"Freakish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the shimmering white surface of a dry lake caught his angry eye. As he looked, it began to rock gently from side to side. Presently, in a freakish spirit of its own, it curled up at the edges. Later, it seemed to turn into a dimpling sheet of water, cool, sweet, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... she turned into the garden. The shadows of the ilex-avenue chequered her straw bonnet, her prim black cape, her white skirt. There had been no meddling of freakish hands with her dark hair this morning. It was tightly plaited at the back of her head. Her plain sun-shade, her black kid gloves were neatness ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a church steeple when he is flying low; but his greatest dangers are in the clear air itself, where they cannot be detected. He may suddenly drop into a 'hole,' which is really a downward current of air, or he may get a terrific bump when he strikes a rising current. A freakish whim of the winds may unexpectedly take away the air support from under one of the wings, and he will lurch and dip sharply to ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... process of washing "pay-dirt." It was not only slow, but unemotional. It had not the power to stir the senses to a pitch of excitement like this veritable Tom Tiddler's ground, pitchforked into their very laps by one of Nature's freakish impulses. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... the tides, there is a species of goby, which is amphibious. This fish lies in myriads on the mud-banks left uncovered by the ebb of the tide, and moves with great agility on the approach of birds. Nature seems to have made the goby in one of her most freakish moods. It is equally at home in the earth, the air, and the water; and at different times in the day may be observed swimming in the stream, basking upon the surface of the tidal banks, and burrowing deep in ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... of something funny. You know, my memory is still freakish, and things come back in splotches. Just now I was recalling a primitive Brazilian tribe in whose language the word 'we' means also 'good. 'Others,' which they express by saying 'not we,' means also 'evil.' Isn't that a ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... Irwell meandered, here, through nooks, "o'erhung wi' wildwoods, thickening green;" and there, among lush unshaded pastures; gathering on its way many a mild whispering brook, whose sunlit waters laced the green land with freakish lines of trembling gold. To me this ride is always interesting, so many points of historic interest line the way; but it was doubly delightful on that glorious July morning. And I never saw Fishergate, in Preston, look better than it did ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... place on earth. After a few days spent in studying the native dress of the Eskimos, and in trying to adapt my own dress to the freakish breezes I concluded that if I stayed at St. Michael I should dress as they did. If I started for the eating room with my hat properly placed on hair arranged with ever so much care, a heavy beaver cape, and dress of walking length, I was completely demoralized ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... already past when protoplast patients were looked upon as something mildly freakish and to be pitied. Artificial noses, ears and limbs were becoming quite common. Whether there was some justification for the earlier reaction of pity, however, still remains to ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... heaps of sandstone so bewildering that Bud afterward swore that in spite of the fact that he was leading Sunfish, he frequently found himself at that patient animal's tail, where they were doubled around some freakish pillar. Frequently Eddie stopped and peered past his horse to make sure that Bud had not lost the trail. And finally, because he was no doubt worried over that possibility, he knotted his rope to his ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... * * * * * The moon on the east oriel shone, Through slender shafts of shapely stone, By foliated tracery combined; Thou would'st have thought some fairy's hand 'Twixt poplars straight the osier wand In many a freakish knot had twined; Then framed a spell, when the work was done, And changed the willow-wreaths ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various
... out on the bank of the canal this evening before bedtime and we'll have a lark," reflected Walker Farr as he toiled in the hot trench. And he stopped quizzing himself as to the whys of this sudden devotion to a freakish notion. He seemed ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... freakish flights strange oily lights came fluttering round its head, Like butterflies of a monster size—then I knew it for the Dead. Its face was rubbed and slicked and scrubbed as smooth as a shaven pate; In the ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... soil, who had passed all their days in the desolation of Aigues-Mortes, the little fortified, derelict city in the salt marshes of Provence. Although they regarded him with the same unimaginative wonder as a pair of alligators might regard an Argus butterfly, their undoubted but freakish progeny, and although Aristide soared high above their heads in all phases of thought and emotion, the mutual ties remained strong and perdurable. Scarcely a year passed without Aristide struggling somehow south to visit ses vieux, as he affectionately called them, and whenever ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... understands Marie-Louise. I sent her away to school, but she wouldn't stay. She likes her home and she hates rules. She loves animals, and if she were a boy she would practice medicine. Being a woman and having no outlet for her energies, she is freakish. You saw the way she was dressed ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... the midst of his sorrow a freakish whim came into the head of Odysseus, characteristic of his subtle and tortuous nature. Approaching his father, who was still stooping over his work, he said to him in a disguised voice: "Old man, I perceive that thou art well skilled in the ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... influence of the mild night, Margaret was in the high spirits which accompany the expectation of bliss, without the sobering effect of its responsibility. Love itself is very serious, but the overture is full of freakish gayety. And it was all gayety that night. We all constituted ourselves a guard of honor to Miss Forsythe and Margaret when they went to their cottage, and there was a merry leave-taking in the moonlight. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... little taffeta silk, and Nell said it was cut in a style so disgracefully freakish that she would not let Sally wear it. It was bought at one of those ultra-shops on Fifth Avenue where they have styles for children that ape the frocks their big ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose
... to illustrate the early strength of Margaret's character—a strength concealed under a hundred freakish whims and humours, as an ancient and massive buttress is disguised by its fantastic covering of ivy and wildflowers. In truth, if the damsel had told all she heard or saw within the Foljambe apartments, she would have said but little to ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... able to transport herself to the most distant Regions in the smallest Space of Time. She was continually varying her Dress, sometimes into the most natural and becoming Habits in the World, and at others into the most wild and freakish Garb that can be imagined. There stood by her a Man full-aged, and of great Gravity, who corrected her Inconsistences, by shewing them in his Mirror, and still flung her affected and unbecoming Ornaments down the Mountain, which fell in the Plain below, and were gathered up and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... for although I had been glad to believe that we were faced with a problem which would prove to have a human solution, the revulsion had come, and I should have welcomed the knowledge that some weird, freakish application of natural power ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... of a child's dream, where shapes, though inanimate, are watchful and protean. From that silent world legions of grotesques move out of the shadows at a touch of sunlight, and then, when you turn on them in surprise, become thin and vague, either phantoms or smoke, and dissolve. The freakish light shows in little what happens in the long run to man's handiwork, for it accelerates the speed of change till change is fast enough for you to watch a town grow and die. You see that Dockland is unstable, is in flux, alters ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... for the last time, escaping from the house with his puppy, in freakish rebellion against old Trella. Later, when his absence had begun to cause anxiety, his puppy crept back to the farm, cowed, whimpering and yelping, a pitiful, dumb lump of terror, without intelligence or courage ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... and telegraphers familiar with the wireless alphabet were busy trying to reconcile some of the names received with those of persons who went down on the Titanic. That the body of William T. Stead, the English journalist and author, had been recovered by the Mackay-Bennett, but through a freakish error in wireless transmission the name of another was reported instead, was one of the theories advanced by persons familiar with the ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... Only a freakish wisp of hair?— Nay, but its wildest, its most frolic whorl Stands for a slim, enamoured, sweet-fleshed girl! And so, a tangle of dream and charm and fun, Its every crook a promise and a snare, Its every dowle, or genially gadding Or crisply curled, Heartening and ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... called on her once or twice during the preceding days. It was due to her after his long neglect of her, he told himself, and had found improvement in her. But to-night she seemed to take a freakish pleasure in letting him see that there was much of the old Ann still left in her: the frank conceit of her; the amazing self-opinionatedness of her; the waywardness, the wilfulness, the unreasonableness of her; ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome |
