"Irony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon a grave and sensible though unsuspecting individual, he felt quite delighted at the feat; and took the person thus imposed upon into the number of his favorites. It was upon this principle among others that Norton, who pretended never to see through his flimsy irony, contrived to keep in his favor, and to shape him according to his wishes, whilst he made the weak-minded young man believe that everything he did and every step he took was the result of his own deliberate opinion, whereas in fact he was ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... followed, Lenox looked blankly round the empty room:—the room where they should have spent their first evening together. Then the irony, the finality of it all, overwhelmed him, and he sank upon the nearest chair. "What have I done? . . . My God, what have I done?" he breathed aloud. And it is characteristic of the man that, for all his grinding sense of injury, ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... complicity, of cunning, perhaps of irony, passed through the dealer's cynical and sad eyes. But he bowed ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... with unmixed sadness; the irony of that fate seemed so cruel which allowed the fearless lion to succumb to the gnawing of a rat! Ah! had Armand's life not been at stake! ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... curious irony of fate, the same influence which led me to put as little faith in modern speculations on this subject, as in the venerable traditions recorded in the first two chapters of Genesis, was perhaps more potent than any other in keeping alive a sort of pious conviction that ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... he acquired a reputation almost as gigantic as his stature, and as brilliant as his coat covered with spangles. This was the part in which BELLECOURT excelled, and which had been respected even by MOLE. The latter at length appeared in it; but irony, which is the basis of this character, was not his talent: yet MOLE having seen the court, and knowing in what manner noblemen conducted themselves, BAPTISTE had an opportunity of correcting himself by him in ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... tough and stubborn race. The arrow that is to fly far must be discharged from a well distended bow: if, therefore, anything is necessary for greatness, it is a fierce and tenacious opposition, an opposition either of open contempt, or of malicious irony, or of sly silence, or of gross stupidity, an opposition regardless of the wounds it inflicts and of the precious lives it sacrifices, an opposition that nobody would dare to attack who was not prepared, like the Spartan of old, to ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... girls, I wonder?" inquired the proprietor of the arm-chair, with cutting irony. "Whiney piney, whiney piney. I wish there were no such things as ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... great celebration; in fact, it was a gala day in Melbourne, and their journey through the settled districts one triumphant march. Their purpose was to cross to Carpentaria. Fate seemed so propitious that one would think in irony she laughed, as she ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... abominable dogkennels called houses was the group known as the Cit des Kroumirs, in the 13th arrondissement, which, by a strange irony, was built on land belonging to the Department of Public Assistance, which was let out by that body to a rich tenant, who sublet it to these lodging-house owners. This veritable den of infection and misery has now been demolished; but there are plenty of others quite ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... and the absence of any sign of wind induced the party to vote the mast and sails a useless encumbrance, and they were accordingly left ashore, and a spare pair of oars taken in their place. The irony of fate left it to Dick's lot to see the anchor was in proper trim and firmly secured—a task which he discharged with ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... you shouldn't," said Mrs. Morel, and she returned to her book. He winced from his mother's irony, frowned irritably, thinking: "Why can't I do as ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... peddled his etchings from door to door, he could have foreseen the great army of admirers who three centuries later should outbid each other at auctions, and make war in print over his experimental plates, his failures and his trial-proofs—now often exalted into "states"—the very irony of the thing would surely have brought him genuine satisfaction ...
— Rembrandt and His Etchings • Louis Arthur Holman
... master of his country, after one of the fiercest campaigns on record. Pompeius distinguished himself when very young, but it is thought that the title of "the Great" was conferred upon him by Sulla in a spirit of irony. The late Sir William Napier, who ought to have been a good judge, said that he was a very great general, and in a purely military sense perhaps greater than Caesar. He was fifty-eight in the campaign of Pharsalia, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... dead; but the signification of the word remains the same: The bodiless spirits were called giants, because they were objects of terror to the living; comp. remarks on Ps. lxxxviii. 11. The word is, in ver. 14, used [Pg 154] with a certain irony.—"Light" is equivalent to "salvation." The Plural signifies the fulness of light or salvation. The complete fulfilment which the words, "Thy dead shall live," will find in the resurrection of the body, affords a guarantee for the fulfilment of the ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... has said with pungent irony, "Who knows but that one of these days a powerful microscope may detect globules of ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... eyes searched the other's impassive face for some trace of the irony he suspected. They were as wide asunder as the poles, these two, in their political views; and mistrusted as Andre-Louis was by all his colleagues of the Literary Chamber of Rennes, he was by none mistrusted so thoroughly as by this vigorous republican. Indeed, had Le Chapelier been able to prevail ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... enough. In both of these books, as in Criquette (M. Halevy's only other novel), as in A Marriage for Love, and the twoscore other short stories he has written during the past thirty years, there are the same artistic qualities, the same sharpness of vision, the same gentle irony, the same constructive skill, and the same dramatic touch. It is to be remembered always that the author of L'Abbe Constantin is also the half-author of "Froufrou" and of "Tricoche et Cacolet," as well as of the librettos of "La Belle Helene" ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... time to change your mind and advise your mother," Lady Loring remarked with grave irony ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... am the essence of discretion, and ask no awkward questions; but when a customer cannot look me in the eye, he has to pay for it." The dealer once more chuckled; and then, changing to his usual business voice, though still with a note of irony, "You can give, as usual, a clear account of how you came into the possession of the object?" he continued. "Still your uncle's cabinet? A ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... became grave. His irony vanished. In his face was a flicker almost of consternation at this follow-up murder. He might have been asking himself how much ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... were also hit, and the only field gun taken. The retiring Boers were swiftly followed up by Thorneycroft's column, however, and the gun was retaken, together with twenty of Kritzinger's men. It must be confessed that there seems some irony in the fact that, within five days of the British ruling by which the Boers were no longer a military force, these non-belligerents had inflicted a loss of nearly six hundred men killed, wounded, or taken. Two small commandos, that of Koch in the Orange River Colony, and that ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pressed on him, assailed him, like two accomplices of the immovable and mute woman before his eyes. He was suddenly vanquished. He was shown his impotence. He was soothed by the breath of a corrupt resignation coming to him through the subtle irony ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... to Mrs. Archer. "If Louisa's health allowed her to dine out—I wish you would say to Mrs. Lovell Mingott—she and I would have been happy to—er—fill the places of the Lawrence Leffertses at her dinner." He paused to let the irony of this sink in. "As you know, this is impossible." Mrs. Archer sounded a sympathetic assent. "But Newland tells me he has read this morning's Times; therefore he has probably seen that Louisa's relative, the Duke of St. Austrey, arrives next week on the Russia. He is coming to ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... eye For all the mockeries of life, Beware, in this dark masque of things that seem, Lest even that tragic irony, Which you discern in this our mortal strife, Trick you and trap you, also, ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... Jewish reader, considering that Punch's expression bordered upon rudeness, and that the sufferance which was his tribal badge need not under the circumstances seal his lips, wrote to protest against the "malice and grossness of language"—for he had failed to appreciate Punch's robust irony and too carefully veiled championship. Then, in one of those generous moods which often directed Jerrold's pen, Punch explained. (Vol. VI., 1844, p. 106.) He pointed out how his article had been directed against the "bygone bigotry and present ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... over these pages than over the grotesque absurdities that abounded in the former collection of sketches, we are the more fascinated by the quiet subtlety of their humour, their irony and pathos."—Evening ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... car effectively unsealed Sir Richmond's mind. Hitherto Dr. Martineau had perceived the possibility and danger of a defensive silence or of a still more defensive irony; but now that Sir Richmond had once given himself away, he seemed prepared to give himself away to an unlimited extent. He embarked upon an apologetic ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... his wife and children. His teachings were but vaporing talk to her small mind and to those of many of the people. And the keen questions with which he convicted so many of ignorance, and the sarcastic irony with which he wounded their self-love, certainly did not make him friends among this class. In truth, he made many enemies. One of these was Aristophanes, the dramatist, who wrote a comedy in which he sought to make Socrates ridiculous. This turned many of the audiences ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... feeling, or for those sentimental confidences between the reader and the poet, in which the modern muse so much delights, could not be imagined. But what do we find? The theme is treated in the most general manner. Though emphasizing the irony of his reflection by the beautiful touch of memory in the second stanza, the poet speaks throughout as a moralist or spectator; from first to last he seems to lose all thought of himself in contemplating the tragedies he foresees for others; the subject ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... Maigre'. Success in this field was yet decidedly doubtful when 'Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard' appeared in 1881. It at once established his reputation; 'Sylvestre Bonnard', as 'Le Lys Rouge' later, was crowned by the French Academy. These novels are replete with fine irony, benevolent scepticism and piquant turns, and will survive the greater part of romances now read in France. The list of Anatole France's works in fiction is a large one. The titles of nearly all of them, arranged in chronological order, are as follows: 'Les Desirs de Jean ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... Thornton, was the best house and the most fertile farm in all the wild surrounding country, and irony crept into his smile with the thought that it was a place he could not enter save under an anonymous ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... laughter of an unaffected nature, the effervescence of a sparkling and overflowing brain, in such poems as Up at a Villa—Down in the City, or Pacchiarotto, or Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis. Fra Lippo Lippi leans to this category, though it is infused with biting wit and stinging irony; for it is first and foremost the bubbling-up of a restless and irrepressibly comic nature, the born Bohemian compressed but not contained by the rough rope-girdle of the monk. He is Browning's finest figure of comedy. Ned Bratts is another admirable creation of true humour, tinged with ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... with the simpler sort, he might, should he choose to keep the whole thing down, just take her mild attention for a part of her general business. As soon as he heard her voice, however, the gap was filled up and the missing link supplied; the slight irony he divined in her attitude lost its advantage. He almost jumped at it to get there before her. "I met you years and years ago in Rome. I remember all about it." She confessed to disappointment—she had been so sure he didn't; and to prove how well he did he began to pour forth ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... a long year since my dear friend Messer Guido dei Cavalcanti died of that disastrous exile to which, by the cynical irony of fate, my other dear friend, Messer Dante dei Alighieri, was foredestined to doom him. That sadness has nothing to do with this sadness, and I here give it the go-by. But at nights when I lie awake in my cell—a thing which, I thank my stars happens but rarely—or ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a walk after dinner, thereby missing a call from Yorke (who came thus early to prevent Gulian's intended interview), it would be vain to speculate; but when the maid returned, feeling more like her old happy self than she had done in weeks, the irony of fate prompted an encounter with her brother-in-law at the ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... student, an enigma among men of the world, and a stumbling-block to the politician of the clubs. Beyond this, we find that certainty and decision of judgment, that crisp concentration of phrase, that grave and deliberate irony and that mastery of subtlety, allusion, and wit, which make his interpretation an adventure and ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... cool irony, "is doubtless a charming thing for digestive purposes, but it is a luxury too expensive for me. The gods in this country bid for shams, and shams I purpose giving them. I am not sure I shall not go into chromos eventually. I don't enjoy this especially, but after ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... to Evelyn to admire; and Caroline was, to her inexperience, a brilliant and imposing novelty. Sometimes Miss Merton's worldliness of thought shocked Evelyn; but then Caroline had a way with her as if she were not in earnest,—as if she were merely indulging an inclination towards irony; nor was she without a certain vein of sentiment that persons a little hackneyed in the world and young ladies a little disappointed that they are not wives instead of maids, easily acquire. Trite as this vein of sentiment was, poor Evelyn thought ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book I • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... civilization, slavery in America. He spoke and wrote in behalf of the abolitionists at a time when the anti-slavery men were openly despised as heartily in the North as they were feared and detested in the South. He wrote with a pen which never faltered, and satire, irony, and fierce invective accomplished their work with a will, and moved many a heart, almost ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... a show of irony. "Your congratulations overwhelm me. You look as if you were about to begin the reading ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... the verge of Vanity Fair, he had looked curiously down at the feverish whirl, the gilded shams, the maddening, murderous conflict for place,—the empty mocking pageantry of the victorious, the sickening despair and savage irony of the legions of the defeated; and after the roar and shout and moan of the social maelstrom, as presented in the great city where his studies had been pursued, it was pleasant this afternoon to watch the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... seized the pen and wrote her name as with her life-blood—great veins starting out on her white forehead, her eyes dim and blurred, her heart beating so that she scarce could trace the words that seemed an irony: ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... impression. How easily Stillman must have seen through Claire's muteness and the elder woman's eager craving for an audience! And all the time Mrs. Condor had been laughing, not ill-naturedly, but with the irony of an experienced woman possessing a sense ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... man;—but really nothing gave more surprise to everybody here, than to find him the supreme head of your ecclesiastical affairs. The rest is of course. Your Assembly addresses a manifesto to France, in which they tell the people, with an insulting irony, that they have brought the church to its primitive condition. In one respect their declaration is undoubtedly true; for they have brought it to a state of poverty and persecution. What can be hoped for after ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... instance of the irony of fate that Queen Adelaide should have thus been supposed to desire to take an active part in politics. It is obvious, from her letters, that she had practically no political views at all, except a gentle ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... The hideous irony of this statement made poor Geoffrey gasp. He gripped the wooden framework of the room so ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... and not to be convinced, till too late, I replied to his peaceful overture by the most insulting irony: "You were not afraid to fire at a poor boy in the water," said I, "though you do not like to stand a shot in return. Come, come, take your ground, be a man, stand ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... contemplate for a moment the desertion of his colours. Still his heart often yearned towards those engaged in what then appeared so unequal a struggle on shore, and he could scarcely help expressing satisfaction at any success they met with. Poor Mercer had to endure a great deal of irony and abuse on the subject, but while he defended the rebels, and asserted their right to take up arms in the defence of their liberties, he acknowledged that his own duty was to remain loyal to his sovereign. The dispute ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... first notes about The Queen Pedauque is the fact that in this ironic and subtle book is presented a story which, curiously enough, is remarkable for its entire innocence of subtlety and irony. Abridge the "plot" into a synopsis, and you will find your digest to be what is manifestly the outline of a straightforward, plumed ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... is still extant from Sir Philip Hoby requesting permission from the King's agent to purchase stone from the Abbey ruins for building, and there can be little doubt that this house was constructed of the same material. By the "irony of fate" this mansion, born of the spoliation of that institution, in its turn fell a prey to the destroyer, and fragments of carved stones telling of Elizabethan days may be found in these and other farm buildings within the area ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... expresses, and evidently feels, they mistake for irony, or totally distrust; his unwillingness to give pain to persons from whom he has received kindness, they scornfully reject as affectation, and although they must know right well, in their own secret ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the world seems, indeed, to be penetrated by a good-natured irony; it is as if the Power controlling us saw that, like children, we must be tenderly wooed into doing things which we should otherwise neglect, by a sense of high importance, as a kindly father who is doing accounts keeps his children quiet by letting one hold the blotting-paper and ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Love, or Gawtrey, with a singular mixture of irony and compassion in his voice; "and it was hunger, then, that terrified you at last even more ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... commenting upon fine ladies, who expressed great anxiety to help others, but must have the plates cleaned before they could wash or wipe them, and supposed they must have people to sweep the way before them, others to hand their food to their mouths. In fact, the irony ran so high, and was felt so sorely, that a private petition was sent in to have it stopped. This I was most glad to do, for our meals had been rendered a little unpleasant by mortified tears bedewing the face of the gentle Zoe, ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... little by little an intolerable sadness is expressed in those large eyes with their empty sockets—for, at this moment, the ultimate secret, that which the Sphinx seems to have known for so many centuries, but to have withheld in melancholy irony, is this: that all these dead men and women who sleep in the vast necropolis below have been fooled, and the awakening signal has not sounded for a single one of them; and that the creation of mankind—mankind that thinks and suffers—has had no rational explanation, and that our poor aspirations ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... only were not so beautiful!" she moaned as the first pale streaks of light in the east told her that day had finally dawned, and she crept stealthily back to bed again. Of course Jack, the wretch, was sleeping peacefully—that was the irony of fate! What did he know of suffering? But he would ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... Finnegan. You are small potatoes and few in the hill; you are shamefully drunk, and your nose bleeds; you are stricken with Spanish mildew, and you smell vilely—but you are immortal. You have been a disgrace to the service, but Fate in her gentle irony has redeemed you, permitting you, in one brief moment of your misspent life, to save to your country the command of the seas—to guide, with your subconscious intelligence, the finest battle-ship the science of the world has constructed to glorious victory, through the fiercest ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... his wife often had a tone which he found inscrutable he could not tell for his life whether she was in jest or in earnest. The truth is that circumstances had done much to cultivate in Mrs. Tristram a marked tendency to irony. Her taste on many points differed from that of her husband, and though she made frequent concessions it must be confessed that her concessions were not always graceful. They were founded upon a vague project she had of some day doing something very positive, ...
— The American • Henry James
... abortion grips our nation. Abortion is either the taking of a human life or it isn't. And if it is—and medical technology is increasingly showing it is—it must be stopped. It is a terrible irony that while some turn to abortion, so many others who cannot become parents cry out for children to adopt. We have room for these children. We can fill the cradles of those who want a child to love. And tonight I ask you in the Congress ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... cried, with a certain tone of irony in his voice, "that you think I am a mere society butterfly. What do you think I care for all the scented drawing-rooms in the world, for polo, for Hurlingham, for a stuffy reception in some great house in town? Nothing—nothing! Give me the open prairie ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... Was this the keenest irony, or was it the wandering of a weary mind? We cannot tell; but if the latter, it was the only occasion on which Jeanne's mind wandered; and there was method and meaning in the ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... battle, with the detachment of a non-combatant marvelling at the irony of two lines of men engaged in an effort at mutual extermination, I have caught myself thinking with the other side. I knew why my side was busy at killing. Why was the other? For the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... good reason for your being so happy," remarked the doctor, with a tinge of irony in ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... have no sense of humor and irony, the essay 'Of Love' unquestionably gives countenance to the theory that Francis Bacon was cold and passionless in all that concerned woman. Of the many strange constructions put upon this essay, not the least amusing ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... for the weak, for the victims of the deceptions of society, for the sufferings of the obscure. If the successful adventurer, Lesable, and the handsome Maze are the objects of his veiled irony, he maintains, or feels a sorrowful, though somewhat disdainful tenderness, for poor old Savon, the old copying clerk of the Ministry of Marine, who is the drudge of the office and whose colleagues laugh at him because his wife deceived ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... If there was any irony in his heart, his tongue did not show it. Indeed his manner betrayed little. Immobility had again replaced all tokens of anger, and immobility which only yielded now and then to a slight contortion more expressive of physical pain than of mental agitation. ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... moral. Not only the strong appeal of old affection, entwined with the earliest associations, was at work, but the appeal of womanhood itself:—the grey sad story of a woman's life, bare and dumb and pathetic in its irony and pain: the injury from without, and then the self-injury, its direct offspring; unnecessary, yet inevitable; the unconscious thirst for the sacrifice of others, the hungry claims of a nature unfulfilled, the groping instinct to bring the balance of renunciation to the level, and indemnify ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... those of many deformed persons, turned from right to left of the face instead of dividing it down the middle. The mouth, contracted at the corners, like that of a Sardinian, was always on the qui vive of irony. His hair, thin and reddish, fell straight, and showed the skull in many places. His hands, coarse and ill-joined at the wrists to arms that were far too long, were quick-fingered and seldom clean. Goupil wore boots only fit for the dust-heap, and raw silk stockings now of a ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... that expressed irony qualified by enjoyment, the creditor replied: "'T is a pleasure to aid a man to whom I am ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... into the soft valley soil. The trees closing overhead made long tunnels through which the sunshine worked in blobs and patches. Down in the tunnels were bars of sand and gravel, old roots and trunks covered with moss or painted red by the irony water; foxgloves growing lean and pale towards the light; clumps of fern and thirsty shy flowers who could not live away from moisture and shade. In the pools you could see the wave thrown up by the trouts as they charged hither and yon, and the pools were joined to each other—except ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... moved into Happy Valley I was struck with the remarkable infelicity of its title. Generous as Californians are in the use of adjectives, this passed into the domain of irony. But I was inclined to think it sincere,—the production of a weak but gushing mind, just as the feminine nomenclature of streets in the vicinity was evidently bestowed by one in habitual communion with ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... Napoleon's Dalmatia into a province of the Habsburgs? And the list is endless. Jella[vc]i['c] was very probably deceived by Francis Joseph, who kept dangling before his eyes a vision of a "Greater Croatia." But, by an irony of history, this hope of union of the Southern Slavs was for the time flung very much into the background by the action of the Tzar, who rescued Austria when in 1849 she was again at variance with the Magyars. Kossuth had been furious at the Constitution ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... wise birth-controller will not (like the deliciously absurd suffragette of old-time) imagine that birth-control for all means a New Heaven and a New Earth, but will, rather, appreciate the delightful irony of the Biblical legend which represented a world with only four people in it, yet one of them a murderer. Still, it may be pointed out, that was a state of things much better than we can show now. The world would count itself happier if, during the Great War, only twenty-five per cent of the ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... who spoke a little English, picked up, like Yaigok's, from American whalemen at East Cape. Professor Nordenskjold's ship the Vega wintered here some years ago, and the natives showed us souvenirs of the Swedish explorer's visit in the shape of clasp-knives and tin tobacco-boxes. The irony of fate and obstinacy of pack-ice are shown by the fact that all on board the Vega were expecting an easy passage through Bering Straits to the southward, and yet within twenty-four hours were compelled to remain for another ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... gentleness towards others, and her continual subordination of herself and of her own troubles, appeared on her face blended in a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow upon them passionate caresses. The torments inflicted on her by ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... could. His Majesty"—Andrew Forbes said the two last words with bitter irony in his ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... of bitterness in the displeased tone of Fernanda, whilst that of the count was calm and ceremonious, although slightly dashed with irony. ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... sight with a look as regretful as if he were witnessing the departure of his dearest friend. Then he turned his attention again to his surroundings, and a sigh welled up from his heart. "And this is Mt. Hope," he repeated. A note in his voice indicated that he fully appreciated the spirit of keen irony in which the place ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... the eve of his departure he had sent the following brilliant document to the Emperor-elect as a reply to an attempt to entrap him to Peking, a document the meaning of which was clear to every educated man. Its exquisite irony mixed with its bluntness told all that was necessary to tell—and forecasted the inevitable fall. ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... form rather than the right one, that of a professed and regular disquisition. And because the coarse buffoonery and broad laugh of the old and rude adversaries of the Christian faith would offend the taste, perhaps, rather than the virtue, of this cultivated age, a graver irony, a more skilful and delicate banter is substituted in its place. An eloquent historian, beside his more direct, and therefore fairer, attacks upon the credibility of Evangelic story, has contrived to weave into his narration ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... victory gave a new complexion to English naval warfare. Rodney and Howe were Hawke's pupils, Nelson himself, who was a post-captain when Hawke died, learned his tactics in Hawke's school. No sailor ever served England better than Hawke. And yet, such is the irony of human affairs, that on the very day when Hawke was adding the thunder of his guns to the diapason of surf and tempest off Quiberon, and crushing the fleet that threatened England with invasion, a London mob was ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... said the musketeer, continuing his imperceptible tone of irony, "I had no idea at all ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... softly, and with no trace of his wonted irony, but Theydon was aware that once more the little detective had peered into his ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... of the vessel. The lieutenant's tact let him see that Senor Montefalderon was a person of a very different calibre from Spike, as well as of different habits; and he did not choose to indulge in the quiet irony that formed so large an ingredient in his own character, with this new acquaintance. He spoke Spanish himself, with tolerable fluency, and a conversation now occurred between the two, which was maintained for some time with spirit and a ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... 'Powers' of the hospital—all were sorry; yet they could not understand to the point of quite forgiving their vagaries. The twain were outcast, wandering each in a dumb world of his own, each in the endless circle of one or two hopeless notions. It was irony—or the French system—which had ordered the Breton Roche to get well in a place whence he could see nothing flatter than a mountain, smell no sea, eat no fish. And God knows what had sent Gray there. His story was too vaguely understood, ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... call it? The damned, cynical irony of this whole passion-driven puppet-show—that's what it shows! The man who is loved cannot marry the woman he loves lest they both starve; the man who can give a woman half the world is loathed for ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... toilet are minutely described, and all the mistakes the poor countrified Backfisch makes the first morning. She actually gets out of bed before she puts on her clothes, and has to be driven behind the bed curtains by her aunt's irony. This is an incident that is either out of date or due to the genius and imagination of the author, for I have never seen bed curtains in Germany. However, Gretchen is taught to perform the early stages of her toilet behind them, and then to wash for the first time ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... in front of the furious warrior, without any weapon with which to defend himself. Not only that, he folded his arms over his breast and with biting irony added: ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... insured his life when he was twenty would have made money on the transaction regardless of rate. Yet he was the hero of sixty-seven battles on land and sea, and engaged in more than two hundred personal encounters, where rifles, pistols, stilettos, swords or cudgels played their part. Behold the irony of Fate! ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... the North took the form of a sudden exaltation of the personality of Lincoln, bringing out characterizations of the man far different from those which had been his earlier in the war. The presence of a "rural attorney" in the Presidential office had seemed like the irony of fate in the great crisis of 1861. Even so acute an observer as Lyons could then write, "Mr. Lincoln has not hitherto given proof of his possessing any natural talents to compensate for his ignorance of everything but Illinois village politics. He seems to be well meaning and conscientious, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... it that he had the courage to address the queen in behalf of his faith. He laments plaintively that despite his sixty years he has not been able to eradicate all traces of his descent (reato de su origen), and turns his irony against himself: ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... only my emphatic way of speaking." "Of course, you meant figuratively," said Mr. Balch, in a tone of irony; mentally adding, "as I hope you may ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... the Queen was with the Lady Mary, once more in her chamber, having come down as before, from the chapel in the roof, to pray her submit to her father's will. Mary had withstood her with a more good-humoured irony; and, whilst she was in the midst of her pleadings, a letter marked most pressing was brought to her. The Queen opened it, and raised her eyebrows; she looked down at the subscription and frowned. Then she cast it upon ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... massacred by his comrades. On the other hand, there was the liability of being ourselves shot by the Carlists. How were they to distinguish a neutral or a sympathizer from their foes? I confess I could not help smiling as the thought occurred to me what a piece of irony in action it would be if Barbarossa were to be helped to a morsel of lead by his friends, the enemy. With a cheerful equanimity I contemplated the prospect of his receiving a very slight contusion from a spent bullet on a soft part ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... gods,"— things that they never possessed nor could hope to have any interest in. "Not one among many, many Romans," said he, "has a family altar or an ancestral tomb. They have fought to maintain the luxury of the great, and they are called in bitter irony the 'masters of the world' while they do not possess a clod of earth that they may ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... exceedingly glad that Adamson had to stay in town to play for the South against the North, or Fred would not have come. On that tour I played very badly and Fred very well, which is what some people would call the irony of fate. But I must say in excuse for myself that more difficult people to get hold of than those Swansea, Newport and Cardiff three-quarters I cannot conceive, and I had no end of chances of trying to collar them. How many of those chances ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... without asking my advice, you will see how you will get through. Faust is so strange an individual that only few can sympathize with his internal condition. Then the character of Mephistopheles is, on account of his irony, and also because he is a living result of an extensive acquaintance with the world, also very difficult. But you will see what lights open upon you. Tasso, on the other hand, lies far nearer the common feelings of mankind, and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... question, Chevalier! Most willingly I will aid you in anything proper for a lady to do!" added she, with a touch of irony. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... alluding to the Spectator's critiques of Shakespeare, Milton, and Chevy Chase, and near the end of the first number slides into a remark that "one of the Scribleri, a descendant of the famous Martinus, has expressed his suspicions of the text being corrupted." A page or two of irony concerning the "plain and simple" opening of the poem seems to hark back to something more subtle in the Augustans than the Wagstaffian derision, no doubt to Pope's victory over Philips in a Guardian ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... of the greatest objects, and capable of a steady and cool comprehension of them. He had wit at will. He had humor that, when he pleased, was delicate and delightful. He had a satire that was good-natured or caustic, Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais, at his pleasure. He had talents for irony, allegory, and fable, that he could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political truth. He was master of that infantine simplicity which the French call naivete, which never fails to charm, in Phaedrus ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been wise in their own esteem, ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and suddenly Porfiry Petrovitch looked with obvious irony at him, screwing up his eyes and, as it were, winking at him. But perhaps it was Raskolnikov's fancy, for it all lasted but a moment. There was certainly something of the sort, Raskolnikov could have sworn he winked ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the Peninsular War, Sir William Butler was great both as a soldier and as a writer. His autobiography sparkles with humour, irony, and felicitous diction; but it was in his Life of Gordon of Khartoum that he rose to his full stature as a contributor to the ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... rage, hate, irony, the terrors of remorse, the bitterness of disappointment, were not the only dramatic means in the possession of that artist whom Madame Sontag proclaimed as "the greatest known singer." None could express as did Delsarte, contemplation, serenity, tenderness—the dreams ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... But they had to decide—and the thing was discussed at a little family conference—where they should send their wives and children. And one of these Frenchmen, the one who had been most ferocious in his condemnation of the German barbarian, said quite naively and with no sense of irony or paradox: "Of course, if we could find an absolutely open town which would not be defended at all the women folk and children would be all right." His instinct, of course, was perfectly just. The German "savage" had had three quarters of a million people in his absolute power in Brussels, and ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... a shack out here an' live in it, I am!" exploded Hopalong in withering irony as he dug the sand out of his ears and also from his sixshooter. "I just nachurally dotes on ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... by tears and then dried by the panting, anguished breathings of beings fashioned in the image of their Creator, as they toiled and died under the brutal hands of their savage task-masters—the civilian officials of that cruel "System" which, by the irony of fate, the far-seeing, gentle, and tender-hearted Arthur Phillip, the founder of Australia, ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... the joint in the armour of this extraordinary Midland personage. With all his irony, with all his violent humour, with all his just and unprejudiced perceptions, he had a tenderness for the Institution of which he was the dictator. He loved it. He could laugh like a god at everything in the Five Towns except this one thing. He would try to force himself to regard even this with ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... subject of prosecution, and but for the keen scent of the Association, the rank and huge sedition contained in the New Year's Address might have lain in its covert undetected and undisturbed. But to drop this irony and be serious, the law officers of the crown are fully adequate to their duties, and Carlile's shop was as well known to the Attorney General as St. Paul's to you. For years he has not had his eyes off it. ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... stricken, and her sufferings were all the more intense because she had to hide them from every one, especially from her husband, and they made a marked contrast, by the irony of fate, with the pleasures and amusements that surrounded her. She was too clear-sighted and intelligent to proceed to question the Emperor. She feared light and dreaded the truth. She hesitated before the abyss that awaited her, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... Mackinder looked at the galaxy in the evening sky with laughter and with pride. It had played its part with Fate against Constantine Jopp and the little widow at Jansen. It had never shone so brightly as on the night when Vigon struck oil on O'Ryan's ranch. But Vigon had no memory of that. Such is the irony of life. ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... quickly, "And I will leave a note for Madame Eversham at the desk to inform her of your destination and to express my regret that she is not here to accept the invitation." His voice was flavored with droll irony. "In ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... yet again the great soul of the hero!" put in Basset with grim irony. "If he lie abed i' th' day for a wound to his wrist, what shall he do for a stab to his feelings? You shall drive him to drown him in salt water; and that were cruelty unheard-of, for it should make his eyes smart. I tell thee what, Jack ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... far better not to respect me at all," said the queen, with a chilling irony of manner. "It would be far better if you were not innocent. Do you presume to suppose that I should be satisfied simply to leave you unpunished if ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... meaning that, unless within forty-eight hours the Emperor consented to arbitration, American battleships, already coaled and cleared, would sail for Venezuelan waters. The hint was sufficient. The Kaiser accepted the proposal and the President, with the fine irony of diplomacy, complimented him publicly on "being so stanch an advocate of arbitration." In terms of the Monroe Doctrine this action meant that the United States, while not denying the obligations of debtors, would not permit any ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... her hand as if to check him with a warning gesture. "Yes, dear," she said suddenly, lifting her musical voice, with a mischievous side-glance at Paul, as if to indicate her conception of the irony of a possible application, "this way. Here we are waiting for you." Her listening ear had detected Milly's step in the passage, and in another moment that cheerful young woman discreetly stopped on the threshold of the room, with every expression of apologetic indiscretion ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... into a short grim laugh. The idea of Beatrice languishing for Owen Davies, indeed the irony of the whole position, was too much for his sense ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... realism of Thackeray's study to the scornful amenity of the other's—as you have but to contrast the elaborate and extravagant cruelty of Thackeray's Alcide de Mirobolant with the polite and half-respectful irony of Disraeli's treatment of the cooks in Tancred—to perceive that in certain ways the advantage is not with 'the greatest novelist of his time,' and that the Monmouth produces an impression which is more moral because more kindly and humane ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... watch the sale, and mayhap make a bid for a purchase on her own account; the rich Roman matrons with large private fortunes and households of their own, imperious and independent, were the object of grave deference and of obsequious courtesy—not altogether unmixed with irony, on the part of the young men ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... gales with sails close-reefed and hatches battened, and came {5} out with only one of his three ships left, the first English keel to cleave the waters of the Pacific. In honour of the feat Drake renamed his ship the Golden Hind. Perhaps there was jocose irony in the suggestion of gold and speed. Certain it is, the crew of the Golden Hind were well content with the possession of both gold and speed before advancing far up the west coast of ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... remnants of his men. Their adventures during that prodigious night are not to be described. They did not know whether they were going towards or away from the enemy. Not knowing where they themselves were, or where their opponents were, it was mere irony to ask where was the rest of their army. For a thing had descended upon them which London does not know—darkness, which was before the stars were made, and they were as much lost in it as if they had been made before the stars. Every now and then, as those frightful ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... proof of love to him that hath redeemed us, but not to recommend us to his favour. The picture of such a feast drawn by John Bunyan must make upon every reader a deep, a lasting, an indelible impression. How bitter and how true is the irony, when the Pharisee is represented as saying, "I came to thy feast out of civility, but for thy dainties I need them not, I have enough of my own; I thank thee for thy kindness, but I am not as those that stand in need of thy provisions, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... causes his own death in turn through the greed of Attila. There was originally, according to Boer, no question of revenge, except the revenge of fate, the retribution which overtakes the criminal. This feeling for the irony of fate was lost when the motive, that Hagen kills Siegfried because of his treasure, was replaced by the one that he does it at the request of Brunhild. This leads Boer to the conclusion, that Brunhild did not originally belong to the Siegfried ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... let themselves go—"for the sake of happiness," as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated—and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led, IRONY was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that said plainly enough "Do not dissemble before me! here—we are equal!" ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... see?—a second Tolstoy. . . . As for Schopenhauer and Spencer, he treats them like small boys and slaps them on the shoulder in a fatherly way: 'Well, what do you say, old Spencer?' He has not read Spencer, of course, but how charming he is when with light, careless irony he says of his lady friend: 'She has read Spencer!' And they all listen to him, and no one cares to understand that this charlatan has not the right to kiss the sole of Spencer's foot, let alone speaking about him in that tone! Sapping the foundations of civilisation, of authority, of other people's ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... down and then up; and the other, the falling circumflex, in which the voice slides upward and then downward on the same vowel. They may both be denoted by the same mark, thus, (^). The circumflex is used chiefly to indicate the emphasis of irony, ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... flaying irony and blundering invective, however, Joe Lathrop never for a moment lost sight of the fact that there were some men upon the finishing floor whom it was far better for him to let alone. With all his ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... at Mr. Tape, as if he suspected some lurking irony beneath the bland innocence of his words. Perceiving, as usual, nothing in the speaker's countenance, Mr. Smith—blowing at the same time a tremendous cloud to conceal a faint blush which, to my extreme astonishment, I observed ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... life than others, he realized that he did not know much. He criticized freely the prevailing beliefs, customs, and religious practice. For this he was accused of impiety, and forced to drink the hemlock. With an irony in manner and thought, Socrates introduced the problem of self-knowledge; he hastened the study of man and reason; he instituted the doctrine of true manhood as an essential part in the philosophy of ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... and nervous exaltation Sadie never lost consciousness of the gravity of the situation. If her sense of humor enabled her to see one side of its grim irony; if she experienced a wicked satisfaction in accepting the admiration and easy confidence of the high-born guests, knowing that her cousin had assisted in preparing the meal they were eating, she had never lost sight of the practical effect of the discovery ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... of quiet irony accompanied the words. As it curved her lips alluringly, Lord Hurdly felt himself touched with the sudden sense of her powerful charm. No one else on earth would have dared to say this to him, or anything remotely comparable with it. There was something very ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... acute critics as Chesterfield and Warburton thought the performance serious. Rousseau, whose famous discourse on the evils of civilization had appeared six years before, would have read Burke's ironical vindication of natural society without a suspicion of its irony. There have indeed been found persons who insist that the Vindication was a really serious expression of the writer's own opinions. This is absolutely incredible, for various reasons. Burke felt now, as he did thirty years later, that civil institutions cannot wisely or safely be measured ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... with joy or irony," and said, "Well, I cautioned you, and told you that my name would almost damn ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... look of anxious indecision in Fabian's countenance, he added, with that bitter irony which formed a part of his character; "But after all, if this duty is so repugnant to you, I shall undertake it; for not having the least ill will against Cuchillo, I can bang him without a scruple. You will see, Fabian, that the knave will not testify any surprise ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... which taught or preached so absurd and unfair a doctrine. "I wish I could go to the other side of the world," he said, "and live among heathens who know no such dreams. I, Frederick Brent, son of Tom Brent, temperance advocate, sometime drunkard and wife-beater." There was terrible, scorching irony in the thought. There was a pitiless hatred in his heart ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... not what we are accustomed to. I suspect, on the contrary, that there are not unfrequently substantial reasons underneath for customs that appear to us absurd; and if I were ever again to find myself amongst strangers, I should be solicitous to examine before I condemned. Indiscriminating irony and faultfinding are just sumphishness, and that is all. Anne is now much better, but papa has been for near a fortnight far from well with the influenza; he has at times a most distressing cough, and ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... a lady of quite mature appearance, the remark was not without its little irony. The other man blew his horn by way of grace, at which Liza called out ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... Plato glories in this impartiality of the dialectical method, which places birds in juxtaposition with men, and the king side by side with the bird-catcher; king or vermin-destroyer are objects of equal interest to science (compare Parmen.). There are other passages which show that the irony of Socrates was a lesson which Plato was not slow in learning—as, for example, the passing remark, that 'the kings and statesmen of our day are in their breeding and education very like their subjects;' or the anticipation that ...
— Statesman • Plato
... a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction, to set off the meanest things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity, is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is made great, and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep. It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... to quarrel with it on that account," said Matt, with the philosophical serenity which might easily be mistaken for irony in him. "The book we get our religion from teaches leniency in ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... world knows that nothing is so useless as a general maxim. If it be very moral and very true it may serve for a copy to a charity boy." So the very moral and the very true are not for the statesman but for the charity-boy. This perhaps may be defended as irony; hardly, but even so, in such irony the character appears as plainly as in volumes of solemn rant. To us it stands out clearly as the characteristic attitude of the English Government. The English people are used to it, ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... Lucilla, her lips trembling with bitter irony. 'Now I know what you all are made of. We are obliged for your offered exertion, but we are not inclined to ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to Lydia Meredith that the girl showed no sign of her night's adventure when she came in to breakfast on the following morning. She looked bright. Her eyes were clear and her delicate irony as pointed as though she had ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... and my recognition of the civility from every one which had so ineffectively abetted my search. Simple and gentle, how hospitable they had all been to my vain inquiry, and how delicately they had forborne to visit the stranger with the irony of the average American who is asked anything, especially anything he does not know! I went thinking that the difference was a difference between human nature long mellowed to its conditions, and human nature rasped on its ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and installed without preparation as one of the hereditary legislators of a great country. It is with a very bitter irony that the paper, on which all this depends, is left to float for years at the will of wind and tide. What, again, can be finer in conception than that voice from the people heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Remark the irony of fate. This affair had no sooner been settled, Mr. Gurr's claims cut at the very root, and the Treasury regulation apparently set beyond cavil, than the Chief Justice pulled himself together, and, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a pretty irony; "well, then, of co'se, sisteh or no sisteh, you muz' instan'ly go!" The steady tinkle of the sister's laughter as she passed with a chair provoked her own: "Yes, go! Me, I'll rimmain with her till Joy"—the ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... man who deals in oracular utterances acquires instinctively a mode of speech which may shift its colour with every change of light. The texture of Disraeli's writings is so ingeniously shot with irony and serious sentiment that each tint may predominate by turns. It is impossible to suppose that the weaver of so cunning a web should never have intended the effects which he produces; but frequently, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... mute tribute to the trouble he was powerless to relieve. It roused, too, the drugged pulses of his own grief: he was touched by the chance propinquity of two alien sorrows in a great city throbbing with multifarious passions. It would have been more in keeping with the irony of life had he found himself next to a mother singing her child to sleep: there seemed a mute commiseration in the hand that had ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton |
