"Strangeness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him the passages of the proposal for the Queen to have married the Prince; that for this purpose the Prince was sent for out of Germany, and the Queen seemed inclinable to the match; yet, after the Prince was come, she used him with a strangeness which was occasioned by the whisperings of Grave Magnus de la Gardie to the Queen, that when the Prince was in Germany he was too familiar with some ladies; at which information, he said, the Queen was so enraged that the ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... figure and the sharp-edged, yet amorphous, shadow cast by that same figure. For the young man had moved as she came up from the garden below. He stood clear of the balustrade, only the fingers of his left hand resting upon the handrail of it. Seeing him thus the strangeness, the grotesque incompleteness, of his person struck her as never before. But this, though it did not move her to mirth as in her childhood, moved her to pity no more now than it then had. That which it did was to deepen, to stimulate, her excitement, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... John grown to me. The mistress, and presumptive wife, of Woodvil Can never stoop so low to supplicate A man, her equal, to redress those wrongs, Which he was bound first to prevent; But which his own neglects have sanction'd rather, Both sanction'd and provok'd: a mark'd neglect, And strangeness fast'ning bitter on his love, His love which long has been upon the wane. For me, I am determined what to do: To leave this house this night, and lukewarm John, And trust for food ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... know that he was the toy of forces which, working on him through the strangeness of passionate womanhood, could have made him a great cad or a petty hero as easily as they did make him confusedly sorry for himself. That he wasn't very much of a cad or anything of a hero is a detail, an accident resulting from ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... chatting gaily in French, and I was so absorbed in my contemplation of them that I did not at first consider the strangeness of their appearance in that costume so early in the morning. When it did occur to me, I concluded the four must have come over from St. Louis to attend the ball and had no other dress to return in, and the other two were doubtless Mr. Gratiot's daughters, which I learned ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... as myself, who especially aroused my interest. A courteous, punctual, mild old man with an air which deprecated notice; who conversed each evening for a minute or two with the proprietor, as he rolled, always at the same hour, a valedictory cigarette, in a language that arrested my ear by its strangeness; and which proved to be his own, Hungarian; who addressed a brief remark to me at times, half apologetically, in the precisest of English. We sat next each other at the same table, came and went at much the same hour; and for a long while our intercourse was ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... no surprise to me to hear of this extinct species lingering on Lundy; the strangeness and wildness of the place might lead one to expect it to be the haunt of the Dodo, or that monstrous and fabulous bird of the "Arabian ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... the fever amongst men, women, and children, the immunity of the beasts and birds had a sad strangeness. ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... may well imagine had opened his eyes at my statement. But he was full of his recalled experiences on board the Ferndale, and the strangeness of being mixed up in what went on aboard, simply because his name was also the name of a shipping-master, kept him in a state of wonder which made other coincidences, however unlikely, not so very ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... in her letter to upset me. It is only the strangeness of this place. I shall be all right in a ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... snap, but Tredgold and Chalk made no move. Glued to their seats, they stared blankly at the door, until the rigidity of their pose and the strangeness of their gaze began to ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... farces, such as The Workhouse-Ward, are very amusing; The Rising of the Moon is a little dramatic gem, and The Gaol Gate is touched with genuine tragedy. Synge wrote only one play—Riders to the Sea—that acts well. The others are admired by critics for the strangeness of their diction and the beauty of the nature-pictures scattered through them. His much-discussed Playboy of the Western World has become famous for the rows it has created at home and abroad from its very first production ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... them more miraculous. But we do hate all impostures and lies, insomuch as we have severely forbidden it to all our fellows, under pain of ignominy and fines, that they do not show any natural work or thing adorned or swelling, but only pure as it is, and without all affectation of strangeness. ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... ganoids of the second age of vertebrate existence,—that of the Old Red Sandstone,—some were remarkable for the strangeness of their forms, and some for constituting links of connection which no longer exist in nature, between the ganoid and placoid orders. The Acanth family, which ceased with the Coal Measures, was characterized, especially in its ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... said. One of the party turned round, and the light of a suspended lamp discovered him to be the brave Earl Gloucester, whom Wallace had taken, and released at Berwick. The same ray showed another to be Percy, Earl of Northumberland. Wallace found the strangeness of his situation. He, the conqueror of Edward, to have been singing as a mendicant in his halls; and having given laws to the two great men before him, he now sat in their view unobserved and unfeared! Their figures concealed that of Bruce, but at last when all rose together, he heard Gloucester ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... The strangeness of the dark sea lay over all. It seemed uncanny, this dark departure from one's native land—-the land for which these men were going to fight, to bleed ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... be summoned to the senate-house by the crier to attend king Tarquinius. They assembled immediately, some being already prepared for the occasion, some through fear, lest their not having come might prove detrimental to them, astounded at the novelty and strangeness of the matter, and considering that it was now all over with Servius. Then Tarquinius, commencing his invectives against his immediate ancestors: "that a slave, and born of a slave, after the untimely death of his parent, without an interregnum being adopted, as ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... that he desired and believed his life to be an imitation of Jesus, but what we know about the Christ is in fact so little, that St. Francis's life loses none of its strangeness for that. His conviction that he was but an imitator preserved him from all temptation to pride, and enabled him to proclaim his views with incomparable vigor, without seeming in the least to ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... when I am with him that I have reached my home; if to suffer a strangeness even with myself, and to feel less familiar with myself than with him, is to love, then I love him, Honora. If to want to work with him, and to feel there could be no exultation like overcoming difficulties with him, is love, then truly ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... of a play are varied in finish and intensity, but the variety which Mr. William Rooney conducted was of the most brilliant, and he expected them to go as well as the opening night. He made small allowance for the strangeness of lights, scenery, and costuming, and that allowance was only for time, not in smoothness. As he willed, his cast generally performed. The cast of "The Purple Slipper" was of experienced actors, and he felt certain that they would meet his expectations. At six-thirty o'clock he seated himself ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... won't go. Why, Mac, I'm just getting to know and enjoy you, and thought we'd have a nice time this winter reading something together. Must you go?" And Rose seemed to forget his strangeness, as she held him still by one button while ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... gigantic panorama rotating to simulate a race at breakneck speed. But Miss Carmichael looked with unseeing eyes; the whirling prairie with its golden flecks of cactus bloom was but part of the universal strangeness, and the dull ache of ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... to move. It is always an uncanny thing to watch for any length of time a person who believes himself to be absolutely alone, and when, as in this case, the person is undergoing, and giving full vent to a very strong emotion, the strangeness is ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... waiting for something to happen. Graves would be produced—how, they could not tell. The strangeness of the actions of Frederick's fraternity brothers made the affair more unsolvable. Threatening looks were showered upon them as freshman after freshman, guarded by juniors, filed in. Dan Jordan slouched to the door of the opera-house, his eyes ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... occupied, and the other way was to be as occupied, quite as occupied, just with the sense and the image of it all, and on only a fifth of the actual immersion: a circumstance extremely strange. Life was taken almost equally both ways—that, I mean, seemed the strangeness; mere brute quantity and number being so much less in one case than the other. These latter were what I should have liked to go in for, had I but had the intrinsic faculties; that more than ever came home to me on those occasions when, as I could move ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... again and again while I was making the machine; but then I had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk—one of the risks a man has got to take! Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light. The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, above all, the feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely upset my nerve. I told myself that I could never stop, and with a gust of petulance ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... long till they were called to table, and in the discussion of parish matters the strangeness of the Elder's action was for the time ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... had rarely felt since childhood, when almost every lonely and desolate building filled me with a sense of awe and mystery, as though it were the home of ghosts or fairies or witches. I was conscious of the absurdity of the emotion, but I surrendered to it and even enjoyed its strangeness. ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... the last girl to feel at a loss in such a situation. No one would have rung him out of a saloon with an air of more contemptuous majesty. But the shock, the solitary strangeness of the scene, the fear, for the first time, that none were near, and perhaps, also, her exhausted energy, frightened her, and she shrieked. One only had heard that shriek, yet that one was legion. Sooner might the whole world know the worst than this person suspect ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... by one all my impressions of the last four years, and exert my mind to discover in the strangeness, in the fatality, in the excessive injustice of my past misfortunes, a natural explanation for extraordinary and incredible events of the present. The reverses themselves were romantic and improbable, therefore the reparations and consolations should in their turn be equally romantic. Is it an ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... an enthusiastic naturalist, and he descanted at great length on the strangeness of the flora and fauna that it had been his privilege to discover and classify in this isolated and hitherto unvisited region. It appeared that neither its animals nor its plants were quite like those of ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... the silence of snow, and a hopeful glow in the west. Just here, by the barberry bush at the corner, he had stood still under the spell of Northern Lights. That was the night when his wife lay first in Tiverton churchyard; and he remembered, as a part of the strangeness and wonder of the time, how the north had streamed, and the neighboring houses had been rosy red. But at this hour of the brooding, sultry fall, there was a bitter fragrance in the air, and the world seemed tuned to the somnolent ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... were to peer through the murk at the sight of Mr. Dudley Stackpole fleeing to the shelter of home like a man hunted by a terrible pursuer. But with all his desperate need for haste he ran no straightaway course. The manner of his flight was what gave added strangeness to the spectacle of him. He would dart headlong, on a sharp oblique from the right-hand corner of a street intersection to a point midway of the block—or square, to give it its local name—then go slanting back again to the right-hand corner ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... he meant to go, he found himself out of sight of the house—in a favourite haunt, but one in which he always had a peculiar feeling of strangeness and even expatriation. He had descended the stream that rushed past the end of the house, till it joined the valley river, and followed the latter up, to where it took a sudden sharp turn, and a little farther. Then ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... fear, and my sensations at feeling the supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg's pagan arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night's events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. For though I tried to ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... unintelligible, I have sought to choose, among the better meanings which have been offered for each of the passages, that which seemed the best, and to weave it into the authorized text in such a manner as not to produce any sense of strangeness or interruption." The attempt was truly laudable, and the execution admirable for taste and ease. The majestic flow and cadence of the traditional English are never interrupted. There is no concession to such pedantries as Professor Robertson Smith's "greaves ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... conductor called out "Central Park," and Halfdan woke up with a start. He dismounted with a timid, deliberate step, stared in dim bewilderment at the long rows of palatial residences, and a chill sense of loneliness crept over him. The hopeless strangeness of everything he saw, instead of filling him with rapture as he had once anticipated, Sent a cold shiver to his heart. It is a very large affair, this world of ours—a good deal larger than it appeared to him gazing out upon ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... her, wonder and interest gave way to terror. His bulk, his blackness, his square, mighty head, his big, blazing eyes, and short, thick muzzle filled her with repulsion and amazement. His voice, too, though unmistakably caressing and persuasive, was too daunting in its strangeness. With a wild snort, she turned and fled into the woods with a speed that he could not hope ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... having put away her knitting, 'I ask thee honestly, sir, does thee think my niece in real danger of any sort? I cannot understand this strangeness.' ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... singular pleasure heightened by an intermingled strangeness and even terror—qualities which bring out the quality of pleasure in the same way that a bourdon in a pedal-point passage brings out the quality of what a German would, I think, call the over-work. I was at Canterbury, where the great central tower is wreathed with scaffolding, and ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... so dreadfully sorry,' said Edith, feeling the strangeness of Bruce's want of sense of proportion. He had, as it seemed, to speak to her about some important matter. Yet the inkstand being too full attracted his attention, roused his anger! She remembered he had said these very words the day he came back from his ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... was conscious that she was seized upon by that black enormity of nature; it was no longer terror alone which was gaining possession of her; it was something more terrible even than terror; she shivered. There are no words to express the strangeness of that shiver which chilled her to the very bottom of her heart; her eye grew wild; she thought she felt that she should not be able to refrain from returning there at the same hour on ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the strangeness of his glance she did not persist; questions would have taught her nothing. And besides, now that he no longer went to bed at the same time as she did, there was nothing extraordinary in ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... natural laws—events as seasonable as the springing up and the cutting down of the corn. In these simple lives, so closely lived to the ground, grave things were sweetened by an unconscious humour which was of the soil itself; and even death lost something of its strangeness when it came like the grateful shadow which falls over a tired worker ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... and the sparse grey-green leaves of a wild olive-tree stood out against the dark shadows of the ilex. Clarke, in the deep folds of dream, was conscious that the path from his father's house had led him into an undiscovered country, and he was wondering at the strangeness of it all, when suddenly, in place of the hum and murmur of the summer, an infinite silence seemed to fall on all things, and the wood was hushed, and for a moment of time he stood face to face there with a presence, that was neither man nor beast, neither the living ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... water, and within it reared a long mass of high and regular walls, erected on mounds as high, and nearly as steep, as themselves. When I climbed the banks from my boat and entered the walls, I was completely bewildered by the novelty and strangeness of the town's interior. Regular streets; wide, straight roads; well-built houses of two stories instantly arrested the eye. But the buildings had nothing in common with Arabic architecture. The style was not Byzantine, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... but suggesting the possibility that cause and effect may have been interchanged by mistake, and that it was Charles's abdication which occasioned the appearance of the comet. According to Gemma's account the comet was conspicuous rather from its great light than from the length of its tail or the strangeness of its appearance. 'Its head equalled Jupiter in brightness, and was equal in diameter to nearly half the apparent diameter of the moon.' It appeared about the end of February, and in March presented a terrible appearance, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... As he contemplated the strangeness of his fortune, which seemed to delight in placing him at the disposal of others, without the power of directing his own motions, Edward's eye suddenly rested upon his portmanteau, which had been deposited in his apartment during his sleep. The mysterious appearance of Alice in the cottage of the ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Their strangeness exists only in the oddity of association which rejects all idea of law and of chronology, of propriety and time. No one, however, ever dreamed of any ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... out on the platform. The gray dawn was just glimmering over the frozen earth, the world looked snowy and icy and desolate. On swept the train, and not a familiar object met his eye. Did Tode feel dreary and homesick, lost in the whizzing strangeness, sorry he had come? Did he want to shrink away from sight and sound? Did he feel that he would give anything in the world to be landed at that moment somewhere near Broadway in Albany? Not a bit of it! Nothing ...
— Three People • Pansy
... its original and proper channels bare? And whence were they to be, even in any measure, refilled, if all the supply must, as usual, be led off in other directions? I mused as I went up the stairs, feeling perplexed, nevertheless, at the strangeness of the work I was doing, and with something in my heart giving a pull at my judgment towards the side of what was undoubtedly "pleasant to the eyes." So I followed Dr. Sandford up the stairs and into the wilderness of the cloak department, where all manner of elegancies, ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... so much food. Mary Jane thought there couldn't possibly be enough folks in Chicago to eat all those good things! But when she and her mother actually got into the store and began to buy, Mary Jane forgot all about the strangeness and remembered only the fun. For they didn't get somebody to wait on them as they used to at Mr. Shover's—not at all! They waited on themselves! They went through a little turnstile and then wandered ...
— Mary Jane's City Home • Clara Ingram Judson
... absent himself to bestow upon her that professional care she so much requires. Nay, look not so incredulous. I am aware that the pretext is a meagre one, but I cannot at present think of a better; and in her enfeebled state she will not dwell upon the strangeness of the plea. Go on then, I entreat you, and desire Catherine to collect what you will want, while my men carry to the scow such articles of furniture as will be most useful to you in your new quarters. Quick, dear Maria, I implore you, there has already been ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... Upon any American, the strangeness of this incident is somewhat lost. For as far back as he goes in his own land, he will find some alien camping there; the Cornish miner, the French or Mexican half-blood, the negro in the South, these are deep in the woods and far among the mountains. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the private Secretary dined together. As the Duke sat at table, he began to think how long it was since such a state of things had happened to him before, and his heart softened towards her. Instead of being made angry by the strangeness of her proceeding, he took delight in it, and in the course of the evening spoke a word to signify his satisfaction. "I'm afraid it won't last long," she said, "for Lady ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... lips, it passed with such melting warmth into her heart. Swift as a swallow's flight these thoughts darted through Helen's mind, and gave an indecision and embarrassment to her manner, which emboldened Clinton with hopes of success. All at once her countenance changed. The strangeness of her situation, the lateness of the hour, the impropriety of receiving such a visitor in that little dark, narrow passage—the dread of Arthur's coming in, and finding her alone with her dreaded though splendid companion—the fear that Miss ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... agreeably—in particular the hard metallic stamping and slipping, on the bricked pavement under the window, of a team of cart-horses that were being turned in a space too small for their grand, free movements, and the good-humoured cracking of a whip. Again Hilda was impressed, mystically, by the strangeness of the secret relation between herself and this splendid effective man. There they were, safe within the room, almost on a footing of familiar friendship! The atmosphere was different from that of the first interview. And none knew! And she alone had brought it all ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... night of repose. The restlessness of mind and body once subdued, Nature asserted her empire, and I slept profoundly until morning. Another day and night followed, with little variation from the first; and by this time, the strangeness and mystery of my situation had quite worn away, and the feeling of security was established. I trod the upper deck with all the pride, and more than the composure, of a modern monarch on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... East, is that of a man who married a sorceress, without being in any way conscious of her character in that respect. She was sufficiently agreeable in her person, and he found for the most part no reason to be dissatisfied with her. But he became uneasy at the strangeness of her behaviour, whenever they sat together at meals. The husband provided a sufficient variety of dishes, and was anxious that his wife should eat and be refreshed. But she took scarcely any nourishment. He set before her a plate of rice. From this plate she took somewhat, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... mind beside that of dawn, of running water, and of the earliest violets and lilacs. It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first time after long, like the flowers in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge of sense and that impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out of life with the coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is what renews a man's character ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... distinctly their own and when a player becomes thoroughly used to a "Tubbs" he rarely feels comfortable with even the finest bows of another make. Conversely, a player in the habit of using constantly any other bow experiences a slight feeling of strangeness on first trying a "Tubbs." The workmanship in a Tubbs bow is almost unique in its perfection. And there is a characteristic English solidity about the secure way in which all the fittings are adjusted. I have been an eye witness of the care and ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... A strangeness in his manner which this last discussion had brought out, lay heavy on aunt Polly's mind all day after the departure of the team for the Ferry. She watched the two men drive off in silence, Leander's bush beard reddening in the sun, his big body filling more than his ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... censure with his book. I condemn it to be burnt in the most public manner that can be. The manner in other countries is (where such books are) to be burnt by the hangman, though not used in England (yet I wish it may, in respect of the strangeness and heinousness of the matter contained in it) to have a strange manner of burning; therefore I shall desire it may be so burnt by the hand of the hangman. If it may agree with the Court, I do adjudge Mr. Prynne to ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... could discourage, for these difficulties could not, pulled themselves and one another up by stumps and boughs of trees. The guard hearing a rustling, fired down the precipice at random, as our men did up into the air; but, terrified by the strangeness of the attempt, the French picquet fled—all but the captain, who, though wounded, would not accept quarter, but fired at one of our officers at the head of five hundred men. This, as he staked but a single life, was thought such an ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 272, Saturday, September 8, 1827 • Various
... thoughts returned to the same point: the strangeness of the fact that those boys would never appear again. At no moment, however, did it occur to him that the same thing might have happened to himself—or might happen some time in the future. He was Keith Wellander, to whom such ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... vacantly, but the newness and strangeness of it reacted upon her. She felt very desolate and lonely, and by and bye remembered that she had still to grapple with a practical difficulty. She could not stay with Mrs. Hastings indefinitely, and she had not the least notion ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... more'n twenty years, I ain't never yet seen a comfortable, respectable, satisfied, old maid—they ain't permitted here, and you know it. In season, of course, you'd marry—that's to be looked for. It chances to be Jude—and after you get over the strangeness, he'll do as well as any other. They are all powerfully alike when they have their senses. The sameness lies in their having their faculties. The only man as was ever different in St. Ange was Timothy Drake. ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... cataracts of foam, then suddenly struck rigid by a power so instantaneous in its action that even the froth and fleeting wreaths of spray have stiffened to the immutability of sculpture. Unless you had seen it, it would be almost impossible to conceive the strangeness of the contrast between the actual tranquillity of these silent crystal rivers and the violent descending energy impressed upon their exterior. You must remember too all this is upon a scale of such prodigious magnitude, that when we succeeded subsequently in approaching the spot—where ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... gift was liberal, almost wonderful—an assertion I make even while remembering to how many clever women, early and late, his work has been dear. It was not only that the woman he was to marry was in love with him, but that (this was the strangeness) she had really seen almost better than any one what he could do. The greatest strangeness was that she didn't want him to do something different. This boundless belief was indeed the main way of her devotion; and as an act of faith it naturally ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... imaginative. This would move Hansel and Grethel into the second-grade work and Sleeping Beauty preferably into the work of the first grade. The child soon gains sufficient experience so that later the story impresses, not the strangeness. ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... strangeness to beauty, that constitutes the romantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed element in every artistic organisation, it is the addition of curiosity to this desire of beauty, that constitutes ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... Mr. Saifula Baba handed us tea and sweetmeats, after the fashion of his country; and we adjourned to the abode of a worker in papier mache, where we underwent a second edition of tea and sweetmeats, and inspected a number of curiosities. The chief and only beauty of the work was in the strangeness of the design; and some of the shawl patterns, reproduced on boxes, &c., were pretty in their way, but as manufacturers of papier mache simply, the Cashmeeries were a long way ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... shock of his strangeness over-come, I adored Carlos, and Veronica liked him, and laughed at him, till one day he said good-by and rode off along the London road, followed by his Tomas Castro. I had an intense longing ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... of the Virginal Mother contains another element, an element of which man in his contact with woman is deeply conscious: the element of mystery. To a man a young girl, untouched by the faintest breath of sensuality, has a quality of strangeness and mysteriousness (this is probably a result of European sentiment), and at all times the woman who has become a mother has been regarded with a slight feeling of superstitious awe. In the Virginal Mother these two vaguely reverential feelings ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... I walked there alone, to and fro, under the bridge. The moon had long since crossed the streak of star-fired blue above, and the canyon was black in shadow. At times a current of wind, with all the strangeness of that strange country in its moan, rushed through the great stone arch. At other times there was silence such as I imagined might have dwelt deep in the center of the earth. And again an owl hooted, and the sound was nameless. ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... old acquaintances. Young and beautiful as they were, they found the deepest pleasure in one another, and the cold feeling of strangeness melted as by a charm. They were awakened to the consciousness that half an hour earlier neither of them had an idea of the other's existence, by the appearance of a girl in the gap in the wall, who seemed very much surprised at the sight of their evident ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... strangeness of another incident came to her mind. Roger de Conde spoke no English, and yet she had plainly heard English words upon this man's lips as he addressed ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... deep caverns, where the gnomes and the fiends dwelt: and ever and anon their groans and laughter, and the sounds of their unutterable toils, or ghastly revels, travelled to the upper air, mixing in an awful strangeness with the summer festivity and buoyant occupation of those above. And this is the picture of human life! These reflections of the maddening disparities of the world are dark, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... disfigured, and emaciated, that they hardly knew him. But this was not the worst effect of his devotion. Solitude, often dangerous to a melancholy turn of thought, had, under the circumstances of his inquietude, and the strangeness of his penance, impaired his reason. He became restless and suspicious, often starting.—In one of these fits he determined to put to death the whole family of his predecessor, Sha Hussein; among whom were several ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... be overlooked. We never note them by contrast with their absences. The purpose of a discussion of such factors may be described as being to make obvious things look odd. We cannot envisage them unless we manage to invest them with some of the freshness which is due to strangeness. ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... Shoshones are like young quail, knowing without teaching about feeding and hiding, and learning what civilized children never learn, to be still and to keep on being still, at the first hint of danger or strangeness. ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... head up in a pudding-bag?—Does not the very form of the hood approach too nearly to that of the head, and thus violate a fundamental principle of aesthetics?" Our reply must be, that there are various kinds of hoods, and that, if they be considered ugly, it is more from their strangeness, through long disuse, than from any fault in their natural form. Besides, the very principle of concealment, so essential to a woman's modesty, militates rather against the principle of beauty; we admit it to be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... Fisher's roof, last saw Fisher on June 17, 1826 (June 16 may be meant), in the evening. Some other people, including one Lawrence, were in the house, they left shortly after Fisher went out that evening, and later remarked on the strangeness of his not returning. Nathaniel Cole gave evidence to the same effect. Fisher, in short, strolled out on June 17 (16?), 1826, and was seen no more ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... reviving queer old points of view, brushing aside endless new aspects and new perspectives, and then it was time to go to the station and take the London train. Their names and the personal things they had to talk of do not matter to our story, but only the changes and all the strangeness that this poor returning soul found ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... hands and limbs, as if to be assured of his identity, and then shouted in reply, loudly and wildly; for there was a strangeness and terror upon him, as if ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... accordingly. I do not think it had ever once occurred to me to question myself as to the chemical proportions of my motives in this great and popular charity. Now, as I entered the familiar place, some query of this nature did indeed occupy my mind; it had the strangeness of all mental experiences consequent upon my new condition, and somewhat, if ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... very odd at Aunt Hannah's; but somehow its strangeness made it rather interesting, it was such a contrast to home. There she had always played in well-furnished rooms with plenty of toys, and good fires in winter. The attic had no carpet and no fire, and the only things in it were one broken old chair, a poker, some rolls of dusty ...
— Susan - A Story for Children • Amy Walton
... his canvases—harsh dissonances, dots, dabs, spots, patches, heavy planes, strong rhythmic effects of lighting, heavy impasto, luminous atmosphere, air, sunshine, and vibrating movements; also the strangeness of his material. Manet went to him a beginner. After studying the Maja desnuda at the Prado Museum he returned to France and painted the Olympe, once of the Luxembourg, now in the Louvre. The balcony scenes ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... balancing battalions, carnage measured by a plumb-line, war regulated watch in hand, nothing left voluntarily to accident, old classic courage and absolute correctness. On the other side we have intuition, divination, military strangeness, superhuman instinct, a flashing glance; something that gazes like the eagle and strikes like lightning, all the mysteries of a profound mind, association with destiny; the river, the plain, the forest, and the hill summoned, and, to some extent, compelled to obey, the despot ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... place? Is it better resting in flesh than in God? Dost thou think that those souls which are now with Christ, do so much pity their rotten or dusty corpse, or lament that their ancient habitation is ruined, and their once comely bodies turned into earth? Oh, what a thing is strangeness and dis-acquaintance. It maketh us afraid of our dearest friends, and to draw back from the place ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... talked, the priest went to the side and looked over, again suddenly overwhelmed by the strangeness of the whole position. Once again there came on him the sense of irresponsible unreality. . . . He stared out, hardly seeing that on which he looked: the grey mass of the lower castle beneath with lighted windows, at the blankness beyond, again with the scattered lights—the ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... comradeship out of doors during betrothal was the only custom she knew, and to her it had no strangeness; though it seemed oddly anticipative to Clare till he saw how normal a thing she, in common with all the other dairy-folk, regarded it. Thus, during this October month of wonderful afternoons they roved along the meads by creeping paths which followed ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... he has heard that word of some great man, and now applies it to a fool. Vent my folly! I am afraid this great lubber, the world, will prove a cockney.—I pr'ythee now, ungird thy strangeness, and tell me what I shall vent to my lady. Shall I vent to her that thou ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... is almost unlimited. "In the big world the old people do be leaving things after them for their sons and children, but in this place it is the young men do be leaving things behind for them that do be old." In the quavering rhythm of these words, there is poignantly present that quality of strangeness and remoteness in beauty which, as we are coming to realise, is the touchstone of Celtic literary art. However, the very asceticism of the play has begotten a corresponding power which lifts Synge's work ...
— Riders to the Sea • J. M. Synge
... with a bunch of keys in his hand. On his way to the cabinet he turns and looks at NAPOLEON. Seeing the glass and a strangeness in the EMPEROR, he abandons his object, rushes out, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... June afternoon, with its steady, even flow, and its tranquil, many-voiced murmur, it made an impression upon my mind distinct and peculiar, fraught in an eminent degree with the charm of seclusion and remoteness. The solitude was perfect, and I felt that strangeness and insignificance which the civilized man must always feel when opposing himself to such a vast scene of silence and wildness. The trout were quite black, like all wood trout, and took the bait eagerly. I followed the stream ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... Egypt any more the strangeness that once amazed, and at first almost bewildered me. Stranger by far is Morocco, stranger the country beyond Biskra, near Mogar, round Touggourt, even about El Kantara. There I feel very far away, ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... is the sand dunes at Ambleteuse, north of Boulogne. I knew Ambleteuse. It gave a sense of strangeness to see the old tower at the water's edge loom up out of the sea. The sight of land was comforting, but vigilance was not relaxed. The attacks of submarines have been mostly made not far outside the harbours, and only a few days later that very boat was to make a sensational ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... his family, but, to his utter dismay, the landlord on returning soon undeceived him and gave his own opinion of "the most peculiar and wicked law" that he had ever heard of. Although Dutchmen had known and had heard of some strange laws, yet this Dutchman was so full of indignation at the strangeness of this law that his description of it was made up of largely untranslatable Dutch adjectives. These adjectives, however, could not relieve the suffering of his native tenant from the wound inflicted by the law in his sudden expulsion from his home. It ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... thinking about his arms. The evening was extremely bright and pleasant; but the wind rose during the night, and the waves began to break heavily on the shore, making our island tremble. I had not expected in our inland journey to hear the roar of an ocean surf; and the strangeness of our situation, and the excitement we felt in the associated interests of the place, made this one of the most interesting nights I remember during ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... in its immensity, and its solemn vastness—but unlike any temple ever raised by human toil. In no ruin of earth's youth giants' work now crumbling under the weight of time had I ever sensed a shadow of the strangeness with which this was instinct. No—nor in the shattered fanes that once had held the gods of old Egypt, nor in the pillared shrines of Ancient Greece, nor Imperial Rome, nor mosque, basilica ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... among the garrets; indeed, that good woman with the earth-colored face, and neat but very simple clothes, reminded them of their charitable visits from College Bourdaloue. They felt between herself and them the same strangeness, the same distance, which no memory, no word from their parents had ever lessened. The abbe realized her embarrassment, and, to banish it, launched forth upon a speech delivered with the throaty voice, the violent gestures common to those men who always think that they have ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the camp life brought to Keineth some new experience, thrilling in its strangeness to the little girl. She had learned to love going to sleep with the great, star-lit vault of the sky enveloping her; the singing of the "bugs," as Peggy had put it, was fairy music to her ears; she had conquered her first terror of ...
— Keineth • Jane D. Abbott
... The others slid forward on the long seat, unbuttoned their vests, thrust their feet up on the chairs, pulled the stately brass cuspidors nearer, and ran the green window-shade down on its little trolley, to shut them in from the uncomfortable strangeness of night. After each bark of laughter they cried, "Say, jever hear the one about—" Babbitt was expansive and virile. When the train stopped at an important station, the four men walked up and down the cement platform, under the ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... him, and the determination they had shown to stand by him until he had reached the goal he sought. He spoke, too, of the magnitude and importance of their discovery, of the knowledge it would add to the geographical lore of the country, and of the strangeness of the fact that the source of their mightiest river had so long been a disputed question. The cause of this he attributed to the peculiarities of the region in which it rose, the many lakes and swamps making much traveling impracticable; ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... was not of much use. Of course the first thing that suggested itself was, Could my angel be in love? and with some mortal mere? The very idea was a shock, simply from its strangeness. Of course, being a woman, she might be in love; but the two ideas, Marion and love, refused to coalesce. And again, was it likely that such as she, her mind occupied with so many other absorbing interests, would ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... for a few moments; he was thinking. His two companions looked at him with much emotion, for they were greatly excited by the strangeness of the situation. ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... none. Fingering the pointed fragments he experienced more emotion than ever before in his kaleidoscopic life. He sat in profound contemplation of that which prehistoric and elemental fires had laid down for his use. There was in his mind no question of strangeness that it should be himself who had decided that the thing was there and must be unearthed. It was the turning of another page in the book of his own history, the beginning of that chapter which would be the most fascinating ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... Paris in the hope of seeing her, and arrived, unluckily, on the very day of her death. Two letters from Lambert to the Baroness remained unanswered. The memory of Madame de Stael's good intentions with regard to Louis remains, therefore, only in some few young minds, struck, as mine was, by the strangeness of the story. ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... the very first time I tried to poke my head around where I could see, that practice stopped, and my mistress, in a dull and heavy voice, told me to leave everything on the floor and go away. It seemed that she had grown suspicious. It seemed that she had something to conceal. I brooded over the strangeness of it all until I began to wonder how this other person, whatever or whoever it might be, had ever entered the house. I even began to wonder whether creatures could be drawn from the air and put into the form ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... may find memories of former travel suddenly stirred to life by some view on a mountain road, or some stretch of beetling coast seen through a fog of spray. But this illusion of resemblance vanishes as swiftly as it comes; details immediately define into strangeness, and you become aware that the remembrance was evoked by form only, never by colour. Colours indeed there are which delight the eye, but not colours of mountain verdure, not colours of the land. Cultivated plains, expanses of growing rice, may ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... all her womanly nature seemed to rise into her upturned face and yearning eyes. It was as though her attention had been specially recalled to him; as though his particular loss and sorrow were brusquely brought home to her. And then she was struck by the strangeness and unexpectedness of such a meeting between them. He had been to her a judge, an authority, an embodied standard. His high-mindedness had won her confidence; his affection for his sister had touched and charmed her. But she had never been conscious of any intimacy ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... made it strike so sharply, with such a pleasant pungency on Elizabeth's senses? Or was it something else—some perception of an opening future, not only for Canada but for herself, mingling with the broad light, the keen air, the lovely strangeness of the scene? ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the ways boys think they want to be loved; that is, the shy longing boy, afraid of all things, and mostly of himself, in the period just this side of sex revelation. He is the neophyte—the homeless, pathetic Peter, perplexed with the strangeness of things real and temporal—vision and memory counting for all there is of reality to him, with life itself a thing as yet untasted. Who shall forget (who has a love for real expression) the entrance of Peter into ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... you take me back to the one mother country. Almost your words persuade me that the strangeness of these Western lands is a passing thing. We wonder, and as we wonder they shall crumble away. The sun rises ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... plotting, hardened knave, wholly regardless of everything but his own ends, and the means to secure them.—Not so Macbeth. The superstitions of the age, the rude state of society, the local scenery and customs, all give a wildness and imaginary grandeur to his character. From the strangeness of the events that surround him, he is full of amazement and fear; and stands in doubt between the world of reality and the world of fancy. He sees sights not shown to mortal eye, and hears unearthly music. All is tumult and disorder within and without his ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... short distance that separated us. We were reading each other's souls, and both saw and understood all that the heart of love could desire. It was an undiscovered country to each of us, upon which we trod just then; a new creation that was the sweeter because of its strangeness. ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... were by their tramping and the hot sun, clouds of dust that they encountered harrassed them greatly, so that they could no longer walk nor yet speak, but only utter the word "Water, water!" When [moisture] appeared, on account of [its] strangeness it attracted no more attention than if it had not been found, till Severus called for a cup, and having filled it with water drank it down in full view of all. Upon this some others likewise drank and were invigorated. Soon after Severus ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... Many scholars show little respect for the terms and some would abolish them altogether. Everything, however, hinges upon a reasonable definition. Pater's well-known saying that "Romanticism is the addition of strangeness to beauty" is fair; and yet, since strangeness in art can result only from imaginative conception, it amounts to nothing more than the truism that romantic art is imbued with personality. Hence Stendhal is right in saying that "All good art was Romantic in its day"; i.e., it exhibited ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... lovers wise In her pale beauty trembling down, Lending curved cheeks, dark lips, dark eyes, A strangeness not their own. And, though they shut their lids to kiss, In starless darkness peace to win, Even on that secret world from this Her twilight ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... possible help and attraction of sound in our language to smooth the way for the admission of things so remote from our present concerns. My own notion of translation is, that it cannot be too literal, provided these faults be avoided: baldness, in which I include all that takes from dignity; and strangeness, or uncouthness, including harshness; and lastly, attempts to convey meanings which, as they cannot be given but by languid circumlocutions, cannot in fact be said to be given at all.... I feel it, however, to be too probable that my translation is deficient ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... answered candidly; "I'm feeling the strangeness of the country, and I've an idea that both George and I may need friends in it. It strikes me that you and your ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... wearied of her modernity and transferred her to other rooms, as barred and screened, in the palace of some husband!... That thought was brushing Ryder ... with other thoughts of her present risk ... of her lovely eyes, visible again, above the veil, thoughts of the strangeness and unreality of it all ... there in the shrubbery of a pasha's garden, the pasha's daughter whispering at ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... broke the thread Of fine-spun thought, and very gently said, "The One of whom thou thinkest bids thee go Alone to Spiran's huts, across the snow, To serve Him there." With sorrow and surprise Malvin looked up, reluctance in his eyes. The broken thought, the strangeness of the call, The perilous passage of the mountain-wall, The solitary journey, and the length Of ways unknown, too great for his frail strength, Appalled him. With a doubtful brow He scanned the doubtful task, and muttered, "How?" ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... life, and becomes food for other creatures, even smaller than, though just as wonderful as itself. Every day fresh living creatures are being discovered, filling earth, and sea, and air, till men's brains are weary with counting them, and dizzy with watching their unspeakable beauty, and strangeness, and fitness for the work which God has given ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... Lindsay is an artist not only with the pen, but with the pencil. He has made drawings since childhood; drawing and writing still divide his time and energy. The first impression one receives from the pictures is like that produced by the poems—strangeness. The best have that Baconian element of strangeness in the proportion which gives the final touch to beauty; the worst are merely bizarre. He says, "My claim for them is that while laboured and struggling in execution, they represent ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... a meaningful reaction, are interwoven into the sounds,—they and the sounds come to us as a single indissoluble whole of experience. The emotions become the content of the sounds. And hence the strangeness of the musical experience—the fact that we feel ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... awed, he bowed his head, he trembled, he marveled at the desert silence. It was the one thing always present. Even when the wind roared there seemed to be silence. But at night, in this lava world of ashes and canker, he waited for this terrible strangeness of nature to come to him with the secret. He seemed at once a little child and a strong man, and something very old. What tortured him was the incomprehensibility that the vaster the space the greater the silence! At one moment Gale felt there was only death here, and that was the secret; at ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... which many regarded Him, or the angry murmurings against Him and His word, as by indolence of mind, by obstinate, stupid adherence to commonplace inanities, by entire lack of perception, by indifference towards spiritual life. At first the novelty and strangeness of His appearance had compelled attention, but that was over. Whether the Prophet was old or new, it was all one to them. One was just like another, they declared, and they remained indifferent. "The hot and the cold," Jesus exclaimed ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... overseer found himself welcomed because he was Sally's husband, and the strangeness of this was a bewilderment indeed. He could hardly understand the atmosphere of cordial good feeling which seemed in so short time to have grown up between his wife and all the household. He had become so used to Sally's sweet sad ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... mountains, this killer, this master of a wolf pack, could be in any way connected with my father? I wondered, and as I wondered I found that a vague fear of this mad man who despite his reputed age seemed as youthful and as agile as a man in his thirties, was gripping me. Perhaps the strangeness of the wilderness park added to my awe, for certainly one could expect almost anything supernatural to happen in the twilight of the forest of giant trees, whose interlacing branches overhead shut out ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... eyes were opened—he had achieved a standard of comparison and he felt her commonness with an awakening of his literary instinct, quite as acutely, he told himself, as he should have felt it had she been presented to him in the form of a printed page. The sense of remoteness, of strangeness, grew upon him at each instant; he realised the uselessness of his good intentions toward her—the utter impossibility of snatching her or any human creature from the ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... pressed upon it. It was all in a moment, the strange surprise of look and word and tone and touch, the joyful cries of "It's Uncle John, it's Uncle John!" from some one of the children. Then all in a moment the strangeness seemed to have passed, and John Lambert was taking his place amongst them with the fond belief that he was his sister-in-law's chosen guest. And she, with those warm, manly words of thanks, those joyful cries of childish welcome in her ears, could she ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... cried the poet at his side. The newness and strangeness of the scene had filled the poet's face with animation. No problems ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... object as she had left it. Nature had proceeded undisturbed in her accustomed rotation. Green were the fields, and the boundless heavens still displayed their majestic grandeur. Yet, all around, to the eyes of Theodora, bore a tint of strangeness she could not well define. Alas! the change was not in those places, but in the tone of mind with which she considered them. Guadix and its gardens, and its groves, and its fountains, were still the same, but Theodora was changed. She had left those happy scenes in all the glory of youth ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... two common ways of studying old and foreign arts—the way of the connoisseur and the way of the craftsman. The collector may value such arts for their strangeness and scarcity, while the artist finds in them stimulus in his own work and ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... but he is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility—the sport of circumstances, questioning with fortune, and refining on his own feelings, and forced from the natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has no time to reflect—as in the scene where he kills Polonius; and, again, where he alters the letters which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are taking with them to ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... fastened with red stones like rubies. In truth, she was a splendid creature, and yet, I know not how, her beauty suggested more of the spirit than of the flesh. Indeed, in a way, it was unearthly. My senses were smitten, it pulled at my heart-strings, and yet its unutterable strangeness seemed to awake memories within me, though of what I could not tell. A wild fancy came to me that I must have known this heavenly ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... strangeness of his relation caused Mr. Thorowgood to order his son John, then about 12 years of age, to write it in full length in his common place book, & to take it from Lindsey's own mouth. This common place book, and likewise y^e same story writen ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various
... London was still seething with the tragedy and strangeness of the crime, Mr. Jabez Pash came to the heterogeneously-furnished sitting-room in Gwynne Street to read the will. For there was a will after all. Deborah, and Bart, who had witnessed it at the ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... soul. I am sure he has had wonderful experiences, and has seen things undreamed of by such as I. I had a kind of feeling, when I asked you for it, that I might have met him, or seen him somewhere; but I never have. His face is like no other I have ever seen, although, in spite of its strangeness, it is wonderfully striking. If ever you have a chance, you must bring him to see me. I am sure I should like to talk to him. A man who has a face like that couldn't help ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking |
