"Incongruity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Tennessee, and the lion spoke the old familiar mountain dialect so easily recognizable in this locality. Even a lapsus linguae, "you uns." was unmistakable amidst the high-flown periods. Although the ventriloquism was appreciated, the incongruity of this countrified jargon, held in great contempt by the townfolks, discounted Emperor's majesty and ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... almost utter want of apprenticeship in this country, the facility with which pursuits are taken up and abandoned, and the variety and, indeed, seeming incongruity of the numerous industrial offices that are frequently united in one person, will appreciate the force of this argument.... The organization of domestic service in the United States is so crude that no distinction whatever can be successfully maintained. ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... weaknesses valor and beauty had not only sacrificed themselves, but made things equally unpleasant to a great many minor virtues. Nevertheless, the consul, with an amused sense of its ridiculous incongruity to the grim Scottish Sabbath procession in the street, and the fog-bound volumes of admiralty law in ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... at the following conclusion with respect to the growing incongruity between our Latin system of education and the requirements ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... should be throwing myself away, that he expects me, if I marry at all, to do very differently; in short, his manner of viewing the subject is on the whole far from being one in which I can sympathise. My own objections arise from a sense of incongruity and uncongeniality in ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... ornaments: for, if the Poet's subject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit occasion, lead him to passions the language of which, if selected truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated, and alive with metaphors and figures. I forbear to speak of an incongruity which would shock the intelligent Reader, should the Poet interweave any foreign splendour of his own with that which the passion naturally suggests: it is sufficient to say that such addition is unnecessary. And, surely, it is more probable that those passages, which with propriety abound ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... odd to think it'd all be yours if—if anything happened to Lord Tristram." His tone showed a mixture of amusement and awe. She was what he saw—she might become My Lady! The incongruity reached his sense of humor, while her proximity to a noble status nearly made ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... followers, and when he pressed their claims, he was accused of arrogance towards his chief. This, however, was a dilemma, the vexations of which wore off as places were apportioned and the Ministry got to its work; there was a more fatal incongruity in his position. He was technically a subordinate Minister, pledged to reform (as Prime Minister he had opposed a Radical Reform Bill on the ground that he would introduce his own), and the representative ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... I ain't a-goain' ter say as I kin fling wun o' them 'ere bloomin' 'arpoones like ar bowt-steerers kin; but I kin do my bit o' grawft wiv enny on 'em—don'tchu make no bloomin' herror." The glorious incongruity of the thing tickled me immensely; but I laughed more heartily still when on going below I was hailed as "Wot cher, chummy; 'ow yer hoppin' up?" by another barbarian from the wilds of Spitalfields, who, from the secure shelter of his cats'-meat round in 'Oxton, had got ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... support. It cannot be denied that in this undertaking an opportunity is presented that would be eagerly seized, with all its attendant labor and expense, by any one of the States, and that it was with great difficulty, and only because of the self-evident incongruity of holding it elsewhere, that we were permitted by the national authorities to celebrate the anniversary in Philadelphia. It is in connection with this, and as a part thereof, that the Zoological Gardens deserve immediate attention, as an additional, and next to the grand exhibition itself the principal, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... not inferior to any thing in the earlier series; and others were even superior as poems, equal indeed, in pathos and intensity to any thing that Lowell has written in his professedly serious verse. In such passages the dialect wears rather thin, and there is a certain incongruity between the rustic spelling and the vivid beauty and power {500} and the figurative cast of the phrase in ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... looked at me, the whole field of possibilities seemed opened. I must have been mistaken in thinking this marriage impossible and incongruous. What incongruity could there be in Isaacs marrying Miss Westonhaugh? My conclusions were false. Why must he necessarily return with her to England, and wear a red coat, and make himself ridiculous at the borough elections? Why should not this ideal couple choose some happy ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... these are the outward garniture. He is as much, and as visibly, our Redeemer, there bound, there fainting, and bleeding from the scourge, with the cross in view, as if he sat on his throne of glory in the heavens! Sodoma, in this matchless picture, has done more towards reconciling the incongruity of Divine Omnipotence and outraged, suffering Humanity, combined in one person, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Alfieri was at Naples when he received this news, riding gloomily along the sea-shore, weeping profusely (for we must remember that to an Italian, especially of the eighteenth century, there is no incongruity in a would-be ancient Roman shedding love-sick tears), unable to give his attention to work, living, as he expresses it, on the coming in and going out of the post. "I wished to return to Rome," he writes, "and at the same time I felt very keenly ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... general outline, there can be no doubt as to the vast superiority of Lincoln. Lincoln has sacrificed a great deal to the enormous pitch of its roofs, but it has its reward in the distant view of the outside. The outline of York is spoiled by the incongruity between the low roofs of the nave and choir and the high roofs of the transepts. The dumpiness of the central tower of York—which is, in truth, the original Norman tower cased—can not be wholly made a matter of blame to the original builders. For it is clear that some finish, whether ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... and gashing his legs, meanwhile trying to get its knife into play. He was vaguely conscious that his men had disposed of the rest of the Rumi and were dancing around him frantically trying to get a chance to aid him. He was struck by the incongruity of a civilized being descended from simian ancestors and a civilized being descended from feline ancestors fighting fang and claw while a bunch of misplaced amphibians ...
— Narakan Rifles, About Face! • Jan Smith
