"Turgidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from the West. An exaggerated report of his wit prepared the way for probable disappointment. The surprise which awaited his hearers was of a different kind; they were prepared for a florid Western eloquence offensive to ears which were used to a less spontaneous turgidity; they heard instead a speech with no ornament at all, whose only beauty was that it was true and that the speaker felt it. The single flaw in the Cooper Institute speech has already been cited, the narrow view of Western respectability as to John Brown. ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... in great matters, so in small. Whatever literary production was brought under Matthew Arnold's notice, his judgment was clear, sympathetic, and independent. He had the readiest appreciation of true excellence, a quick intolerance of turgidity and inflation—of what he called endeavors to render platitude endurable by making it pompous, and lively horror of affectation ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... genius that we do possess have been written by converted aristocrats, like Tolstoy, and have a little of the fanaticism and over-emphasis of the convert. Or they represent and share the turgidity of the minds they interpret, like some of the work of Walt Whitman. All this is true, and yet a careful reader of American literature must be more impressed by such prose as Lincoln's, by such poems as Whitman's, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... philosophic accent which reveal in startling style the working of Borrow's mind. The linguistic lore is phenomenal, as in all his books. But though the wild, passionate scenes make the whole narrative an indescribable phantasmagoria, the diction is always free from turgidity, and from involved periods. Borrow died at Oulton, Suffolk, on July 26, 1881. A mighty athlete, an inveterate wanderer, a philological enthusiast, and a man of large-hearted simplicity mingled with violent prejudices, he was one of the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds. |
