"Perverse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The perverse reason people like to eat fats is that they are very hard to digest and greatly slow the digestive action of the stomach. Another way of saying that is that they have a very high satiety value. Fats make a person feel full for a long time because their presence in the stomach makes it churn and ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... suspected, what I afterwards definitely knew and have already intimated, that the poor lady had taken a dislike to me; and this of course was not encouraging. She thought me an obtrusive and even depraved young man, whom a perverse Providence had dropped upon their quiet lawn to flatter her husband's worst tendencies. She did me the honor to say to Miss Ambient, who repeated the speech, that she didn't know when she had seen her husband take such a fancy to a visitor; and she measured, apparently, my ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... once coming to hys house and Mistress Whiting giving him a drink of ye cyder, he did sett down ye pot and smaking his lips say yt Adam and Eve were rightlie damned for eating ye appills in ye garden of Eden, they should have made them into cyder." This perverse application of good John Eliot's teaching would have vexed the apostle sorely. Of so much account were the barrels of cider, and so highly were they prized by the ministers, that one honest soul did not hesitate to thank the Lord in ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... not have shown it. This is another perverse and suicidal inconsistency on a woman's part: she should never exhibit these small meannesses of pique, sullen tempers, jealousy, to her husband, since they place her wholly at a disadvantage, making her less attractive than the objects she ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... was not so hard as I had expected, and father was just as wise as mother, and I alone rebellious concerning his departure. I cried night and day whenever I could get a moment to cry in, and I could not help it. How perverse I felt, although doing all I could to forward his departure, which was daily coming nearer, and when the 4th of July came and with it the gala day which the entire country about us enjoyed, I could not and did not go to the pic-nic, or the speech ground, and I succeeded in making ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... death because of their skaldic quality. Another he killed with his own hand, I know not for what reason. In brief, after about a year, Thangbrand returned to Norway and king Olaf; declaring the Icelanders to be a perverse, satirical, and inconvertible people, having himself, the record says, "been the death of three men there." King Olaf was in high rage at this result; but was persuaded by the Icelanders about him to try farther, and by a wilder instrument. He accordingly chose ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... days," as Old Sophy called them. The light in her eyes was still, but very bright. She looked up so full of perverse and wilful impulses, that Dick knew he could make her go with him and her father. He had his own motives for bringing her to this determination,—and his own ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... that 'Rhetoric made a Greek of me,' we should wish heartily that he had never been a rhetorician. It is the practice of talking on unreal cases, doubtless habitual with him up to forty, that must be responsible for the self- satisfied fluency, the too great length, and the perverse ingenuity, that sometimes excite our impatience. Naturally, it is in the pieces of inferior subject or design that this taint is most perceptible; and it must be forgiven in consideration of the fact that without the toilsome study of rhetoric he would not have been the master of Greek ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Mont. Perverse, and traiterous miscreant! Where are your other fellowes of my guard? Have I not told you I will speake with ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... he turned to the window, to the westering sun, to the motors, the smart gowns and the women who looked so delightful and of whom all had their secrets—secrets trivial, momentous, perverse ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... how they can effect changes in nature and in society, in order that those impressions may not exist. If ugliness were to vanish from the world, if universal virtue and felicity were established there, perhaps artists would no longer represent perverse or pessimistic sentiments, but sentiments that are calm, innocent, and joyous, like Arcadians of a real Arcady. But so long as ugliness and turpitude exist in nature and impose themselves on the artist, it is not possible to prevent the expression of these things also; and when it has arisen, factum ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... plea for delay until they knew what Luck meant to do, Applehead went on with his energetic preparations for a spring roundup of his own. Some perverse spirit seemed to possess him and drive him out of his easy-going shiftlessness. He offered to hire the Happy Family by the day, since none of them would promise any permanent service until they heard from Luck. He put them to work gathering up the saddle-horses that ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... as if by perverse devilishness, a fierce wind from the west swept over the crest of Nob Hill and was answered by leaping tongues of flames from out of ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... pass'd, and many a Region dolorous, O're many a Frozen, many a Fierie Alpe, 620 Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death, A Universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutterable, and worse Then Fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceiv'd, Gorgons and Hydra's, and Chimera's dire. Mean while the Adversary of God and Man, Satan with thoughts inflam'd ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Carpentaria, leaving the others in charge of Brahe, to await his return, and also Wright's long-delayed arrival. On the 16th December, 1860, Burke, having with him Wills, King, and Gray, six camels, two horses, and three months' provisions, started on this tramp, which for perverse absurdity stands unequalled. The first duty of a man entrusted with such a large party, was to have carried out its chief aim and mission of reporting on the geographical features and formation of the country he was ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... for it. He said terrible things to him, and the boy covered his face with his hands, as though he were crying; but he was laughing. He was suspended from school for three days, and he returned more perverse and insolent than before. Derossi said to him one day, "Stop it! don't you see how much the teacher suffers?" and the other threatened to stick a nail into his stomach. But this morning, at last, he got himself driven ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... heart and perverse words, Ye darken beauty with your plots of pain! What languors beat through me like muted chords? I know indeed that suffering shall profane These lovers, sweet as viols or violet-spices. Strangely must end their dreamy chess-playing, ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... "A giddy, perverse child I was," retorted Mrs. Meredith; "and another art thou, to fling the misbehaviour in ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... abstains from "nipping." "One nips or is nipped, and never knows beforehand," quoted Rickie, and opened the poems of Shelley, a man less foolish than you supposed. How pleasant it was to read! If business worried him, if Stephen was noisy or Ansell perverse, there still remained this paradise of books. It seemed as if he had read nothing for two years. Then the train stopped for the shunting, and he heard protests from minor officials who were working on the line. They complained that ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... of day coming through the chinks of the barn, he was up and abroad. Ere long finding himself in the suburbs of a considerable village, the better to guard against detection he supplied himself with a rude crutch, and feigning himself a cripple, hobbled straight through the town, followed by a perverse-minded cur, which kept up a continual, spiteful, suspicious bark. Israel longed to have one good rap at him with his crutch, but thought it would hardly look in character for a poor old ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... Cicely, I must be obeyed; and you are a right perverse child as one might look for with the training you have had. Let me hear no more about headache: it's nothing ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... secundum leges cognitionis intuitivae, repraesentatio est impossibilis. Quanquam autem harum e non paucis scholis explosarum notionum, praesertim prioris, causam hic non gero, maximi tamen momendi erit monuisse. gravissimo illos errore labi, qui tam perverse argumentandi ratione utuntur. Quicquid enim repugnat legibus intellectus et rationis, utique est impossibile; quod autem, cum rationis purae sit objectum, legibus cognitionis intuitivae tantummodo non subest, non item. Nam hic dissensus ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Paula deserved to own the stronger spell. Paula's emotional channels were open and deep. No choking snags and sandbars, no perverse eddies in them. Look at her with Rush to-day! There was a situation that fairly bristled with opportunities for blundering. She might, with this grown-up son of her husband's whom she had hardly seen, have shown herself shy, ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... on a week or two, then the expert came up and put in a new clock. He came up every three months during the next three years, and put in a new clock. But it was always a failure. His clocks all had the same perverse defect: they would put the alarm on in the daytime, and they would not put it on at night; and if you forced it on yourself, they would take it off again the minute ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... Pope establishes in the Spiritless papal Church. The fact is, however, the doings of Pope and councils are mere outward matters; they relate to external commands and government. The above theory is, therefore, wholly inconsistent and perverse. Of the work of the Holy Spirit, the Papists make a dead, written law, when it is really a living, spiritual law. Thus they render the Holy Spirit a Moses, and his words mere human prattle. It is all due to ignorance of the character of the Holy Spirit, of the ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... consent come to a pause. The doctor, when a sufficient time had made him fully sensible of this, walked up to Fleda, who wished heartily at the moment that she could have presented the reverse end of the magnet to him. Perhaps however it was that very thing which by a perverse sort of attraction drew him ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... woman such a pinafore would have been intolerable to the sensitive eye. But on Rachel it simply had a piquant and perverse air, because she was young, with the incomparable, the unique charm of comely adolescence; it simply excited the imagination to conceive the exquisite treasures of contour and tint and texture which it veiled. Do not infer that Rachel was a coquette. Although comely, ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... one must allow for the original descent;something of the German boorishness still flows in the blood; something of the whiggish and perverse opposition to established rank and privilege. You may observe that he never has any advantage of me in dispute, unless when he avails himself of a sort of pettifogging intimacy with dates, names, and trifling matters of facta tiresome and frivolous accuracy of memory, which is ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... passed, and many a region dolorous, O'er many a frozen, many a fiery alp, Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death— A universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good; Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Obominable, inutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feigned or fear conceived, Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire. Meanwhile the Adversary of God and Man, Satan, with thoughts inflamed of highest design, Puts on swift wings, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... magician, loving darkness rather than light, and darkening himself in the delusions of his darkness, stubbornly persevered in his malice, and still contentiously affirmed that his wicked and perverse opinions excelled the doctrines of the saint. And the king feared that the works of the magician would be overturned, and he proposed a certain trial to be made between them: "Let your books be plunged into the water, and he whose ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... away; as a faith it had failed him in his hour of need. In its stead another faith had come to him, a faith which he felt to be all-powerful, and the sole stay of a man's life amid the shifting shadows of intellectual creeds. And it had been revealed too late. Led by perverse motives, now no longer intelligible, he had reached a goal of mere frustration; between him and the true end of his being there was a ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... interests and schemes had suffered in Leander's flight. He dwelt with dismay upon the possibility that he might secure the postmastership without the capable assistant whose services were essential. In this perverse sequence of events disaster to his application was more to be desired than success. He foresaw himself browbeaten, humiliated, detected, a butt for the ridicule of the community, his pretensions ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... consigned him without his consent. The wicked old woman shouted for joy when she heard that the queen had found her a herd-boy, and sent word that she might treat him as she pleased, because the youth was very perverse, and nothing good was to be got out of him. She did not know how hard the new millstone was, and hoped to treat him in her usual fashion; but she was soon to discover that this fence was too high to jump over, and that the youth would not sacrifice ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... freedom of the Press. Opinion is King of England and Victoria is Queen. Every phase of opinion speaks through some book or journal and is repeated widely in proportion to the hold it takes upon the public. Government is the representative of whatever opinions prevail; if it prove too perverse it falls—ministers change, without a revolution. Then too, when every man's tongue is free, we are accustomed to hear all manner of wild suggestions. Fresh paint does not soon dazzle us; we are like children lavishly supplied with toys, who receive ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... extravagance in the conception of the poems, or in the sentiments expressed; of any want of concentration in thought, of national or historical keeping. Far from this, indeed, a deliberate unity of purpose is strikingly apparent. Without referring for the present to what are assumed to be perverse faults of execution—a question the principles and bearing of which will shortly be considered—assuredly the mention of the names of a few among Browning's poems—of "Paracelsus," "Pippa Passes," "Luria," the "Souls's Tragedy," "King Victor and King Charles," even of the ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... and, if he had heard a strange hint now and then about Elsie, had never considered it as anything more than idle and ignorant, if not malicious, village-gossip. All that he fully understood was that this had been a perverse and unmanageable child, and that the extraordinary care which had been bestowed on her had been so far thrown away that she was a dangerous, self-willed girl, whom all feared and almost all shunned, as if she carried with her ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the Pope returned answer, that he had decided to submit the book to a congregation of "learned, grave, and saintly men," who would weigh every word in it. The views of his Holiness personally on the subject were expressed in his belief that the Dialogue contained the most perverse matter that could come ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... of slamming pew-seats could easily be heard over half a mile away from the meeting-house in the summer time, for the perverse boys contrived always in their salute of welcome to the Amen to give vent in a most tremendous bang to a little of their pent up and ill-repressed energies. In old church-orders such entries as this ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... her seat as the old lady rustled slowly away. Her heart was hot with fury, and she was only partly soothed by hearing Richard Carter's murmur of reproach: "How can you be so perverse, Mother—" ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... any view current on certain tangible interests which concern man very nearly, and which has been shared by great parties and even by whole peoples for generations, is not based only on ignorance or a perverse love of wrong. The error consists more frequently in applying measures wholesome and even absolutely necessary under certain circumstances, to circumstances entirely different. And here, a thorough insight into the conditions of the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... substitute for the duties of moral righteousness and a sublime virtue, lulling the conscience into a state of artificial repose. And to produce this effect, no scheme of religious belief, that ever emanated from the perverse ingenuity of the human mind, was ever so perfectly contrived as the Calvinistic ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... of his commentary is acquiescence in his first thoughts; that precipitation which is produced by consciousness of quick discernment; and that confidence which presumes to do, by surveying the surface, what labour only can perform, by penetrating the bottom. His notes exhibit sometimes perverse interpretations, and sometimes improbable conjectures; he at one time gives the author more profundity of meaning than the sentence admits, and at another discovers absurdities, where the sense is plain to every other reader. But his emendations ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... the centre of the great Putnam family; and, her sister Bayley being the wife of the minister, a powerful combination was secured to his support. The opposition so obstinately made to his settlement, appearing to his friends, as it does to us, so unreasonable, if not perverse, engendered a very bitter resentment, which spread from house to house. Every thing served to aggravate it. The disregard, by the opposition, of the advice of the old church to agree to his ordination, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... suppose everyone can make a mistake. It seems to me as if there are a lot of channels, some short, ending abruptly, some long, going almost to the center of things. And genius is like a liquid poured into them. I only want you to pour yours into a long channel. Is it very stupid, or perverse, of me?" ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... little specialty of seeing nothing in certain celebrities, of seeing overmuch in an occasional nobody, and of judging from a point of view that, say what I would for it (and I had a monstrous deal to say) remained perverse and obscure. Mine was in short the love that killed, for my subtlety, unlike Mrs. Highmore's, produced no tremor of the public tail. She had not forgotten how, toward the end, when his case was worst, Limbert ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... college days, and he had such vast energy, vitality, and pride, that his life at this time would have borne a little taming under the influence of a sister thoroughly congenial to him. In relation to his studies he was wilful, though not perhaps perverse. He steadily declined, for instance, to learn Greek, though he mastered Latin pretty fairly. After a time spent at the High School, Edinburgh, Scott was sent to a school at Kelso, where his master made a friend and companion of him, and so poured into ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... you, I should think it quite certain that what you witnessed just before my father's death would secure you from ever thinking again of Philip Wakem as a lover. But I don't feel certain of it with you; I never feel certain about anything with you. At one time you take pleasure in a sort of perverse self-denial, and at another you have not resolution to resist a thing that ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... soothe the Soul through the Senses into Acquiescence with Things as he saw them, than to perplex it with vain disquietude after what they might be. It has been seen, however, that his Worldly Ambition was not exorbitant; and he very likely takes a humorous or perverse pleasure in exalting the gratification of Sense above that of the Intellect, in which he must have taken great delight, although it failed to answer the Questions in which he, in common with all men, ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... modulations, ugly distortions of melody and rhythm. Everything it is possible to think of is raked up to produce the effect of odd originality, but especially strange keys, the most unnatural positions of chords, the most perverse combinations with ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... peace out of that honest affection. She had not the knowledge—not the skill perhaps. The night had come on apace; it had grown pitch-dark where we were, so that without stirring she had faded like the intangible form of a wistful and perverse spirit. And suddenly I heard her quiet whisper again, "Other men had sworn the same thing." It was like a meditative comment on some thoughts full of sadness, of awe. And she added, still lower if possible, "My father did." ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... in downright earnest, and in those cold dark mornings early rising seemed an affront to the understanding, and a snare to be avoided by all right-minded persons; yet notwithstanding all that, a perverse, fidgety notion of duty drove me with a scourge of mental thorns from my warm bed. For I was young and healthy, and why should I lie there while Deborah and Martha broke the ice in their pitchers, and came downstairs with rasped red faces and acidulated tempers? ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... religious belief, should call up an army of assailants and defenders. Nor have the supporters of the theory much reason, in many cases, to blame the more or less unskilful and hasty attacks of adversaries, seeing that those attacks have been in great part due to the unskilful and perverse advocacy of the cause on the part of some of its adherents. If the odium theologicum has inspired some of its opponents, it is undeniable that the odium antitheologicum has possessed not a few of its supporters. It ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... Baudelaire and Gautier; with the poets of the forest and the sun, and not with those of the alcove. We can make peace with him for love of them; we can imagine them thankful to him who, poor and perverse in thought in so many pages, could yet join them in ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... be, whether it should be called dimness of understanding, or rather perverse ingenuity, that men reason thus, when the facts are: So general is the disposition to abuse power, that wherever it is accumulated, it will surely be abused; accordingly it must be distributed as equally as possible. If government ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... thought to cross your mind that I can ever forget you, for I cannot bear such an idea. My chief aim is, and always will be, to endeavor that we may meet soon and happily, but we must have patience. You know even better than I do that things often take a perverse turn, but they will one day go straight—only patience! Let us place our trust in God, who will never forsake us. I shall not be found wanting; how can you possibly doubt me? Surely it concerns me also to work with all my strength, that I may have the pleasure and the happiness (the sooner ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... been a great deal of discussion lately as to the exact nature of the bond which united Great Britain and the United States. Some one says blood is thicker than water, whereupon another with perverse ingenuity begins at once to analyze the blood and discovers that the elements are not, when resolved, precisely the same. That, it is said, is the bond of the Anglo-Saxon race; whereupon a Scotchman insists, or a Welshman insists, that it ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Eyes, the charming gifts of Nature, &c. making use still of the second cause instead of the first, which we yet know to be the original of all. And 'tis no more Blasphemy to say that Providence took more care of a perverse beautiful Womans Body than her Soul, than 'tis to say that the Sun made a gay Tulip flourish in a Garden to delight the Eye, not caring three-pence tho it never smelt so sweet as ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... in writing. Trustworthy information respecting America, in the absence of maps, gazetteers, and books of travel, was more difficult to procure. The ordinary Englishman of that day regarded America with horror or contempt as perverse and rebellious colonies, making a great to-do about a paltry tax, and giving "the best of kings" a world of trouble for nothing. He probably heard little of the thundering eloquence with which Fox, Pitt, Burke, and Sheridan were nightly defending the American cause ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... thorough artifices! But were they now to open and see me here, won't they feel ashamed. Moreover, the voice in which those remarks were uttered resembles very much that of Hung Erh, attached to Pao-yue's rooms, who has all along shown a sharp eye and a shrewd mind. She's an artful and perverse thing of the first class! And as I have now overheard her peccadilloes, and a person in despair rebels as sure as a dog in distress jumps over the wall, not only will trouble arise, but I too shall derive no benefit. It would be better at present therefore for ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... niche, hidden from the men in the valley below, but with a perfect view of everything that went on. The wind whistled around the cliffs, ceaselessly moaning a tuneless song. He felt like standing up and shouting wildly, "Here I am! Here I am!" but he repressed the perverse urge. ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... (and, as he boasted, without a fee) from an eminent Scottish counsel, under whose notice he contrived to bring the point while consulting him regularly on some other business. But the Baron would not listen to such a proposal for an instant. On the contrary, he used to have a perverse pleasure in boasting that the barony of Bradwardine was a male fief, the first charter having been given at that early period when women were not deemed capable to hold a feudal grant; because, according to Les coustusmes de Normandie, c'est l'homme ki se bast et ki conseille; or, as is ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... with him. 'It is the wisest thing that has been said yet!' exclaimed she. 'Now I shall have a chance for Albinia!' and accordingly, Mr. Kendal having given a gracious and grateful consent, Albinia was informed; but Winifred thought her almost perverse when a perturbed look came over her, and she said, 'It is very kind in Maurice, but I must speak ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and the gospels of the Christian Church, surely forget that St. Paul was a Jew, and that there are some transformations of which the religious mind is incapable. He never speaks of Christ as a 'Saviour God'. Even more perverse are the arguments which are used to prove that the centre of St. Paul's religion was a gross and materialistic sacramental magic. The apostle, whose antipathy to ritual in every shape is stamped upon all his writings, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which He hath purchased with His own blood. 29. For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. 30. Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them. 31. Therefore watch, and remember, that by the space of three years I ceased not to warn every one night and day with tears. 32. And now, brethren, I commend you to God, and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up, and to give ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... SHATOV WAS NOT PERVERSE but acted on my note, and called at midday on Lizaveta Nikolaevna. We went in almost together; I was also going to make my first call. They were all, that is Liza, her mother, and Mavriky Nikolaevitch, sitting in the big drawing-room, arguing. ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... She would fain have recalled her words, but that was impossible: fain would she have stood upon form, and have kept her lover at a distance, as the custom of discreet ladies is, to frown and be perverse, and give their suitors harsh denials at first; to stand off, and affect a coyness or indifference, where they most love, that their lovers may not think them too lightly or too easily won; for the difficulty of attainment increases the ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... crookedly marrying a shining sinful Frenchman who believes a woman must do one or the other of those things. The lightest of US have a ballast that they can't imagine, and the poorest a moral imagination that they don't require. She was romantic and perverse—she thought the world she had been brought up in too vulgar or at least too prosaic. To have a decent home-life isn't perhaps the greatest of adventures; but I think she wishes nowadays she hadn't ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... "are six in number (all on various forms of vice); and show great knowledge, classical and sociological, of unsavory subjects. Now that the book is too rare to do us any harm, we may admit that the pastiche was not only highly amusing, but showed a perverse cleverness ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... instead of roofs to their houses because not troubled with rain, and the matts were a sufficient protection from the sun: but made their walls of stone to defend themselves against the malignity and rapaciousness of the Badwis, a perverse people, void of all goodness, who often suddenly assaulted the place in hope of plunder, and frequently pillaged the caravans coming across from the Nile with ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... believe in the antiquity of The Flowers of the Forest rather than to learn that "the most positive evidence" proved its modern origin. The editor's introduction to the poem seems perfectly clear; he names his authority and quotes two verses which are ancient;[64] but the reviewer says with a perverse irritability: "Mr. Scott would have done well to tell us how much he deems ancient, and to give us the 'positive evidence' that convinced him the whole was not so."[65] This review was, however, for ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... found at Versailles.] Frontenac was full of faults; but it is not through these that his memory has survived him. He was domineering, arbitrary, intolerant of opposition, irascible, vehement in prejudice, often wayward, perverse, and jealous: a persecutor of those who crossed him; yet capable, by fits, of moderation, and a magnanimous lenity; and gifted with a rare charm—not always exerted—to win the attachment of men: versed in books, polished in courts and salons; without ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... that he was given secret warning of the meaning of his demand. This it is not for us to know. But, knowing or unknowing, he repeated his cry, and was answered. There and then, with this mysterious, perverse wisdom, his task-master began his training, blinding the eyes of the pupil to all save the few immediate steps along the steep road that lay before, permitting him to advance only step by step, under her guidance. Ivan yielded himself as clay to those powerful hands; but the ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... is out of the power of the most perverse theory to spoil the true poet. The poems of Wordsworth must continue to charm and elevate mankind, in defiance of his crotchets, just as Luther, Henri Quatre, and other living impersonations of poetry do, despite ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... the German by the Rev. Dr. Henry Stebbing, of London, and we have the first of the two octavos of which it consists, from the press of Robert Carter & Brothers. So much inexcusable ignorance, so much perverse misrepresentation, so much insolent lying, may be found scattered through modern literature, respecting the great Genevan, that Dr. Henry deserves well the thanks of the christian world for exhibiting the chief facts ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the health of a modern commonwealth on the only real strength, and the only kind of force that can be relied upon, namely, the honest, manly, simple, and emancipated character of the citizen. This gives to his doctrine a hold and a prize on the work of the day, and makes him our helper. Carlyle's perverse reaction had wrecked and stranded him when the world came to ask him for direction. In spite of his resplendent genius, he had no direction to give, and was only able in vague and turbid torrents of words to hide a shallow and obsolete lesson. His confession to Emerson, quoted above, looks as if ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... animal, felt the snarl before he saw the immaculateness; and like any healthy animal he snarled back—and had business downtown. He responded to my real mental and emotional state, responded against his will many times; and I did not know it. I supposed him perverse and impossible of pleasing. I knew I had tried my best (according to my lights, which it had not occurred to me to doubt), but it never entered my cranium that he had tried, too. I looked upon the outward appearance—my immaculate appearance, ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... it comes from this branch. This branch of divine grace, which makes man acceptable and by which we merit eternal life, is offered to all. But it is not grafted on all, for they will not purge away the wild branches of their trees—that is to say, unbelief or a perverse will, or disobedience to the commandments of God. But in order that this branch of divine grace may be planted in our soul, three things are necessary; the antecedent grace of God, the conversion of our free will, and the purification of the conscience. Antecedent grace touches ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... doubtless regarded with sincere commiseration and good will the unfortunate exiles to whom he had given so princely a welcome. Yet neither commiseration nor good will could prevent him from speedily discovering that his brother of England was the dullest and most perverse of human beings. The folly of James, his incapacity to read the characters of men and the signs of the times, his obstinacy, always most offensively displayed when wisdom enjoined concession, his vacillation, always exhibited most pitiably in emergencies ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... degrees become very irritable, moody, and perverse, and her perversity developed itself in ways which puzzled poor ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... of his distinguishing between the solidity of waking experience and what we may call the unsubstantialness of the dream. He may, indeed, have learned that the dream is not to be relied on for telling the truth; the Zulu, for example, has even reached the perverse triumph of critical logic achieved by our own Aryan ancestors in the saying that "dreams go by contraries." But the Zulu has not learned, nor had the primeval Aryan learned, to disregard the utterances of the dream as being ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... Grierson was indirectly, though not less intentionally, responsible; and her satisfaction was in just proportion to the results attained. But in spite of these successes there were still obstacles to be surmounted. From the first there had been a perverse minority refusing stubbornly to bow the head in the house of—Grierson. The Farnhams were of it, and the Raymers, with a following of a few of the families called "old" as age is reckoned in the Middle West. The men of this ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... which genius and unwearied labour have been so successfully united. It is to Pope's credit, that, with everything against him in the race of life, he attained the goal for which he started in his youth. The means he employed to reach it were frequently perverse and discreditable, but the courage with which he overcame the obstacles in his ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... "And so, perverse one, thou canst not love this great hero, a proper person truly, and a mighty warrior, who will eat you an army of Persians at a meal. These Spartan fighting-cocks want no garlic, I warrant you.[20] And yet you can't love him, ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... a formal assurance that it condemns this dangerous propaganda against the monarchy and the territories belonging to it, and that the Royal Serbian Government shall no longer permit these machinations and this criminal and perverse propaganda. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... may bid farewell to the politician who is Chesterton. His politics are like his perverse definitions of the meaning of such words as progress and reform. He is like a child who plays about with the hands of a clock, and makes the surprising discovery that some clocks may be made to tell a time that does not exist—with the small hand at twelve and the large at ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... declared the perverse Harry, "because I don't like it;" and so saying, he rushed off to join "the boys," as he ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... was exquisite from the first moment. "Exquisite!" I said under my breath, as I first saw her come upon the stage. But it is not merely by her personal charm that she thrills you, though that is strange, perverse, unaccountable. ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... pedant, mountebank, or infidel. After that we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries of injustice and despotism, is but a poor excuse for such perverse blindness. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... did late eclipse; Music framed for infants' glee, Whistle never tuned for thee; Though thou want'st not, thou shalt have them, Loving hearts were they which gave them. Let not one be missing; nurse, See them laid upon the hearse Of infant slain by doom perverse. Why should kings and nobles have Pictured trophies to their grave, And we, churls, to thee deny Thy pretty toys with thee to lie— A ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... perverse accident turned good Mrs. Teachum's design of giving them pleasure into their sorrow, and raised in their little hearts nothing but strife and anger: for, alas! there happened to be one apple something larger than the rest, on which the whole company ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... Nestorius, and gave a clear and orthodox exposition of their faith. That heresiarch, being banished from his see, retired to his monastery in Antioch. John, though formerly his friend, yet finding him very perverse and obstinate in his heresy, and attempting to pervert others, entreated the emperor Theodosius to remove him. He was therefore banished to Oasis, in the deserts of Upper Egypt, on the borders of Libya, in 431, and died miserably ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... least in the beginning. We may be very sure that a friendly advance from him would have melted Schiller's animosity as the sun melts April snow. But he did not say the word. He looked upon Schiller as the spokesman of a new and perverse generation that knew not Joseph; and so he went his own way, serenely indifferent to the personality of the man whose talent he had recognized by helping him to a Jena professorship. He paid some attention, it is true, to Schiller's philosophic ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... is forcing itself into unwilling recognition. I have seen nothing, in the various hypotheses brought forward, which did not to me involve a greater improbability than the presumption of guilt. Take that, for witness, that Byron accused himself, through a spirit of perverse vanity, of crimes he had not committed. How preposterous! He would stain the name of a sister, whom, on the supposition of his innocence, he loved with angelic ardor as well as purity, by associating ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... favourite orchid of the day. It has every advantage, except, to my perverse mind—brilliancy of colour. None show a whole tone; even the lovely C. niveum is not pure white. My views, however, find no backing. At all other points the genus deserves to be a favourite. In the first place, it is the most interesting of all orchids to science.[3] Then ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... door, her departing laugh rippling mockingly through the dusk. Alma picked up Gilbert Murray's letter and went to her room. She wanted to cry, since she could not shake Anna. Even if she could have shook her, it would only have made her more perverse. Anna was in earnest; Alma knew that, even while she hoped and believed that it was but the earnestness of a freak that would pass in time. Anna had had one like it a year ago, when she had cast Gilbert off ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... repair your rifles, but he will have instructions to mend arms to none but such as shall be recommended by their chiefs, it being proper that such leaders should have it in their power to distinguish those that are peaceable and obedient from the obstinate and perverse. ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... they were there—because the Middle Age was, in the gross, a coarse, barbarous, and profligate age—because it was necessary, in order to bring out fairly the beauty of the central character, to show 'the crooked and perverse generation' in which she was 'a child of God without rebuke.' It was, in fact, the very ferocity and foulness of the time which, by a natural revulsion, called forth at the same time the Apostolic holiness ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... "foolishly enough I felt charmed by his countenance, by the soft sound of his voice, by his whole look and air: this perverse sympathy will keep following us everywhere. I took a liking to him: and catching my heart in this piece of folly, I punisht myself by conceiving a downright aversion to the fellow, as we should and must do to everything we are ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... did not have chicken that day, nor the next. There is nothing so perverse as the human appetite. Those were not really bad chickens, and in a few days they were much better. If any one of those middle-aged roosters had been brought to us by the butcher we would have paid the usual dollar for it, and, baked and browned and served with ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... was in Carmine Street that he wrote his "Arthur Gordon Pym," with Gowans the publisher for a fellow lodger; it was on Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place that he created "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher." After Virginia's death, he took a room just off the Square, and wrote the "Imp of the Perverse," with her picture (it is said) above his desk. It was at these quarters that Lowell called on him, and found him, alas! "not himself that day." The old Square has no stranger nor sadder shade to haunt it than that of the brilliant and melancholy genius who in life ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... "What a perverse taste!" Mr. Linden said, laughing and springing up. "All the rest of the world think a near-by humming so ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... many are there in England at this day that think the better of themselves merely upon that account; ay, and think the people of God ought to think so too, not understanding that it is ordinary for an Eli to have a Hophni and a Phinehas, both sons of Belial; also a good Samuel to have a perverse offspring; likewise David an Absalom. I say, their being ignorant of, or else negligent in regarding this, they do think that because they do spring from such and such, as the Jews in their generation did, that therefore they have a privilege with God more than others, when there is ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... delicate sepia shade of the pupils being lightened by a faint sheen of gold in the irides; they were, furthermore, large and set well apart. On the whole he decided that they were even beautiful, for all the dancing glimmer of perverse humour in their depths; he could fancy that they might well seem very sweet and womanly when their ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... that he is an honest man and means well. If that be true, as perhaps it may, I only wish him a better place, where only honesty and well-meaning are required, and where his other qualities can do no harm.... I hope, however, that our affairs will not much longer be perplexed and embarrassed by his perverse and senseless management." But for the present Franklin was of opinion that it would be well "to leave this omniscient, infallible minister to his own devices, and be no longer at the expense of sending any agent, whom he can displace by a ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... she looked rather tired this evening," answered Riatt, who always found himself perverse in ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... stream his heart began to thump; he summoned up, however, all his resolution, gave his horse half a score of kicks in the ribs, and attempted to dash briskly across the bridge; but instead of starting forward, the perverse old animal made a lateral movement, and ran broadside against the fence. Ichabod, whose fears increased with the delay, jerked the reins on the other side, and kicked lustily with the contrary foot. ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... because people did not know how to write in the first ages, or because their records had been lost in wars and by the sloth and ignorance that followed them. Perhaps men did not think that the records of their own times were worth preserving when they reflected how base and corrupt, how petty and perverse such deeds would appear to those who should come after them. For whatever reason, Milton said that it had come about that some of the stories that seemed to be the oldest were in his day regarded as ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... Catherine Leyburn had always conducted her life on principles entirely different from those of other people. Mrs. Thornburgh wholly denied, as she sat bridling by herself, that it was a Christian necessity to make yourself and other people uncomfortable. Yet this was what this perverse young woman was always doing. Here was a charming young man who had fallen in love with her at first sight, and had done his best to make the fact plain to her in the most chivalrous devoted ways. Catherine encourages him, walks with ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fibre sufficiently robust to make this impulse likely to result in any violent outbreak, and, indeed, but for circumstances it would doubtless have vapored itself away in words and vagrant fancies. He had once remarked, embodying a truth in one of his frequent whimsically perverse statements, that the worst thing which could be said of him was that he was incapable of a great crime, and only the constant pressure of an annoyance, such as the threats of Irons in regard to Ninitta, or the presence ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... hedn't told the haffen o' it. Cold winter nights, when the snow sifted in through the cracks, an' the wind blew in the rotten old door, 'Fambly' liked ter hev friz ter death. They hed the pneumonia, an' whoopin'-cough, an' croup; an' in summer, bein' a perverse set o' brats, 'Fambly' hed fever an' ager, an' similar ailments common ter the young o' the human race, the same ez ef 'Fambly' war folks! 'T war 'stonishin', kem ter think of it, how 'Fambly' hed the insurance ter grow up ter look like folks, let alone settin' out ter run fur office; an' ef ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... everlasting hell those who disbelieve him! He went abroad in fine arrogance, railing at lawyers and the rich, rebuking, reproving, hurling angry epithets, attacking what we to-day call "the decent element." He called the people constantly "Fools," "Blind Leaders of the Blind," "faithless and perverse," "a generation of vipers," "sinful," "evil and adulterous," "wicked," "hypocrites," ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... away without giving him any interview, she had persistently kept away, yet though she was doing what she could, by fits and starts, to forget him, that perverse imagination of hers always pictured him as waiting, constant, ready. There was a particular tree in the glen behind which she had so frequently represented him to herself as standing patiently while she approached with furtive steps, that when she came home and went to look ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... Corn, are hilled up, sugar-loaf fashion, until the height of each hill is about equal to its breadth at the base, so that two days' hot sun dries the hill completely through, while there is no soil a foot from each stalk for its roots to run in. From such perverse cultivation, a good yield is impossible. There has been no rain of consequence here for some weeks, whence Wheat and Barley are ripening too rapidly, while Corn, Potatoes and Vegetables suffer severely from drouth, when with ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... performed many of his greatest miracles in the presence of his enemies, who had both the means and the will to institute a searching investigation concerning them, and who would have denied their reality had it been in their power to do so. Sad indeed is the record of the perverse opposition and calumny which our Lord encountered on the part of the Jewish rulers. But even this has a bright side. It shows us that the Saviour's miracles could endure the severest scrutiny—that after every means which power and wealth and ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... perjuries, They say Jove laughs. O gentle Romeo, If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully: Or if thou think'st I am too quickly won, I will frown and be perverse.... Well, do not swear: although I joy in thee, I have no joy of this contract to-night. It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden; Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be Ere one can say, It ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... always be, a considerable number of men who, not being able to succeed themselves, distrusted and disliked the successful. There was also a plentiful supply of demagogues skilful in appealing to the prejudices of the ignorant, envious, or perverse, and as a result came a cry ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... I were stiff wi' pains. What could I do? I did what I could, but that weren't much. I couldn't draw her out o' the mire. That would take a man wi' two good arms, and she was able to scramble out if she liked. But she's that perverse, there's no knowing, she might drown herself ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... Indeed, the Baron's perverse attachment to his lately-acquired charger—an attachment which seemed to attain new strength from every fresh example of the animal's ferocious and demon-like propensities—at length became, in the eyes of all reasonable men, a hideous ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... was outstretched at Veda. It seemed as if some imp of the perverse were compelling her unwilling tongue ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... his self-esteem, however, he was not unwise enough to feel sure of the result. Were not all women, even the best of them, notoriously perverse? And there was always, conceivably, that inopportune third party, a preferred rival, to be counted with, who might have been first ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... between himself and Ayacanora? Many reasons might be given: I deny none of them. But the main one, fantastic as it may seem, was simply, that while she had discovered herself to be an Englishwoman, he had discovered her to be a Spaniard. If her father were seven times John Oxenham (and even that the perverse fellow was inclined to doubt), her mother was a Spaniard—Pah! one of the accursed race; kinswoman—perhaps, to his brother's murderers! His jaundiced eyes could see nothing but the Spanish element in her; or, indeed, in anything else. As Cary said ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... view seems to be that all standards are false, and that the limitations ought to be trampled on as representing abandoned ideals. It is thought that the whole matter ought to be left to the control of an unintelligent impulse, which is capable of any caprice, but whose authority is imperative. Perverse as the old restrictions often were, they had in them a notion of self-selection such as is needed now, if only the criteria and standards which are correct can be ascertained. The old restrictions contained a notion of breeding up, a notion which is by no means false, if we can get a rational idea ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... the most honourable function which can be intrusted to a man is unexampled in the history of civilised nations. It will astonish and afflict Europe as an unheard of crime, which hitherto the most perverse Governments have not dared to meditate. The First Consul is too well acquainted with sentiments of the Diplomatic Body accredited to him not to be fully convinced that every one of its members will behold, with profound regret, the profanation ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... perverse, self-willed, capricious little puss. She's been too much indulged. She needs to be brought under discipline," said Gerald, angrily whipping off a blossom with his rattan as they walked toward ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... would ask you to recall the evidence contained in the letter written by former employers of the defendant, substantiating my assertion that this boy has been the victim of circumstances, and not the victim of perverse or vicious tendencies. Does he look like a criminal? Does he act like a criminal? I ask you ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... moment Napoleon was putting into effect against the United States one of those perverse and shameless interpretations of international relations, or actions, by which he not infrequently contrived to fill his pockets. The Non-Intercourse Act, passed March 3, 1809, had decreed forfeiture of any French or British ship, or goods, which should enter American waters after May 20, of the ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... moment or two while Helen tried to fit easily into the conversation. It was not likely that Bo would long be at a loss for words, and also it was immensely probable that with a flash of her wonderful spirit she would turn the tables on her perverse lover in a twinkling. Anyway, plain it was that a lesson had sunk deep. She looked startled, hurt, wistful, and finally ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... truth," quoth Adalbert von Chamisso, "Remember that the world clings more firmly to superstition than to faith,"—or, to borrow expression from an equally inspired source,—remember that perverse humanity rarely fails to favour, rather, what Shakespeare terms "The seeming truth which cunning times put ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... perverse reasoning of man. And Mrs. Worthington, having lived with considerable of a man for fifteen years, hearing echoes of this sedition, attacked the fortification of the faithful on its weakest side. She invited the thirty seditious husbands ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... personal—and she did try even to the verge of betraying herself, which would never have done—Miss Felicia had always turned the subject at once or had pleaded forgetfulness. Not a word could she drag out of this very perverse and determined old lady concerning the state of the patient, nothing except that he was "better," or "doing nicely," or that the bandage was being shortened, or some other commonplace. Uncle Peter had been kinder. He understood—she saw that in his eyes. Still even Uncle ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... child. She began to fear that she would never be other than a cross and a trial to her; and it did seem to Aunt Elsie that, with her bad health and her hard work among her brother's children, she had enough to vex her without Christie's untowardness. It did seem so perverse in her, when she needed her help so much, to be so ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... will," replied Clarence. "Now you had better forgive Madeline for putting such a perverse construction upon your words, and then we will send her away to get the rest ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... agreeable, hospitable, intelligent, amusing. We worked too hard, dined too well, frequented too many clubs, and went to bed too late in the forenoon. We were overmuch addicted to shedding the blood of the grape. In short, we diligently, conscientiously, and with a perverse satisfaction burned the candle of life at both ends and in ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... rather than the head, as the chief of desultory Barbarians, who attack without fear and fly without shame; and his military life is composed of a romantic alternative of victories and escapes. By the Turks, who employed his name to frighten their perverse children, he was corruptly denominated Jancus Lain, or the Wicked: their hatred is the proof of their esteem; the kingdom which he guarded was inaccessible to their arms; and they felt him most ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... were negative. In his Summary of Christian Faith, 1905, Dr. H.E. Jacobs gives the following presentation of the doctrine of predestination: "Since God has not predestinated all that He has foreknown ('for all that the perverse, wicked will of the devil and of men purposes and desires to do and will do, God sees and knows before,' ib.), but, in His inexplicable will, has allowed a certain measure of freedom and contingency in His creatures, and afforded them a degree of moral responsibility, knowing ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... imagination of difference' we expect you to reply.— But, we ask in return, have you then come to know by some other means that this beginningless imagination of difference, acting in a manner analogous to that of certain defects of vision, is really the cause of an altogether perverse view of things?—If you reply that this is known just from the fact that Perception is in conflict with Scripture, we point out that you are reasoning in a circle: you prove the defectiveness of the imagination ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... established church. Johnson, himself, was a zealous, uncompromising churchman. None but a marplot like Boswell would have thought, on such an occasion, and in such company, to broach the subject of religious toleration; but, as has been well observed, "it was his perverse inclination to introduce subjects that he hoped would produce difference and debate." In the present instance he gamed his point. An animated dispute immediately arose in which, according to Boswell's report, Johnson monopolized the greater part of the conversation; not ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... much respect to such a baffler, and too much weight to his fancies; to raise the man too high in his courage and conceit; to make his pretences seem worthy the considering and canvassing. Briefly, perverse obstinacy is more easily quelled, petulant impudence is sooner dashed, sophistical captiousness is more safely eluded, sceptical wantonness is more surely confounded in this than in the simple ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... work that was for ever to eclipse the translation of Pope, whom he does not even deign to mention in his preface; but this joke was still more unsuccessful [than his History of Britain].' J. H. Burton's Hume, i. 478. Hume says of him, that he had 'scarce ever known a man more perverse and unamiable.