... because a superior worth is felt to inhere in blood which has been associated with many goods and great power. She will still be her husband's chattel, as she was her father's chattel before her purchase, but she is at the same time of her father's gentle blood; and hence there is a moral incongruity in her occupying herself with the debasing employments of her fellow-servants. However completely she may be subject to her master, and however inferior to the male members of the social stratum in which her birth has placed ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... been new to Queen Elizabeth to hear herself called "a weik instrument," and it is doubtful whether the first offence would be much softened by such an address. Neither was Elizabeth a person to be amused by the incongruity or impressed by the uncompromising boldness of the Reformer to whom the language of apology was so hard. Policy, however, has little to do with personal offences, although to some readers, as we confess to ourselves, it may be more interesting to see the prophet thus arrested, hampered by his own ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... committee, and besought us to save the Military Academy by annexing the necessary appropriations for its support to the bill for civil and diplomatic service. We spoke to them, in reply, of the unfitness, the irregularity, the incongruity, of this forced union of such dissimilar subjects; but they told us it was a case of absolute necessity, and that, without resorting to this mode, the appropriation could not get through. We acquiesced, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... adept to adjust it gracefully. It covers the whole person from head to foot; in parts drawn closely to the form, in others falling in free folds. But for its color, I should admire it much: it seems such an incongruity for a young and beautiful female to be habited in what appear to be mourning robes. I was often reminded of those wicked lines of ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... preferable, at the hazard of some injustice, to revert to the summary process of barbarism? Can it be right, that a magistrate shall be empowered to incarcerate a man for months, while he is debarred from pronouncing definitively on his guilt or innocence? There is an incongruity in all this, of which savages might be ashamed. We trust that the time is approaching when a better system will be established. Consolatory is it to consider, that in various countries of Europe, as well as in America, the subject of prison discipline, and of criminal jurisprudence, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... exist no rational or natural connection or affinity between a pretension like this and the power vested by the Constitution in Congress with regard to the Territories; on the contrary, there is an absolute incongruity between them. ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... things on board of the big ship, few were more striking for incongruity than the pair of grey carriage-horses, to which Letta referred, taking their morning exercise composedly up and down one side of the deck, with a ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... law there was very little if any difference between a performance of "Hamlet" by the great Betterton, and an exhibition of the marital infelicities of Punch and Judy. Are matters so much better now that we can afford to laugh at the incongruity? Do not theatres devoted to the "legitimate" and dime museums, the homes of triple-pated men, human corkscrews and other intellectual freaks, come under the same police supervision, and rank one and all within the same classification as "places of amusement?" Nay, to go further ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... pie or a slice of cake, thinking that they may not return once they have been put in circulation. Certainly I take jelly when it passes along, as well as pickles, olives, and cheese. There is no incongruity, at such a time, in having a slice of baked ham and a slice of angel-food cake on one's plate or in one's hands. They harmonize beautifully both in the color scheme and in the gastronomic scheme. At a picnic my boyhood training reaches ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... unburdening his mind had served to clear her hearer's vision, or merely that the thought of the real Bob Charteris, most unsentimental of men, obtruded itself in all its incongruity with Honour's scheme for commemorating him, certain it is that instead of being grateful to her for falling in so exactly with his wishes, Gerrard was conscious of a distinct impatience. Was there no flesh and blood about the girl—no ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... [2] The same incongruity appears also in Innocent VIII., whose bull against witchcraft (1484) systematized the persecution directed against unfortunate old women and idiots. Sprenger, in the Malleus Maleficarum, mentions that in the first year after its publication forty-one witches ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... fortune by matrimony, were none of them in unison with the open and just dealing which was requisite to my success. The forebodings at which people have so often marvelled are, when they happen, nothing more than perceptions of incongruity, that disturb the mind. Of this kind of disturbing ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... it over the tailor and his work! This story accredits the elephant with appreciating the fact that throwing dirty water over his work would be the peculiar manner in which to annoy a tailor. How has he acquired the knowledge of the incongruity of the two things, dirty water and clean linen? He delights in water himself, and would therefore be unlikely to imagine it objectionable to another. If the elephant were possessed of the amount of discernment with which he is commonly credited, is it reasonable to suppose that he would continue ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... appears at his worst. If any one from real life were suddenly thrust unprepared and unlearned in theatrical art upon a stage the incongruity of the situation would be appalling. Yet the witness is thrown into new and strange surroundings. It is a portion of the reality of life shown vividly against a conventionalized background. The judge and jury in a vague manner understand this. The lawyer producing the witness feels this and elicits ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... enemies?... Is not this hypothesis of transmitted fragments of instincts in accord with the strangely anomalous fact that children are at one moment seemingly cruel and at the next affectionate and kind, vibrating, as it were, between two worlds, egotistic and altruistic, without conscious sense of incongruity?" (F.L. Burk, "Teasing and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... upon the subject of personal religion. Now it seemed quite as bad to undertake to propagate Christianity at the point of a surgical instrument, as it would be to win proselytes by the sword; and the utter incongruity of the two operations disgusted me. At any rate, I changed my dentist. I felt like the man who found upon his landlady's table an article of butter that was inconveniently encumbered with hair, and who informed her that he ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... genemata mou kai ta agatha mou], because [Greek: ta genemata mou] is found in Western documents. The logic is strange, but as Dr. Hort has claimed it, we must perhaps allow him to have intended to include with this strange incongruity some though not many Substitutions in his class of instances, only that we should like to know definitely what substitutions were to be comprised in this class. For I shrewdly suspect that there were actually none. ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... single harmonious work of art and a union of two buildings widely differing in date, style, and proportion. But, on the other hand, it must be said that nothing at Chartres equals the parts of Le Mans taken separately, and that, in the inside at least, the incongruity of Le Mans is far from being felt in the unpleasant way that might have ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... knew Him. They are constantly telling us how He amazed them, awed them, and bound them to Himself. Their superlative tribute to Him is that, holding His own pure and exalted view of God, they felt no incongruity in thinking of Him as beside God on the throne. It may have been their belief in His Messiahship, accredited by His resurrection and destining Him to come with power and judge the world, that led them to place Him ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... Corliss and the company at Antelope Station, and in two more days were at Yuma City. By this time, the Southern Pacific Railroad had been built as far as Yuma, and a bridge thrown across the Colorado at this point. It seemed an incongruity. And how burning hot the cars looked, standing there in the ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... inverse, to obtain precisely the thing required; yet the untutored Irishman, without suspecting the necessity of this operose process, arrives at the solution of the problem by some short cut of his own, as he clearly evinces by the propriety of his metaphor. To be sure, there seems some incongruity in his throwing this lump of a two year old calf at his adversary. No arm but that of Milo could be strong enough for such a feat. Upon recollection, however, bold as this figure may seem, there are precedents for ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... instrument with its dial, face, and needles, and the little bell of which he had spoken. On my trusting that he would excuse the remark that he had been well educated, and (I hoped I might say without offence) perhaps educated above that station, he observed that instances of slight incongruity in such wise would rarely be found wanting among large bodies of men; that he had heard it was so in workhouses, in the police force, even in that last desperate resource, the army; and that he knew it was so, more or less, in any great railway staff. He had been, when young ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... deprecated in terms of dissuasion, forcible as those of Bourdaloue, and eloquent as those of Massillon, delivered from the mouth of a sooty African, as the spontaneous issues of his native moral philosophy and religion, we feel the incongruity too much for our nerves, and reject it in action. It may be asked, "why may not a negro on the coast of Africa enjoy such feelings, possess such virtues and speak them in such terms?" From what we have heard and seen, we entertain little doubt that ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... impossible to alter, and they remain in their original form, for example, Burns, Fraser and McAllister. It is strange to hear these names spoken by people who know no language but the French, and I was much struck by the incongruity. ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... Louis Quinze, gilt-bedded, gilt-framed, gilt-edged bridal-suite de luxe on the seventeenth floor, Mrs. Charley Cox sat rigid enough and in shirt-waisted incongruity on the lower curl of a gilt divan that squirmed to represent ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... observed, in a difference of paint, that this modern improvement had displaced an oldfashioned knocker. The door was opened by a tall and strikingly handsome old woman, whose black eyes still kept their keen light under her white hair, and whose dress showed none of the incongruity which was offensive in the door-bell: it was in the perfection of an antiquated taste, which, however, came just short of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 1894, he went back to Rome to execute a commission for a huge ceiling piece for the Boston Public Library. The piece was for a room later converted into a children's room, and after the canvas was placed, in 1901, the incongruity of the adult painting and the purposes of the room caused unfavorable comment. But the room has been recently readjusted. It is now lined with high oak shelves, almost to the cornice, filled with musty old books of a beautiful brown—perhaps ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... brought up short by a dim realization of the incongruity of the whole business, "Darn it! Can't use 'em as I ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... That voice! Although uttered in somewhat the same vocal quality as Kell's the intonation and accents had strangely altered. O'Hara leaned eagerly over the figure on the couch. The question he asked was startling in its incongruity: ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... art of poetry teach us that, if we would write what may be worth reading, we ought always, before we begin, to form a regular plan and design of our piece, otherwise we shall be in danger of incongruity. I am apt to think it is the same as to life. I have never fixed a regular design of life, by which means it has been a confused variety of different scenes. I am now entering upon a new one; let me, therefore, make some resolutions, and form some ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... forks, spoons, and knives, there were in plenty; but we had not been able to collect enough dishes and bowls for the profusion of viands Old Colonial had provided. Some parts of the service were therefore peculiar, and caused much addition to the merriment. There was always such incongruity between the excellence of the comestible and the barbaric quaintness of the receptacle that happened to contain it. Soups in billies, turkeys in milk-pans, salads in gourd-rinds, custards in cow-bells, jellies in sardine-boxes, ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... journalistic discovery which would infallibly be reproduced on the morrow by French and Swiss newspapers. I had a very bad time of it till the morning, wakeful with nervous worry and night-marish with the feeling of being mixed up with something theatrical and morbidly affected. The incongruity of such a complication in those two women's lives was sensible to me all night in the form of absolute anguish. It seemed due to their refined simplicity that it should remain concealed from them for ever. Arriving at an unconscionably early hour at the door of their apartment, ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... one were writing of any other than Synge, in speaking of Deirdre in such a company. Incongruity, however, is of the very texture of Synge's art, which has reconciled qualities, as I have said, never before reconciled in English literature. It is on Deirdre that Synge has lavished all the ideality ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... and with her. He reproached himself with having been brusque and reserved. He ought to have shown himself more expansive and less restrained. But it was her fault, for she had abashed him! The incongruity between the woman who cried with voluptuous suffering in her letters and the woman he had seen, so thoroughly mistress of herself in her coquetries, was ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... The incongruity between the masquerade and the mystery had created a curious psychological atmosphere. At first they had all felt horribly ashamed at being caught in the foolish disguises of a festival, by an event that had only too ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... to fall back on those grounds of agreement which remained and leave the differences henceforward in respectful silence. The recital may still serve to show to sympathetic persons the true lines and enlargements of her genius. It is certain that this incongruity never interrupted for a moment the intercourse, such as it was, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... flying-fish or the beauty of a golden, crimson, and purple sunset, to individuals of so refined and intellectual an appearance and so polished a behaviour, that the fact of their being 'tween-deck passengers seemed nothing short of a grotesque incongruity. ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... angel of God. Her hair, part of it thrown across the top-rail of the little iron bed, streamed out on each side over the pillow, and in the midst of it lay her face, a radiant isle in a dark sea. I stood and gazed. Fascinated by her beauty? God forbid! I was fascinated by the awful incongruity between that face, pure as the moonlight, and the charnel-house that lay unseen behind it. She was to me, henceforth, not a woman, but a live Death. I had no sense of sacredness, such as always in the chamber even of a little girl. How should I? It was ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... of the kind," rejoined the girl earnestly, quite forgetting the shortness of their acquaintance, as she had forgotten the flight of time, while on his part he did not notice any incongruity in the situation. "I'd leave well ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... The incongruity of some of the things which were pointed out to us during our drive was very amusing. There, for instance, stood a large jail, in the happy condition of being tenantless. So long, indeed, had it been empty ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... principles of our Government. No person will deny that slavery depreciates the dignity of labor, which is the pride and boast of our institutions. Nor does it need any but the logic of common sense to point out the incongruity of a free government resting, even partially, upon a basis ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of the monstrous incongruity of the thing, the almost physical impossibility of a mesalliance of the sort Mary Standish had revealed to him. He saw her, young and beautiful, with face and eyes that from the beginning had made him feel all that was good and sweet ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... yard on this side of the road and then from one on the other. The dog was perfectly bewildered and out of his head by the number of people and the number of houses he saw. We were indeed a sorry, travel-worn, unkempt, uncivilised band, man and dogs, with an old, battered vehicle, and we felt our incongruity with the new environment as we entered the metropolis of the luxury and wealth of the North. Here we passed a jeweller's shop, the whole window aglow with the dull gleam of gold and ivory—the terrible nugget jewellery so much affected in these parts and the walrus ivory which is Alaska's ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... inappropriate surrounding to her silken robes and costly lace mantle, she was none the wiser for that, you know, and took her seat, indifferent to them all, except that presently there stole over her the sense of disagreeable incongruity with her outdoor surroundings; so Satan had the pleasure of ruffling her spirits and occupying her thoughts with her rich brown silk dress instead of letting her heart be touched with the solemnity and beauty of the grand hymn which rolled down those long aisles. Satan has that everlasting ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... dining-room. She was always averse to being in the room when men came on business. Sometimes commercial travellers infringed upon Anderson's home hours, and she was always covertly indignant. She was constantly in a state of armed humility with regard to the details of business. She felt the incongruity of herself, the elderly gentlewoman in the soft, rich, black silk, with the scarf of real lace fastened with a brooch of real pearls at the throat, with the cap of real lace, with the knots of lavender ribbon, on her fluff of ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... ideas. She was becomingly dressed in brown—brown woolly garments, with a brown fur cap, brown stockings, and brown shoes ornamented with very bright silver buckles. Altogether she was decidedly chic; and if a little incongruous in her surroundings, such incongruity only made her the more alluring; and as far as Henri was concerned ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... Roland had invited him to enter it. That was the curious part of the situation, as it was impressed upon him as he sat with his face flattened against the window. The Little Missioner had invited him, and the night was daring him. For a single moment the incongruity of it all made him forget himself, and he laughed—a chuckling, half-broken, and out-of-tune sort of laugh. It was the first time in a year that he had forgotten himself anywhere near to a point resembling laughter, and in the sudden ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... most striking characteristic of dreams is their seeming reality while they last. They seem real in spite of their incongruity, because of the absence of critical ability during sleep. In waking life, when the sight of one object reminds me of another and calls up an image of that other, I know that the image is an image, and I know ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... delay of the Canadian, who had so repeatedly urged the necessity for expedition while in the fort, had, to say the least of it, an appearance of incongruity. Still it was evident, if disposed to harm them, he had full opportunity to do so without much risk of effectual opposition from themselves. Under all circumstances, therefore, it was advisable rather to appear to confide ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... far as she could make out. They were characteristics which, until now, she had never associated together; but now, curiously enough, they did not seem so utterly at variance. Of course they were at variance, must of necessity be so; but in the personality of this man the incongruity seemed somehow lost. Perhaps it was a sense of gratitude toward him that modified her views. He looked a gentleman. There was something about him that appealed. The gray eyes seemed full of cool, confident, self-possession; and, quiet as ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... no incongruity in paying this respectful visit to my ex-cook and her lover, I own that her appearance made me stare. For, if you please, she was dressed out like a lady, in a gown of pale blue satin trimmed with swansdown—a low-necked gown, too, though she had flung a white ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... subsequently gets entirely clear. Gale seems to have had no inkling of the ridiculous possibilities of "serious" verse. Consequently, he is able to write of Pyramus and Thisbe "sit[ting] on bryers,/Till they enjoyd the height of their desires," (Stanza 13), with no sense of the incongruity of the image employed. With similar ill effect in its pathetic context, Thisbe's nose bleed is introduced as an omen of disaster (Stanza 33), and Pyramus' "angry" blood, by a ridiculously far-fetched conceit, is said to gush out "to finde the author of the deed,/But when it none but Pyramus ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... appreciation there is often—not always—a sense of the incongruity as well as of the beauty in peasant speech. The woman crying for alms of bread who described her place of habitation, "I do be like a wild goose over on the side of Drominidy Wood," moves to laughter as well as to pity with the dignity of ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... struggling about the mouth of the major, which I was then too young, and I may add, too American, to understand. The incongruity of the wife of a man of two thousand, or five and twenty hundred dollars a-year, wearing two years' income round her neck, or of being magnificent in only one item of her dress, household, or manner ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... that had blackened his repute, the sentence that had hurled him from his native sphere; or that, as her reason had insensibly matured, she herself, reflecting on all the mystery that surrounded him—his incognitos, his hidings, the incongruity between his social grade and his education or bearing, and his repeated acknowledgments that there were charges against him which compelled him to concealment, and from which he could not be cleared on earth; that ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a strange feeling of the incongruity of this declaration of passion with his surroundings, the stuffy unhomelike chambers on King Street, and the rather severe presence of a man, whose existence emphasized all the hated social distinction that never weighed so heavily on him as at present. This rigorous representative of his class ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... impressed me, so grossly did it outrage all the best feelings of my nature, that even the angelic voice, and perfect science of Mrs. Billington, lost half their charms, or rather increased my aversion to the piece by an additional sense of incongruity. Then I learned the immense difference between reading and seeing a play;—and no wonder, indeed; for who has not passed over with his eye a hundred passages without offence, which he yet could not have ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... incongruity of the writer and his work confronted her intriguingly. A Charteris writes In Old Lichfield; a Cockney drug-clerk writes The Eve of St. Agnes; a genteel printer evolves a Lovelace; and a cutpurse pens the Ballad of Dead Ladies in a brothel. It is manifestly impossible; ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... furnish ideas. My world is built of touch-sensations, devoid of physical colour and sound; but without colour and sound it breathes and throbs with life. Every object is associated in my mind with tactual qualities which, combined in countless ways, give me a sense of power, of beauty, or of incongruity: for with my hands I can feel the comic as well as the beautiful in the outward appearance of things. Remember that you, dependent on your sight, do not realize how many things are tangible. All palpable ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... afford it; there was no question of money. According to the books she had read, that solitary state belonged to old, disappointed bachelors, old maids, faded people generally. Here she sat, a picture unseen, playing at age—and she less than twenty-two. There was a kind of delicate incongruity about it all. And watching her own grey eyes, as they faced her in the mirror, she half comprehended why she continued to live so, even after her father died and took away the reason for her old solitude. ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... is in vain for us to reflect on the absurdity, incongruity and frivolousness, as we apprehend it, of the pagan worship, inasmuch as we find, whatever we may think of its demerits, that the most heroic people that ever existed on earth, in the hour of their direst calamity, regarded a zealous and fervent adherence to that religion ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... world, alone and unsupported, Hamlet's natural buoyancy returns. It is the moment of isolation, but it is the moment also of intellectual freedom. It is desertion, but it is also independence. Every incongruity feeds his fanciful and inventive humour. He follows vanity and affectation with irony and mimicry, removes a mask with the point of his dexterous wit, and exposes the pretence of virtue or conceit of knowledge with sarcastic glee, while there is a savour of retribution in his chastisement ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... even among our contemporaries, that we are altogether baffled. The Englishman and the Italian may understand each other's speech, but the language of each other's ideas has still to be learnt. Our long failures in Ireland have risen from a radical incongruity of character which has divided the Celt from the Saxon. And again, in the same country, the Catholic will be a mystery to the Protestant, and the Protestant to the Catholic. Their intellects have been shaped in opposite moulds; they are like instruments which cannot be ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... direction? If he can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison. It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... fact is simply that the characters are not large enough, true enough, living enough—that the play does not probe deep enough into human experience—to make the august intervention of death seem other than an incongruity. The suicide of Paula Tanqueray, though it, too, has been much criticized, is a very different matter. Inevitable it cannot be called: if the play had been written within the past ten years, Sir Arthur would very likely have contrived to do without it. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... observers. That is to say, with all his faults, Herndon has the inner something that will enable the diverse impressions of Lincoln, always threatening to become irreconcilable, to hang together and out of their very incongruity to invoke a person that is not incongruous. And herein, in this touchstone so ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... sure of his own way? With all his knowledge of the literature and the literary history of the Elizabethan period, he seemed to lack the power of putting himself in sympathy with Shakespeare as he wrote. Hence the crudity and incongruity of his text, his vacillating opinions, and the weakness ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... the prim mouth and joined lips, the elevated brow, and beneath it the quiet contemplative eye, contemplative not of heaven or hell, but of this world as it had seen it, in its most worldly point of view, yet twinkling with a flashing thought of incongruity made congruous, are the indices of the inner man. Most of our wits, it must have been seen, have had some other interest and occupation in life than that of 'making wit:' some have been authors, some statesmen, some soldiers, some wild-rakes, and some players of tricks: Selwyn had no profession but ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... She was so anxious to prevent Mrs. Danvers from feeling dependent that she allowed her to take all sorts of liberties, and the amiable woman was not disposed to let the privilege fall into disuse. On the present occasion there was such an absurd incongruity of time and place that she might possibly have tried to evade the "exposition," but she happened just then to meet Keene's eye. The sarcasm there was not so carefully veiled as it usually was in her presence. ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... in Wolfram, and in the closely allied Grail section of Sone de Nansai; i.e., that the wound of the King was a punishment for sin, he had conceived a passion for a Pagan princess.[22] Now there would be no incongruity in representing the Dead King as reborn in youthful form, the aged King as revenu dans sa juvence, but when the central figure was a man in the prime of life some reason had to be found, his strength and vitality being restored, for his supersession by the appointed Healer. This supersession ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... of Deputies re-elected by the people of France after four years of irritating and exasperating misrule. Much was expected from the dazzling effect upon the popular mind of the Universal Exposition at Paris—so much, indeed, that I have had the obvious incongruity of selecting for the celebration of the French Revolution by a French Republic the centennial of a year in which no French Republic existed, accounted for to me by a French Republican on the express ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... had nothing in common, though she viewed them with perhaps more pity than she did the very poor. An overplus of cash in any one person's possession that had not been rightfully earned by the work of brain or body, was to her an incongruity, and a defection from the laws of the universe;—show and ostentation she despised,—and though she loved beautiful things, she found them,—as she herself said,—much more in the everyday provisions of nature, than in the elaborate designs of art. When she passed the gay ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... drew forth her writing materials in order to put her new and startling resolution into execution, she paused and looked about the familiar little shop with a feeling of estrangement. There was an incongruity between the boldness of the thing she was about to do, and the hard and fast limitations of her lot, which the sight of those humble properties brought sharply home to her. The first pen she took up was stiff and scratchy; the sound of it was like ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... The absolute incongruity between the impression received and the object which roused it, led me to make inquiries, in spite of my friend's jokes over my powers ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... is the night of dalliance in the Temple, and not unfrequently on Sunday morning, leaving a lady love, L'Estrange would go to church—top hat, umbrella, and prayer-book—and having a sense of humour, he was amused by the incongruity. ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... incongruity of his surroundings, he laughed lightly, while his glance, turning inquiringly if not insolently, from one to the other, lingered in some surprise upon the young woman. He had heard that in far-away France the motley was not confined to men. Had not Jeanne, queen of Charles ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... spiced with others, more attractive than all to unfledged youth, an air of the world and a knowledge of life which piqued my curiosity and sat (it seems so even to my later mind as I look back) with bewitching incongruity on the laughing child's face and the unripe grace of girlhood. Her moods were endless, vying with one another in an ever undetermined struggle for the prize of greatest charm. For the most part she was merry, frank mirth passing into sly raillery; now and then she would turn sad, sighing, ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... than for the heroine, who has been stabbed or poisoned, to revive, and come forward laughing in the epilogue?' As to the epilogue, it is spoken to get rid of the idea of the tragedy altogether, and to ward off the fury of the pit, who may be bent on its damnation. The greatest incongruity you can hit upon is, therefore, the most proper for this purpose. But I deny that the hero of a tragedy, or the principal character in it, is ever pitched upon to deliver the prologue. It is always, by prescription, some walking shadow, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... be Stubby's opponent in the market and his friend when they met on a common social ground. MacRae could never be quite like that. Stubby could fight Horace Gower, for instance, tooth and toenail, for an advantage in the salmon trade, and stretch his legs under Gower's dining table with no sense of incongruity, no matter what shifts the competitive struggle had taken or what weapons either had used. That was business; and a man left his business at the office. A curious thing, MacRae thought. A phenomenon in ethics which he found hard to understand, ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... not having read Descartes, and not having even distinguished their waking from their dreaming life nor their passions from their environment, might well stand in the presence of facts that seem to us full of inward incongruity and contradiction; indeed, it is only because original data were of that chaotic sort that we call ourselves intelligent for having disentangled them and assigned them to ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... that motley company of men, with only three curious slatternly women in the background to keep her company, giving herself away to a man who had dedicated his life to work in the desert? But Hazel's happy heart was serenely unconscious of the incongruity of her surroundings, and she answered with a clear ring to her voice as the bishop asked her the questions: "I will." She was coming gladly ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... were always of a meek and submissive character, but her voice, her look, her gestures were those of a queen. The Doctor felt this, but hardly its incongruity, as she slowly resumed her seat and signed to him to ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... thin fresh water. Joyfully, therefore, at last, did we discern clearings, culture, and habitations at the lake-head. There was no tavernous village of Rangeley; that would have been too great a contrast, after the forest and the lakes, where loons are the only disturbers of silence,—incongruity enough to overpower utterly the ringing of woodland music in our hearts. Rangeley was a townless township, as the outermost township should be. We had, however, learnt from Killgrove, feller of forests, that there was a certain farmer on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... bars), thus: "last—hour," is impracticable. It would be out of the question to destroy the musical phrase by breathing after the word "ora," in the third bar. If the text is phrased when spoken as it is when sung, the incongruity is at once apparent. The published score gives a pause [fermata symbol] after the word "ora:" "ultima ora [fermata symbol] del nostro amor." This phrasing is good and effective, especially if the artist changes at once to ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... another; nor is there any dependance or connection throughout; but this perhaps is a fault almost inseparable from a subject in itself so diversified, as not to admit of such limitation. He has not indeed been guilty of any incongruity; the scenes described in spring, are all peculiar to that season, and the digressions, which make up a fourth part of the poem, flow naturally. He has observed the same regard to the appearances of nature in the other seasons; but then what he has described ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... ape their mistresses' dresses as in England, and generally manage to produce a delightful sense of incongruity in their attire; but for all that, they are much less dowdy than ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... atmosphere was heavenly. Not that she fully understood his meaning, however. He meant to be good and generous, and to give her fine things. Naturally she was happy. She took up the package that she had come for, not seeing or feeling the incongruity of her position, while he felt it ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... happiness, seem to have the effect of so completely manning the ramparts of our intellect the nothing, however trivial, escapes observation. Gwen's father, her only near relative, lay cold before her,—his death, from her standpoint, the most painful of mysteries, —and yet the incongruity of Browne's "only too happy " did not escape her, as was evident by the quick glance and sudden relaxation of the mouth into the faintest semblance of a smile. All this was momentary and, I doubt not, half ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... a sense of incongruity in the appearance of a canoe when in a cart, on a train, or in a house, and you have often to meet an inexplicable but evident smile at the whole affair, which perhaps comes from pity, certainly from ignorance, and it may be from contempt; whereas a sailing-boat crossing ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... by the company, he addressed himself to Mr. Dyer in particular, and said, "Sir, I beg to have your judgement, for I know your nicety[37]." Dyer then very properly desired to read it over again; which having done, he pointed out an incongruity in one of the sentences. Johnson immediately assented to the observation, and said, "Sir, this is owing to an alteration of a part of the sentence, from the form in which I had first written it; and I believe, Sir, you may have remarked, that the making ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... incongruity of the rebuke, but it sufficed to send Bettina into a cyclone of grief. She was already one of those who are infinitely indifferent to the sufferings of others and infinitesimally sensitive ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... red-emblazoned newspapers which are yellow; you call your politicians public servants who are your masters, and you call your women the masters, but will not let them vote. Why, then, should you be so surprised at any seeming incongruity in others?" ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... given to tiresome repetitions. He stopped for a moment, and Bob's voice chanted admonishingly from somewhere, "Keep her a-go-o-ing, Bud, old boy!" So Thurston took breath and began on "The Holy City," and came near laughing at the incongruity of the song; only he remembered that he must not frighten the cattle, and ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... officers there were some heart-burnings as to the apparent incongruity of a hospital man doing field duty and an ambulance man doing hospital duty and so forth, but their American sense of humor and of humanity soon had each doing his level best wherever he might be found, whether under American or British senior ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... these lines, some time ago, I was forcibly struck with the incongruity of the terms "sipp'd" and "industrious" as applied to "bug;" and it occurred to me that Pope may have originally written the passage with the words "free" and "bee," as the rhymes of the two last lines. My reasons ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... companionship was requisite for her happiness; but for this society nature had endowed her with no fitness. In the case of an unhappy marriage, where the unhappiness is not caused by actual misconduct, but is solely due to incongruity of tastes and capacities, it is cruel to assume that the superior person of the ill-assorted couple has the stronger claim ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... after dragging days of uncertainty, came to Rudolph like a sea-breeze to a stoker. To escape and survive,—the bare experience seemed to him at first an act of merit, the deed of a veteran. The interim had been packed with incongruity. There had been a dinner with Kempner, solemn, full of patriotism and philosophy; a drunken dinner at Teppich's; another, and a worse, at Nesbit's; and the banquet of a native merchant, which began at four o'clock on melon-seeds, tea, black yearling eggs, and a hot towel, and ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... away, Moore's glance followed her, and a look of sudden inspiration illumined his shiny face. Wild Cat Bill, with his rotund form, resembled a domesticated house cat far more than the agile creature which had given him his frontier title. The incongruity struck Danvers, and he smiled at Winifred Blair as she drifted to another part of the room—a smile that she returned with a friendly nod of farewell. He did not see her again that evening, and not long afterward he and the doctor bade their ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... a mighty, inconvanient matter to fight it out both ways; by the same a-token that I think it a proof of stultity to go to law at all at all, as long as a person is able to take it into his own management. For the only incongruity in the matter is this: that, in the one case, a set of lawyers have the law in their hands, and, in the other, that you have it in your own; that's the only difference, and 'tis easy knowing ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... with him an esquire mounted on ass-back; but no instance occurred to his memory." We can see the whole scene at a glance, the stolid unconsciousness of Sancho and the perplexity of his master, upon whose perception the incongruity has just forced itself. This is Sancho's mission throughout the book; he is an unconscious Mephistopheles, always unwittingly making mockery of his master's aspirations, always exposing the fallacy of his ideas by some unintentional ad absurdum, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... upon him since the week at Lahore. She wondered a little afterwards what he had talked of during the ride, and what she had said in reply; but since he seemed satisfied, she could only hope that she had not betrayed herself by any incongruity of speech ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... The incongruity of his last words with the scene around made the Doctor smile. Overhead the sky still showed a narrow ribbon of blue. Across the valley the sunlight sparkled on the yellowish crags of the rocky wall. In the shadow, ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... india-rubber in response to their wills, of a strangely mingled touch of pathos, prevailed chiefly to interest Hester in their endeavor. This last would appear in the occasional suffering it caused Moxy, the youngest, to do as his father required, but oftener in the incongruity between the lovely expression of the boy's face, and the oddity of it when it became the field of certain comicalities required of him—especially when, stuck through between his feet, it had to grin like a demon carved on the folding ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... the utmost advantage, Christian quite dazzled the eyes of the two ladies who had so persistently called her "that young woman." Any person with eyes at all could see that, except for the difference in age, there was not the slightest incongruity between (to follow Barker's pompous announcement) "the master ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... that of a member of the prize-ring; what we now call a "belcher" bound his throat; a spotted fogle bandaged his jobbernowl, and shaded his right peeper, while a white beaver crowned the occiput of the Magus. And though, at first sight, there would appear to be some incongruity in the association of such a battered character as the Upright Man with his smart companions, the reader's wonder will rapidly diminish, when he reflects that any distinguished P. C. man can ever find a ready passport to the most exclusive ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the clearing into another forest, lying upon the verge of which I saw a bit of white. It appeared to stand out in marked contrast and incongruity to all its surroundings, and when I stopped to examine it, I found that it was a small strip of muslin—part of the hem of a garment. At once I was all excitement, for I knew that it was a sign left by Lys that she had been ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... is undoubtedly an air, but the situation is one to which an air is appropriate, and musica parlante would be inappropriate. If the drama had been a play to be spoken and not sung, there would not have been any incongruity in allotting a song to Orpheus, to enable Eurydice to trace him through the dark abodes of Hades. But the arias of Cavalli are not confined to such special situations, and recur frequently,' Cavalli had the ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... beautiful, bronze-haired, ox-eyed young woman in her disreputable attire—I have never seen a broken black feather waggle more shamelessly—was a sight indeed to strike wonderment into the cockney mind. And perhaps her association with myself added to the incongruity. I am long and lean and unlovely, I know; but it is my consolation that I look irreproachably respectable. Of the two I was infinitely the more disturbed by the public attention. "Calm and unembarrassed as a fate" she returned the popular gaze, and appeared somewhat bored by my efforts to find ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... vaulting. Brick and terra cotta seem to have a natural affinity for one another. Terra cotta is no more than a refined brick, made of the same sort of material, only in every respect more carefully, and kiln baked. Its similarity to brick is such that there is no sense of incongruity if moulded or carved brickwork and terra cotta are both employed in the same building, and this can hardly be said to be the case if the attempt is made to combine ornamental brickwork and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... immediately arrests attention is that with the ludicrous. In this the genius of Hood seemed to hold a very festival of antics, oddity, and mirth; all his faculties seemed to rant and riot in the Saturnalia of comic incongruity. And it is difficult to say whether, in provoking laughter, his pen or his pencil is the more effective instrument. The mere illustrations of the subject-matter are in themselves irresistible. They reach at once and directly the instinctive sense of the ludicrous, and over ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... "A crowning incongruity, as most people are delighted to dine with friends, or at public functions, where the meal is invariably served a la russe (another name for a table d'hote), and on these occasions are only too glad to have their menu chosen for them. The ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... of things, some are afraid that the authors of your miseries may be led to precipitate their further designs by the hints they may receive from the very arguments used to expose the absurdity of their system, to mark the incongruity of its parts, and its inconsistency with their own principles,—and that your masters may be led to render their schemes more consistent by rendering them more mischievous. Excuse the liberty which your indulgence authorizes me to take, when I ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... knock at the wooden guardian of your privacy. Knocks, in such case, grow strokes, grow smashings: the wooden guardian flies in shivers. And now ensues a Scene over which the world has long wailed; and not unjustly; for a sorrier spectacle, of Incongruity fronting Incongruity, and as it were recognising themselves incongruous, and staring stupidly in each other's face, the world ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... the conjunction but usually prepares the way for the second of the two contrasted terms: "He is good but dull." Where and is used instead of but, the incongruity savours of epigram: "He always talks truthfully and prosily." "He is always ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... that the longest list would be no nearer to an exhaustive analysis than the shortest. It is not a specious completeness, but a sense of infinity that can never be completed,—greater intensity, not greater extension,—that distinguishes modern landscape-art. Hence there is no incongruity in the seeming license that it takes with the firm order of Nature. It is in no spirit of levity or profanity that the substantial distinctions of things are thus disregarded,—that all absolute rank is denied, and the value of each made contingent and floating. It is only that the mind is somewhat ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... feasting and afterwards providing food for so many myriads of people, were much greater than all that Nicias possessed as well as spent, put together. So that one might wonder at anyone's failing to see that vice is a certain inconsistency and incongruity of habit, after such an example of money dishonorably obtained, and wastefully ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... robber of birds'-nests. But a great many boys who began life by robbing birds'-nests have ended it much more creditably. The astonishing and interesting element in Benedict Arnold's career was what one might term the anomaly and incongruity of his treason. Born at Norwich, Conn., in 1741, he was blessed from his earliest years by wholesome parental influences. The education which he received was an excellent one, considering his colonial environment. Tales of his boyish pluck and hardihood cannot ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... The incongruity of the name seemed somehow to throw into brighter relief the peculiar sincerity of its bearer's character, and by the time it was generally adopted among the students Madge ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... angry and dissatisfied, but not willing to face things. It was unlikely that the man had seen her, unlikely that she would see him again; but he was incongruous in this simple life, and he brought forcibly home the incongruity of herself and her errand. She had come for the blue daffodil, it was no good pretending she had not; she told herself angrily, as she had told herself when she had first looked at Johnny's yellow-faced watch, that she was going to get it in some ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... opinion or by the accepted systems as it is possible for a creed to be. She never tried to force them upon any one else; possibly she did not believe in them herself sufficiently to wish to do so; but like her queer gowns and her dyed red hair her creed suited Mrs. Ogilvie. There was a congruous incongruity about her which set many people puzzling to find out her real character. Pompous persons and snobs detested her. Stupid or vapid people saw nothing in her, or saw merely that she dyed her hair and was dressed by Paquin. ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... we were at last summoned to 'go up higher', and we joyfully obeyed. It was a strange sort of place to stand in, the dock of a police-court the position struck one as really funny, and everyone who looked at us seemed to feel the same incongruity: officials, chief clerk, magistrate, all were equally polite, and Mr. Bradlaugh seemed to get his own way from the dock as much as everywhere else. The sitting magistrate was Alderman Figgins, a nice, kindly old gentleman, robed in marvellous, but ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... sat back on her heels. She had slipped her bared arms into the armholes of the sleeveless white "fluff-and-flimsy" evening frock, and the "sparklers" of the low-cut bodice now framed her blue-print clad shoulders with an astonishing effect of incongruity. "I have a wonderful inspiration. Let's ask Jeannette out here for a visit—an object-lesson as to the state of life whereunto the country cousins have been called. She hasn't seen me in ten years, and all I remember of her is a fluffy, yellow-haired girl with a sniffly ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... filled her with dismay. The array of hard-faced little girls daunted her; she turned to the boys, but she only saw one—the little hatless, coatless scarecrow with the perfect features And arresting grace, who stood out among his smug companions with the singularly vivid incongruity of a Greek Hermes in the central hall of Madame Tussaud's waxwork exhibition. Fascinated, she strayed down the line toward him. She halted, looked for a second or two into a pair of liquid black eyes and then blushed in agonized shyness. She stared ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... neighbour, but no, Mrs. Marchmont, though inwardly afraid of this squire of dames; and of his intellect, determined to appear at ease, and so talked on the one engrossing idea of her life; the last conundrum in fancy work, the last fashionable incongruity in the blending of colours. And poor, victimized Lionel longed to breathe in Vaura's refreshing breadth of thought; on his tormentor pausing to recover breath, it was not as balm to a wound to hear Sir Dennis ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... a drawer which held what was left of her father's clothes without any feeling of incongruity. There were four shirts of checked oxford shirting, two pairs of long stockings, a corduroy jacket, and his best suit of black serge bound with braid round the coat. There was a revolver, too, a clasp knife, a unused church-warden, an old wide-awake ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone |
