"Bizarre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... happy hour he arranged and rearranged. At the end, surveying his handiwork with undisguised pleasure, he thought of the bizarre night when Babs Neave had forced her way in. He could still hardly believe that it had occurred. And yet, without shutting his eyes, he could almost see the child, deadly pale, tired, delighted and wholly unexplained, bending forward with her wonderful white arms outstretched to catch ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... against the ships and the island fortification, which last was soon silenced. On the nineteenth day of June, the Echo, a French frigate, was taken by the English cruisers, after having escaped from the harbour. From the officers on board of this ship the admiral learned that the Bizarre, another frigate, had sailed from thence on the day of the disembarkation, and the Comete had successfully followed her example. Besides the regular approaches to the town, conducted by the engineers under the immediate command and inspection ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... things, the creation of Eve with absolute literalness—with its beautiful and solemn crypt in which the dust of the titular saint lies entombed—with its minute windows, and its vast columns sustaining the roof upon capitals of every bizarre and fantastic device—is doubtless most abundant in that Gothic spirit, now grotesque and now earnest, which somewhere appears in all the churches of Verona; which has carven upon the facade of the Duomo the statues of Orlando and Olliviero, heroes of romance, and ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... residence. Maurice's consulting-room and dining-room corresponded, perhaps, to Mr. Brooke's dining-room and study: it was upstairs where the difference showed itself. Ethel's drawing-room was like herself—a little whimsical, a little bizarre; pretty, withal, and original, and somewhat unlike anything one had ever seen before. She was fond of novelties, and introduced the latest fashions in draperies or china or screens as soon as she could get hold of them; and ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... proceeded by way of axioms and definitions, must be on the track of truth. They did not see that these axioms were nothing better than very vague and very uncertain propositions; that the definitions were inexact, defective, and bizarre. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... bizarre satin rag of a programme that they had given her. "I have never heard Madame Mansoni," she added. I glanced at her; there was a blush on her cheek. She had heard of Madame Mansoni, although she ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... with her head on one side, putting the scarlet head of a poppy among her black hair. Jess had strange tastes, which would be called artistic nowadays in some circles. Her liking was always BIZARRE and excellent, the taste of the primitive Galloway Pict from whom she was descended, or of that picturesque Glenkens warrior, who set a rowan bush on his head on the morning when he was to lead the van at the battle of the Standard. Scotland was beaten on that great occasion, ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... the Opera and the Plaza were covered with figures in dominoes, blue, red or black, many grotesque and bizarre costumes, and not a few sober claw hammers. The great flare of yellow light which bathed and flooded the shifting, many-colored throng, also lent a strangely weird effect to the now heavily falling snowflakes. Carriages and cabs kept arriving ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... several panes of glass were shattered with a fearful din. That decided her. Coke, if he were not killed, would surely be driven out. She sprang to her feet, and literally ran down the steep ladder to the saloon deck. Through the open door of the officers' mess she witnessed another bizarre act—an act quite as extraordinary in its way as Coke's jump over the steersman's body. In the midst of this drama of death and destruction, Watts was standing there, with head thrown back and uplifted arm, gulping down a tumblerful of some dark-colored liquid, draining it to the ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... end of the last century stood in sore need of some of the elementary virtues. If obviousness and simplicity are liable to be overdone, they are not so deadly in their after-effects as the bizarre and the extravagant. The literary movement of the eighteen nineties was like a strong stimulant given to a patient dying of old age. Its results were energetic, but the energy was convulsive. We ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... kopje, all steep, and many precipitous, yet not the bare, stony cairns of the transmontane regions, but moist green masses of verdure, seldom parched even in the dry season, and in the wet, glistening with a thousand cascades; not severely conical or rectangular, like the bizarre eminences which cover Cape Colony with the models of a school of geometry, but nobly outlined. Many of the foothills, it is true, are mere heaps of rock and stone; but even these are rarely such naked and uncompromising ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... still believes the ancient and bizarre legend that mountain sheep rams jump off cliffs and alight upon their horns? I think not. People now know enough about anatomy, and the mental traits of wild sheep, to know that nothing of that kind ever occurred save ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... have a direct human purpose, a definite human application. When the cup of human life is so overflowing with woe and pain and misery, it seems to me a narrow dilettanteism or downright charlatanism to devote one's self to petty or bizarre problems which can have no relation to human happiness, and to prate of self-satisfaction and self-expression. One can have all the self-expression one wants ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... eyes. The tea-shop, the music, the indefinable odour of women all seemed bizarre after her communion with the Most High. She made ready ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... could not understand it in her. What was more, he could not have thought as she did if he had tried. She had that sort of mind which accepts no stereotyped reflection or idea; she worked things out for herself. Her words were her own, and not another's. She was not imitative, nor yet was she bizarre; she ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... negotiations they had allowed themselves to be embarked, for this one night only, in a capacious sailing boat to Nepenthe, in order to pleasure Mr. Keith's guests. And here they sat, huddled together in dignified repose and abashed, as it seemed, by the strangeness of their surroundings; a bizarre group stained to an almost negro tint by exposure to ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... metropolis. It has a grand establishment known as the Societe d'Automobiles Bauchet, which will cater for any and every want of the automobilist, and has a half-dozen sights of first rank, from the old Hotel Dieu to the bizarre doubled-up Eglise St. Nicolas and the ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... most picturesque incident of the "incident." Most envied of all observers of the tournament was an aviator who looked down on a show bizarre even in the annals of aviation. The German planes had been driven to cover, which gave the Briton a fair field. A knightly admiration, perhaps a sense of fellowship not to say sympathy with the old arm of scouting from the new, possessed him; or let it be that he could not resist a part in ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... was a horse to be remarked and to be remembered. Yet—and again yet—Calico was not wholly to blame for his many faults. Farm breeding, which was more or less responsible for his bizarre appearance, should also bear the burden of his failings. As a colt he had been the marvel of the county, from Orono to Hermon Centre. He had been petted, teased, humored, exhibited, coddled, fooled with—everything ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... away his own wife in this manner; for have we not recounted in this present history how Livia was dowered and given in marriage to Augustus by her first husband, the grandfather of Claudius? The deeding of a wife with a dowry was a part of the somewhat bizarre marriage customs of the Roman aristocracy, which gradually lost ground in the first and second century of our era in proportion as the prestige and power of that aristocracy declined, and in proportion as the middle classes acquired ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... his professorial robes. Under them Cydwick Ohms wore an ancient and bizarre costume: black riding boots, highly polished and trimmed in silver; wool chaps; a wide, jewel-studded belt with an immense buckle; a brightly checked shirt topped by a blazing red bandana. Briskly, he snapped a tall ten-gallon hat on his head, and ...
— Of Time and Texas • William F. Nolan
... Beyond, reached by stone staircases, spreads the great lake, which covers eighty-seven acres. On this may be seen a gay full-masted frigate, the aspect of which in this tranquil and richly wooded country strikes a somewhat bizarre note. The park contains four thousand acres, and in the neighbourhood of the house may be seen many handsome cedars and yews. The finest view is obtainable from the opposite bank of the lake, or from near the head, where stands ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... More and more I feel the impenetrability of the mystery that surrounds us; the phenomena of nature, the discoveries of science, instead of raising the veil, seem only to make the problem more complex, more bizarre, more insoluble; the investigation of the laws of light, of electricity, of chemical action, of the causes of disease, the influence of heredity—all these things may minister to our convenience and our health, but they make the mind of God, the nature ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... this was, in substance, what Darwin did. There are many species in which the male, singly or with others, practises antics or sings during the love-season before the female; and when all such cases, or rather those that are most striking and bizarre, are brought together, and when it is gratuitously asserted that the females do choose the males that show off in the best manner or that sing best, a case for sexual selection seems to be made out. How unfair the argument is, based on these carefully selected cases ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... your authority for that?" Phil turned a large, bizarre ring round on his slender left little finger and the whole room waited, testing ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... these and other equally bizarre products of the "great laboratory," we must mention the sect of the Napoleonites, some few members of which were still to be found recently in Southern Russia. William Hepworth Dixon, who visited the country in 1870, claims to have met some in Moscow, and according to him they ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... plaisant projet d'un poete ignorant, Qui de tant de heros va choisir Childebrand! D'un seul nom quelquefois le son dur et bizarre Bend un poeme entier, ou burlesque ou barbare. Art Poetique, c. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... table and a dozen cushions. He had hung on each wall a drawing of dancing-girls by Degas. Since the coverings of the couch and the cushions were of Chinese silken embroideries, the interior appeared a somewhat bizarre mixture of ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... dropped the jewels in the hurry of his start from the inn that night! Doubtless, too, he had carried them in that bizarre hiding-place for the sake of safety, considering it unlikely that robbers, if he fell into their hands, would take the sachet from him; as still less likely that they would suspect it to contain anything of value. Everywhere ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... veteran shapes bizarre, At whom the urchin laughs and gapes. They were the day, of which we are The evening, and ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... everything was perfect of its kind. Only, there was an over-elaboration, so that the ensemble was flamboyant. And the man's manners precisely harmonized with his clothes, whereby the whole effect was emphasized and rendered bizarre. Garson took one amazed look, and then rocked ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... with a morning-after thirst. You're panting for romance, for something bizarre. Egypt and St. Petersburg and Buenos Ayres and Samoa have all become commonplace to you. You've overdone them. That's why you're back here in New York waiting with stretched nerves for the Adventure of Life to cat-creep up from behind and ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular emotion began stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, there crept unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling of ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... tombs indicate that red pigment was freely and invariably used for that purpose. It was applied in broad streaks or large patches, the former encircling the face or forming bands across it; the latter, covering the eyes or triangulating the cheeks. It is probable that this bizarre decoration was used only on ceremonial occasions and that it appears in a greatly accentuated form ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... States-General vied with each other in generosity to the great champion of protestantism, who was combating the holy league so valiantly, and rarely has a great historical figure presented itself to the world so bizarre of aspect, and under such shifting perplexity of light and shade, as did the Bearnese in the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Norris has composed little, and that little is done on simple lines, but the simplicity is deep, and the harmonies, without being bizarre, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... Cromwell; he had lived, had worked for the future—and now he had ceased to exist. His future—our past, had come to an end. The barge with the man still straining at the oar had gone out of sight under the arch of the bridge, as through a gate into another world. A bizarre sense of solitude stole upon me, and I turned my back upon the river as empty as my day. Hansoms, broughams, streamed with a continuous muffled roll of wheels and a beat of hoofs. A big dray put in a note of thunder and a clank of chains. ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... cases, and suddenly wished he were somewhere else. Anywhere else. This one showed sudden signs of developing into something positively bizarre. "I see," he said, wondering if ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... marked traits that differentiate it from all other cities, but several have marked likenesses. Cairo differs from all these in having no traits in common with any of them. It stands alone as the most kaleidoscopic of cities, the most bizarre in its mingling of the Orient ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... were given in eastern standard time. And in a later part of the Project report, the consultant admits this fact. But he has an alternate answer: "If the difference in time is real, the object was some form of known aircraft, regardless of its bizarre nature." ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... half-hidden by the flickering shadows of the torches. A deep cloak fell back from her shoulders. It might have been the light fabric of the aborigine. Upon the foot of Mary Connynge, twinkling in and out as she walked, showed the crudely garnished little shoe of the Indian princess over seas, dainty, bizarre, singular, covering the smallest ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... was talking in a low, throaty, unnatural tone. Her words were meaningless, but the effect, at that hour and in those surroundings, was bizarre and fearsome. Esteban felt his scalp prickling uncomfortably. This ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... sole protection from the rain was a waterproof ground sheet. Originally fawn-coloured it had been liberally camouflaged with bizarre circles, squares and triangles painted in a medley of colouring. At five hundred yards the wearer was practically invisible, the "colour-scheme" blending with the surrounding ground in a most effective manner. For the present the ground sheet, ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... eyes. What a fantastic life it had been hitherto, how sheltered, how remote from actuality! I seemed to have been building up a rococo stucco habitation out of whims and fancies, adding a room here and a row of pinnacles there, all utterly bizarre and grotesque. Vague dreams of poetry and art, nothing penetrated or grasped, a phrase here, a fancy there; one's ideal of culture seemed like Ophelia in Hamlet, a distracted nymph stuck all over with flowers and anxious to explain the sentimental value of each; ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pour mon Cosmos dans votre patrie; mais il en est des formes de composition litteraires, comme de la variete des races et de la difference primitive des langues. Un ouvrage traduit manque de vie; ce que plait sur les bords du Rhin doit paraitre bizarre sur les bords de la Tamise et de la Seine. Mon ouvrage est une production essentiellement allemande, et ce caractere meme, j'en suis sur, loin de m'en plaindre lui donne le gout du terroir. Je jouis d'une bonne ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... of Lolita in safety, what had seemed bizarre and piteous became obscured, and another aspect of the adventure was presented to Laura. The sufferings of the arrogant are not wholly depressing to the spectator; and of arrogance Hedrick had ever been a master. She began to ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... experience and direction, but I have no doubt he can be made very useful to you. And, poor fellow! he is very poor. I told him to write something for every number of your magazine, and that you might find it to your advantage to give him some permanent employ. He has a volume of very bizarre tales in the hands of ——, in Philadelphia, who for a year past has been promising to publish them. This young fellow is highly imaginative, and a little given to the terrific. He is at work upon a tragedy, but I have turned him to drudging upon whatever may make money, and I have no ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... it, to stifle and smother it; an inward struggle ensued which brought the perspiration in beads upon my cheeks—a struggle short, sharp, decisive. It was useless—useless to try to put it from me—this idea so wretchedly bizarre, so grotesque and fantastic, so utterly inane—it was useless to deny that the cat bore a distinct ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... homme, dit au MASQUE DE FER, ouvrage dans lequel on fait connaitre, sur preuves incontestables, a qui le celebre infortune dut le jour, quand et ou il naquit'. The wording of the title will give an idea of the bizarre and barbarous jargon in which the whole book is written. It would be difficult to imagine the vanity and self-satisfaction which inspire this new reader of riddles. If he had found the philosopher's stone, or made a discovery which would transform the world, he could ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... against the supposition that even the most remarkable cases of resemblance, such as that of the leaf insect, may have arisen through a process of mutation. Experience with domestic plants and animals shows that the most bizarre forms may arise as sports and perpetuate themselves. Were such forms, arising under natural conditions, to be favoured by natural selection owing to a resemblance to something in their environment we should obtain a striking case of protective ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... feel as if I should take to buzzing. Do you know that it is hard upon three o'clock in the morning? I must leave off and go to bed, for I rehearse Constance to-morrow at eleven, and act her to-morrow night. On Friday I act Bizarre in "The Inconstant," and think I shall find it great fun.... God ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... hills, and black shadows were assembling, like conspirators, in the orchards and under the spreading elms by the roadside, when Edward Lynde came in sight of a large manufacturing town, which presented a sufficiently bizarre appearance at ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... him, questing for an interview since morning, cornered him at last in Bob Woodward's What Cheer House at Sacramento and Leidesdorff streets. It was one of those odd institutions found only in this vividly bizarre metropolis of the West. For "two bits" you could get a bed and breakfast at the What Cheer House, both clean and wholesome enough for the proudest. If you had not the coin, it made little difference. One room was fitted out as a museum and contained the many curious articles which had ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... erratic and bizarre, was not justly entitled to rank among great statesmen. But the characteristics of Congress, as a body, can be brought into better relief in the narrative of his life than in that of any other person of his day. These characteristics were so striking, so essential ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... intimate and suggestive connection with this crime, the explanations he had to give of this connection, frequently bizarre and, I must acknowledge, not always convincing,—nothing could alter these nor change the fact of the undoubted cowardice he displayed in hiding Mrs. Fairbrother's gloves in ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... curiously bizarre fate led him? Where was "Wartrace Hall," and who was "Mahsteh Majah"? Who was the winsome little lady who looked as if she might be twenty, and had all the wit and wisdom of the ages at her tongue's end—who had held him so nearly spellbound ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... either side, let it be mentioned—to join the literary staff of the Aurora Borealis, an organ of quite a different complexion, and of considerable notoriety in the empire city, as it was famed for its bizarre sensations and teeming news. ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... dependence, and this filled his cup to overflowing. It was an outrageous thing to do; no one save a Courteau would have thought of subjecting the woman who bore his name to such a humiliation. But he was a perverse individual; his mind ran in crooked courses; he took a bizarre delight in the unusual, and morality of the common sort he knew not. To smirch her, even a little bit, to subject her to seeming disgrace, not only taught her a lesson, but also united them more closely, so he told himself. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... sight of her before she could leave Key West. Yet I first had a mission to fulfill at the cafe, nor did I confide this at once to him lest he brand me a total wreck. I knew that he was delighted at the prospect of this bizarre chase, however chimeric it might seem to him, for he possessed the faculty of "playing-true" even in the veriest of fairy-tales. So for the moment I let the other matter rest, not realizing at the time that he had read more of it in my face than I ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... effort to analyze. That belonged to the future. Just now, all was marvelous. What miracles around him were wrought out of golden virtue, and what out of brazen vice, did not as yet concern him. New worlds are not long new worlds. The boy from Misery was presently less bizarre to the eye than many of the unkempt bohemians he met in the life of the studios: men who quarreled garrulously over the end and aim of Art, which they spelled with a capital A—and, for the most part, knew nothing of. He retained, except within a small circle of intimates, a ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... are never worn in public, can literally be as bizarre as you please, and if you are driving in a closed motor, you can also wear an "original" type of dress. But in walking on the street,—if you care to be taken for a well-bred person—never wear anything that is exaggerated. If skirts are short, don't wear them two inches shorter than any one else's; ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... reinforced by Major Frank North and three companies of the celebrated Pawnee scouts. These became the most interesting and amusing objects in camp, partly on account of their race, but mainly because of the bizarre dress fashions they affected. My brother, in his autobiography, describes the appearance presented by these scouts during a review of the ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... come to me by conception, everything by sensation. These confused emotions, striking me one after another, did not warp a reason that I did not yet possess, but they gradually shaped in me a reason of another cast and temper, and gave me bizarre and romantic ideas of human life, of which neither reflection nor experience has ever been able wholly to cure me."[5] Thus these first lessons, which have such tremendous influence over all that follow, had the direct and fatal effect in Rousseau's case of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... truth, a strange picture; this child of thirteen, small and delicate for his years, yet with a face of singular freshness and gravity, his youthfulness heightened by cassock and cowl—a unique, simple figure, against the bizarre magnificence of the background, the central point of interest for that learned and brilliant assembly, as he stood there above the beautiful kneeling angel who held the Book of the Law, ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... There is no produce of the coast which has not been used to express gratitude, and 'to help the hospital along.' Codfish is a common fee. Sealskins, venison, wild ducks, beadwork, embroidered skinwork, feathers, firewood—nothing is too bizarre to offer." ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... grotesque element. At the same time the sculptor, while discarding Gothic tradition, has not betaken himself yet to a servile imitation of the antique. He has used invention, and substituted for grinning dragons' heads something wild and bizarre of his own in harmony with ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... will be noted that the above responses are partly true and partly false. The error they contain renders them unacceptable. Most of the failures are due to misstatements as to size, shape, or color, but occasionally one meets a bizarre answer. ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... that the decadence obvious in the sartorial modes for society women reached its limit last year and that a saner and more decent sense of propriety would evince itself in the revulsion of public taste. But the tendency to bizarre indecency has increased so that now we are offered in our public ballrooms the spectacle of criminal impropriety—of women's bare legs with painted knees, of naked backs and lewdly veiled bosoms, of transparent skirts and ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... express them after they have become common. Understanding is more valuable when it encompasses the things that tend to separate and distinguish men than when it is limited to the things that unite them. There is nothing so bizarre that art may not express it, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... and the fantastically laughable adventures of Wriford in his company—do they mingle quite smoothly with the painfully realistic manifestations of poor Wriford's state? Can so dreadful a theme ride off successfully on so bizarre a steed? And then again, was not the whole agony of the man on the physical and mental, not the spiritual plane? For did not Wriford before his illness give many obvious signs of unselfishness? Is there ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various
... rather irresponsibly, and looked at Hyacinth, his neighbour at dinner, with such obvious appreciation, that her gaiety became infectious. In the little panelled dining-room which, like all the house, was neither commonplace nor bizarre, but simple and distinguished, floated an atmosphere of ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... ribbons. As the figure paused before the door, Miss Tish gasped, and cast a quick restraining glance around the classroom. But it was too late; a dozen pairs of blue, black, round, inquiring, or mischievous eyes were already dancing and gloating over the bizarre stranger through the window. ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... mysteries of the distant portions of the universe, we find a chaos of opinion regarding the structure and formation of the earth. Guesses were not wanting to explain the formation of the world, it is true, but, with one or two exceptions, these are bizarre indeed. One theory supposed the earth to have been at first a solid mass of ice, which became animated only after a comet had dashed against it. Other theories conceived the original globe as a mass of water, over which floated vapors containing ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... it were not so flat, if the margins of the lakes had not been flooded by dams at the outlets, which have killed the trees, and left a rim of ghastly deadwood like the swamps of the under-world pictured by Dore's bizarre pencil,—and if the pianos at the hotels were in tune. It would be an excellent sporting region also (for there is water enough) if the fish commissioners would stock the waters, and if previous hunters had not pulled all the hair and skin ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... unequalled; and his faults were those rather of a bizarre temper, arising from an eager and irritable nervous habit, than any depravity of disposition. He was devoid of selfishness, which I take to be the basest ingredient in the human composition. He was generous, humane, and noble-minded, when passion ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... flume the river for many miles. The California mining system a gambling or lottery transaction. Miner who works his own claim the more successful. Dr. C. a loser in his mining ventures. Another sleep-killer. Bowling-alleys. Bizarre cant phrases and slang used by the miners. "Honest Indian?" "Talk enough when horses fight". "Talk enough between gentlemen". "I've got the dead-wood on him". "I'm going nary cent" (on person mistrusted). All carry the freshness of originality ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... actor on the subject of the grotesque vizard. They went wilily to their purpose, observing that his classical and Attic wit, his delicate vein of humour, his happy turn for dialogue, were rendered burlesque and ludicrous by this unmeaning and bizarre disguise, and that those attributes would become far more impressive if aided by the spirit of his eye and the expression of his natural features. The actor's vanity was easily so far engaged as to induce him to make the experiment. He played Harlequin ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... It was Lopez's bizarre and wild ambition which frustrated his own schemes. A single tide of invasion was not sufficient to satisfy a mind such as his. Gathering together a second powerful army, he determined to strike at the south-eastern portion of Brazil in addition to its province of Matto Grosso. In order ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... were changed into huge stones tossed together at random, like the inside of a wild beast's den, nor was the den without an inhabitant. The beautiful and innocent lips to which Artavan de Hautlieu had approached his own, were now changed into the hideous and bizarre form, and bestial aspect of a fiery dragon. A moment she hovered upon the wing, and it is said, had Sir Artavan found courage to repeat his salute three times, he would then have remained master of all the wealth, and of the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Swedish building. Situated on a narrow tongue of triangular shape, the architect has taken the fullest advantage of this original piece of ground. The building gives a very good idea of some of the very best tendencies in the modern art of Europe, without being bizarre, like some recent American attempts, in the most wrongly labeled of all art ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... uniforms and decorations suggesting a dress ball in the capital of the world. But the motley costumes of the women, who dressed with the license of unrestrained individuality, were even more startling and bizarre—a ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... done," she read. "Old Miss Campion has a 'flair' for the suitabilities, and now that so many are trying to be smart or bizarre, it is a relief to come back to the old pleasant suitable things—you know what I mean. And the old lady has an air. How she gets it, I don't know, for the dear Queen is her idea of style. Perhaps there is something ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... entered in the Wardrobe Accompts 20th Edw. III. I suspect that it was not 'till towards the close of the 15th century, when the sister art of painting directed that of engraving, that books were bound in thick boards, with leather covering upon the same; curiously stamped with arabesque, and other bizarre, ornaments. In the interior of this binding, next to the leaves, there was sometimes an excavation, in which a silver crucifix was safely guarded by a metal door, with clasps. The exterior of the binding had oftentimes large embossed ornaments ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... did you bring me?" He hesitated, trying to think of some polite form of address. Those he knew which were appropriate to their sex on other worlds seemed incongruous when applied to the bizarre figures now facing him. ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... wishes to win the applause of the multitude one may do it easily enough by proclaiming some new and untried plan. At our educational gatherings you notice above everything else a straining for spectacular and bizarre effects. It is the novel that catches attention; and it sometimes seems to me that those who know the least about the educational situation in the way of direct contact often receive the largest share of attention and have the ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... distance of only six miles. The mountain crests were sharply outlined against the clear sky. Well wooded at the base, they grew more bare and showed only stunted evergreens toward the summit. There the scraggly trees, grotesquely twisted, gave to the rocky heights a bleak and bizarre appearance. Here and there the ridge rose in sharp peaks. On our right the Black Dome, nearly seven thousand feet high, reared its gigantic head, sparkling at times above ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne
... wits and beauties of the Salon Bleu may have committed a thousand follies, but their chivalrous codes of honor and of manners, their fastidious tastes, even their prudish affectations, were open though sometimes rather bizarre tributes to the virtues that lie at the very foundation of a well-ordered society. They had exalted ideas of the dignity of womanhood, of purity, of loyalty, of devotion. The heroines of Mlle. de Scudery, ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... CHIROMANCY. Supposed to have been printed with wooden blocks. Folio. You may remember the amusement which you said was afforded you by the account of, and the fac-similes from, this very strange and bizarre production—in the Bibliographical Decameron. The copy before me is much larger and finer than that in Lord Spencer's collection. The figure of the Doctor and of the Princess Anna are also much clearer ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... so that altogether you may imagine I presented a terrifying appearance. Of this, however, I soon grew quite oblivious—a fact which I afterwards had occasion bitterly to regret. It were, indeed, well for me that I had on subsequent occasions realised better the bizarre nature of my appearance, for had I done so I would probably have reached civilisation ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... appeared to be well supplied with funds, but purchased sparingly as became a miserly hermit. And so vicious was his tongue that few cared to converse with him, even the young hoodlums of the town hesitating to harass him with the banter usually accorded the other bizarre characters of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... to see the bizarre carnival these people enjoy on the Seventh Day," answered the other. "Their duns and drabs, their russets and tawny tones of red and orange, are of their environment, the proper skins for their bodies; but to think of that girl brightening the eyes of a hundred louts ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... Clement the cyclamen, and Rio the jasmin; while, at Venice, there is a stray leaf from his portfolio dotted all over with studies of violets and the wild rose. In him first appears the taste for what is bizarre or recherche in landscape; hollow places full of the green shadow of bituminous rocks, ridged reefs of trap-rock which cut the water into quaint sheets of light—their exact antitype is in our own western seas; all ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... that he was now conscious of the lack, as a Greek Faun might be conscious of the difference between his life and that of struggling and suffering men. Nothing, indeed, could less suggest the blithe nature-life which Greek imagination embodied in the Faun, than the bizarre and restless aspect of the Squire. This spare white-haired man, with his tempers and irritations, was far indeed from Greek joyousness. And yet the Greek sense of beauty, half intellectual, half sensuous, had always seemed to her the strongest force in him. ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... but a languid reception unless roused by something either horrible or sensational, but her bizarre appearance had the effect which the Manager ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... mountain;" in Norway it is "in an egg, in a duck, in a well, in a church, on an island, in a lake"; in the Hebrides it is "in an egg, in the belly of a duck, in the belly of a wether, under a flagstone on the threshold." It is impossible to imagine the human mind independently imagining such bizarre convolutions. They were borrowed from one nation to the other, and till we have reason shown to the contrary, the original lender was a Hindu. I should add that the mere conception of an external soul ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... around a few minutes longer, but could not recapture any interest in the doings of the human beings around him. He had filed away every detail of what had just happened, and it had so many bizarre aspects that he could not think of anything else. Wherefore he flagged down a "taxi" and was taken out to the Pleiades. Belle and Lola were ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... merely means that he is not in the active practice of his profession. But exceptional cases, cases which by reason of their novelty interest him, he may be persuaded to undertake. I fancy this matter of your daughter's would prove attractive to him. It is unusual—bizarre. I strongly advise ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... trouble to get some object of art he would often give it away the next week. For he really liked money only for freedom and ease. The general look of the house was, consequently, distinguished, sincere and extremely comfortable. It was neither hackneyed nor bizarre, and, while it contained some ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... itself felt. I have seen Huysmans in his office—he is an employe in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a model employe; I have seen him in a cafe, in various houses; but I always see him in memory as I used to see him at the house of the bizarre Madame X. He leans back on the sofa, rolling a cigarette between his thin, expressive fingers, looking at no one and at nothing, while Madame X. moves about with solid vivacity in the midst of her extraordinary menagerie of bric-a-brac. The ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... thought to himself: This Siddhartha is a bizarre person, he expresses bizarre thoughts, his teachings sound foolish. So differently sound the exalted one's pure teachings, clearer, purer, more comprehensible, nothing strange, foolish, or silly is contained in them. But different from his thoughts seemed to me Siddhartha's hands and ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... preternatural size and bizarre colors—the college colors at football games, for instance—are in great demand. They are extremely decorative, and their remarkable lasting quality insures their permanent popularity. I have heard that the unexpanded bud can be cooked like cauliflower for the table; but we have not learned ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... the cloister are glazed with a peculiarly charming white glass, which admits plenty of light, but is not transparent. The effect is most restful to the eyes after examining some of the bizarre creations in ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... Blaneys in the city was much like the one Patty had seen at Lakewood, only a little more elaborately bizarre. The Moorish lamps were bigger and dustier: the thick brocade draperies a little more faded and tattered; the furniture a ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... which burned in the huge crystal chandeliers. The Landhofmeisterin's own musicians discoursed rhythmical strains from the gallery, and a gay motley crowd moved on the inlaid polished floor. There were dominoes of every colour, bizarre, fantastic shapes; and somehow this masked assemblage had a strangely sinister appearance, a mysterious lurking menace seemed to emanate ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... But there were very few people, and under the light of the rare street lanterns, he encountered strange faces of a hue unknown to him, between black and greenish; and raising his head from time to time, he beheld churches of bizarre architecture which were outlined black and vast against the sky. The city was dark and silent, but after having traversed that immense desert, it appeared lively to him. He inquired his way of a priest, speedily found the church and the house, ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and opinions—heads with some diverting twist in them—the oddities of authorship please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish of any thing that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing goes down with her, that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common sympathy. She "holds Nature more clever." I can pardon her blindness to the beautiful obliquities of the Religio Medici; but she ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... found the handle of the door and entered the room. It was a curious place draped, not without taste of a bizarre kind, in vivid colours, wherein purple dominated, and it gave an idea of mingled magnificence and squalor. Some of the furniture was very good, as were one or two of the pictures, though all of it was of an odd and unusual make. Thus, the sideboard was shaped like a sarcophagus, and supported ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... are far different from the great fete de Neuilly across the Seine, which begins at the Porte Maillot, and continues in a long, glittering avenue of side-shows, with mammoth carousels, bizarre in looking-glass panels and golden figures. Within the circle of all this throne-like gorgeousness, a horse-power organ shakes the very ground with its clarion blasts, while pink and white wooden pigs, their tails tied ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... At night, before falling asleep, I would pull it over my head, shut my eyes tight, and evoke a flow of fantastic shapes, bright, beautifully tinted, and incessantly changing form and color. While the play of these figures and hues was going on before me I would see all sorts of bizarre visions, which at times seemed to have something to do with my ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... tired, and left alone with Miss Amabel, she settled to an hour's laziness. She knew Miss Amabel liked having her there, liked her perhaps better than Anne, who was of the beautiful old Addington type and not so piquing. Lydia had, across her good breeding, a bizarre other strain, not bohemian, not gipsy, but of a creature who is and always will be, even beyond youth, new to life. There were few conventions for Lydia. She did not instinctively follow beaten paths. If the way looked feasible ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... much stimulant; his step becomes quicker, his eye keener, his voice rises a note on the scale, and grows a trifle sharper. In fine, the effects observed in our autumn foliage may be traced in the people themselves, a heightening of colors; and while this accounts for much that is prurient and bizarre, it infolds also the best promise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... these facts known to him, Lamarck did not see that such changes were due to changes of level of the land rather than to their being abandoned or invaded by the sea, but explained these by his bizarre hypothesis of westward-flowing currents due to the moon's action; though it should be in all fairness stated that down to recent times there have been those who believed that it is the sea and not the land which has ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... Faubourg. Here, on the afternoon of September 26th, 1833, among others strollers, were two who might have seemed to an observant eye to be waiting for somebody: one was a stout, inelegant little man, with something bizarre about his costume, and the other a dark, handsome lady, dressed in the height of fashion, and perhaps known to some of the loungers as the rich Russian Countess. The manner of their meeting is uncertain; but ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... as "Pilgrim's Progress." Elsewhere, as in the fictional essay on the "The Cow" and in the delightful lies that Brann in rollicking mischief attributed to his fellow Texas journalists, we find the humorous tale enriched with the bizarre and scintillating figure. Nor was Brann unconscious of his fictional gift, for he was working on a novel at the time of his death. That O. Henry's ambition to write may be accredited to the influence of Brann seems more ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... therefore utterly inconceivable and in the highest degree improbable that this long chain of chance circumstances should have happened a second time in America, and have been responsible for the creation of the same bizarre story in reference to one of the rarer American snakes of a localized distribution, whose horns are mere vestiges, which no one but a trained morphologist is likely to have noticed or ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... the next man was worse—hygienic. While with this creature I read Poe for the first time, and I was singularly fascinated by some of his grotesques. I tried—it was an altogether new development, I believe, in culinary art—the Bizarre. I made some curious arrangements in pork and strawberries, with a sauce containing beer. Quite by accident I mentioned my design to him on the evening of the festival. All the Philistine was aroused in him. 'It will ruin my digestion.' 'My friend,' I said, 'I am not your doctor; ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... the stone, whence gas escaped steadily and burned with a blue flicker, hung copper pots fairly well fashioned, though of bizarre shapes. Here the communal cuisine went steadily forward, tended by the strange, white-haired, long-cloaked women; and odors of boiling and of frying, over hot iron plates, rose and mingled with the shifting, swirling vapors ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... of surpassing fascination. If her eyes and cleft chin meant mischief, her mouth engaged to make amends by smiles and seductive words, more sweet than honey, because their flavor would never clog upon him who tasted thereof. Her attire was striking—it would have been bizarre upon any other lady in the room, but it enhanced the small stranger's beauty. A black robe—India silk or silk grenadine, or some other light and lustrous material—was bespangled with butterflies, gilded, green, and crimson, the many folds of the skirt ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... for every word, when perhaps three or four have combined to form it. The habits of thought and methods of study followed by philologists render them especially open to this charge. They wish to establish every form as symmetrical and mathematical, where nature has been freakish and bizarre. Some years ago when I published certain poems in the broken English spoken by Germans, an American philologist, named Haldemann, demonstrated to his own satisfaction that the language which I had put into Hans Breitmann's mouth was inaccurate, because I had not reduced ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... the best that man can do. And I didn’t undertake to build a crazy house so much as one that should have some dignity and character. That passage around the chimney is an indulgence, Jack,— I’ll admit it’s a little bizarre,—you see that chimney isn’t so big outside as it is in!”—and he laughed and rubbed his knees with the palms of his hands,—“and my bringing foreign laborers here wasn’t really to make it easier to get things done my way. Wait till you have seen the May-apples blossom and heard the ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... ends hammered into the form of viper-heads. She has large flowers of gold in her ears, a small gold flower in her very delicate little nose. This nose ornament does not seem absurd; on these dark skins the effect is almost as pleasing as it is bizarre. This jewellery is pure metal;—it is thus the coolies carry their savings,—melting down silver or gold coin, and recasting it into bracelets, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... calumet, a green and golden slipper from the seraglio, a Moorish yataghan, a Tartar idol, to the soldier's tobacco pouch, to the priest's ciborium, and the plumes that once adorned a throne. This extraordinary combination was rendered yet more bizarre by the accidents of lighting, by a multitude of confused reflections of various hues, by the sharp contrast of blacks and whites. Broken cries seemed to reach the ear, unfinished dramas seized upon the imagination, smothered lights caught ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... many stories are told of bizarre happenings,—of duels, raggings, suicides and such-like—in olden times; but of K., venerable, illustrious K. of Ireland, few and far between are the accounts of similar occurrences. This is one, however, and it deals with the phantom of ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... the opposite shore, and felt the cool breath of mountain and river sweep his cheek and mingle a few escaped threads of her fair hair with his own. With that glimpse and that sensation the vulgarity and the tawdriness of their surroundings, the guttering candles in their sconces, the bizarre figures, the unmeaning faces seemed to be whirled far into distant space. They were alone with night and nature; it was they who were still; all else had receded in a vanishing perspective of dull reality, in which they ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... recalled the Elizabethans, but marred her work by declamatory rhetoric and by a tormented and often obscure style. Robert Browning was yet more difficult, owing to his overpowering taste for subtlety and the bizarre—nay, even the grotesque. Almost ignored, or at least unappreciated by his contemporaries, he has since taken an exalted place in English admiration, which he owes to the depth, originality, and extreme richness of his ideas, all the more, perhaps, because they lend themselves ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... the abnormal or the bizarre that interests most of us to-day. It is not into the by-ways of vice that we seek to penetrate. It is the normal exercise of a normal instinct by normal people that interests us: and it is of this that I have tried to write and speak. The curiosities ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... crystalline glass drops—a cool white pavement invited the gay minuet. Beyond, a huge banquet table groaned with delicacies and wines the cost of which would have gone far to rationing the thirty thousand hungry of the nearby City. Indeed, enough was wasted to have fed many. With bizarre and often gross entertainment Marquis de Praille amused his guests who themselves presented a wanton and amorous scene that seemed itself a part ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... the model verb, expressing the archetype of activity. Once you can love grammatically there is a world of things you may do without stumbling. For, strange to say, "to love," which in real life is associated with so much that is bizarre and violent, is always "regular" in grammar. Ancient and modern tongues tell the same tale—from Hebrew to street-Arabic, from Greek to the elephantine language that was "made in Germany." Not only is "to love" deficient in no language ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... certain that even the clever people who write them have moods and impulses far more vivid and thrilling, far more abnormal and bizarre, than they have the audacity to put into their work. A sort of perverted Puritanism restrains them. They have the diseased conscience of modern art, and they think that nothing can be true which is not draggle-tailed and nothing can be real which ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Sects of the second century had one common link and badge; they all proposed a "way," often bizarre and strange-sounding to modern ears, by which the soul, astray, lost, encumbered, or imprisoned in matter, might attain its freedom and become spiritual. Most of the Gnostic teachers, who in their flourishing time were as thick as thistle-downs ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... his demonstration afresh. 'Ah,' said De Wimpffen, 'your positions are not so strong as you would have us believe them to be.' 'You do not know the topography of the country about Sedan,' was Von Moltke's true and crushing answer. 'Here is a bizarre detail which illustrates the presumptuous and inconsequent character of your people,' he went on, now thoroughly aroused. 'When the war began you supplied your officers with maps of Germany at a time when they could not study the geography of their own country for want of French ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... backward bend, side practice, toe-practice, and all novelties. Dramatic authors had their cards among the rest, and one poor fellow, as if he had not the heart to name himself, advertised a play to be heard of at the office of the newspaper. Whatever related to the theatre was there, in bizarre solidarity, which was droll enough to Maxwell in one way. But he hated to be mixed up with all that, and he perceived that he must be mixed up with it more and more, if he wrote for the theatre. Whether he ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... Spenser, the Rowley poems would have been very different. They would then have borne some resemblance to the language of the fifteenth century, whereas they are rather less like the language of that period than of any other. The spelling of the words is frequently too late, or too bizarre, whilst many of the words themselves are too archaic or too uncommon."[14] But this internal evidence, which was so satisfactory to Scott, was so little convincing to Chatterton's contemporaries that Tyrwhitt felt called upon to publish in 1782 ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... to this same date should be assigned the bizarre and even comical expression of hopes and fears for the future which Balzac confided to his sister Laure. In order to force himself to take exercise, he used to correct his proofs either at the printer's or at her house. ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... said the Secretary, mopping his forehead, "except when you speak. Then I have the bizarre experience of seeing glimpses of teeth, tongue and throat hanging in mid-air. I'd never have believed it if I hadn't witnessed it myself! That paint ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst
... dipped and splashed or dried her royal skin. She set a hot pace for all the votaries of dress to follow. All kinds of fashions came in from abroad with the rush of new-found wealth; and so, instead of being sanely beautiful, they soon became insanely bizarre. 'An Englishman,' says Harrison, 'endeavouring to write of our attire, gave over his travail, and only drew the picture of a naked man, since he could find no kind of garment that could please ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... for odds and ends which had no place elsewhere, but it now usually serves the purpose of a sideboard. It is a remote and illegitimate descendant of the cabinet; it has rarely been elegant and never beautiful. It was one of the many curious developments of the mixed taste, at once cumbrous and bizarre, which prevailed in furniture during the Empire period in England. The earliest cheffoniers date from that time; they are usually of rosewood—the favourite timber of that moment; their "furniture" (the technical name ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... after having read it, almost any one will be likely to imagine that a novel with so startling a heroine and with incidents so bizarre cannot possibly be based on any sound and genuine knowledge of its background; that the author has conjured out of his fantasy not only his plot and chief characters, but also their world; that he has created out and out not merely his Vestal, but his Vestals, their circumstances and ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... the ears of his mistress his gentle fancies: the mother stilled her child with some bizarre allegory as she rocked it in her arms; the bard favored by royalty—the poet laureate—amused the idle moments of his chief with some witty improvisation; the alii himself, gifted with the poetic fire, would air his humor or his didactic comments in rhythmic shape—all ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... pointing out Seniha's rooms, facing on the street, and contributing several bizarre anecdotes of the palace life. But Billy was not to be diverted, and went over the plans again and again, before the diminished number of lights and the hoverings of the attendant Arabs recalled the lateness of the hour to ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... Ellenora. Her supple, robust figure attracted his senses; her face was interesting; she had brains, uncommon brains. What would she become? Not a poet, not a novelist. Perhaps a literary critic, like Sainte-Beuve with shining Monday morning reviews. Perhaps—yes, perhaps a critic, a writer of bizarre prose-poems; she has personal style, she is herself, and ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... foot of the panel, and it was not this that first attracted attention. It was of the bizarre shape of German escutcheons of the fifteenth century. It was perpendicular and rested, although rounded at the base, upon a worn, moss covered stone. Of the two upper angles, one bent to the left and curled back upon ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... s'enivre, pour l'ainsi dire, de son propre vin, il se persuade que la cause de ses passions est la cause de Dieu (p. 72), mais quelque violent qu'ait pu tre l'enthousiasme de S. Paul, il sentait trs bien que la doctrine qu'il prchait devait paratre bizarre et insense des tres raisonnables" ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... now forty-six years of age, a mathematician of European fame, and the holder of an honourable post at an ancient university, which he might have exchanged for other employment quite as dignified and far more lucrative. In dealing with a character as bizarre as his, it would be as a rule unprofitable to search deeply for motives of action, but in this instance it is no difficult matter to detect upon the surface several causes which may have swayed him in this ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... Anthony, the father, saw in the person of Adelbert Higgins a budding criminal of rare precocity, and a menace to his son; while to the object of his solicitude the aforesaid criminal was nothing more than an entertaining companion, whose bizarre disregard of all established rules of right and wrong matched well with his own careless temper. Higgins, moreover, was an ardent follower of athletics, revolving like a satellite about the football stars, and attaching ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... canvas sheds open in front and covered with all kinds of signs, in all languages. Great piles of merchandise were in the open air, for lack of storehouses. The streets were full of people of as diverse and bizarre a character as their dwellings: Yankees of every possible variety, native Californians in serapes and sombreros, Chilians, Sonorians, Kanakas from Hawaii, Chinese with long tails, Malays armed with everlasting creeses, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... seizing on any bizarre incident reported in the morning papers, enfolding it in "funny language," adding a pun, and thus making it his own. He had a cunning mastery of periphrasis, and ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... been an act of courage, of rashness if you will, to take this draught. He was acutely introspective, ready for anything, for the most disagreeable or the most bizarre sensations. He was asking himself, Were his feet steady? Was ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... sneered at the lyric ecstasy of Renoir, at the severe restraint of Chavannes, at the poetic mystery of Carriere, their lips were hushed as they tiptoed into the Salle Cezanne. Sacred ground, indeed, we trod as we gazed and wondered before these crude, violent, sincere, ugly, and bizarre canvases. Here was the very hub of the Independents' universe. Here the results of a hard-labouring painter, without taste, without the faculty of selection, without vision, culture—one is tempted to add, intellect—who with dogged persistency has painted in the face ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... little hackneyed and time-worn. He has surely done his part in literature, and may retire to the heaven of the dilettante. But all the inhabitants of Marsh Island are human and attractive, and the untiring industries of the well-ordered household soothe one like the rhythm of a song. The bizarre, incongruous, but, upon the whole, satisfactory specimen of New England "help" which Miss Jewett generally introduces finds an excellent example here in the person of Temperance Kipp. Squire Owen is a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... temple. His eyebrows were red tufts standing fiercely out over his little red-brown eyes, and his nose, long, lean, and absurdly pointed, seemed peering at his great teeth, yellowed by much smoking of cigarettes. He added to his charms an attire intentionally bizarre, for he dressed himself, so to speak, in character. And with these natural and achieved drawbacks to his appearance he had the temper of a wasp, so that it was small wonder that questionings were rife as to the reason of his retention, his overpaid retention, in the De Nemours' household. ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane |
