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More "Whimsicality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Norah's going," Cobbs, naturally enough, as it seemed, took occasion to remark, "You'll be all right then, sir, with your beautiful sweetheart by your side." Whereupon we realised more clearly than ever the delicate whimsicality of the whole delineation, when we saw, as well as heard, the boy return a-flushing, "Cobbs, I never let anybody joke about that when I can prevent them," Cobbs immediately explaining in all humility, "It wasn't a joke, sir—wasn't so meant." No wonder, Boots ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... story itself is completely lost, if, indeed, it can be said ever to have been begun. The absence of arrangement is so marked that it is very difficult to turn to a passage which in a previous perusal has struck the eye. The eccentricity and whimsicality of the book contributed greatly to its immediate popularity. But the same characteristics which seem brilliant when novel, soon become dull when familiar, and although "Tristram Shandy" will always afford single passages of lasting interest to the lover of literature, the work as a whole is not ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... cabin, they were surprised to find Philip still gone. With the whimsicality of lovers, they dismissed him from their thoughts and sat down in the armchair together, laughing and talking of the past. Their conversation ran gradually into a clearly defined discussion in which both minds were compelled to think quickly, and they found new joy in their ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... that a man never repeats a performance like that of the duke. The Italian custom prevents!" he added, with a curious expression of whimsicality over which Nina puzzled as she mounted the stairs to her room. Even in her shaken state, she marveled at the contrast between Giovanni's finely chiseled features and the elastic strength that must have been necessary to overpower the ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... possible, with the crude type of actor at one's disposal in this country, to give a really adequate performance of such a play as 'The Rose of America.' These people seem to miss the spirit of the piece, its subtle topsy-turvy humor, its delicate whimsicality. This afternoon," Mr Pilkington choked. "This afternoon I happened to overhear two of the principals, who were not aware that I was within earshot, discussing the play. One of them—these people ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... pride in being civilized is still so nearly universal—especially among Americans—that many persons upon hearing the point mooted whether civilization be a disease or not, are disposed to resent the bare suggestion as smacking of whimsicality. ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... England and the Italian Question, which he wrote in 1859, and which deals with the unity and independence of Italy. It is the first essay which he ever published, but it abounds in clearness and force, and is entirely free from the whimsicality which in later years sometimes marred his prose. Above all it shows a sympathetic insight into foreign aspirations which is rare indeed even among cultivated Englishmen. In reference to this pamphlet he truly observed: "The worst of the ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... protests against the flamboyance of the age as typified in the rhetorical style of Seneca and Lucan. If the work was written at the time when Seneca and Lucan first fell from the Imperial favour, such criticism may well have found favour at court. If, with the brilliant whimsicality that characterizes all his work, Petronius has placed these utterances in the mouth of disreputable and broadly comic figures, that does not impair the value or sincerity of the criticism. Eumolpus' complaint of the decline of ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... a delightful evening of it, living in the land of Never Was. For one source of her charm lay in the gay, childlike whimsicality o her imagination. She believed in fairies and heroes with all her heart, which with her was an organ not located in her brain. The delicious gurgle of gaiety in her laugh was a new find to ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... odds with modern times. While tolerant of those who have yielded to the new order, he himself is a great stickler for the preservation of antique forms and ceremonies: sometimes, indeed, pushing his fancies to lengths that fairly would lay him open to the charge of whimsicality, were not even the most extravagant of his crotchets touched and mellowed by his natural goodness of heart. In the earlier stages of our acquaintance I was disposed to regard him as an eccentric; but a wider ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... based on poems of Heine's are particularly successful, especially in the excellent opportunity of the lyric describing the wail of the Scottish woman who plays her harp on the cliff, and sings above the raging of sea and wind. The third catches most happily the whimsicality of the poet's reminiscences of childhood, but hardly, I think, the contrasting depth and wildness of his complaint that, along with childhood's games, have vanished Faith and Love and Truth. In the last, however, the cheery majesty that realizes Heine's likening of Death to a cool night ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... Greek alphabet, and found it "fascinating." The word was underlined. Had she laughed when she drew that line? Was she ever serious? Didn't the letter show the most engaging compound of enthusiasm and spirit and whimsicality, all tapering into a flame of girlish freakishness, which flitted, for the rest of the morning, as a will-o'-the-wisp, across Rodney's landscape. He could not resist beginning an answer to her there and then. He found it particularly ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... much more labor on the latter than the former. The law can only equalize the conditions of sale. It is evident that while the Portuguese sell their oranges here at a dollar apiece, the ninety-nine cents which go to pay the tax are taken from the American consumer. Now look at the whimsicality of the result. Upon each Portuguese orange, the country loses nothing; for the ninety-nine cents which the consumer pays to satisfy the impost tax, enter into the treasury. There is improper distribution; ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... blinding slopes of snow, that burned their now hardening faces, laughing in an endless sequence of quips and jests and polyglot fancies. The fancies were the reality to both of them, they were both so happy, tossing about the little coloured balls of verbal humour and whimsicality. Their natures seemed to sparkle in full interplay, they were enjoying a pure game. And they wanted to keep it on the level of a game, their ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Robert Graves, who reflects it in a lighter and more fantastic vein; in James Stephens, whose wild ingenuities are redolent of the soil. And it finds its corresponding opposite in the limpid and unperturbed loveliness of Ralph Hodgson; in the ghostly magic and the nursery-rhyme whimsicality of Walter de la Mare; in the quiet and delicate lyrics of W. H. Davies. Among the others, the brilliant G. K. Chesterton, the facile Alfred Noyes, the romantic Rupert Brooke (who owes less to Masefield and his immediate predecessors than he does to the passionately intellectual ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... fragrance of the orange-flower poured around him, and in continual ecstasy. As an idyll it is delicious; as a serious contribution to the hardest of problems it is naught. The sequel, by a stroke of matchless whimsicality, unless it be meant, as it perhaps may have been, for a piece of deep tragic irony, is the best refutation that Rousseau's most energetic adversary could have desired. The Sophie who has been educated on the oriental principle, has presently to confess ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... of preservation: some on account of the ingenuity displayed in their composition; some in their wit; some for their domesticativeness,—matrimonial offers, for example,—and others for the conceitedness exposed in them, the ignorance of the writers, or the whimsicality of the matter advertised. In 1804 there was advertised in an English paper, as for sale, "The walk of a deceased blind beggar (in a charitable neighborhood), ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... the most artistic sort, and it is handled with a freshness and originality that is unquestionably novel."—Boston Transcript. "A feast of humor and good cheer, yet subtly pervaded by special shades of feeling, fancy, tenderness, or whimsicality. A merry thing in prose."—St. ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... period," continued the young gentleman—"to be exact, say one minute. Light work," he added with a certain whimsicality, "short hours, ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... And then, with a mixture of whimsicality and earnestness he continued: "Do you remember the talk we had the other ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... themselves, and thus obtaining the notoriety which they crave with every breath they inhale. They dress differently from other people, wearing enormous shirt-collars, or peculiar hats, or oddly cut coats of unusual colors, or indulging in some other similar whimsicality of an unimportant character, in the expectation that they will thereby attract the attention or excite the comments of those ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... Heine's are particularly successful, especially in the excellent opportunity of the lyric describing the wail of the Scottish woman who plays her harp on the cliff, and sings above the raging of sea and wind. The third catches most happily the whimsicality of the poet's reminiscences of childhood, but hardly, I think, the contrasting depth and wildness of his complaint that, along with childhood's games, have vanished Faith and Love and Truth. In the last, however, the cheery majesty that realizes Heine's likening ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... way; his eyes were steel blue, like hers, with a similar expression, half brooding, half tender, in their depths. He had the mobile, smiling mouth of the picture, but his chin was deeper and squarer, dented with a dimple which, combined with a certain occasional whimsicality of opinion and glance, had caused Elder Trewin some qualms of doubt regarding the fitness of this young man for his high and holy vocation. The Rev. Jabez Strong had never indulged in dimples or ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... isolated herself in the consciousness of her charms and in the perfection of her varied culture, and exhibited herself to the public admiration. The tendency to idiosyncrasy often approached wilfulness, caprice and whimsicality, and opposition to the national moral sense. A Diogenes in a tub became possible; the soulless but graceful frivolity of an Alcibiades charmed, even though it was externally condemned; a Socrates completed the break in consciousness, ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... youth. And I thought of the bird and the Sphinx, the thing that was whimsical wooing the thing that was mighty. And I gazed at the immense columns and at the light and little figures all about me. Bird and Sphinx, delicate whimsicality, calm and terrific power! In Egypt the dead men have combined them, and the combination has an irresistible fascination, weaves a spell that entrances you in the sunshine and beneath the blinding blue. At Abydos I knew it. And I loved the ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... flung out his arms, ecstatically. Free! He would see no more of that nagging beggar Ryan until tomorrow. Free to put into execution the idea that had been bubbling all day long in his head, like a fine champagne, firing his blood with reckless whimsicality. ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... Mr. Clarence Day, Jr., speculates with so much whimsicality upon the possible effects of surgical rejuvenation of men that one might overlook the keenness of his observation in a hurried perusal of his article. For the sake of preserving it for more leisurely study, and because ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
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