"Whimsicality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the brotherhood of David Urquhart, Mure of Caldwell, and the rest of them. Where are they gone, those candid inquirers, so full of gentlemanly curiosity, so informative and yet shrewdly human; so practical—think of Urquhart's Turkish Baths—though stuffed with whimsicality and abstractions? Where is the spirit that gave them ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... becomes poetry, philosophy, wisdom, or prophecy in its various forms of manifestation. Without that gift of natural sagacity (odoratio quaedam venatica),—a good scent for truth and beauty,—it appears as extravagance, whimsicality, eccentricity, or insanity, according to its degree of aberration. Emerson was eminently sane for an idealist. He carried the same sagacity into the ideal world that Franklin showed in the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... The whimsicality of the adventure began to tickle Lagardere's fancy. He seemed to be destined to play many parts that night. A few minutes back he had masqueraded as a bravo to deceive the mysterious shadows. Then he had pretended to be a husband to deceive the Duchess de Nevers. Now he imitated ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... certain of ourselves undeniably do. Thomas Hardy, too, has been arraigned for the conventionalism of his plots. And yet Hardy happens to be one of the rare novelists who have evolved a new convention to suit their idiosyncrasy. Hardy's idiosyncrasy is a deep conviction of the whimsicality of the divine power, and again and again he has expressed this with a virtuosity of skill which ought to have put humility into the hearts of naturalists, but which has not done so. The plot of The Woodlanders is one of the most exquisite examples of ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... great Mercenary city of Bellona along with its population of over a hundred thousand souls. The Bedlamites and the Helldamites were twin slave organizations, while a new religious sect that did not flourish long was called The Wrath of God. Among others, to show the whimsicality of their deadly seriousness, may be mentioned the following: The Bleeding Hearts, Sons of the Morning, the Morning Stars, The Flamingoes, The Triple Triangles, The Three Bars, The Rubonics, The Vindicators, The Comanches, and ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... "Norah's going," Cobbs, naturally enough, as it seemed, took occasion to remark, "You'll be all right then, sir, with your beautiful sweetheart by your side." Whereupon we realised more clearly than ever the delicate whimsicality of the whole delineation, when we saw, as well as heard, the boy return a-flushing, "Cobbs, I never let anybody joke about that when I can prevent them," Cobbs immediately explaining in all humility, "It wasn't a joke, sir—wasn't so meant." No wonder, Boots ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... story itself is completely lost, if, indeed, it can be said ever to have been begun. The absence of arrangement is so marked that it is very difficult to turn to a passage which in a previous perusal has struck the eye. The eccentricity and whimsicality of the book contributed greatly to its immediate popularity. But the same characteristics which seem brilliant when novel, soon become dull when familiar, and although "Tristram Shandy" will always afford single passages of lasting interest to the lover of literature, the work as a whole is not ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... cabin, they were surprised to find Philip still gone. With the whimsicality of lovers, they dismissed him from their thoughts and sat down in the armchair together, laughing and talking of the past. Their conversation ran gradually into a clearly defined discussion in which both minds were compelled to think quickly, and they found new joy in their ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... that a man never repeats a performance like that of the duke. The Italian custom prevents!" he added, with a curious expression of whimsicality over which Nina puzzled as she mounted the stairs to her room. Even in her shaken state, she marveled at the contrast between Giovanni's finely chiseled features and the elastic strength that must have been necessary to overpower the ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... possible, with the crude type of actor at one's disposal in this country, to give a really adequate performance of such a play as 'The Rose of America.' These people seem to miss the spirit of the piece, its subtle topsy-turvy humor, its delicate whimsicality. This afternoon," Mr Pilkington choked. "This afternoon I happened to overhear two of the principals, who were not aware that I was within earshot, discussing the play. One of them—these people ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... pride in being civilized is still so nearly universal—especially among Americans—that many persons upon hearing the point mooted whether civilization be a disease or not, are disposed to resent the bare suggestion as smacking of whimsicality. ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... England and the Italian Question, which he wrote in 1859, and which deals with the unity and independence of Italy. It is the first essay which he ever published, but it abounds in clearness and force, and is entirely free from the whimsicality which in later years sometimes marred his prose. Above all it shows a sympathetic insight into foreign aspirations which is rare indeed even among cultivated Englishmen. In reference to this pamphlet he truly observed: "The worst of the ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... protests against the flamboyance of the age as typified in the rhetorical style of Seneca and Lucan. If the work was written at the time when Seneca and Lucan first fell from the Imperial favour, such criticism may well have found favour at court. If, with the brilliant whimsicality that characterizes all his work, Petronius has placed these utterances in the mouth of disreputable and broadly comic figures, that does not impair the value or sincerity of the criticism. Eumolpus' complaint of the decline of ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... a delightful evening of it, living in the land of Never Was. For one source of her charm lay in the gay, childlike whimsicality o her imagination. She believed in fairies and heroes with all her heart, which with her was an organ not located in her brain. The delicious gurgle of gaiety in her laugh was a new find to ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... odds with modern times. While tolerant of those who have yielded to the new order, he himself is a great stickler for the preservation of antique forms and ceremonies: sometimes, indeed, pushing his fancies to lengths that fairly would lay him open to the charge of whimsicality, were not even the most extravagant of his crotchets touched and mellowed by his natural goodness of heart. In the earlier stages of our acquaintance I was disposed to regard him as an eccentric; but a wider ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... based on poems of Heine's are particularly successful, especially in the excellent opportunity of the lyric describing the wail of the Scottish woman who plays her harp on the cliff, and sings above the raging of sea and wind. The third catches most happily the whimsicality of the poet's reminiscences of childhood, but hardly, I think, the contrasting depth and wildness of his complaint that, along with childhood's games, have vanished Faith and Love and Truth. In the last, however, the cheery majesty that realizes Heine's likening of Death to a cool night ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... Greek alphabet, and found it "fascinating." The word was underlined. Had she laughed when she drew that line? Was she ever serious? Didn't the letter show the most engaging compound of enthusiasm and spirit and whimsicality, all tapering into a flame of girlish freakishness, which flitted, for the rest of the morning, as a will-o'-the-wisp, across Rodney's landscape. He could not resist beginning an answer to her there and then. He found it particularly ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... much more labor on the latter than the former. The law can only equalize the conditions of sale. It is evident that while the Portuguese sell their oranges here at a dollar apiece, the ninety-nine cents which go to pay the tax are taken from the American consumer. Now look at the whimsicality of the result. Upon each Portuguese orange, the country loses nothing; for the ninety-nine cents which the consumer pays to satisfy the impost tax, enter into the treasury. There is improper distribution; ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... blinding slopes of snow, that burned their now hardening faces, laughing in an endless sequence of quips and jests and polyglot fancies. The fancies were the reality to both of them, they were both so happy, tossing about the little coloured balls of verbal humour and whimsicality. Their natures seemed to sparkle in full interplay, they were enjoying a pure game. And they wanted to keep it on the level of a game, their ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Robert Graves, who reflects it in a lighter and more fantastic vein; in James Stephens, whose wild ingenuities are redolent of the soil. And it finds its corresponding opposite in the limpid and unperturbed loveliness of Ralph Hodgson; in the ghostly magic and the nursery-rhyme whimsicality of Walter de la Mare; in the quiet and delicate lyrics of W. H. Davies. Among the others, the brilliant G. K. Chesterton, the facile Alfred Noyes, the romantic Rupert Brooke (who owes less to Masefield and his immediate predecessors than he does to the passionately intellectual ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... fragrance of the orange-flower poured around him, and in continual ecstasy. As an idyll it is delicious; as a serious contribution to the hardest of problems it is naught. The sequel, by a stroke of matchless whimsicality, unless it be meant, as it perhaps may have been, for a piece of deep tragic irony, is the best refutation that Rousseau's most energetic adversary could have desired. The Sophie who has been educated on the oriental principle, has presently to confess ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... of preservation: some on account of the ingenuity displayed in their composition; some in their wit; some for their domesticativeness,—matrimonial offers, for example,—and others for the conceitedness exposed in them, the ignorance of the writers, or the whimsicality of the matter advertised. In 1804 there was advertised in an English paper, as for sale, "The walk of a deceased blind beggar (in a charitable neighborhood), ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... the most artistic sort, and it is handled with a freshness and originality that is unquestionably novel."—Boston Transcript. "A feast of humor and good cheer, yet subtly pervaded by special shades of feeling, fancy, tenderness, or whimsicality. A merry thing in prose."—St. ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon |
