"Incongruous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... house that had turned it out. His cartridge belt was new and squeaky, and he had the last patents in waterproof match safes and skinning knives. That goneness at his stomach, and the strange sensations up and down his spine, seemed incongruous in such valorous trappings. But he had them unmistakably, and they kept him cringing close against the wall as though ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... thickness of the wall, looked out upon a dismal yard littered with brooms and buckets. Opposite the foot of the bed—a modern French bedstead, by the bye, whose brass fittings and somewhat flimsy hangings were strangely incongruous with their venerable surroundings—was an ingle, containing the smouldering relics of what had doubtless been intended for a fire, but which needed considerable coaxing before it could be converted from a pretence to a reality. There was no exit save by the doorway I had entered, and no furniture ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... out into a loud laugh, stopped suddenly, sat down, and took Nick on his knee. It was an incongruous scene. Mr. Fanning ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the captain, solemnly; "at least I'll try to separate the ideas—they are a trifle incongruous—if you'll tell me how at that distance you could mingle your devotions with appraisal ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... who had been having a fine time with the impatient and curious hounds, did not vouchsafe any information on that score. But very shortly we were destined to learn the use of this incongruous firearm. I was riding in advance of Wallace, and a little behind Jones. The dogs—excepting Jude, who had been kicked and lamed—were ranging along before their master. Suddenly, right before me, I saw an immense jack-rabbit; and just ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... could mentally congratulate his successor on having an hour still to sit in Miss Fancourt's drawing-room. He himself might use that hour for another visit, but by the time he reached the Marble Arch the idea of such a course had become incongruous to him. He passed beneath that architectural effort and walked into the Park till he got upon the spreading grass. Here he continued to walk; he took his way across the elastic turf and came out by the Serpentine. He watched with a friendly eye the diversions ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... capitals as in the crannies of the crag; the same atmosphere and daylight clothe the eternal rock and yesterday's imitation portico; and as the soft northern sunshine throws out everything into a glorified distinctness—or easterly mists, coming up with the blue evening, fuse all these incongruous features into one, and the lamps begin to glitter along the street, and faint lights to burn in the high windows across the valley—the feeling grows upon you that this is a piece of nature in the most intimate sense; ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... anything," "hateful," "horrible," may constantly be heard in conversation upon trivial and unimportant subjects in companies of young people whose educational opportunities and social advantages would lead us to expect a very different style of conversation. So of incongruous and inappropriate expressions. "My grandfather and grandmother died on the same day of the year? wasn't it funny?" said a young miss to a companion She meant that it was a strange circumstance or coincidence. It was the wise remark of a great ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... "Well, I think the perfection of sacred music is Gregorian set to harmonies; there you have the glorious old chants, and just a little modern richness." Campbell: "And I think it just the worst of all, it is a mixture of two things, each good in itself, and incongruous together. It's a mixture of the first and second courses at table. It's like the architecture of the facade at Milan, half-Gothic, half-Grecian." Reding: "It's what is always used, I believe." Campbell: "Oh, yes, we must not go against the age, it would be absurd ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... ere she stood in Isabella's presence, Marie knew not. The most incongruous thoughts floated, one after another, through her bewildered brain—most vivid amongst them all, hers and her husband's fatal secret: had it transpired? Was he sentenced, and she thus summoned to share ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... incongruous to hear the English of a girl's finishing school from the mantilla'd young woman who beamed mischievously at him. She had the delighted air of one aiding a romance. It was doubly incongruous because of the dark and shadowy Cathedral in which they were, and the raucous noises of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... on the occasion of his second visit to Cherry Orchard haunted Anstice for days. There was something so incongruous in the notion of this woman having served a sentence of imprisonment for an offence which, of all others, might well be supposed the most impossible for any decent person to commit; yet Anstice knew instinctively ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... guides and saves you. You can feel in a moment the presence or influence of a base, sensual, and unworthy nature. An electric-like thrill animates you, and you are naturally repulsed from him. When your suitor is a man of incongruous temper, ungenial habits, and of a morose and unsympathetic disposition, this same precious, divine instinct acts, and the man feels, though he cannot tell why, that all his arts and aspirations are in vain. It will seldom be necessary for you to tell him verbally of his failure; but should such ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... remembered that Brigham sat with four of his wives in one of the boxes, enthusiastically applauding that portrayal of a single love. As the picture came back to her now, there seemed to have been something incongruous in this spectacle. She observed the seamed and hardened features of his earliest wife, who kept to the sofa during the evening, beside the better favoured Amelia, whom the good man had last married, and she thought of his score or ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... amends for much. The incongruous elements were not so apparent. Everybody was hungry, and even the most fastidious had to acknowledge the fare of the best. Captain Bertram quite retrieved his character in Beatrice Meadowsweet's eyes, ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... of trade became clogged and blocked by its constant increase. Auction houses became the means of brokerage; and their number increased to such an extent that half a dozen red flags at last dotted every block on Main street. And incongruous, indeed, were the mixtures exposed at these sales, as well as in the windows of the smallest shops in Richmond. In the latter, bonnets rested on the sturdy legs of cavalry boots; rolls of ribbon were festooned along the crossed barrel of a rifle and the dingy cotton umbrella; while ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... carols, and from excellent carols: but I protest that with 'choirs and places where they sing' they will be found incongruous. Indeed, Mr. Bramley admits it. Of his collection "some," he says, "from their legendary, festive or otherwise less serious character, are unfit for use within ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... prepared, where the meaning seems plain and obvious, to believe that the writer meant what he said, and to reject any interpretation which implies that when he came to speak of himself he said what he did not mean, or filled the picture with descriptions, situations or emotions, incongruous or inappropriate. And if in so reading they seem clear and connected, fanciful and far-drawn interpretations will not be adopted. We should not distort or modify their meaning in order to infer ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... a woodbine, trimmed, however, so as to leave the openings clear. A few rickety steps, at the sides and between the cracks of which sprouted tall blades of grass, led down to the path which terminated in the gate. This path was distinguished by an incongruous pavement of white limestone slabs, which were always kept carefully clean. The gate was a rattle-boned affair, hanging feebly between two grandfatherly old posts, which hypocritically tried to maintain an air of solidity, though perfectly aware that they were wellnigh rotted away ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... is nothing incongruous in Nature, as everything is admirably adapted for its purpose, as unity of design is perceptible in all things, as every effect proceeds from a cause, and becomes a cause in its turn of succeeding effects, so God has willed that ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... about half a mile our side of Ypres. Its grounds are ploughed up by shells and bombs, but most of the fountains and wretched garden statuary remains with the fishponds which perhaps gave the villa its army name, and rustic bridges most egregiously incongruous with ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... are repetitions of the Persian leaf or tree of life, and the border consists of kneeling hares or fawns between a Persian arabesque and a corded line. The mixture of Egyptian and Assyrian styles is remarkable throughout, till we come to the centre of the rosace, where we find a most incongruous man in armour on horseback with a hawk on his wrist, giving the Norman stamp of the reigning house and influence in Sicily. The central subject is exactly repeated on an embroidered twelfth century chasuble in the treasury of the Cathedral of Bamberg, only that a royal crown and robes ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... themselves of these circumstances in order to deceive and induce mankind to believe that the Godless revolution was in sympathy with Pius IX. and the Church. The venerable Pontiff was still able to take to task the indiscreet writers who, from mistaken zeal, maintained that such an incongruous coalition had ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... shook, clinging to him, only his arm keeping her from falling. A man had thrown his coat about her, and Garland pulled it over her, then, looking down, saw her feet, bare and scratched in pointed, high-heeled slippers. The sight of them, incongruous reminders of the intimate aspects of life, brought him down to the moment and her place ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... four of us, Adrian, Jaffery Chayne, Tom Castleton and myself, been at Cambridge together, and formed after the manner of youth a somewhat incongruous brotherhood. We knew one another's shortcomings to a nicety and whenever three of the quartette were gathered together, the physical prowess, the morals and the intellectual capacity of the absent fourth were discussed with admirable lack of reticence. So it came to pass that ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... and read the story of Christ's birth in Matthew and Luke, Mark and John having never heard of it or forgotten it. What an incongruous jumble of absurdities! A poor fairy tale of the world's childhood, utterly insignificant beside the stupendous revelations of science. From the fanciful story of the Magi following a star to Shelley's "World on worlds are rolling ever," what an advance! As I retired ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... the old vaulted chambers of the Dominican monastery at Perth echoed with sounds that would seem incongruous in such a home of austerity, but that the disturbed state of Scotland rendered it the habit of her kings to attach their palaces to convents, that they themselves might benefit by the "peace of the Church," which was in general accorded ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... certain, and in that he was very probably correct. To be sure, there was the character of the country girl, Mary, which he had taken from his own little waiting-maid: but that was a very subordinate element, and although, on the whole, he rather regretted having introduced anything so incongruous and unimaginative, he decided to let it go. The romance, as a whole, was too great to be injured by one little country girl, drawn from real life. "And by the way," murmured the author to himself, "I wish Mary would bring ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... bore his name. It was visible for several miles before he even entered the park, so proud and prominent was its position, on the richly- wooded steep of a considerable eminence. It was a castellated building, immense and magnificent, in a faulty and incongruous style of architecture, indeed, but compensating in some degree for these deficiencies of external taste and beauty by the splendour and accommodation of its exterior, and which a Gothic castle, raised according to the strict rules of art, could scarcely ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... restoring the old system entirely, and he dwelt much on its being the title which Caesar had borne. He often said, "One may be the Emperor of a republic, but not the King of a republic, those two terms are incongruous." ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the coast had long combined in perfect harmony with the crude Gothic Art of the ecclesiastical buildings scattered along it, throwing into extraordinary discord all architectural attempts at newness there. To restore the grey carcases of a mediaevalism whose spirit had fled, seemed a not less incongruous act than to set about renovating the adjoining ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... Establishment is representative of all the citizens of the United States."[3-13] The majority invoked past experience, efficiency, and patriotism to support the status quo, but its chorus of reasons for excluding Negroes sounded incongruous amid the patriotic din and call to ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... looked curiously out of place in this unwholesome, gaslit building with its atmosphere of cheese and bacon. He would have been noticeably good-looking upon the cricket field or in any gathering of people belonging to the other side of life. Here he seemed almost a curiously incongruous figure. He passed through the glass-paned door and stood respectfully before his employer. Mr. Weatherley—it was absurd, but he scarcely knew how to make his suggestion—fidgetted for a moment and coughed. The ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... incongruous with his surroundings and recent train of thought in the girl's sudden remark that Henley ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... there was a silence. Ten minutes later the priest and nurse came out, throwing wide the door on the remains of Henry Clairville, just passed from this world to the next. At the same instant, a strange incongruous sound came from the room, and Pauline, wide-eyed and panting, stopped sobbing, and stood up with her hands pressed over her heart. It was the penetrating chant of three lusty kittens, new-born, blind and helpless, yet quick to scent ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... want of it lies much deeper than word of mouth. The man without a sense of humor is sure to make a certain number of solemn blunders. They may be in matters of importance or in the merest trifles, but they are blunders none the less, and come from insensibility to the incongruous, the ludicrous, or the impossible. It may be said that common sense suffices to avoid these pitfalls, but this is really begging the question, inasmuch as common sense of a high order amounting almost ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Church at Setubal, built by Justa Rodrigues, Dom Manoel's nurse, has fifteen paintings in incongruous gilt frames and hung high up on the north wall of the church, which also have something of ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... of our liturgy has descended to us as a precious legacy from the time when Peter and Paul preached in Rome. It would be incongruous that our ancient hierarchy robed in ancient vestments should perform our ancient liturgy in a moderne language. As in all parts of the globe there are members of the Catholic church, she has wisely preserved in her ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... during the Epiphany Tide and the long period of the Trinity Season. Black is made use of at funerals and on Good Friday. This use of the colors applies to the stole as well as to the Altar hangings. The black stole is always out of place, incongruous, except at funerals and on Good Friday. Where they are used, the cope, chasuble, maniple, dalmatic and tunic also vary with the Season in the same manner. The use of the Church colors, besides "decking the place of His Sanctuary" is also most helpful ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller
... Oil.—This sounds somewhat incongruous, as mineral oil is entirely unsaponifiable. Most of the suggestions for this purpose consist of the incorporation of mineral oil, or mineral oil emulsified by aid of Quillaia bark, with a cocoa-nut oil ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... carried, in our old-fashioned neighbourhood, to a point at which what began in reverence ended in what was barely decent, and what was meant to be most melancholy became absolutely comical. But a sense of the congruous and the incongruous was not cultivated amongst us, whereas solid value (in size, quantity and expense) was perhaps over-estimated. So our furniture, our festivities, ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... induced some to adopt, or at least to regard with favor, the theory of Materialism, is—the difficulty of conceiving of the union of two substances so incongruous as Mind and Matter are supposed to be,—and still more the difficulty of explaining how they could have any mutual action on each other. Dr. Priestley largely insists on this, as well as on the former ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... Jansen, and to its satisfaction, for was it not a tribute to all that she would distinguish no particular unit by her permanent favour? But for one so sprightly and almost frivolous in manner at times, the self-denial seemed incongruous. She was unconventional enough to sit on the side-walk with a half-dozen children round her blowing bubbles, or to romp in any garden, or in the street, playing Puss-in-the- ring; yet this only made her more popular. Jansen's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a few school-books that jauntily swung from a strap in her gloved hand, she bore no resemblance to a pupil; in her pretty gown of dotted muslin with bows of blue ribbon on the skirt and corsage, and a cluster of roses in her belt, she was as inconsistent and incongruous to the others as a fashion-plate would have been in the dry and dog-eared pages before them. Yet she carried it off with a demure mingling of the naivete of youth and the aplomb of a woman, and as she swept down the narrow ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... THACKERAY himself, a score of great and (to the kindly chronicler) gracious personalities live again in her pages. I should add that the volume is rounded off by a short story, a late addition to the Miss Williamson series, which might be called a pot-boiler, were it not somehow incongruous to associate so gentle a flame with any such activities. Slight as it is, From Friend to Friend forms an apt and graceful finish to the work of one whose life was given ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... or another, had long fermented in Wagner's brain. At first it was—incongruous though the thing may seem—either Jesus of Nazareth or Wieland the Smith; then Parzival grew out of the Siegfried idea; and at length, stimulated by the attentions and help of poor Ludwig, he settled on Parsifal. ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... she could hardly keep from smiling at the idea, so wildly incongruous with the scene she had really undergone, of looking out for admirers ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... figured also in the Greek mysteries, and are elaborated with much detail in Plato's great Phaedo Myth—in all these cases with increasing fullness of mystical meaning. In the popular mind they were incrusted with layers of incongruous notions and crude superstitions. But, as Plato, for one, so clearly saw, there is always at their core a group of intuitions which have their bearing on the deepest problems of human life, and are capable of ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... prettier in her uniform Captain Middleton would have been the first to allow; but he hated it nevertheless. There seemed to him something incongruous and wrong for a girl with a smile like ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... can say, hell. Yet all these ideas have a foundation in fact, and only a foundation. The superstructure has been reared by exaggerating, diminishing, combining, separating, deforming, beautifying, improving or multiplying realities, so that the edifice or fabric is but the incongruous grouping of what man has perceived through the medium of the senses. It is as though we should give to a lion the wings of an eagle, the hoofs of a bison, the tail of a horse, the pouch of a kangaroo, and the trunk of an elephant. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... laughed out idiotically. Handcuffs! They seemed the most incongruous things in the world for the Adventurer to have, and—She felt mechanically in his pocket, and handed ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... garments stopped short of his knees; the whole attire belonging to a smaller man than the unfortunate statesman. His delicate white hands, much exposed by the shortness of the sleeves, looked very unlike those of a day-labourer, and altogether the new mason presented a somewhat incongruous and wobegone aspect. Grotius was fearful too lest some of the preachers and professors frequenting the book-shop next door would recognize him through his disguise. Madame Daatselaer smeared his face and hands with chalk and plaster however and whispered encouragement, and so with a felt ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... him before why the children's clothes, Daddy's and Mummy's as well for that matter, were such an incongruous assortment of village or peasant wear, and smart, well-cut garments that bore ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... Mother Guendolen? Some faint, vague, misty memories seemed to awake within me—an odd, incongruous mixture like a dream—dark eyes like Margaret's, which told a tale, but this seemed a tale of terror; and an enamelled cross, which had somewhat to do with ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... nach Luft, wie ein Spatz unter der Luftpumpe.—In vielen der hiesigen Strassen riecht es am Ende auch lenzhaft, naemlich pestilenzhaft, und die guten Stuttgarter merken das gar nicht; 'suess duftet die Heimat.'"[87] In his fondness for bringing together the incongruous, for introducing the element of surprise, and in the fact that his humor is almost always of the impatient, disgruntled, cynical type, Lenau reminds us not a little of Heine in his "Reisebilder" and some other prose works. Hoelderlin, ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... did her step falter as she quitted the library, and returned to her own room, when, carefully closing the door, she sunk on the nearest seat, and covering her eyes with her hands, as if to shut out all outward objects, gave unchecked dominion to the incongruous thoughts occasioned by Percy's tale. She could not define or banish them; a sudden oppression appeared cast upon her brain, deadening its powers, and preventing all relief from tears. The ruin, the wretchedness from which she had been mercifully preserved stood ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... holding a candle that softened the austerity of her plain black dress. There in the half light there was a slender grace about her that made her seem vaguely unreal. In that disordered room she seemed as incongruous as some portrait from a house across the water, as coldly unresponsive to her surroundings. I imagined her on the last canvas of the gallery, bearing all the traits of the family line—the same quiet assurance, ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... fail to remark Judy's wedding present. A bride in white from top to toe—a lovely bride in the tenderest bloom of youth, to carry a bouquet of strong dark green and crimson—had anything so incongruous ever been seen before? But Hilda held the flowers tightly, and Judy's hungry heart ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... inadequately described the repellent sensuousness of this veritable potentate, who could contrive to invest a sitting room in a modern hotel with the atmosphere of a secret Eastern household. To consider Ormuz Khan in connection with matters of international finance was wildly incongruous, while the manicurist incident indicated an inherent cruelty only possible ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... There were a good many times and things in which she scarcely expected much companionship from Frank. She would not have said even to herself, that Frank was rusty; and she would do her faithful and good-natured best to rub her up; but there was an instinct with her of the congruous and the incongruous; and she would not do her Bath-brick polishing out ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... highly personal account of the whaler's life, and to that end had assembled a mass of information upon the sperm whale to add to his own memories. Very literally the story begins as an autobiography; even the elemental figure of the cannibal, Queequeg, with his incongruous idol and harpoon in a New Bedford lodging house, does not warn of what is to come. But even before the Pequod leaves sane Nantucket an undercurrent begins to sweep through the narrative. This brooding ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... truth, nothing often results from these singular unions, especially when they are very incongruous, as the individuals which result from them are usually sterile; but also, when the disparities are less great, it is known that the drawbacks (defauts) with which it has to do no longer exist. However, this means ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... on the bridge staring after him, and as he went towards the Grafton Street gate, there was something slightly incongruous about his look. ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... dresses of the women. The sidewalks quivered with life—soberly dressed coolies, making green background for the gauds of their women, bespangled babies late out of bed that they might gain good luck and blessing from those rites, priests in white robes, dignitaries in long tunics, incongruous Caucasian tourists and spectators. ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... find Lady Ingleby in the mood of a typical April day, sunshine and showers rapidly alternating; whimsical smiles, succeeded by ready tears; then, with lashes still wet, gay laughter at some mistake of her own, or at incongruous behaviour on the part of her devoted but erratic household; speedily followed by pathetic anxiety over her own supposed short-comings in view of Lord ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... Washington wrote President Roosevelt another letter which throws light upon the relations between the two men as well as upon the incongruous phases of racial prejudice: ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... is true, yet in no way incongruous with what we can imagine Pippa to have thought, if not, certainly, in such lovely diction to have been able to express. Thenceforward, until the episodical lines on the Martagon lily, the child and her creator are one. There comes the ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... I broke off. "Such an appellation is anachronistic, incongruous, and infinitely absurd. I can't use it. I must take the liberty of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... first sight appear somewhat incongruous that a king and court thus given up, the former to flagrant immorality, the latter to the unbridled pursuit of riches and honors, should early have exhibited a disposition to carry forward in an aggravated form the system of persecution ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... becomes part of our knowledge but as it has been shaped and coloured by its magic reflexion. Nay, more, it is not only our mirror but our archetype for every thing. So we spiritualise the material universe, and afterwards, by an incongruous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... a promise not to inform her brother of Peak's singular position, Marcella spoke with sincerity. She was prompted by incongruous feelings—a desire to compel Godwin's gratitude, and disdain of the circumstances in which she had discovered him. There seemed to be little likelihood of Christian's learning from any other person that she had met with Peak at Budleigh Salterton; he had, indeed, dined with her ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... contest in which we are engaged must be recast. Our demands on our national leaders—not those now in power who only mislead—must be greatly enlarged. Truth, however bitter, must take the place of fancy. Ideas and institutions incongruous with the new social and political conditions must be displaced. The nation's aims and policy should be stated boldly and clearly, and adequate machinery set up to achieve them. In a word, system will have to be substituted for confusion, ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... answer, Gallant," he said, "because your silence is enough. Regardless of how incongruous it seems in view of the great wrong I have done her, I love her, too. And, because I love her I can tell that you do. I can see it by the way you speak to her, the way you look at her and unless I am greatly mistaken she knows it as well ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... men lay close among the shore-side bushes, expecting their arrival; when a silly lad, in mere lightness of heart, fired a shot in the air. My native friend, Mrs. Mary Hamilton, ran out of her house and gave the culprit a good shaking: an episode in the midst of battle as incongruous as the grazing cow. But his sillier comrades followed his example; a harmless volley warned the boats what they might expect; and they drew back and passed outside the reef for the passage of the Fuisa. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... justifies his sport. It is a sign of intellectual barrenness in the writers; for what is easier than parody? what means of raising a laugh so certain and so cheap as to roll a statue from its pedestal and stick some vulgar utensil in its place? Laughter always follows the incongruous; and to make a Grecian Deity call for a pot of half-and-half, or to ask a Fairy Princess if her mother has parted with her mangle, is to secure the laugh, though contempt may follow it. To our minds there is something ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... dreams. In the heart of Venice could I have erected a better? You behold around you, it is true, a medley of architectural embellishments. The chastity of Ionia is offended by antediluvian devices, and the sphynxes of Egypt are outstretched upon carpets of gold. Yet the effect is incongruous to the timid alone. Proprieties of place, and especially of time, are the bugbears which terrify mankind from the contemplation of the magnificent. Once I was myself a decorist; but that sublimation ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... pouring into our country, our political traditions and racial characteristics still continue English—Mr. Douglas Campbell would say Dutch, but even so the stock is the same. Though thus somewhat gorged with food not wholly to its taste, our political digestion has contrived so far to master the incongruous mass of materials it has been unable to reject; and if assimilation has been at times imperfect, our political constitution and spirit remain English in essential features. Imbued with like ideals of liberty, of law, of right, certainly not less progressive than our kin ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... tribes in the Russian territory," the Queen Charlotte Islanders, Koloshes, Ugalentzes, Atnas, Kolchans, Ken['a][:i]es, Tun Ghaase, Haidahs, and Chimmesyans. His Nootka-Columbian family is scarcely less incongruous, and it is evident that the classification indicated is only to a comparatively slight ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... servant; but, although the bell cord dangled within easy reach, he made no movement toward it; it had occurred to his mind that the act might subject him to the suspicion of fear, which he certainly did not feel. He was more keenly conscious of the incongruous nature of the situation than affected by its perils; it was revolting, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... "counter-plotting and secret wishing one another's dissolution"; "a habit of wrath and perturbation"; "heavenly with hellish, fitness with unfitness," &c. "God commands not impossibilities," he bursts out, "and all the ecclesiastical glue that Liturgy or Laymen can compound is not able to sodder up two such incongruous natures into the one flesh of a true beseeming marriage." Or take this remarkable passage, repeating an opinion we have already had from him, "No wise man but would sooner pardon the act of adultery once and again committed by a person worth pity and forgiveness than to lead a wearisome ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... cannot guess, Fail to track their deep distress— Dull look on when death is nigh, Note no change, and let them die. Poor Matthias! couldst thou speak, What a tale of thy last week! Every morning did we pay Stupid salutations gay, Suited well to health, but how Mocking, how incongruous now! Cake we offer'd, sugar, seed, Never doubtful of thy need; Praised, perhaps, thy courteous eye, Praised thy golden livery. Gravely thou the while, poor dear! Sat'st upon thy perch to hear, Fixing with a mute regard Us, thy human ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... of it, the sore punishments appointed to it), we may consider, that to common sense vain swearing is a very unreasonable and ill-favoured practice, greatly misbecoming any sober, worthy, or honest person; but especially most absurd and incongruous to ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... and incongruous love ballad of old lands, and old days, for the absurd reason that the youth of the world in his own land beat in his blood, and because in the night time one of the twinkling stars of heaven had dropped down the sky and become a girl ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... guest with the kindness of his nature, and an inward smile at the incongruous assemblage he was likely to have around him by the arrival of the Jarvis's, who, at that moment, drove to his door. The introductions between the baronet and the new comers had passed, and Miss Jarvis ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... to the rail, and the yachtsmen stared at her as if she were Aphrodite risen from the sea instead of a mighty pretty girl emerging from a dark companion-way. She had appeared so suddenly! She was so manifestly incongruous in ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... maintained that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. But he is the advocate of a philosophical method which makes the belief in the existence of an immaterial principle superfluous and incongruous; he not only acknowledges no such distinction between the phenomena of mind and those of matter as to require the hypothesis of a free intelligence to account for it; he not only regards the ascertained ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... as incongruous a figure as was the American at the Court of King Arthur; he was as unhappily out of the picture as would be Cyrano de Bergerac on the floor of the Board of Trade. Judged, as at the time he was judged, by writers of comic paragraphs, by presidents of railroads, by amateur "statesmen" ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... at Overstow was certainly a strange and incongruous one, consisting as it did of persons who seemed all in league with each other, the master-criminal whose shrewd, steel-grey eyes were so uncanny, and his accomplices and underlings who all profited and grew fat upon the ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... countless images fell into the hands of Jake Nuddle, who had been keeping an incongruous eye on the Sunday supplements for some time. This time the double of Mamise was not posed as a farmerette in an English landscape, but as a woman of fashion in a ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... of his mind, and the power he possessed of throwing himself with the utmost keenness into many absolutely dissimilar and incongruous enterprises at the same time, add further to the difficulty of understanding him. An extraordinary number of subjects had their place in his capacious brain, and the ease with which he dismissed one and took up another with equal zest the moment after, causes his doings to seem unnatural to ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... chiefly remarkable for their intricate plots, and for the hope of better things that breathed through the cheap sensation of the best of them. But it was a hope that had been deferred a good many years. His manner was better than his matter; indeed, an incongruous polish was said by the literary to prevent Langholm from being a first favorite either with the great public or the little critics. As a maker of plots, however, he still had humble points; and Rachel assured him that she had burnt ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... the tibia. His nephew (oh! whip me such philosophical coxcombs!) was reading Thucydides' description of the plague, and nodding his conceited little head in time to the music, while his lips were repeating all the loathsome details of that terrible delineation. The puppy saw nothing incongruous in learning at the same time a ditty of love and a description of ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Fielding should have been born among buildings raised by Benedictine hands is not incongruous; for no man ever more heartily preached and practised the virtue of open-handed charity; none was more ready to scourge the vices of arrogance, cruelty and avarice; no English novelist has left us brighter pictures of innocence and goodness. And it was surely a happy stroke ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... too polite for good manners. It was incongruous with the eccentric spectacle of the duellists which ought to have startled a sane and free man. It was also incongruous with the full and healthy, though rather loose physique of the man who spoke. At the first ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... I should lay my garden out into four squares, the combination of squares, central circles and straight main paths would look incongruous. So I shall cut the central points of the four square beds off by swinging circles. Have patience and you will see, for the general plan is in my mind just as it ought to be in the mind of any person who is to make a garden. Now swing another circle ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... and he cannot understand why he needs winter clothing, why he is always seeking the sun, why he wants a fire at night. It is a fraud, he says, all this visible display of summer, and of an almost tropical summer at that; it is really a cold country. It is incongruous that he should be looking at a date-palm in his overcoat, and he is puzzled that a thermometrical heat that should enervate him elsewhere, stimulates him here. The green, brilliant, vigorous vegetation, the perpetual sunshine, deceive him; he is careless ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... being so benumbed with cold that he found it impossible to unbutton the straps which confined his month. In this emergency he could only utter the strange and unintelligible moan which had reached our ears, and which, mingled with the bursts of laughter from Julia D'Egville, formed a most incongruous melange. ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... facts and get the personal side of the matter—and feel it. Then he must tell the story just as he sees and feels it. Absolute truthfulness in the telling is as necessary as keen perception in the seeing. Humor must be sought through the simple, truthful presentation of an incongruous or humorous idea or situation; pathos must be sought by the truthful presentation of a pathetic picture. Just as soon as the reporter tries to be funny or to be pathetic he fails, for the reader is not looking to the reporter for fun or pathos—but ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... unknown in cities, woven with homespun, and Sunday black, and sea-cloth polished on the bench of rowing. The room, like the house, had been a sort of wonder in that country-side, it was so neat and habitable; and to see it now, shamed by these incongruous additions, filled me with indignation and a kind of anger. In view of the errand I had come upon to Aros, the feeling was baseless and unjust; but it burned high, at the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were carefully brushed, and his fat face, which wore an incongruous expression of anxiety and dejection, shone with washing. David studied him a moment in silence, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... must have straight vision, and a Grecian nose. Hers is a face that will look very arch and piquante, when she acquires more sense, and lays aside her lack-a-daisical airs; but, at present, the expression and the features are very incongruous. It is excessively mortifying! but it cannot be helped; many times a day does she cast her eyes on the glass, but the obstinate pug remains a pug, and Alice is forced to conclude that she is not intended for a heroine. Yet she always holds herself ready for ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... could not remember that there was a boat about the place. I had not seen one. As I thought all this in a wild, excitable way, I snatched up some of my clothes, slipped them on partly as I ran; and even then, incongruous as it may sound, I could not help thinking how the wet hindered me. Then running on, I came upon Gunson, with his face cut and bleeding, struggling back from among ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... sculptor did his best; but he was careful to do nothing which was out of harmony with its surroundings. He sank himself in his work. And even when he was engaged on a more serious substantive work, what he most avoided was the incongruous and unbecoming. He so worked that the attention of the spectator was concentrated not on the character of the workmanship, but on the person or the subject portrayed. The idea which he tried to incorporate in marble or bronze was not his own thought about the subject, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of the Alexander story thus well illustrates one way of the mediaeval mind with such things—the way of combining at will incongruous stories, of accepting with no, or with little, criticism any tale of wonder that it happened to find in books, of using its own language, applying its own manners, supposing its own clothing, weapons, and so forth to have prevailed at any period of history. And further, it shows how the geste theory—the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... remains however—admiration of a familiar and even slightly patronizing kind. The Maison Carree does not overwhelm you; you can conceive it. It is not one of the great sensations of antique art; but it is perfectly felicitous, and, in spite of having been put to all sorts of incongruous uses, marvelously preserved. Its slender columns, its delicate proportions, its charming compactness, seemed to bring one nearer to the century that built it than the great superpositions of arenas and bridges, and give it the interest that ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... superb carriages in the avenues and parks, and teams of handsome cream-colored oxen in the suburbs: but we saw also in the highways, small, rough-coated donkeys overburdened with panniers of fruit; tall, bony horses mismatched with diminutive donkeys; incongruous teams composed of a cow and a donkey, or a large ox and a small cow; and a team even more grotesquely made up of a horse, a cow, and a donkey. We saw the elite of the city elegantly dressed in the latest fashion promenading in the shopping districts; but on the sidewalks of the tenement ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... theory it is the form proportionate to full manhood; planting and fostering institutions tending to promote the free play of all that is great and glorious in human character. It does not thus far practically realize its theory, because, without regard to this incongruous system of inhumanity, which, by its very nature, can find no harmony nor peace in connection, nations themselves wear the human form, and must, therefore, realize the various states of infancy, youthfulness, and manhood—of germ, growth, and fruitage. This is true of whatever national ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... the next verse. This desirable end can only be reached through a preliminary painful ordeal, 'but I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished.' If I might use such an incongruous figure, the fire that is to flash and flame through the world emerges from the dark waters of that baptism. Our Lord goes on still further to dwell upon the consequence of His mission and of His sufferings. And that, too, shadows the first triumphant ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... institutions, myself (flint-maniac)—to say nothing of men like Dufresnoy—we all contrive to fit, after a fashion, into the place; we have a raison d'etre. But this composite, unadaptive city-dweller: how incongruous a figure against that background of ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... this form, or rather this degree, of aestheticism, which so often prevents our realising the higher aesthetic harmonies. In obedience to a perception of what is congruous on a small scale we often do oddly incongruous things: spend money we ought to save, give time and thought to trifles while neglecting to come to conclusions about matters of importance; endure, or even cultivate, persons with whom we have less than no sympathy; nay, sometimes, from a keen sense of incongruity, tune ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... National Gallery, and that most wonderful one of our Saviour and the Disciples at Emmaus in the Louvre: there they sit at supper as they might have sat. Rubens and the Venetian Painters did neither one thing nor the other: their Holy figures are neither ideal nor real: and it is incongruous to see one of Rubens' brawny boors dressed up in the ideal red and blue drapery with which the early Italians clothed their figures of Christ. But enough of all this. I have seen Trench's Sabbation, and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... so great, and in its collective effect so pacifically magnificent, that to make war upon it seemed incongruous beyond measure, like laying siege to the National Gallery or attacking respectable people in an hotel dining-room with battle-axe and mail. It was in its entirety so large, so complex, so delicately immense, that to bring it to the issue of warfare was like driving a crowbar into the mechanism ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... men—i. e., as they ride three in a rank, the outer legs of those personages who formed the outside, as it may be called, of the procession, were {p.151} each clothed in a boot. This and several other incongruous appearances were thrown in the teeth of those cavaliers by the Kelso populace, and, by the assistance of whiskey, parties were soon inflamed to a very tight battle, one of that kind which, for distinction sake, is called royal. It was not without great difficulty that we extricated ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... grouch," Pepper Sneed, seemed always to find some new objection to raise, or some dire calamity to predict. And as for Mr. Bunn, he made many protests at roles he considered incongruous ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... of realism is wanting; it needs a population out of one of Watteau's pictures,—clean and deft as the painted figures; flesh and blood are too gross, too prone to muddy shoes, and to—sneeze. The rock-work, also, is incongruous; it belongs on no such wavy roll of park-land; you see it a thousand times grander, a half-hour's drive away, toward Matlock. And the stiff parterres, terraces, and alleys of Le Notre are equally out of place in such a scene. If, indeed, as at Versailles, they bounded and engrossed the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... that night with one of the men who had destroyed the mystery of Mongolia. In 1916, Coltman and his former partner, Oscar Mamen, had driven across the plains to Urga, the historic capital of Mongolia. But most unromantic and incongruous, most disheartening to a dreamer of Oriental dreams, was what I learned a few days later when the awakening had really come—that among the first cars ever to cross the desert was one purchased by the Hutukhtu, the Living Buddha, the God of all ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... oath the things come to her cognisance in this process, and has avowed naught save praises of the said foreigner, because since her coming her man had treated her better in consequence of the neighbourhood of this good lady, who filled the air with love, as the sun did light, and other incongruous nonsense, which we have not committed ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... probably once been part of the Bog itself, there stood—there stands still—a short, square tower, battlemented at top, and surmounted with a pointed roof, which seems to grow out of a cluster of farm-buildings, so surrounded is its base by roofs of thatch and slates. Incongruous, vulgar, and ugly in every way, the old keep appears to look down on them—time-worn and battered as it is—as might a reduced gentleman regard the unworthy associates with which an altered fortune had linked him. This is all that ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... fifty years ago, the Norman details were still very distinct, though the round arches of the arcades had been parodied by the Georgian windows of the east end, and by the plastered romanesque reredos; but gloom and darkness overspread the whole place, encroachments of the most incongruous kinds had invaded the most sacred portions, and to the casual observer it seemed impossible that the church could ever be rescued from the ruin with which it was threatened, or reclaimed from the squalor by which ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... seemed so incongruous with Paul's feelings, and above all with the recollection of his scene with Yerba, that he excused himself from dining with the party, alleging an engagement with his old fellow-traveler the German officer, whose acquaintance he had renewed. Yerba did not press him; he even fancied ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... four centuries later than Ethelbert and Augustine; but the origin of Canterbury is commonplace and prosaic compared with the origin of Westminster." (Yes, that's true.) "We can hardly imagine a figure more incongruous to the soberness of later times than the quaint, irresolute, wayward prince whose chief characteristics have just been described. His titles of Confessor and Saint belong not to the general instincts of Christendom but to the most transitory ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... that afterward it would be possible for the man to have offspring only by marrying a new wife. There are also several specifics to prevent conception, but none for producing fertility. The kapala gave as reasons for this practice scarcity of food and woman's fear of dying. Both seem incongruous to fact and primitive ideas, and perhaps his view would better be accepted only as an indication of his ignorance in the matter. The young people are taught to dance by the blian before they are married, and take lessons for ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... much as possible and that I must not spoil my chances of safety either by relying too recklessly on my disguise or through risking arousing suspicion in Falco by any attempt at confining myself to my apartment, which would have been altogether incongruous with the character I ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... the daughters of farm labourers nowadays ride their bicycles, instead of going out to service as their mothers and grandmothers did before them, and dress themselves ridiculously out of keeping with their position and surroundings. It seems very incongruous to see such girls living in indolence in country villages, while the daughters of their parson, as frequently happens in large families, turn out and ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... his hand. In the moonlight the grass seemed tipped with hoar frost. Most of the beeches were already bare, but the shoots, clustering round them, like children at their mother's skirts, still retained their leaves red and brown. Among the pines these leaves were as incongruous as a wedding-dress at a funeral. Gavin was standing on grass, but there were patches of heather within sight, and broom, and the leaf of the blaeberry. Where the beeches had drawn up the earth with them as they grew, their roots ran this way and that, slippery to the feet and looking like disinterred ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... shirt-sleeves, his coat being rolled up to serve as a pillow. Above the "bed" hung a Derby hat—an incongruous object. He was short, stout, and fresh coloured, with a startling black moustache elaborately curled at the ends and two grey eyes that were lined around with much laughter. He walked slowly to the party and held out ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... plan. In an earnest plea he urged Jay to convene the Legislature in extraordinary session for this purpose. "The anti-Federal party," he wrote to the Governor, "is a composition indeed of very incongruous materials, but all tending to mischief; some of them to the overthrow of the government by stripping it of its due energies; others of them by revolutionising it after the manner of Bonaparte. The government must not be confided to the custody of its enemies, and, although the measure proposed ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... square in front of the railway station. "Keep to the sidewalk" is the brusque order to those who stray. Also the park in front of the Royal Palace is closed to the public. Three bright red gasoline tank wagons among the trees give it an incongruous touch, while the walks and drives are used as an exercising ground for officers' mounts. All the windows of the Royal Palace are decorated with the sign ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various |
