"Strangeness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the miracle consisted in Browne's preservation from infidelity, it must be admitted that to the ordinary mind that result seems explicable by natural causes. We must be content with Johnson's explanation, that, in some sense, 'all life is miraculous;' and, in short, that the strangeness consists rather in Browne's view of his own history, than in any unusual phenomena. Certainly, no man seems on the whole to have slipped down the stream of life more smoothly. After his travels he settled quietly at Norwich, and there passed forty-five years ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... called to his men to fall back. They had not seen one man of the invaders; all was silent and dark within the Fort; even the two torches which had been burning above the gate were down. At that moment, as if to add to the strangeness, a caribou came suddenly through the fires, and, passing not far from the bewildered Indians, plunged into the trees behind ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of getting ready multiplied about him, Varney's interest in his novel undertaking imperceptibly grew. The thing had come upon him so unexpectedly that it had not yet by any means lost its strangeness. To the old friend of his mother's girlhood, Elbert Carstairs, he was sincerely devoted, though knowing him for an indulgent man whose indulgences were chiefly of himself. But when, responding to his excited summons that night, he had sat and ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... and thought that maybe he was right—for my father's judgment was ever the best in my eyes—and so set my mind at rest, though the strangeness of the matter would not let it be ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... of the East, is that of a man who married a sorceress, without being in any way conscious of her character in that respect. She was sufficiently agreeable in her person, and he found for the most part no reason to be dissatisfied with her. But he became uneasy at the strangeness of her behaviour, whenever they sat together at meals. The husband provided a sufficient variety of dishes, and was anxious that his wife should eat and be refreshed. But she took scarcely any nourishment. He set before her a plate of rice. From ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... evening was extremely bright and pleasant; but the wind rose during the night, and the waves began to break heavily on the shore, making our island tremble. I had not expected in our inland journey to hear the roar of an ocean surf; and the strangeness of our situation, and the excitement we felt in the associated interests of the place, made this one of the most interesting nights I remember during ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... one more night already darkening would close his acquaintance with it, perhaps for ever. Dismantled of his little stock of books and pictures, it looked coldly and reproachfully on him for his desertion, and had already a foreshadowing upon it of its coming strangeness. 'A few hours more,' thought Walter, 'and no dream I ever had here when I was a schoolboy will be so little mine as this old room. The dream may come back in my sleep, and I may return waking to this place, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the still night suggesteth to the heart. Thy voice is like to music heard ere birth, Some spirit lute touched on a spirit sea; Thy face remembered is from other worlds, It has been died for, though I know not when, It has been sung of, though I know not where. It has the strangeness of the luring West, And of sad sea-horizons; beside thee I am aware of other times and lands, Of birth far-back, of lives in many stars. O beauty lone and like a candle clear In this dark country of the world! Thou art My woe, my early ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... after, as Babadul was pondering over the strangeness of his situation, and just recovering from the effects of this apparition, a door opened in another part of the apartment, and a mysterious figure, richly dressed, came in, bearing a bundle, equally covered with a shawl, about the size of that which had just been ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... out-of-the-way experiences in that line—generally when intent on other pursuits. I doubt, for instance, if even you, Major Travers, notwithstanding your well-known exploits against man and beast, notwithstanding that doubtful smile of yours, could match the strangeness of a certain hunting adventure in which ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... a chaos of strangeness, the wrench to my sense of the transition. I had been the inhabitant of a little world, the Cometara, with a gravity beneath my feet. Now, in a breath, I had no world to inhabit. I was alone in space. No gravity; nothing ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... midsummer, and presently brought the duck to land. Crawley felt the elation which always accompanies the first successful shot at a bird on the wing; at any rate he had killed something, and might do well yet when the strangeness wore off. ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... Italy, Greece, or even the shores of Spain, sadness would be routed by strangeness and excitement and the nudge of a classical education. But the Cornish hills have stark chimneys standing on them; and, somehow or other, loveliness is infernally sad. Yes, the chimneys and the coast-guard stations and the little bays with the waves breaking unseen by any one ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... around to his wife, who lifted her shoulders in mystified amazement. But it was a bigger surprise to see John's bent head. For the moment John was a part of this family—part of a wholeness tied together by an invisible bond. The utter strangeness of it shocked Philon into rare ...
— The House from Nowhere • Arthur G. Stangland
... in a high-backed arm-chair beside one of them. His mother!—up?—at seven o'clock in the morning? Yet was it his mother? He came nearer. The figure was motionless—the head thrown back, the eyes invisible from where he stood. Something in the form, the attitude—its stillness and strangeness in the morning light—struck him with horror. He rushed to the garden door, found it open, dashed up the stairs, and ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... struck rigid by a power so instantaneous in its action that even the froth and fleeting wreaths of spray have stiffened to the immutability of sculpture. Unless you had seen it, it would be almost impossible to conceive the strangeness of the contrast between the actual tranquillity of these silent crystal rivers and the violent descending energy impressed upon their exterior. You must remember too all this is upon a scale of such prodigious magnitude, that when we succeeded subsequently in approaching the spot—where ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... assumption of superiority? No, I felt that this was not the cause of her cold suspicion, her proud, unapproachable bearing. Undoubtedly it arose from the manner in which she had fallen into our hands, the strangeness and delicacy of our situation, the knowledge that I was a "Rebel" in arms against her people. These were the things which had reared such a barrier between us. She but resorted to what was apparently her only available ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... cart. Of course the club was a strange one, both of my own being closed for cleaning, a coincidence expressly planned by Providence for my inconvenience. The club which you are 'permitted to make use of' on these occasions always irritates with its strangeness and discomfort. The few occupants seem odd and oddly dressed, and you wonder how they got there. The particular weekly that you want is not taken in; the dinner is execrable, and the ventilation a farce. All these evils oppressed me to-night. And yet I was puzzled to find that somewhere ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... that, just on the other side of this plain, the pilgrims came to a place where stood an old monument, hard by the highway side, at the sight of which they were both concerned, because of the strangeness of the form thereof; for it seemed to them as if it had been a woman transformed into the shape of a pillar; here, therefore they stood looking, and looking upon it, but could not for a time tell ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan
... at a glance, and the thought that had struck him before of the strangeness of sending this beautiful girl, like a bale of goods, to an unknown country, where she had no connections, returned with confirmed force. How friendless she was! But slenderly supplied with money, of course. A daring possibility had darted into his ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... the stone of which it is built, assists the strangeness of its effect; for it has an ancient, ivory hue, and all its elaborate carving is not unlike that on some old ivory cabinet grown yellow with age. A long series of scriptural histories, from the scene in Eden, upwards, are represented on ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... vague wonder as she did as Andrews told her—wonder at the strangeness of getting up to be dressed, as it seemed to her, in the middle ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... weary, I went to rest, but could sleep little for the strangeness of the place, the noises in the streets, and the thought of the morrow. While it was yet dark, I rose, climbed the stair to the roof of the house, and waited. Presently, the sun's rays shot out like arrows, and lit upon the white wonder of the marble Pharos, whose light ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... Saviour. My companions shall never have occasion to laugh at any affectation of religious feeling in me. No, I will affect nothing. In a manly way I will, with God's blessing, do my duty. I will not, as far as I can help, dishonour His service by any strangeness or extravagance of conduct, any unreality of words, any over-softness or constraint of manner; but they shall see that the fear of God only makes those who cherish it more respectable in the world's eyes as well as more heavenly-minded. What a blessed return it ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... surrounded them like an impassible fate; her face was a study of happiness, tenderness, suffering, and strength; her father wrapped her close in his protecting arms, and thus she could bear everything. They were silent for a while: he trying to accept the revelation in its strangeness, she planning how she should ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Mrs. Enderby's three children and Hetty Gray were standing by, gazing at one another. The little Enderbys, Mark, Phyllis, and Nell, had taken in the whole conversation, and understood perfectly, with the quick perception of children, the strangeness of the situation, and their own peculiar position with regard to Mrs. Kane's little girl ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... side of Gerald and Uncle Eb went off with Tip for another trip in the dugout. The night was chilly but the fire flooded our shanty with its warm glow. What with the light, and the boughs under us, and the strangeness of the black forest we got little sleep. I heard the gun roar late in the night, and when I woke again Uncle Eb and Tip Taylor were standing over the fire in the chilly grey of the morning. A dead deer hung on the limb of a tree near by. They began ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... the English reader to notice is that this great difference does exist between the French language and his own. The complex origin of the English tongue has enabled English writers to obtain those effects of diversity, of contrast, of imaginative strangeness, which have played such a dominating part in our literature. The genius of the French language, descended from its single Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction—in simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... three distinct ages, the last of which coincides with the mournful period of old age. In Mademoiselle des Touches this order was reversed. Her youth was wrapped in the snows of knowledge and the ice of reflection. This transposition is, in truth, an additional explanation of the strangeness of her life and the nature of her talent. She observed men at an age when most women can only see one man; she despised what other women admired; she detected falsehood in the flatteries they accept as truths; she laughed at things that made them serious. This contradiction of her life with ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... and lilacs. It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first time after long, like the flowers in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge of sense and that impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out of life with the coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is what renews a man's character from the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... peer through the murk at the sight of Mr. Dudley Stackpole fleeing to the shelter of home like a man hunted by a terrible pursuer. But with all his desperate need for haste he ran no straightaway course. The manner of his flight was what gave added strangeness to the spectacle of him. He would dart headlong, on a sharp oblique from the right-hand corner of a street intersection to a point midway of the block—or square, to give it its local name—then go slanting back again to the right-hand corner of the next street ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... know," replied Therese, thoughtfully. "I shall enter upon a new world which will astonish and perchance affright me by its strangeness. Now I know you all in my heart, but when I see you I shall no longer recognize you. Oh, mother, why do you wish me to be restored to sight? I am very happy ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... vernacular, and Val noticed it, and wondered dully if she would ever do likewise. She had not yet admitted to herself that Manley was different. She had told herself many times that it would take weeks to wipe out the strangeness born of three years' separation. He was the same, of course; everything else was new and—different. That was all. He seemed intensely practical, and he seemed to feel that his love-making had all been done by letter, and that nothing now ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... family—well, nothing was known about her, for her family could not be traced. Wiped out, I presume, in some inter-family quarrel, leaving her alone. Dalis found her, took an interest in her, and the very strangeness of her gave him his idea, which he brought to my ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... again and again, with bestial cries, cries that I recognised, such cries as had awakened me on the night of the high wind. Her strength was like that of madness; mine was rapidly ebbing with the loss of blood; my mind besides was whirling with the abhorrent strangeness of the onslaught, and I was already forced against the wall, when Olalla ran betwixt us, and Felipe, following at a bound, pinned down his mother ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I occupied myself with looking around me, and striving to appear as indifferent as possible, and as much used to all this splendor as if I had been born in it. But, to tell the truth, my head was almost dizzy with the strangeness of the sight, and the thought that I was really in London. What would my brother have said? What would Tom Legare, the treasurer of the Juvenile Temperance Society, ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... over the dream itself. Anyone's experience is sufficient to show that this is wrong. The events of dreams as they happen are quite plain and matter-of-fact, and it is only in the intervals, and, so to speak, the scene-shifting of dreaming, that any suspicion of strangeness occurs ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... for a moment fingering each piece of his scanty clothing, recalling every piece of labor or battle which had added pouch, belt, strip of fabric to his equipment. Yet—there was still that odd sense of strangeness, as if none of this was ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... hopes of promotion. Anne listened at first indifferently; but knowing no one else so good-natured and experienced, she grew interested in him as in a brother. By degrees his gold lace, buckles, and spurs lost all their strangeness and were as familiar to ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... amid which it seemed really to help to give her a clue—an almost terrifying strangeness, full, none the less, after a little, of reverberations of Ida's old fierce and demonstrative recoveries of possession. They had been some time in the house together, and this demonstration came late. Preoccupied, however, ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... "Oh, massa! how you do, massa? Oh, missis! oh! lily missis! me too glad to see you!" accompanied with certain interjectional shrieks, whoops, whistles, and grunts, that could only be written down in negro language, made me aware of our vicinity to our journey's end. The strangeness of the whole scene, its wildness (for now beyond the broad river and the low swamp lands the savage-looking woods arose to meet the horizon), the rapid retrospect which my mind hurried through of the few past years ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... stumbled upon this mysterious retreat. The question arose in her mind whether or not she should ask him to guide her into the path. In her anxiety to reach home she decided that she would appeal to him, notwithstanding the strangeness of appearing before his eyes at this place and season. But when, in pursuance of this resolve, Thomasin reached the van and looked in she found it to be untenanted; though there was no doubt that it was the reddleman's. The fire was burning in the stove, the lantern hung from ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... saucers of pickle-like and preserve preparations, popular amongst the Malays as appetisers, but quite needless in Ned's case, for he was perfectly independent of anything of the kind, and after his curry and coffee, now the first chill of strangeness had passed, paid plenty of attention to the fruit pressed upon him by the doctor's daughter. Now it was a deliciously-flavoured choice banana with a deep orange skin, now a mangosteen, and then a portion of a great durian, a scrap or two of which ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... in the Jules Verne, declared that nothing which he had seen there was so terrifying as what they now beheld. One creature, which seemed to be the unresisted master of this kingdom of phosphorescent life, appears to have exceeded in strangeness the utmost descriptive powers of all those who looked upon it, for their written accounts are filled with ejaculations, and are more or less inconsistent with one another. The reader gathers from them, however, the general impression that it ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... But strangely—and its strangeness grew upon her—he did not ask such questions. He did not seem to have the least interest in her family, her history, or the object of her journey. He asked where she was going, a conventional question, perfunctorily put. His ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... the strangeness of the look she seemed to have surprised on his face? Her own glance grew on the instant slightly puzzled, showed a passing constraint; then her manner became light again. "No. Especially as—You ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... OCEANA. The strangeness of it! Sometimes my whole being rises up in revolt... I could tear the skies apart, to wrest the secret from them! You see, we don't know anything. We don't know what's right, we don't know what's wrong. We're in a trap! [She rises suddenly.] No, no, I mustn't talk that way. I've lost my self-control. ...
— The Naturewoman • Upton Sinclair
... purpose of a discussion of such factors may be described as being to make obvious things look odd. We cannot envisage them unless we manage to invest them with some of the freshness which is due to strangeness. ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... post by the window to the rug before the bright fire and leaned her head on the seat of the great easy-chair. She was frightened at the storm in her heart; at the suddenness with which it had come on, as well as at the strangeness of an entirely new sensation. She felt all at once as if she could not bear to give up her share of Mr. Aladdin's friendship to Huldah: Huldah so bright, saucy, and pretty; so gay and ready, and such good company! She had ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... difficulties of Chinese ancient history is the unravelling of proper names; but, as with other difficulties, this one is owing rather to the novelty and strangeness of the subject, to the unfamiliarity of scene and of atmosphere, than to any inherent want of clearness in the matter itself. In reading Scottish history, no one is much disconcerted to find a man called upon the same ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... in which the sheer horror of nature's action, or of man's crime, becomes invested with an illicit beauty, and fascinates while it kills. On the other hand, it is seen in all of the many cases in which exquisite beauty proves also to be dangerous, or at least sinister. "The haunting strangeness in beauty" is at once one of the most characteristic and one of the most ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... she is brought to choose a husband from among the young lords at the court, her heart having already made its election, the strangeness of that very privilege for which she had ventured all, nearly overpowers her, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... When they see it, they shall be troubled with terrible fear, and shall be amazed at the strangeness of his salvation, so far beyond ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... his heart's secret by then, but there was a coldness, a strangeness, about the girl who had been his boyhood's friend that kept him back from anything bearing ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... passing swiftly thousands of feet above the earth, will have made but a small impression upon him—at any rate consciously. It will not be until the handling of his machine becomes less laborious, and he has time to accustom himself to his unique view-point, and the strangeness and beauty of the scene below him, that the novice will realise some of the fascinations of aerial travel; fascinations that it is difficult to describe. The sensation of having thrown off the bonds of earth-bound ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... five times in all," says Beauvayse. "I'd set eyes on her twice before I was introduced. I couldn't rest for thinking about her. She drew me and drew me.... And when we did meet, there was no strangeness between us, even from the first minute. She just seemed waiting for what I had to own up. And when I spoke, I—I seemed to be only saying what I was meant to say.... From the beginning of the world! And you'd understand better ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... taste sanctions such outrA(C) effects probably find pleasure in the strangeness and daring of ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... thin, black-haired woman with a faintly Tartar cast of countenance, a dead-white complexion that made her seem denser than ordinary flesh, and somewhat the look of an idol before whose blank yet sophisticated eyes had been performed many extraordinary rites. Tonight her strangeness was made doubly emphatic by a gown of oxidized silver tissue painted over in dull colors ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... into the middle of the room as if he belonged, mouth open, tongue lolling, smiling and panting a hearty approval, as he looked about at the strangeness for all the world as a human being might have done. It was plain he was ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... in his more conspicuous and triumphant successors—in, so to speak, the direct and royal line. Richard Strauss was, clearly, not writing in that manner; nor were the brother musicians of Debussy in his own France; nor, quite as obviously, were the Russians. The immediate effect of its strangeness and newness was, of course, to direct the attention of the larger world of music, within Paris and without, to the artistic personality and the previous attainments of the man who had surprisingly put forth ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... Rebecca at the Well; a graceful composition, correct and somewhat severe drawing, the greatest sharpness and clearness of outline. In the Martyrdom of St. Andrew the drawing and the composition are no less absolutely perfect, but there hangs over the whole picture a luminous haze of strangeness and mystery. A light that never was on sea or land bathes the distant hills and battlements, touches the spears of the legionaries, and shines in full glory on the ecstatic face of the aged saint. It does not seem a part of the scene. You see the picture ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... of a midsummer dawn In troubled dreams I went from land to land, Each seven-colored like the rainbow's arc, Regions where never fancy's foot had trod Till then; yet all the strangeness seemed not strange, At which I wondered, reasoning in my dream With twofold sense, well knowing that I slept. At last I came to this our cloud-hung earth, And somewhere by the seashore was a grave, A woman's grave, new-made, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Owing to the strangeness of their surroundings, and the knowledge of the danger which threatened, no one gave himself ...
— The Search for the Silver City - A Tale of Adventure in Yucatan • James Otis
... and strangeness of their position made all on board forget their enemies, among whom a terrible silence had fallen, but as the captain glanced in the direction of the praus he saw that the distance between them had increased, and that, caught in the same wondrous current, the enemy's vessel was being ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... first tone of compliment she had forgotten all the strangeness of their meeting, and remembered only the coquetry so naturally her own. With or without the uniform of her country, he was at least a man, and there had been a dearth of men about their ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... him deadly pale, the faintest, sweetest smile on her lip. He was for the moment incapable of speech. He began phrase after phrase, and broke them off. A whirlwind of feeling possessed him. The strangeness, the unworldliness of what she had done struck him singularly. He realised through every nerve that what she had just said to him she had been bracing herself to say to him ever since their last parting. And ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... own sensations, as he sat there, have been actually translated into a veritable hell, from the utter strangeness of the atmosphere which his thoughts seemed to gasp in. William had never come fully into the atmosphere of his own sin before, but now he had, and somehow the untidy pots and kettles on the hearth made it more real. He was conscious as he sat there of very little pity for the girl in the other room, ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Mr. McDonald went on, "will understand the strangeness of my situation when I explain that the—the young lady I care for is very near; is, ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a dinner of a hundred, or a hundred and fifty persons, on a hot day, alarmed me; but, the strangeness got over, I rather liked this mode of living, and, as a stranger in a new country, would certainly prefer it to the solitary mum-chance dinner ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... either of the boys been in such a situation before, and the strangeness, the mysteriousness of it impressed them powerfully. All the sights and sounds of the day were missing and in their place arose a host of unfamiliar sensations. Mist was rising all about them, making the darkness denser and ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... about nine o'clock." The woman did not meet Rosalind's direct gaze; she flushed under it and looked downward, twisting her fingers in her apron. Rosalind had noted a strangeness in the woman's manner when she had entered the cabin, but she had ascribed it to the child's illness, and had thought nothing more of it. But now it burst upon her with added force, and when she looked up again Rosalind saw there was an odd, strained light in her eyes—a ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... over; opened them one by one, to make sure that they were of the same nature as the first, and what time he did so he found himself speculating upon the strangeness of Ostermore's having so treasured them. Perhaps he had thrust them into that secret recess, and there forgotten them; 'twas an explanation that sorted better with what Mr. Caryll knew of his father, than ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... had been inundated by the stream, for bank there was none. Huge cypresses stood out at every angle, many having fallen as far as they could, but only to be supported by their fellows. And as the boat went swiftly on in obedience to the sturdily-tugged oars, Nic forgot his troubles in wonder at the strangeness of the scene through which he passed, for it was dreary, horrible, and beautiful all in one. Rotting vegetation supplied the rich, muddy soil from which rose vine and creeper to climb far on high, and then, finding no further support, throw themselves into the air, to hang and swing where ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... show; for the clapping thunder of the weaving-room instantly snatches the sound from one's lips and batters it into shapelessness. Johnnie had been an expert weaver on the ancient foot-power looms of the mountains; but the strangeness of the new machine, the noise and her surroundings, bewildered her. When the man saw that she was not likely to injure herself or the looms, he turned away with a careless nod and left her ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... Despite his strangeness and remoteness, Apicius is not dead by any means. We have but to inspect (as Gollmer has pointed out) the table of the Southern Europeans to find Apician traditions alive. In the Northern countries, too, are found ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... vacantly, but the newness and strangeness of it reacted upon her. She felt very desolate and lonely, and by and bye remembered that she had still to grapple with a practical difficulty. She could not stay with Mrs. Hastings indefinitely, and she had not the least notion where to go or what she was to do. She was leaning ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... that night the two friends sat together. Now that the first strangeness had worn off, and with it the consciousness of the divergence of the roads which they had travelled since the old days, Flint began to find his liking springing up as strong as ever, only the liking was of a different ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... it; but it was not until I saw it practised around me, and found that I was often suddenly deprived of the services of my best hunters or boat-hands, by the necessity which they felt, and which nothing could persuade them to disregard, of observing couvade, that I realized its full strangeness. No satisfactory explanation of its origin seems attainable. It appears based on a belief in the existence of a mysterious connection between the child and its father-far closer than that which exists between the child and its mother,—and of such a nature that if the father infringes any ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... curiosity of the impromptu crowd invariably on the ground before the balloon, and reluctantly leaving it only when the last whiff of gas is rolled out of it and the last rope thrown into the wagon; the moonlight ride to the station with the gas-bag for a pillow and the brain too busy with the strangeness of the day for much talk,—all this and more, in endless diversity of circumstance and treatment, these gentlemen have embalmed for the curious millions who cannot or will not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... fell also into the imputation of a tax of nobility, for that it lay long covered in the embers of division between the Houses of York and Lancaster, and forgotten or connived at by the succeeding princes: so that the strangeness of the observation, and the difference of those latter reigns, is that the Queen took up much BEYOND the power of law, which fell not into the murmur of people; and her successors took nothing but by warrant of the law, which nevertheless was received, ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... aught in the way of safeguard. After that was done, those whose watch off it was went on board the ships, and slept under the shelter of the gunwales, wrapped in their thick sea cloaks. They gave me one, and bade me rest on the after deck by the chiefs; and in spite of the strangeness of everything I slept dreamlessly, being tired in mind as ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... the girls had lost most of their strangeness or embarrassment and continued the flower-pot until we were compelled to remind them that they were playing for us. Everybody let go hands and the little ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... of the downfall of Antichrist, may be considered, either with respect to the suddenness, unexpectedness, terribleness, or strangeness thereof. It may also be considered with respect to the way of God's procedure with her, as to the gradualness thereof. As to the suddenness thereof, 'tis said to be in an hour. It is also to be, when by her unexpected; for then she saith, 'I sit a queen' ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... was sure to spare no speed, but he could hardly be at Avoncester within an hour and a half, and the doctor would take at least two in coming out. Mrs. Kelland was the companion of Rachel's watch. The woman was a good deal subdued. The strangeness of the great house tamed her, and she was shocked and frightened by the little girl's state as well as by the young lady's grave, awe-struck, and ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... semi-professional even in holiday trim. She looked into the compressed fire in the high, old-fashioned grate, and wondered how she would pass the coming idle week. She had spent a good many idle weeks at Carter Hill before; but they always came upon her afresh with a sense of strangeness, bringing at the same time a tide of ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... of the strangeness. The storm had evidently come down here with terrific force, making a path through the pine-forest, some of whose trees were laid like wheat after a heavy wind; while just in front one huge tree had been blown right over, and in falling had crushed down a dozen or more in the path ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... that this strong, bright current of family life would have the power to carry her forward to a new, spring-like experience. To her foreign-bred eyes there was an abundance of novelty in this American home, but it was like the strangeness of heaven to the poor girl, who for months had been so sad and almost despairing. With the strong reaction natural to youth after long depression, her heart responded to the glad life about her, and again ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... consists in fighting, not in subduing How uncertain duration these accidental conveniences are I bequeath to Areteus the maintenance of my mother I for my part always went the plain way to work I love temperate and moderate natures Impostures: very strangeness lends them credit In solitude, be company for thyself—Tibullus In the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors Interdict all gifts betwixt man and wife It is better to die than to live miserable ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Essays of Montaigne • David Widger
... smoked in solemn silence. He found that he was wishing for the story not so much because of its strangeness, but because he wanted that voice to run on indefinitely. Yet he weighed the question pro ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... is free to give those episodes in the History of the Thirteen which, by reason of the Parisian flavor of the details or the strangeness of the contrasts, possessed ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... has been obliged to use the Sanskrit term for lack of an exact English equivalent, he has invariably interpreted it by a familiar English word in brackets; and everything has been done to remove the sense of strangeness in order that the Occidental reader may not feel himself an alien in the new regions of thought opened ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... pale, and with a wild look in her face that Gustave had never seen there before. She gave him no sign of recognition, but passed out of the courtyard, and walked rapidly away. That unusual look in her face, the strangeness of the fact that she should be leaving the house at this hour, inspired him with a vague terror, and he followed her, not stealthily, without a thought that he was doing any wrong by such an act—rather, indeed, with the conviction that he had a ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... with dim look, Sat crooning by the roadside of the year, So, Autumn, in thy strangeness, thou art here To read dark fortunes for us from the book Of fate; thou flingest in the crinkled brook The trembling maple's gold, and frosty-clear Thy mocking laughter thrills the atmosphere, And drifting on its current calls the rook To other lands. As one who wades, alone, Deep in the dusk, ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... dream? When it is far out of reach, it has a safe, romantic appeal. Bring its fulfillment a little closer, and its harsh aspects begin to show. You get a kick out of that, but you begin to wonder nervously if you have the guts, the stamina, the resistance to loneliness and complete strangeness. ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... at the man. The suggestion added to the strangeness of the situation. The presence of chemicals in a fisherman's hut tallied with the boy's general idea that this man must hold a post of some importance in the plot. But ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... captain, the manner in which Richard Shandon received the proposition of superintending its outfit, the careful selection of the crew, its unknown destination, scarcely conjectured by any,—all combined to give this brig a reputation of something more than strangeness. ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... strange and at first dreadful, this intense silence and this strangeness of the familiar earth. But after a while everything like terror passed away from Josiah's mind. He began to feel the fascination of the thing. His spirits rose as he breathed the delicious air, and when the captain said, "We are over the water now," and Josiah looking down discerned ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... was a new strangeness about London. The authorities were trying to suppress the more brilliant illumination of the chief thoroughfares, on account of the possibility of an air raid. Shopkeepers were being compelled to pull down their blinds, and many of the big standard lights ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... the doorway. He looked round the small dining-room as if he were still puzzled by its strangeness. Papa was not what he used to be. A streak of grey hair showed above each ear. Grey patches in his brown beard. Scarlet smears in the veined sallow of his eyes. His bursting, violent life had gone. He went stooping and shuffling. The house was ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... haven't seen 'em this dozen year; but the last I heard, Miss Warner and Rose was livin' in Leominster, and Henry was in a big store in Wooster. But what the plague is the matter?" he continued, alarmed at the expression of Hagar's face, as well as at the strangeness of her manner. ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... to the revery of winter, the silence of snow, and a hopeful glow in the west. Just here, by the barberry bush at the corner, he had stood still under the spell of Northern Lights. That was the night when his wife lay first in Tiverton churchyard; and he remembered, as a part of the strangeness and wonder of the time, how the north had streamed, and the neighboring houses had been rosy red. But at this hour of the brooding, sultry fall, there was a bitter fragrance in the air, and the world seemed tuned to the somnolent ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... over to his opinion; and you do the same with Demus, the fair young son of Pyrilampes. For you have not the power to resist the words and ideas of your loves; and if a person were to express surprise at the strangeness of what you say from time to time when under their influence, you would probably reply to him, if you were honest, that you cannot help saying what your loves say unless they are prevented; and that you can only be silent when they are. Now you ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... the repeated instruction of the entire Congress of the United States in the art of telegraphy, that body was finally induced to make an appropriation of thirty thousand dollars to be expended in the construction of an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore. And now begins the actual strangeness of the story of the Telegraph. After many years of toil, Morse still had learned nothing of the efficient construction of an electro-magnet. The magnet which he attempted to use unchanged was after the pattern of the first one ever made—a bent U-shaped bar, around which were a few turns of ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... surprise, whether from the effect of the horror which he felt, acting as it were hysterically on his nervous system, or that at the first moment he lost the sense of the guilt of the proposal in the feeling of its strangeness and absurdity, he flung her from him and burst into a fit of laughter. Irritated by this almost to frenzy, the woman fell on her knees, and in a loud voice that approached to a scream, she prayed for a curse both on him and on her own child. Mary happened ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Rascor, owned a mine in the Laurentides, some thirty miles from Quebec City—a fabulously productive mine of gold. It was an anomaly that gold should be produced in this region. No vein oL gold-bearing rock had been found, except the one on Polter's property. Alan had seen a newspaper account of the strangeness of it; and just upon the chance had come to Quebec, seen Frank Rascor on the Dufferin Terrace, and recognized ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... endeavoured to explain to him that in North America persons were almost quite equal to one another—being born so—but at this he told me not to be silly and continued to regard my rise as an insoluble part of the strangeness he everywhere encountered, even after I added that Demosthenes was the son of a cutler, that Cardinal Wolsey's father had been a pork butcher, and that Garfield had worked on a canal-boat. I found him quite hopeless. "Chaps go dotty talkin' that ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... house, an orphaned little girl, Whose large shy eyes, pale cheeks, and shrinking ways Filled all our hearts with wonder, as we stood And stared at you, until your heart o'erfilled With the oppressive strangeness, and you wept. Yes, I remember how I pitied you— I who had never wept, nor even sighed, Save on the bosom of my gentle mother; For my quick heart caught all your history When with a hurried step you sought the sun, And pressed your eyes against the ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... again into the mirror. She was gone. The mirror reflected faithfully what his room presented, and nothing more. It stood there like a golden setting whence the central jewel has been stolen away—like a night-sky without the glory of its stars. She had carried with her all the strangeness of the reflected room. It had sunk to the level ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... markolo. Strait (narrow) mallargxa. Strait (difficulty) embarasajxo. Straiten mallargxigi. Strand marbordo. Strand (of rope, etc.) fadeno. Strange stranga. Stranger fremdulo, malkonulo. Strangeness strangeco. Strangle sufoki. Strap rimeno. Stratagem ruzo. Strategy militarto. Stratify tavoli. Stratum tavolo. Straw pajlo. Strawberry frago. Stray erarigxi. Streak streko. Stream rivereto. Street strato. Strength ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Will the beloved have no mercy? "Jesu, donami la morte, o di te fammi assaggiare." Then the joys of love, depicted with equal liveliness, amplifications as usual of the erotic hyperboles of the Shulamite and her lover; the phenomenon, to whose uncouth strangeness devotional poetry accustoms us even now-a-days, which we remarked in Gottfried von Strasburg and Frauenlob, and on which it is ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... number of Negroes who moved to the North and West was probably a half million—a number which perhaps exceeds or certainly equals that which resulted from all other movements from the South to the North during a period of forty years. Herein alone, if such a view of it can be held at all, lies its strangeness and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... carefully with his examining pick over beyond the north pasture through the soft spring-warm afternoon, he occasionally smiled to himself as the morning scene of worship, etched deep on his consciousness by its strangeness to his tenets of life, rose again and again to his mind's eye. They were a wonderful people, these Valley folk, descendants of the Huguenots and Cavaliers who had taken the wilderness trail across the mountains and settled here "in ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... coffer, in the cupboard, in the secret chamber, or whatever was indicated by the apparently idle words of the document which he had preserved? He still smiled at the idea, but it was with a pleasant, mysterious sense that his life had at last got out of the dusty real, and that strangeness had mixed itself up ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... line to you to let you know where I am, in order that you may write to me here, for it seems to me that a letter from you would relieve me from the feeling of strangeness I have in this big town. Papa and I came here on Wednesday; we saw Mr. Wilson, the oculist, the same day; he pronounced papa's eyes quite ready for an operation, and has fixed next Monday for the performance ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... nearer to reducing them. But once worsted on land, in an instant they were confronted with a danger affecting the very lives of child and wife, and vital to the interests of the entire state. We may very well understand, then, the strangeness, not to say monstrosity, in their eyes, of surrendering to others the military leadership on land, in matters which they have made their special study for so long and with such eminent success. I end where I began. I agree absolutely with the preliminary decrees of your own senate, which I consider ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... room, and, throwing himself just as he was upon his couch, tried to sleep; but the strangeness of the adventure kept him ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... night of repose. The restlessness of mind and body once subdued, Nature asserted her empire, and I slept profoundly until morning. Another day and night followed, with little variation from the first; and by this time, the strangeness and mystery of my situation had quite worn away, and the feeling of security was established. I trod the upper deck with all the pride, and more than the composure, of a modern monarch ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... she was still his angel of comfort and healing. She had bidden him share her belief; and he never had felt altogether alone. Sustained by that inner conviction, he had somehow adapted himself to the strangeness of a life empty of her physical presence. The human being, in a world of pain, like the insect in a world of danger, lives mainly by that same ceaseless, unconscious miracle of adaptation. Dearly though he craved a sight of his father and Christine, he had ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... hair pervaded the room and filled the boy's heart with romance. Tenderness long suppressed called with a thousand voices. The hour, the strangeness and unexpectedness of her visit, perhaps even a boy's pardonable vanity, roused passion from its slumbers and once again wrought in Ernest's soul the miracle of love. His arm encircled her neck and his lips stammered blind, sweet, crazy and ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... to be held on Gaudy days, by which were meant the great Church festivals, the election days of Fellows and College officers, All Saints' Day, and, on what at first sight seems strange, the anniversary of her husband's death; but the strangeness disappears if it be remembered that October 20th comes ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... she was still content. At first she had been astonished and indignant at her own capacity for emotion; it was as if her nature had suddenly revealed itself in a new and unpleasant light. Then she had grown accustomed to it. Yesterday she was even amused at the strangeness and the fatuity of it all. She described herself as a bungling amateur wandering out of her own line and attempting the impossible. Clearly she should have left this sort of thing to people like Audrey, to whose genius it was suited, and who might ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... myself telling you," he went on. "Not that there is much to it, besides its strangeness. In fact, to be brief, I don't ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard |
