"Genitive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that the Italians should envy this so much more methodical, cleanly and prosperous nation. For glowing life and blooming beauty fare still more madly among the Hollanders, and sharp anguish is more salutary to man, and preferred by the genitive soul of humanity, than the unfelt evil of ugliness, of dullness and of the great and beautiful passions stifled by fear. Everywhere in the present world a minority sensitive to beauty exists among a ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... of the word "news," on which you have recently had some notes, is a case in illustration of the importance of this point. I have never had the least doubt that this word is derived immediately from the German. It is, in fact, "das Neue" in the genitive case; the German phrase "Was giebt's Neues?" giving the exact sense of our "What is the news?" This will appear {429} even stronger if we go back to the date of the first use of the word in England. Possibly about the same time, or not much earlier, we find in ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... all phenomena, that in a matter so important as that of style, he should have nothing loftier to record of his own merits, services, reformations, or cautions, than that he has always conscientiously forborne to use the personal genitive whose in speaking of inanimate things? For example, that he did not say, and could not have been tempted or tortured into saying, 'The bridge whose piers could not much longer resist the flood.' Well, as they say in Scotland, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey |