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... its charter in 1811. It had been very useful, indeed almost indispensable, in managing the national finances, and its decease, with the consequent financial disorder, was a most terrible drawback in the war. Recharter was, however, by a very small majority, refused. The evils flowing from this perverse step manifesting themselves day by day, a new Bank of the United States, modelled closely after the first, was chartered on April 10, 1816, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster being its chief champions. Republican opponents, Madison among them, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... said, with a hard laugh. "You had better find him in church to-morrow morning, and tell him that you have been wilful and perverse and disobedient. He'll give you absolution, no doubt. So now you'd better go back to your dancing. Your many friends will ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... into groups. It might have been a fashionable drawing-room where ladies and young girls offer after dinner the assistance that coffee, liqueurs, and sugar afford to diners who are struggling in the toils of a perverse digestion. But in a little while laughter broke out, the murmur grew, and voices were raised. The saturnalia, subdued for a moment, threatened at times to renew itself. The alternations of sound and silence bore a distant resemblance ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... perilous moment of all, which is the moment before she is actually overtaken by the breaking crest of the wave, she is apt to refuse to answer her helm, and he who is steering her loses all control over her; she seems to be seized with a perverse determination to take a broad sheer one way or the other, with disastrous results, despite a hard-over helm, and then the only thing to be done to retrieve the situation is to effect a lightning shift of helm against all ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... perverse. A certain amount of perversity was to be allowed for in a young lady whose lover had thrown her over; but not such an amount as would prove inconvenient to his apologists. "That you should be reasonable," said Mrs. Penniman, with some sternness. ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... again, but, alas! with mischief in his heart! and raising me up, he said, Rise, Pamela, rise; you are your own enemy. Your perverse folly will be your ruin: I tell you this, that I am very much displeased with the freedoms you have taken with my name to my housekeeper, as also to your father and mother; and you may as well have real cause to take these freedoms with me, as to make my name suffer for imaginary ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... misrepresent it. Although Mr. Dicey endeavors not to commit himself upon the vital differences in the agitation of anti-slavery sentiments by the Abolitionists and by the Republican party, it is very evident that he inclines to the belief that the former, in their advocacy of disunion, acted not from a perverse and fanatical philosophy, but from the logical compulsions of a critical understanding, stimulated by an intense ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... followed the arrangement of these scholars, numbering the Hymns to Dionysus and to Demeter, I and II respectively: to place "Demeter" after "Hermes", and the Hymn to Dionysus at the end of the collection seems to be merely perverse.] ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... Camden, by the Wateree. And he is writing without hope that he will see the Lady and her Lord and the Princeling, for moons and moons. This is a sad, sad word for him to write. But the whole world is skew-jee, awry, distorted and altogether perverse. The President is broken in body, and obstinate in spirit. Clemenceau is beaten for an office he did not want. Einstein has declared the law of gravitation outgrown and decadent. Drink, consoling friend of a Perturbed ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... idolatrous population, make up a scene that awakens one to a keen appreciation of its novelty. One realizes fully that here the idolatry, the "bowing down before images" that in our Sunday-school days used to seem so unutterably wicked and perverse, so monstrous, and so far, far away, is a tangible fact. To keep up their outward appearance on a par with the holiness of their city, men streak their faces and women mark the parting in their hair with red. Sacred bulls are allowed to roam the streets at will, and the chief ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... refuses as an outrage both the theory of masculine superiority and the fact so evident in Germany of masculine domination, here is the self-constituted superwoman calling as if she was Eve to the primaeval male. It may be perverse of me, but my imagination refuses ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these.' Never debate in your mind, Willy, of what use are these things which God has made—for of what use, then, is man, the most endowed and the most perverse of all creation, except to show the goodness and the forbearance of the Almighty! You may, hereafter, be inclined to debate why noxious reptiles and ferocious beasts, that not only are useless to man, ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... open; for, d'ye see, you've plenty to learn, and you can't begin too soon. We must square the mainyard, captain, if you please," continued he as we entered Blackwall Reach. "What could make the river so perverse as to take these two bends in Limehouse and Blackwall Reaches, unless to give pilots trouble, I ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... how perverse she can be when in the mood. Directly over the draw, something connected with the wagon or the harness of the team got askew and the driver paused to set it right. Possibly it was pretence on his part, for many men will do such ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... a slim girl of nineteen; she had light soft hair and a small full mouth. Her eyes, which were grey with a shade of green through them, had a habit of glancing upwards when she spoke with anyone, which made her look like a little perverse madonna. Mrs. Mooney had first sent her daughter to be a typist in a corn-factor's office but, as a disreputable sheriff's man used to come every other day to the office, asking to be allowed to say a word to his daughter, she had taken her daughter ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... his talents and accomplishments as a thinker on historical subjects. The literary papers on "Tennyson," "Burns," "The Poetry of Sacred and Literary Art," and "Hours with the Mystics," are full of striking and suggestive, if somewhat perverse, thought. The volume, as a whole, is read with mingled feelings of vexation and pleasure; but whether provoked or delighted, we are always interested both in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... critic has called Rops "a false genius," probably alluding to the malign characters of the majority of his engraved works rather than to his marvellous and fecund powers of invention. Perverse idealist as he was, he never relaxed his pursuit of the perfection of form. He tells us that in 1862 he went to Paris, after much preliminary skirmishing in Belgian reviews and magazines, to "learn his art" with Bracquemond and Jacquemart, both of whom he never ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... can never win the spiritual respect of mankind." The main objection that the humanists make to the introduction of natural science as a necessary subject of education, is, he declared, that science is not spiritual, that it does not work in the sphere of ideas. He went on very properly to show how perverse is such a representation of science, but, alas, in further recommendation of science as a safe subject of instruction he added that the antagonism of science to religion is ended, and that the contest had been a passing phase. Reading this we may wonder whether we are in fairness entitled ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... used to. When I propose to play a game, he says he is tired and would rather sit under a tree and hear stories. When I tell them he says they do not suit him, they all end happily, and that is stupid. He is very perverse. But he clings to me like a bur. He is always teasing me to tell him the name of every flower in my garden and given him one ...
— The Unruly Sprite - The Unknown Quantity, A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... the lack of imagination in the execution of these enormous buildings, have set their imagination to work, but in a perverse way and without candidly recognizing the conditions imposed upon them by the sky-scraper form: and the result here and there has been worse than dull; it has been distressing. But here and there, too, one sees the evidence of real understanding and ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... that is a sign of a rich and varied nature. We must bear with patience and good nature Harry's gushing, little condescensions, for he really thinks the majority of his elders to be grossly ignorant, perverse, and cynical. Yet he really loves us in spite of our faults, so I think we must be ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr |
