a comment that the Kaiser will probably make and that the average "practical ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... extremely gracious to him. Renouard guessed in him a man whom an incurable habit of investigation and analysis had made gentle and indulgent; inapt for action, and more sensitive to the thoughts than to the events of existence. Withal not crushed, sub-ironic without a trace of acidity, and with a simple manner which put people at ease quickly. They had a long conversation on the terrace commanding an extended view of the town ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... fact that what you are reading is "poetry"—if you do this, you are not likely to leave it unfinished. And before you reach the end you will have encountered *en route* pretty nearly all the moods of poetry that exist: tragic, humorous, ironic, elegiac, lyric—everything. You will have a comprehensive acquaintance with a poet's mind. I guarantee that you will come safely through if you treat the work as a novel. For a novel it effectively is, and a better one than any written ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... Missourians had tossed on straw for the lack of quinine, and yet were presuming to save this gorgeous empire of golden spurred gentlemen. The thought of his mission gave Driscoll an ironic twinge. ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... can do?" he demanded, looking down at her with something grimly ironic in his eyes. She steadied ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... not provoke to ironic laughter that very nemesis which presides over the destinies of nations, if the most autocratic government yet remaining in civilization should succeed in utilizing for its own autocratic methods the youngest and most daring experiment in democratic government which the world has ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... him that has a sense for the God-like. Often, notwithstanding, was I blamed, and by half-strangers hated, for my so-called Hardness (Haerte), my Indifferentism towards men; and the seemingly ironic tone I had adopted, as my favourite dialect in conversation. Alas, the panoply of Sarcasm was but as a buckram case, wherein I had striven to envelop myself; that so my own poor Person might live safe there, and in all friendliness, being no longer exasperated ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... ideals. The Augustan satiric alternative—returning to older beliefs in religion, government, philosophy, art—and the stylistic expression of such beliefs—formal verse satire and epistle, mock-poem, heroic or Hudibrastic couplet, diction of polite conversation, ironic metaphysical conceits, fantastic fictional situations—become irrelevant to the satirist writing when the past seems lost. In his later works, Pope took Augustan satire about as far as it could go. The Epilogue to the Satires becomes an epilogue to all Augustan satire and the conclusion of ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... stuffed them full with preliminary meat. Oh, droll! oh, delicious! oh, rare for Antony! And now a young man noticeable by his emaciated face and his premature baldness was drawing to the front amid ironic cheers. When the grotesque racers had passed by, noble cavaliers displayed their dexterity at the quintain, and beautiful ladies at the balconies—not masked, as in France, but radiantly revealed—changed their broad smiles to the subtler smiles of dalliance. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... since whether we might have known the love of the mind. Is love something entirely of the flesh, something created by an ironic God merely to propagate His race? Or can there be love without emotion, love without passion—love between two cold intellects? I do not know. I did not ask then. I accepted anything that would make our ...
— The Coming of the Ice • G. Peyton Wertenbaker
... DUFFERIN, yes, the Reptile Press Is not confined to realms Teutonic. You squelch it—could you well do less?— With an urbanity fine, ironic. France is too chivalrous, too polite, To back these crawlers, venomous, "varment"!— But our Ambassador does quite right To—brush ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 25, 1893 • Various
... not that Storch was unable to discover a score of men ready and willing to murder Hilmer, but he was finding an ironic diversion in shoving a weary soul to the brink. He liked to confirm his faith in the power of sorrow and misery and bitterness ... he liked to triumph over that healing curse of indifference which time accomplished with such subtlety. He took a delight in cutting the heart and soul out of his ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... most kind," he returned with a bow and an ironic smile. "I trust you will let me prove my friendship both to Adrien ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... "To act as an angel". There is a sub-ironic touch in this phrase which should not ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... being, so that all the time she was making up, not only for others but for herself, a sham person who did not exist. That Nan found infinitely oppressive. So did Pamela, but Pamela was more tolerant and sympathetic and less ill-tempered than Nan, and observed the ways of others with quiet, ironic humour, saying nothing unkind. Pamela, when she didn't like a way of talking—when Rosalind, for instance, was being malicious or indecent or both—would skilfully carry the talk somewhere else. She could ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... the other's ironic fence with crude thwacks. 'Do you think a God-fearing congregation would offer office to ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... him more closely to the Schlegels than to Novalis, with his life-and-death consecrations. His absurd play-within-a-play, Puss in Boots (1797), is delicious in its bizarre ragout of satirical extravaganzas, where the naive and the ironic lie side by side, and where the pompous seriousness of certain complacent standards ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... defeat by raising his hat with ironic politeness, and Zora walked swiftly away, in appearance a majestic Amazon, but inwardly a quivering woman. She marched straight up to the recumbent Dix. The Literary Man from London would have been amused. She interposed herself between the conversing Teutons ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... had turned his face away and was plucking the lobes from a frond of fern. "A brave resolve, Father," he said, with an ironic note. "But you have not yet told me what brings you off your ...
— The Broken Soldier and the Maid of France • Henry Van Dyke
... bothered seconds, shrugged his shoulders slightly. This affair had hopelessly and unreasonably complicated his existence for him. One absurdity more or less in the development did not matter. All absurdity was distasteful to him; but, urbane as ever, he produced a faintly ironic smile and said in his ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... with an air of ostentatious authority he gave instructions to have all the muskets and revolvers loaded and ready in case they should be required. The hideous scoundrel fixed his eye on the captain, and with ironic accent intimated he could not help being filled with concern when he heard the orders ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... annals Disguised as the child of a king, But that is a glib And iniquitous fib, For she never was any such thing: They called her the Fair One with Golden Locks, And it's true she had lovers who swarmed in flocks, But the rest is ironic; Her business chronic Was selling hair-tonic ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... where his father lay. Some one had softly unlocked that door, and entered. He knew who that one must be. His place was there alone with his mother, before they were called together as a family, and the mask of decency resumed for those ironic rites in the presence of the ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... said Canalejas. His smile was ironic as before. "But, unlike Senor Ortiz, I have no hope. I have arranged for my daughter to conceal herself and escape from Brazil. I have prepared for everything, Senhor. As you know, I had intended to kill Senhor Ribiera. In returning with ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... above struck blind on the glass in one eye, but the other danced with a genial, a mad scintillation. The light of it caught like contagion, and touched the merest glancer at him with the spark of its warm, ironic mirth. The question which naturally rose to Flora's lips—"Who in the world is that?"—she checked; why, she didn't ask herself. She only felt as she followed Clara, trailing away across the floor, that the interest ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... found in the group, from the Catholic to the freethinker and the bolshevist—one of Froment's young friends professed to be of this opinion. In them you could find the traces of the most various intellectual ancestry; the ironic Lucian appeared in the old professor; the Count de Coulanges was wont to solace himself in the evenings on his estate with cattle and fertiliser, but also revelled in the gorgeous texture of Froissart's style, like cloth ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... terrible female person with a deep bass voice, who asked you over the counter as you entered, "Which side, young man?" It was bad enough to be called "Bubbie", but to be called "young man" in this ironic bass was almost insufferable. Yet you bore it nobly, for the sake of the pound of shot for your air-gun or the blood-alley or the great pink and white peppermints, two for a cent, that reposed in a glass jar on the left side of the shop. Was Miss Emily so terrible a person, I wonder ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... unbroken glare of white makes my eyes ache.... There's one big indoor task I finally have accomplished, and that is tuning my piano. It made my heart heavy, standing there useless, a gloomy monument of ironic grandeur. ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... recovered his composure, an ironic smile curved his lips beneath his small moustache, whilst his hand sought that of Elizabeth: it was the only way he could, at the moment, express the sympathy he had never ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... Marie Ivanovna.... I see her still, bending over the well looking down, then suddenly flinging her head back, laughing as we stood behind her, the sunlight through the apple-trees flashing in her eyes.... That fortnight must be to many of us of how ironic, of ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... out with a red-hot article condemning the administration for reckless extravagance. It had especially condemned Dugan for burdening the city with new bonds to create an unneeded park, and the whole thing had ended with a screech of ironic laughter over the—so the editor called it—fitting capstone of the whole business, the purchase of two dongola goats ...
— The Water Goats and Other Troubles • Ellis Parker Butler
... accurately enough to throw off stuff at escape velocity, but it's a matter of energy and we can't handle one percent of what we'd need. Even if you could generate it fast enough, your conduits would melt under the current." He got up and walked a few steps, then sat down again. "Ironic, isn't it? All we can do is ...
— Tulan • Carroll Mather Capps
... accident so commonplace and inconsequent that it was a comedy. Fate had reserved for him the final insult of riding him down under the wheels of one of those juggernauts at which he had once shouted "Git a hoss!" Nevertheless, Fate's ironic choice for Georgie's undoing was not a big and swift and momentous car, such as Eugene manufactured; it was a specimen of the hustling little type that was flooding the country, the cheapest, commonest, hardiest ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... ever," replied Jeter, "hear what is described in the best fiction as a burst of ironic laughter? Well, that what the Hueber, as it now stands, or floats, is! But the enemy made a foolish move and will live to ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... scene of achievement; that here he was to have written the book that should make his place secure. Ah, well, fate had decreed it otherwise. It had set plump in his path the melodrama he had come up to Baldpate to avoid. Ironic fate, she must be laughing now in the sleeve of her kimono. Feeling about in the shadows Magee gathered his things together, put them in his bags, and with a last look at number seven, closed the door forever on ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... They approached curiously. With ironic impudence the message was scrawled in red crayon upon the reverse of one of Jonathan McGuire's neat trespass signs, and nailed to the tree by an old hasp-knife. Side by side, and intensely interested, ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... an ironic, throaty human voice! It was deep and mellow, yet there was a queer rasp to it. Mary and I stood transfixed. Migul seemed to sag. The metal columns of ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... generous applause, no flowers were handed up to me. The only praise I received came from Charles Lohr, the man who had warned me against becoming a lawyer's hack. He, meeting me in the wings of the stage as I came off, remarked with ironic significance, "Well, that was an ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Delivered of this ironic thrust, Tessie would walk toward the screen door with a little flaunting sway of the hips. Her mother's eyes, following the slim figure, had a sort of grudging love in them. A spare, caustic, wiry little woman, ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... good," suggested the secretary with ironic seriousness. "Takes your mind off that silly trouble. ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... clean-minded little person, her people were of the clean-minded type, therefore she did not understand all that this ironic speech implied, but she gathered enough of its significance to cause her to turn first red and then pale and then to burst into tears. She was crying and trying to conceal the fact when Hannah returned. She bent her head and touched her eyes furtively while her toilette ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the great bird turned his head and gazed down upon him with an ironic fixity which betrayed neither dread nor wonder. Concluding that the nest would be lying somewhere within view of its owner's watch-tower, Horner now turned his efforts towards reaching the dead pine. With infinite difficulty, and with a few bruises to arm and leg, he managed to cross the jagged ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... full the bright, hard, vivid gaze of the alert Cheriton. It had an odd expression at this moment; unmistakably inimical, observantly curious, distinctly sardonic. A faint ironic smile just touched the corners of his determined mouth. Peter returned the look with his puzzled, enquiring eyes that sought ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... in talking was rich and varied, and it was an ironic caprice which made him refuse to write in that language. I doubt, though, whether he would have composed with ease in any tongue, for he found it hard to concentrate, and his small stock of verse was the outcome of ten years of unoccupied life. He approved, rather mockingly, my promise to try ...
— The Garden of Bright Waters - One Hundred and Twenty Asiatic Love Poems • Translated by Edward Powys Mathers
... flagstones of the passage were hard and cold to her naked feet; that was how you could tell you were awake. The door of the Morfe drawing-room opened into Mamma's old bedroom at Five Elms, and when she came to the foot of the bed she saw her father standing there. He looked at her with a mocking, ironic animosity, so that she knew ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... tell you that too," remarked Stepney, with an ironic intention which the other received with the light murmur, "I can at least FIND OUT, my dear fellow"; and Mrs. Bry having declared that she couldn't walk another step, the party hailed two or three of the light phaetons which hover attentively on the confines of the ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... I left you in a hurry last night and forgot to pay my bill. What's the damage?" asked Clay in his gently ironic drawl. ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... passionately fond of them. And when the wonderful view (mentioned in Baedeker—'fatiguing but repaying')—was disclosed to him after the effort of the climb, he had doubtless felt the existence of some great, dignified principle crowning the chaotic strivings, the petty precipices, and ironic little dark chasms of life. This was as near to religion, perhaps, as his practical spirit had ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... stood nearest to Sir Michael. Some of the others laughed at him, calling him Don Quixote, and she heard Sir Michael say that the young man's theories were those of the Gironde. "The Revolution devours her own children," he said, with his fine old ironic smile. "And a good many of us have to eat our own professions before we're forty. The great thing would be if we could keep our youthful generosity with the wisdom ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... Buck's ironic humor to ride beside the girl who had just attempted his life. He bore her no resentment. Had the offender been a man, Buck would have snuffed out his life with as little remorse as he would a guttering candle. But her sex and her youth, and some quality ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... In ironic response to the pleas of the Regulators, the Governor of North Carolina summoned a force of one thousand militia men and led them into the western settlements. At the end of the day, May 16, 1771, two hundred and fifty of the two thousand Regulators who had gathered with their rifles at Alamance ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... an inarticulate noise, apparently meant to convey an effect of ironic incredulity. More intelligible comment was interrupted by a ring of the telephone. He swung around, clapped receiver to ear, snapped an impatient "Well?" and ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... the very first moment of his emergence at Toulon, when the whiff of grape-shot, symptom of an inexorable, merciless intellect and will, started him upon the road that led to the Napoleonic Era. Destiny is always ironic. For the deficiency of the internal secretions which made him eligible for glory was responsible as well as for ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... for his happiness. The new Braithwaite both in body and character had hardened. His gray eyes had concentrated into command. His clean-shaven cheeks and small military mustache gave him an expression which was tolerantly ironic. The moment you saw him, you knew beyond question that he was ruthlessly aware of what he wanted out of life. He was a sword which had lain hidden in its scabbard and was now withdrawn, glistening, intimidating ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... with them. "The big child"—to some women, as we all know, man presents himself in that aspect chiefly. Pauline, remarking of her lover's "idea" that it was perhaps as unintelligible to him as to her, is a tender exponent of this view; the girl in Youth and Art is gayer and more ironic. Here we have a woman, successful though (as I read the poem)[12:1] not famous, recalling to a successful and famous sculptor the days when they lived opposite one another—she as a young student of singing, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... in touch with him." His attitude of mind, which was passive but critical, had developed the faculties of observation rather than the habits of action. As a member of the community he was indifferent and amiable, gay and ironic. Only the few who had seen his reserve break down before the rush of an uncontrollable impulse suspected that there were rich veins of feeling buried beneath his conventional surface, and that he cherished an inarticulate ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... orders meekly. Perhaps they were amused. The French are an ironic race. Perhaps they bided their time. But they never dreamed of disobeying those Amazons whose foot the Kaiser of all the Boches had placed ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the speaker sarcastically, almost with a shade of contempt. "I know you're sorry, deucedly sorry," he mocked. "So sorry that you'd probably like to drown your excess of emotion in the flowing bowl." Again the ironic glance swept the other's face. "Another smile would be good for you, anyway. You're entirely too serious. Here you are!" and the decanter ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... more Piteous than to Witness a proud and haughty Income tottering along the Street, searching in vain for a Workingman's Appetite? When one with a spending possibility of $2 a Minute is told by a Specialist to drink plenty of Hot Water, the Words seem almost Ironic. ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... christened. They were young, rich, lovely and apparently heart-whole. Charley Whistler, being newly-wedded, wanted every one else in the world to get married. He was continually saying that there was "nothing like it," and resented some of the ironic rejoinders of men who had been married all their lives, to hear them talk about it. So he made haste to introduce the twins ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... with an impatient gesture. Not that this silence in any way embarrassed the new comer, who, standing erect on his sturdy legs and feeling quite at home, carefully examined the new picture with his bloodshot eyes. Without any ceremony, he passed judgment upon it in one phrase—half ironic, half affectionate: 'Well, well, there's ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... a shout of laughter, and an ironic "Played indeed!" from Cuthbert Gordon—Broome's grandson. Roy, tumbled from some starry dream of his own, flashed out imperiously: "Look alive, you blithering ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... knew, to do anything for Jane. The only thing that seemed possible to her in her simple reasoning, was to prevent such catastrophes for the future. It was not that pity was misplaced when shipwreck came, nor that charity ever failed. She understood, without being conscious of it, the ironic severity of Jesus, who would have no sudden pity and heart-searching on account of His poor. He had come into the world for righteousness and for judgment, and the judgment and righteousness both declared, not at the time of disaster ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... no reply; and Kitty decided that the younger man had gone on. Silence; or rather, she no longer heard the speakers. Then a low chuckle came to her and this chuckle broadened into ironic laughter; and she knew that Mephisto was abroad. What had been the wager; and what was the meaning of the six months? It is instinctive in woman to interpret the human voice correctly, especially when the eyes are not distracted by physical presentations. ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... from bailiffs, he did many other things that tarnish honour, more or less, and things for which he had to beg Prue's special pardon; but yet he is not a fit subject for the unhandsome incredulity which is proud to be always at hand with an ironic commentary on such ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... or calculatingly and in cold blood put other agents in to wreck a concern in the interests of a rival. It was a matter of fees. Mern could defend the ethics of such procedure with interesting arguments; he had been an inspector of police and held ironic views of human nature; he had invented an anticipatory system, so he called it, by which he "hothoused" criminal proclivities in a person in order to show the person's latent possibilities up to an employer before damage had been wrought to the employer's business or funds. That is ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... multiply these instances. Our own knowledge supplies them by the score. Our personal lives are full of them. God's Will, God's Love, God's Mercy, become strangely ironic forces, grim beyond any open enmity. They remind us of the "love," the "pity," the "mercy," in which the orthodox sent the heretic to the hangman or the stake, destroying the ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... passed me on the other side of the street with a wave of the hand and an ironic smile. The younger brother, the one they had married to an elderly shrew, he, on the strength of an older friendship and as if paying a debt of gratitude, took the liberty to ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... he knew! A single glance at his judges made him certain of it, and from this moment his features wore a calm and contemptuous smile, an unchangeable expression of scorn. With an ironic curiosity he followed his judges through the labyrinth of artfully contrived captious questions by which they hoped to entangle him; occasionally he gave himself, as it were for his own amusement, the appearance of voluntarily being caught in their nets, until he finally by a side ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... of Authorship, and the unprecedented Criticisms introduc'd" make such an essay as he writes "absolutely necessary." Yet there is no clear indication of just what works occasion this necessity. The ironic reference to Mr. Dennis at the end of the first paragraph, taken together with the praise of Mr. Pope's translation of Homer and the allusion to "the malicious and violent Criticisms of a certain Gentleman in its Disfavour" [p. 23], might suggest that Defoe ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... on the doorstep. Looking out, I found a bullock, its four feet tied together with a straw rope, writhing in its last agonies; the butcher, in his hand a cruel 24-inch bladed knife still red with blood, smiling the smile of ironic torture as he looked down upon his struggling victim. He straightway skinned the animal and cut up the carcass immediately in front of my door, where Lao Chang waited to get the best cut for my dinner. My three fellow-lodgers squatted alongside, going through their apologetic ablutions ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... devil is fairly matched by the female devil: Tophet will furnish them of all genders. Caroline has Mephistopheles on her side, the demon who causes tables to spurt forth fire, and who, with his ironic finger points out the hiding place of keys—the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... soberly. "It's an ill of the flesh few recover from. But let us go to the Chateau." Pushing the unemptied bottle from him he rose with a sigh. His puckish, ironic humour had changed; gaiety was utterly gone, and the wrinkles upon his face were those ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... shoulders visible through the screened window across the garden. They said he was very interesting, of course, but painfully shy and bashful. As for him, he was as horribly afraid of them as they would have been of him, had they known. I could not always save myself from the sin of smiling at an ironic situation. ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... when the issue of this struggle would be decided. The air was filled with their chill breath. The struggle round the bed was at its height. On one side doctors, nurses, the father, the mother—on the other that still, ironic Figure, in His very aloofness so strong, in ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... the world in disregarding them, his wincings and mockeries under the sting of the petty disillusions which every hour spent among men brings to his infallibly quick observation, he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air, the mysterious moodiness, the suggestion of a strange and terrible history that has left him nothing but undying remorse, by which Childe Harold fascinated the grandmothers of his English contemporaries. Altogether it is clear that here or nowhere is Raina's ideal hero. Catherine is hardly less ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... an armful of cat-tails from a bit of marshland, and Mr. Fletcher pointed out to him a strange, spotted lizard, which scurried for shelter from the intruders. As they returned, they loitered by the green, verandaed club house to count the fast diminishing fleet of yachts, and joined an ironic audience who watched the struggles of two motorboat owners with their craft, and a pair of rickety wagon trucks. Sunset found them climbing the home steps to sink into the easy porch chairs and wait blissfully until Mrs. Fletcher ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... took care to celebrate his distinction at all times and places, opportune or otherwise—seeming, indeed, to think and talk of little else. It is not probable that he fully comprehended the significance of the matter, as he was certainly far from perceiving its ironic aspect; nevertheless, his dull brain received more stimulus from the prospect than from any other thing that had befallen him, thereby furnishing sardonic humorists with the criticism, that if the Honorable Richard Pennroyal would keep on burying ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... of dejection that, a week before the evening we are describing, she had been obliged to order a box at the Gaiety Theatre, she, who, like all optimists, habitually frequented those playhouses where she could behold gloomy tragedies, awful melodramas, or those ironic pieces called farces, in which the ultimate misery of which human nature is capable is drawn to ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... huddled shoulder to shoulder in the cramping quarters. An ironic picture came to me of the crowding masses of Quabos stuffed into the protection of the outer cave, waiting the outcome of the fight being waged by their warriors. Here were we in a similar circumstance, waiting for the battle to be decided. Though there was little doubt in the minds of any of us ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... satisfaction in finding these two things, tales that I could not only admire genuinely but that I could publish, things that ought to have an interest for all who knew even a little about life. True, they were ironic, cruel, but still with humor and color, so deftly and cleanly told that they were smile-provoking. I called him and said as much, or nearly so—a mistake, as I sometimes think now, for art should be long—and bought them forthwith, hoping, almost ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... was certain that this reason, like the other, (the visit of her husband's uncle's widow) would be "good"! But it was that very certainty which chilled him. The fact of her dealing so reasonably with their case shed an ironic light on the idea that there had been any exceptional warmth in the greeting she had given him after their ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... repulsion—the man and the "familiar" were so ghastly alike. Then he suddenly understood that this was a quaint double jest of the eccentric physician's—his grim fling at his lack of physical charm, his ironic jeer at the ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... a cry of envenomed spite, and in one stride left the room. He was turning up the stairs, three steps and an oath at a bound, by the time P. Sybarite gained the threshold and sped his departing host with a reminder superfluously ironic: ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... resignation. He and Atwill had framed that statement a week before the primaries, and Miss Rose Farrell had copied at least a dozen drafts before Bassett's critical sense was satisfied. Harwood was increasingly amused by the manifestations of Bassett's ironic humor. "I have never yet," ran the statement, "placed my own ambitions before the wishes of my party; and if, when the Democrats of Fraser County meet to choose a candidate for state senator, they ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... if she would ever be able to return to the shell out of which the ironic humour of chance had thrust her. Wondered if she could pick up again philosophically the threads of dull routine. Jane Norman, gliding over this mysterious southern sea, a lone woman among strong and reckless men! Piracy! Pearls! Rugs and paintings worth a quarter ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... and scent-bottles were securely grasped; whereupon the squire, standing bare-headed on the steps, insisted upon seeing the party of the opposition off first, and waited to hand Mrs. Lovell into her carriage, an ironic gallantry accepted by the lady with serenity befitting ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... uncontesting that its foundering seemed at hand. The waters poured back and forth at her waist, as though holding her body captive for the assaults of the active seas which came over her broken bulwarks, and plunged ruthlessly about. There was something ironic in the indifference of her defenceless body to these unending attacks. It mocked this white and raging post-mortem brutality, and gave her a dignity that was cold and superior to all the eternal powers could now ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... schemes and ways crept along my veins, And my heart went ablaze and consumed its many stains, And my lips were touched with wine and my body felt no pains. Then it passed—and yet again it came and it passed— Yet again and yet again, till I toiled at last In the old ironic torture, ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... flights before Daudet set his Pegasus to toil in the mill of realism. The "Pope's Mule," for instance, is not this a marvel of blended humor and fantasy? And the "Elixir of Father Gaucher," what could be more naively ironic? Like a true Southerner, Daudet delights in girding at the Church; and these tales bristle with jibes at ecclesiastical dignitaries; but his stroke is never malignant and there is no barb to his shaft ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... toward the head of it, leaving the two favorites and the three second choices to bring up the rear. The Heathflower thing was immediately in front of them. She had moved so soberly, plodding with low head and sleepy eyes, the watchers had given her an ironic cheer, mingled with cat calls. All the others had got a welcome more or less enthusiastic, but it was only when Aramis, even-money favorite, came through the paddock gate that the ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... problem incapable of solution, or, rather, of which all possible solutions are equally unsatisfactory and undesirable. The playwright cannot too soon make sure that he has not strayed into such a no-thoroughfare. Whether an end be comic or tragic, romantic or ironic, happy or disastrous, it should satisfy something within us—our sense of truth, or of beauty, or of sublimity, or of justice, or of humour, or, at the least or lowest, our cynical sense of the baseness of human nature, and the vanity of human aspirations. But a play which ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... deal!" she slowly repeated, and her steady gaze succeeded in taking the ironic smile out of the corners of ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... have been in her momentary silence a hint of acceptance of it as a practical contribution to their problem, and there were indeed several lights in which it could be considered. Mrs. Brook, on a quick survey, selected the ironic. "I see, I see. I might by the same law arrange somehow that Lady Fanny should find herself in love with Edward. That would 'prove' HER purity. And you could be quite at ease," she laughed—"he wouldn't ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... He said, with ironic triumph: "You see, when I do say it you can't make anything out of it." After this he turned for a time all his ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... bring into dazzling relief the irony which governs the being of kings. Want of logic and defiance of ethical principle underlie their pride in magnificent ceremonial and pageantry. The ironic contrast between the pretensions of a king and the actual limits of human destiny is a text which Shakespeare repeatedly clothes ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... them written his own epitaph. I believe he thought so himself; a few words he said in my last talk with him makes me believe that — now. At any rate, the history of literature, so full of Fate's exquisite ironies, has nothing more poignantly ironic, and nothing at the same time more beautifully appropriate, than the publication of Rupert Brooke's noble sonnet-sequence, '1914', a few swift weeks before the death they had imagined, and had already made ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... to wonder how his mother would take this visit; but he welcomed Mr. Langhope's departure, hoping that the withdrawal of his ironic smile would leave his daughter open to gentler influences. Mr. Tredegar, meanwhile, was projecting his dry glance over the scene, trying to converse by signs with the overseers of the different rooms, and pausing now and then to contemplate, not so ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... determine what we shall call the spirit of the introduction. In what spirit is the introduction treated? There are as many different treatments as there are human feelings and sentiments. The spirit may be serious, informative, dignified, scoffing, argumentative, conversational, startling, humorous, ironic. The student should lengthen this list by adding as many ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... ignorance in not knowing that seamen were accustomed to speak of the flag in this way. Had he been a foreigner who dared to address him in a similar tone of ill-nature, he would have thrown him overboard. As it was, he merely remarked in an ironic accent that Mr Hobkirk "had a lot to learn yet." By the time the cobble got ashore, the fine clipper brig was ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... of his sallies I lost; those I caught were excellent. His trick was often to begin by taking some one urbanely and caressingly by the chin and complimenting him on the intelligenza della sua fisionomia. I kept near him as long as I could; for he struck me as a real ironic artist, cherishing a disinterested, and yet at the same time a motived and a moral, passion for the grotesque. I should have liked, however—if indeed I shouldn't have feared—to see him the next morning, or when he unmasked that night ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the cripple fixed upon the speaker the hard ironic eye of one toughened and defiant in misery, and, in the end, grinned upon him with his unshaven face like ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensees?" He articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. "And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years," he went on, shewing that contempt for the things of this world which some men of the world like to affect, "we should read that the Queen of the Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... it!" he repeated with an ironic laugh—and suddenly grabbed Pale Face Harry's arm and shook him. "There's so much in it that I'm drunk with it, crazy with it—but I'm trying to make myself believe it isn't too good to be true. Get that? Get a grip on that, and hang on. Don't lose ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... The time for being a little college has passed. We must take our place as one of the important colleges—I make bold to say one of the important universities—of the Middle West. But we have to enlarge before we can grow. (answering HOLDEN's smile) Yes, it is ironic, but that's the way of it. It was a nice thing to open the anniversary with fifty thousand from the steel works—but fifty thousand dollars—nowadays—to an institution? (waves the fifty thousand aside) They'll do more later, I think, when they see us coming into our own. Meanwhile, as ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... Mr. Gladstone, once more chancellor of the exchequer, again produced a budget. Semi-ironic cheers met his semi-ironic expression of an expectation that he would be asked the question: what had become of the calculations of 1853? The succession duty proved a woeful disappointment, and instead of producing two million pounds, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... went on, ignoring his ironic turn of phrase, "the Nautilus has run aground at a moment when the sea is full. Now then, the tides aren't strong in the Pacific, and if you can't unballast the Nautilus, which seems impossible to me, I don't see how it ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Women; it might be called Ogniben with about as good right as they are called Lippo Lippi or Blougram; the personality of the supple ecclesiastic floods and takes possession of the entire scene; we see the situation and the persons through the brilliant ironic mirror of his mind. The Chiappino of the second act is Ogniben's Chiappino, as Gigadibs is Blougram's Gigadibs. His "tragedy" is one in which there is no room for terror or pity, only for contempt. All real stress of circumstance ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... and he cultivated their society and that of women only in so far as they were essential to his deeper understanding of life. His code was noblesse oblige and he privately damned it as a superstition foisted upon him by his ancestors. He was sentimental and ironic, passionate and indifferent, frank and subtle, proud and democratic, with a warm capacity for friendship and none whatever for intimacy, a hard worker with a strong taste for loafing— in the open country, book in hand. He prided himself upon his iron ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... a popular bill, too," Mr. Schemer was saying, with a smile of ironic appreciation at the thought of demagogues advocating it. "We should have one of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a hard and ironic tone in the last sentences which jarred upon Maude's sensitive nature. She glanced up quickly and was surprised at the look of pain which had come upon her companion's face. It ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... not too much!" She had an ironic gaiety for the implications of his "this," besides wishing to insist on a general prudence. "She'll wonder what you're ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... you could," answered Mr. Green with a fresh leer, that contained this time something ironic. "I nothing doubt it! But by your leave, I'll pursue my quest ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... it, it leaves no impression on the mind. As no delusive hope, that might be excited here, has the slightest attraction for me, I gain by my absolutely unimpassioned position towards these surroundings a calmness which—let me say it with a certain ironic humour—will probably be of advantage to me in gaining that for which I strove here in my early days, and which now, as it has become indifferent to me, ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... of a well-to-do retired merchant, to whom she had borne three children while she was merely a servant and his first wife still lived. Keith had often overheard his parents speak of Agda's phenomenal rise with ironic smiles, but he didn't care for anything except her continued inclination to ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... the parents causes a temporary suppression of the great question, which does not, however, cease to arouse his intense desire for explanation. The dodging of the issue produces further a characteristic loss of trust on the part of the child, an ironic questioning, or a feeling that he knows better. The knowing better than the questioning father we see in the wanderer. The tables are turned. Instead of the child desiring (sexual) explanation ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... he stood for nothing in the world of achievement; for all the difference that his going made, he might never have been born. Then a thought as startling as the tangible appearance of some ironic, grinning imp flashed to his mind. Who was he, Bruce Burt, to criticise his partner, Slim? What more had he accomplished? How much more difference would his own death make in anybody's life? His mother's labored words came back with painful distinctness: "I've had such hopes for you, my ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... although to meet an implacable enemy. She was not tender any more. She was the Christine who had faced bailiffs and his father's strange, gay friends—ice-cold and bitter and relentless. She took the pictures from him. With a terrible ironic calm she sorted them from his pockets, and spread them out on the table like a pack of cards. He dared not look at her. He was afraid to see what she was seeing. She had torn open the door of his secret chamber, and there in that blasting light was ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... in a deadly loathing which, betrayed in word or look or gesture, animated in him only a spirit of derision. In the absence of Victor, Sturm's eyes were ever ironic, his bows and leers mocking, his speeches flavoured with clumsy sarcasm; from which it resulted that the girl never quite forgot the impression which he had managed to convey in those few moments of their first encounter, that Sturm knew something she ought to know but didn't, and was meanly ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... barbarians like that King Guntram, who fills so many indulgent pages in Gregory of Tours. He is a vaguely contemporary figure, a fat, voluble man, now purring with jovial good nature, now bursting into explosions of wrath and violence, a strange mixture of bonhomie and brutality. It is an ironic commentary on what has happened to civilization that Gregory should regard him with affection, that he should be known as 'Good King Guntram' and that the church should actually have canonized him after his death. Good King Guntram; Michelet has summed him up in a phrase 'Ce bon roi a qui on ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... greatest that ever they heard. For the shrewd old lawyer had an artist's hand with which he played upon the keyboard of the jury and knew just when to pull out the stops of the vox humana of pathos and the grand diapason of indignation and defiance. So he began by tickling their sense of humor with an ironic description of afternoon tea at Mr. Hepplewhite's, with Bibby and Stocking as chief actors, until all twelve shook with suppressed laughter and the judge was forced to hide his face behind the Law Journal; ridiculed ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... ourselves putting forth the lovely flowers and fruit of the virtues whereof the heroes and heroines of romance are so prolific. Usually nothing occurs to disillusion us about ourselves. But now and then fate, in unusually brutal ironic mood, forces us to see the real reason why we did this or that virtuous, self-sacrificing action, or blossomed forth in this or that nobility of character. Mildred was destined now to suffer one of these savage blows of disillusionment about self that thrust us down from the exalted moral ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... inwardly, and unable to deny this chronometry, felt that an ironic Providence was punishing him for his attentions to ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... so, too, were the ironic insolence, the sardonic smile, the air of contemptuous mastery that sat so lightly on him. He might be the greatest scoundrel unhanged—and that was a point upon which I had a decided opinion—but I shall never deny that there was in him the magnetic force which ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... of the attitude struck By this confident slip of good stock histrionic? Though dames swear their dear Petit Duc is a duck, The smile of old stagers is somewhat ironic. But "Bravas!" resound. A lad's "resolute will," The "wisdom of twenty years," stir admiration, The political Cafe Chantant pluck will ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... this cow one is able, indeed one is almost obliged, to feel the soul of a goddess. The incredible is accomplished. The dead Egyptian makes the ironic, the skeptical modern world feel deity in a limestone cow. How is it done? I know not; but it is done. Genius can do nearly everything, it seems. Under the chin of the cow there is a standing statue of the King Mentu-Hotep, and beneath her the king kneels as a boy. ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... thought wildly of the Judge, who hadn't regained full consciousness. He went under once, and came up choking and sputtering. He decided his end had come—and he didn't even know the identity of the enemy who had done him in. It was ironic. He should have asked Dor to tell him more about Garf—was he a traitor, or a Tamdivarian gangster, or what? John Andrew gasped and started ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... through, the dominating fact is that it is "Henry James" speaking—Henry James, with whose delicate, ironic mind and most human heart we are in contact. There is much that can be learned in fiction; the resources of mere imitation, which we are pleased to call realism, are endless; we see them in scores of modern books. But at the root of ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... incongruity of Enriquez' extravagant attentions if ironical, and their equal hopelessness if not, seemed to me plainer than ever. What had this well-poised, coldly observant spinster to do with that quaintly ironic ruffler, that romantic cynic, that rowdy Don Quixote, that impossible Enriquez? Presently she ceased playing. Her slim, narrow slipper, revealing her thin ankle, remained upon the pedal; her delicate fingers were resting ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... as solemn as statues—I don't think one of us smiled. It was during the second Act that I suddenly laughed. I don't know that anything very comic was happening on the stage, but I was aware, with a kind of ironic subconsciousness, that some of the superior spirits in their superior Heaven must be deriving a great deal of fun from our situation. There was Vera thinking, I suppose, of nothing but Lawrence, and Lawrence thinking of nothing but Vera, and Nina thinking of nothing ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... his handwriting difficult to read at the best of times, and undecipherable in hard pencil on thin paper, handed the letter over to the faithful Bakkus, who read it aloud with a running commentary of ironic humour. This Andrew did not know ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... before he regained control of himself, and then he steadied himself in the saddle, assuring himself in a burst of bitter, ironic humor that death at the hands of a crazy man could be no worse than death at the ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... a new internationalism. To-day the world is united by starvation, disease and misery. We are enjoying the ironic internationalism of hatred. The victors are forced to shoulder the burden of the vanquished. International philanthropies and charities are organized. The great flux of immigration and emigration has recommenced. Prosperity is a myth; and the rich ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... got here, the only light burning was in Simon's study—otherwise the house was in darkness, which seemed to me an ironic commentary on my foolish gesture! The study light went out almost immediately, but I lingered on. I sat down on a fallen log in the deep shadow of those trees—there, to the right of the path—and began to think back to old times. One discovery I ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... the smoking-room. He himself mixed the cocktails. He talked to me. We discovered that we had mutual acquaintances. Never shall I forget that face, that ironic and distant look, that sad and melodious voice. Ah! Colonel, gentlemen, I don't know what they may say at the Geographic Office, or in the posts of the Soudan.... There can be nothing in it but a horrible suspicion. Such a man, capable of such a crime,—believe me, it ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... a thin ironic smile hovered on his lips— "And you carried it off well! But—the poor child!—what an ordeal for her! You can hardly have felt it so keenly, being seasoned to hypocrisy for so many years!" Her eyes flashed ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... himself alone at forty was hardly what he had intended. There was something actually comic about it. That for which he had striven had been secured, but for what? Success unshared is of all things ironic, and soon not even General would be here to greet him when the day's work was done. He blew out a thin thread of smoke and followed its curvings with half-shut eyes. He had made money, made it honestly, and it had brought ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... the ironic "Unknown" for an appreciable space of time; then he broke into a laugh. He had suddenly recalled Vyse's similar experience with "Hester Macklin," and the light he was able to throw on that obscure episode was searching enough to penetrate all the dark corners of his own adventure. ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
Copyright © 2025 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
