"Incisive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... S. c. cooperi in shortness of hind foot (18 mm.), shortness of tail (18 mm.), narrowness across zygomata (16 mm.), and grayish pelage. In the long braincase, heavy rostrum, greater condylobasilar length, greater lambdoidal breadth, long rostrum, and longer incisive foramina, it agrees closely with specimens of S. c. saturatus, to which subspecies we refer ...
— Comments on the Taxonomy and Geographic Distribution of North American Microtines • E. Raymond Hall
... was not as red as it had been and there was a different look in his eye. Jed's rough handling had not frightened him, but the Major's cold, incisive tones and the threat of a term in prison had their effect. Nevertheless ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... She was more incisive than her sister. Both were below the medium height, and stout, but Sophia was firm where Amanda was flabby. Amanda wore a baggy old muslin (it was a hot day), and Sophia was uncompromisingly hooked up in a starched and boned cambric over ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... foreseen, his words decided the matter. The cold and haughty manner which he knew so well how to assume, his few but incisive words, produced ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... concluded. How could she, living the refined life she did? Then he chanced upon Kipling's poems, and was swept away by the lilt and swing and glamour with which familiar things had been invested. He was amazed at the man's sympathy with life and at his incisive psychology. Psychology was a new word in Martin's vocabulary. He had bought a dictionary, which deed had decreased his supply of money and brought nearer the day on which he must sail in search of more. Also, it incensed Mr. Higginbotham, who would have ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... the treacherous footing which the flooded alder brakes afforded. And once when he had felled a tree and narrowly missed being pinned beneath it, in spite of Steve's quick leap that dragged him aside, he plunged into an incisive diatribe concerning the perversity of inanimate things—a short discussion in many-syllabled words which would have awakened Steve's admiration by its very brilliance, had he not already been fully concerned with the light of triumph which had flared and ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... by him a continuation of Noli Me Tangere, but with which it really has no more connection than that some of the characters reappear and are disposed of. [10] There is almost no connected plot in it and hardly any action, but there is the same incisive character-drawing and clear etching of conditions that characterize the earlier work. It is a maturer effort and a more forceful political argument, hence it lacks the charm and simplicity which assign Noli Me Tangere to a preeminent place in Philippine literature. ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... riders, and, casting aside to Monsieur de Lucan an expressive glance, she urged her horse slightly forward. He overtook her almost immediately. She cast upon him again an oblique glance, and abruptly, with her bitterest and most incisive accent: ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... English colonies in America, and especially of his own colony; for the latter finding, no doubt, in Beverley and in the grave and noble pages of Stith, and especially in the colonial charters given by Stith, much material for those incisive opinions which he so early formed as to the rights of the colonies, and as to the barriers to be thrown up against the encroaching authority ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... except the theatre. It is enormous, the space given in the newspapers to literary notes, literary announcements, reviews, interviews, personal paragraphs, biographies, and all the rest, not to mention the vigorous and incisive attacks made from time to time upon different authors for their opinions of romanticism, realism, capitalism, socialism, Catholicism, and Sandemanianism. I have sometimes doubted whether the public cared for so much of it all as the editors gave them, but I have always said this under my breath, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... rudimentary. Yet Mr. Matthew Arnold, a living English poet, writes that Sophocles 'saw life steadily and saw it whole.' This is true of no man, not of Shakespeare nor of Goethe, much less of Sophocles or Racine. The phrase itself is as offensively out of date as the First Commandment." The bold, incisive criticism had a singular fascination for his hearers, who were too young to remark in it the crudeness ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... voices, those foreign accents, incisive or stammering, glancing at those varying types of countenance, some uncivilized, passionate, unrefined, others over-civilized, faded, of the type that haunts the boulevards, over-ripe as it were, and observing the same varieties in the corps of servants, where "flunkeys," taken the day before from ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... fulness of expression and on strong emotion, and it may be comparatively careless of form. The Classical style has well been called sculpturesque, the Romantic picturesque. The virtues of the Classical are exquisiteness and incisive significance; of the Romantic, richness and splendor. The dangers of the Classical are coldness and formality; of the Romantic, over-luxuriance, formlessness and excess of emotion. [Footnote: All these matters, here merely suggested, are fully discussed in the present author's 'Principles of Composition ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... sufficient accuracy for general purposes. But the malice of a psychology intended as a weapon against superstition here recoils on science itself. Hume, like Berkeley, was extremely young, scarce five-and-twenty, when he wrote his most incisive work; he was not ready to propose in theory that test of ideas by their utility which in practice he and the whole English school have instinctively adopted. An ulterior test of validity would not have seemed to him satisfactory, for though ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... and as regularly attended mass. But of any new or comforting means of access to God and salvation, he heard nothing, even here. In the town of Erfurt there was an earnest and powerful preacher, named Sebastian Weinmann, who denounced in incisive language the prevalent vices of the day, and exposed the corruption of ecclesiastical life, and whom the students thronged to hear. But even he had nothing to offer to satisfy Luther's inward cravings of the soul. It was an episode ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... by some new term of opprobrium. Ayah's vocabulary was limited, even in the vernacular, and nothing would have induced her to return railing for railing to the children, however sorely they abused her. But Jan occasionally freed her mind, and at such times her speech was terse and incisive. Moreover, she quickly perceived her power over her niece in this respect, and traded on the ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... or two I sat breathless, hardly able to believe my ears. Then my senses and my voice came back to me, while a crushing weight of responsibility seemed in an instant to be lifted from my soul. That cold, incisive, ironical voice could belong to but one man ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... tell you," said Augustus Bartlett, briskly, "what I'd do, if I were you." Augustus Bartlett, who occupied an intensely subordinate position in the firm of Kahn, Morris and Brown, the Wall Street brokers, always affected a brisk, incisive style of speech, as befitted a man in close touch with the great ones of Finance. "I'd sink a couple of hundred thousand in some good, safe bond-issue—we've just put one out which you would do well to consider—and play about ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... torn his soul was not of the kind which seeks its outlet in tears and wailing; it had turned and struck inward, and now his deliberate ferocity was icy and devilish. Only a glint in his eyes told of exultation, and his words were sharp and incisive; one could well imagine one heard the click of his teeth as they bit off the consonants: every letter was clear-cut, every syllable startling in ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... is held up to ridicule. Of higher literary value is the didactic and satirical Buch von der Tugend und Weisheit (1550), a collection of forty-nine fables in which Alberus embodies his views on the relations of Church and State. His satire is incisive, but in a scholarly and humanistic way; it does not appeal to popular passions with the fierce directness which enabled the master of Catholic satire, Thomas Murner, to inflict such telling blows. Several of Alberus's hymns, all of which show the influence of his master Luther, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... stone-walled fort was a busy one for the new recruits. After they were sworn in by Colonel Osborne Smith, that officer returned to his duties at Upper Fort Garry. He had done a good day's work, and if he addressed the men in the crisp, incisive style I have often heard him use on patriotic occasions, then he had made additional contribution to the considerations that inspired the Police to determined endeavour. On his leaving Superintendent ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... were to carry deliverance to one he longed to kill. He had expected a wait—the man, confidant in his security, would be sleeping—but almost on top of his request for Mr. Mayer came a voice, wide-awake and incisive: ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... he would relinquish her in that other country. She had simply been given to him in her sorrow, to care for a brief while. And how grandly he had done it. Rose was too just, perhaps with some of the incisive energy of youth, to cover up miladi's faults at once. If she had been grateful to him for his devotion she would have thought more tenderly of love. Yet she experienced a ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... Raeburn advanced from the somewhat starved quality of pigment, which in his earlier pictures was accentuated by his broad manner of handling, until in many of the pictures painted during the later nineties he attained extraordinary {63} power of expression by vigorous and incisive use of square brush-work and full yet fluid and unloaded impasto. This method with its sharply struck touches and simplified planes reaches its climax perhaps in the striking portrait (1798 circa) of Professor Robison in white night-cap and red-striped dressing-gown, though the more ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... Lawson's tales photograph life at the diggings or in the bush with an incisive and remorseless reality that grips the imagination. He silhouettes a swagman in a couple of pages, and the man is ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... indeed the function or policy of the physician of the future to adequately seek to succour the suffering and regenerate the races of mankind. Of the physician of the present it can at best be said in Goethe's incisive words: ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... Priestly Code. The Law of Holiness underwent a last revision, which represents, not the views of Ezekiel, but those of the Priestly Code, and by means of which it is incorporated in that code. This revision has not been equally incisive in all parts. Some of its corrections and supplements are very considerable, e.g., xxiii. 1-8, 23-38; xxiv. 1-14, 23. Some of them are quite unimportant, e.g., the importation of the Ohel Moed (instead of the Mikdash or the Mishkan), xvii. 4, 6, 9, xix. 21 seq.; the trespass-offering, ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... she said in incisive tones, "did you write a po'try piece for the first page of the Herald, not ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... proves to be a mine of wit and human interest. A book headed by a man's name unmodified and uncommented upon—such as 'Horace Chase'—is apt to have a dreary, unprepossessing air, unless the name is an incisive one that suggests an interesting personality. Fragments of proverbs and poems are always attractive, as well as Biblical phrases and colloquial expressions, but the magic title is the one that excites and baffles curiosity. ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... ordinary life, and its unaffected devotional accent. But Cowper is now appreciated more for his incomparably delightful epistles to his friends than for his poetry. Few letters in our language can compare with these for incisive but kindly and gentle irony; innocent but genuine fun; keen and striking acumen, and tender melancholy. Cowper ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... is terse and incisive, and brilliant with epigram and point. It contains pithy aphoristic sentences which Burke himself would not have disowned. But these are not its best features: its sustained power of reasoning, its wide sweep ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... to his host's ancestral tree, had lifted an alert ear. His quick incisive brain was at work. "I should like to stretch my legs over a horse for a week at a time, and even to climb your highest mountains. You may imagine how much exercise a man may get on a vessel of two hundred ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... she would hardly have known it for his voice. Its incisive, clipped accents were like a knife to her sensitiveness.... She summoned the reserve of her strength, stood erect, unsupported, and moved forward without a word. He stood aside, holding the lamp high, and followed her, lighting the way down the hall ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... sentence, he fell to the floor, overcome by sickness and the responsibilities he had carried for twelve years. Storrow, in a different way, was fully as indispensable as Smith. It was he who built up the superstructure of the Bell defence. He was a master of details. His brain was keen and incisive; and some of his briefs will be studied as long as the art of telephony exists. He might fairly have been compared, in action, to a rapid-firing Gatling gun; while Smith was a hundred-ton cannon, and Lockwood was the maker of ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... the black side of the supernatural his pencil grows more daring and incisive. He has many true inventions in the perilous and diabolic; he has many startling nightmares realised. It is not easy to select the best; some may like one and some another; the nude, depilated devil bounding and casting darts ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sure it is very good of you to come and see us once a month; I wonder you don't send us your cards in an envelope. When you do, pray have them with black edges; it will be for the death of my last illusion." It was in this incisive strain that Mrs. Tristram moralized over Newman's so-called neglect, which was in reality a most exemplary constancy. Of course she was joking, but there was always something ironical in her jokes, as there was always something ...
— The American • Henry James
... cut the air with an incisive clearness that left no shadow of a doubt, though Patricia could scarcely credit ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... violent palpitation of her heart was almost suffocating, and in her ears the surging as of an ocean tide, drowned the accents of the magistrate. At first the words were as meaningless as some Sanskrit formula, but gradually her attention grasped and comprehended. In a strident incisive voice he read from a paper on the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... be lasting is hardly to be presumed. The lesson given by firing on Atua was not sufficiently sharp and incisive to leave a lasting impression on the forgetful Samoan temperament. In fact, conditions are existing which show that peace will not last and is not seriously intended. Malietoa, the King, and his chiefs are convinced that the departure of the ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... was sharp and incisive. His face was grey and anxious. She herself remained lifeless. All that there was of emotion between them seemed to have become vested in ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that a refreshing sentiment from a superintendent of city schools? Note this other delightful touch: "My teachers soon learned that I regard the teacher who works exactly like another teacher as pretty poor stuff." Before the axe of such incisive radicalism, how the antiquated structure of the old school machinery came crashing to the ground, to be replaced by a system which recognized each teacher as an individual builder of manhood and womanhood, working to meet the needs of individual children. It is not an ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... good husband, honest and true. She doesn't want a slave,' replied Miss Wendover, in her incisive way. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... zealous. The article I read was certainly far superior, in point of precision and positiveness, to anything of the sort ever written when I was a young man. The author of the article, Monsieur Paul Meyer, points out every error with a remarkably lucid power of incisive criticism. ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... out of the question, Mr. Harricutt. What do you say?" Mark's voice was cold, incisive, there was nothing ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... it. There isn't any quarrel, Mr. Ware." He stepped down from the door-stone to the sidewalk as he spoke, and stood face to face with Theron. Working-men with dinner-pails, and factory girls, were passing close to them, and he lowered his voice to a sharp, incisive half-whisper as he added, "It wouldn't be worth any grown man's while to quarrel with so poor a ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... he asked gently as the boy sat quietly down; and made irritably incisive by the tendency of near-by men and women to listen as well as watch, he emphasized his expensive order of foods and wines, repeated each item loudly to cheapen the listeners, and sent ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... friends with their own wise and witty sayings; thus Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Procter would say, "Ah yes, you know, as you once said," and then would follow something so sparkling, profound, concise, incisive, and brilliant, that you remained, eyes and mouth open, gasping in speechless astonishment at the merit of the saying you never said (and couldn't have said if your life had depended on it), and the magnificence ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... to speak. At that moment I was gazing at the funnel, trying to decipher a monogram upon it; but I heard a new voice, rapid and incisive, sure of its subject, resolving doubts, and making the crooked straight. It was the man with the brown paper parcel. That was still under his arm—in fact, the parcel contained pink pyjamas, and there was hardly enough ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... all the morning in so terrible a state of agitation that it seemed as if she must have news for better or worse, or die of suspense. My father was not away longer than necessary. He returned as he had gone, wearing a cheerful, incisive look very characteristic of him, and ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... said she, 'come!' and she ushered me without much ado into a den of discomfort where sat a man, with a great beard and such heavy overhanging eyebrows that I could hardly detect the twinkle of his eyes, keen and incisive ...
— The Staircase At The Hearts Delight - 1894 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... help feeling surprised at Narcisse's language, for he remembered his incisive voice and clear, precise, financial acumen when speaking of money matters. And, at this recollection, the young priest's mind reverted to the castle fields, and intense sadness filled his heart as for the last time all the want and suffering rose before him. Again he ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... most people know, his speeches are remarkable for their point, force, logical reasoning, incisive language, and straight, hard hitting, but, as I have observed, he rarely if ever essays to be funny. By his sharp remarks and his adept turns of speech he often, however, creates much laughter—as, for instance, when he once spoke ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... his odes and sonnets spruce With quills plucked from the ordinary goose, While critics write their sharp incisive lines With quills snatched from ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... between Britain and Ireland, blackened and scarred by more burning antagonisms than those that once divided the larger island. The record of several consecutive centuries is graven deep in it by the brand and bayonet, and by the more incisive teeth-marks of hate. The slumbering antipathies of race and religion even now crop out here and there, over the unfused boundary, in hissing tongues of flame. The Briton and the Celt are still struggling for the precedence in the Irishman's breast; but it is not a war ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... polity; so that her account of it, as well as her account of the Crimea, must be read with the necessary allowances. These, however, will not detract from Madame de Hell's unquestioned merit as a close and exact observer, endowed with no ordinary faculty of polished and incisive expression, and a fine capacity for appreciating and describing the picturesque aspects of nature. She wields a skilful brush with force and freedom; her pictures are always accurate in composition and full ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... Jones House. A gentleman of large proportions, but of lively temperament, his frame knit in the North, I think, but ripened in Georgia, incisive, prompt but good-humored, wearing his broad-brimmed, steeple-crowned felt hat with the least possible tilt on one side,—a sure sign of exuberant vitality in a mature and dignified person like him, business-like in his ways, and not to be interrupted while occupied with another, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... care, share and share alike with the sterner sex. After a graceful introduction by Colonel J. W. Bush, the lecturer plunged at once with ease and distinction into her subject and line of argument.... She is a very able and incisive speaker, talks fluently and distinctly, and makes easy and graceful gestures. In a word, she is as good a ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... widower. He met her once in a while, and said to himself that she was a good specimen of the grand style of woman; and then the image came back to him of a woman not quite so large, not quite so imperial in her port, not quite so incisive in her speech, not quite so judicial in her opinions, but with two or three more joints in her frame, and two or three soft inflections in her voice, which for some absurd reason or other drew him to her side and so bewitched him that he told her half his secrets and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... himself up for another attack when suddenly there came a sound of voices from the stairs. One voice was a mere murmur, but the other was sharp and unmistakable, the incisive note of Lora Delane Porter. It brought Steve and Mamie ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... concealed in it, the psychological spring and basis of it, the whole fabric of weakness, habit and aberration underlying it. The one achieved an agreeable romance, and an agreeable romance only. The other achieves an extraordinarily brilliant and incisive study of the Latin-American temperament—a full length exposure of the perverse passions and incomprehensible ideals which provoke presumably sane men to pursue one another like wolves, and of the reactions of that incessant pursuit upon the men themselves, and upon their primary ideas, and upon ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... that most pure and tender of all stories. In doing so he has given us a new creation in Ailie Noble. Not a line can be effectively added to that ideal narrative of a true history, not a word can be pushed from its place. The whole treatment is at once delicate, incisive, tender, reserved, and dramatic. And after reading it,—with or without tears, according to your capacity for dogged resistance to a distended lachrymal duct,—you will be conscious of bearing away a sweet and subduing impression, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... that he talks an' he talks, but he don't p'int out; an' he argufies an' he argufies, but he never shows wherein. A party who's goin' to make a pulpit-play, or shine in Arizona as a racontoor, has done got to cult'vate a direct, incisive style.' ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Professor Boyd Dawkins (The writer in "Macmillan's" tells me: "I cannot quite accept Mr. J.R. Green's sentences as your father's; though I didn't doubt that they convey the sense; but then I think that only a shorthand writer could reproduce Mr. Huxley's singularly beautiful style—so simple and so incisive. The sentence given is much ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... of incisive diction and of moving prose, conceived in the best Oxford manner, drew a terrible picture of what might occur in withdrawing troops from a foreshore in presence of a ferocious foe. Its polished periods portrayed ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... in a clear, incisive voice, though he could hardly control the trembling of his legs. "I will have no more of it. I shall not permit anyone.... I can see very well what you are at with those allusions.... Inquire, investigate! I defy you, but I will not ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... cutting squarely athwart the vague crescendo of the floor came the single incisive stroke of a great gong. Instantly a tumult was unchained. Arms were flung upward in strenuous gestures, and from above the crowding heads in the Wheat Pit a multitude of hands, eager, the fingers extended, leaped into the air. All articulate ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... raised his head and half turned back as if to speak, but thinking better of it, he resumed his chair and watched the approach of the detective with an angry frown. Clancy did not glance at Radnor, but gave his evidence in a quick incisive way which forced the breathless attention of every one in the room. He told without interruption the story of his arrival at Four-Pools and his conclusions in regard to the ha'nt and the theft; he omitted, however, all ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... incisive discussion of this whole subject, based, of course, on the facts of his own time, see the chapter in J. S. Mill, "Principles of Political Economy," entitled "Of the differences of wages in different employments." Book II, Chapter XIV, concludes: "Consequently the wages of each ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... frame of a plot which holds the reader's interest. The Novel, which demands sentiment, style, and imagery, is the greatest creation of modern days; it is the successor of stage comedy grown obsolete with its restrictions. Facts and ideas are all within the province of fiction. The intellect of an incisive moralist, like La Bruyere, the power of treating character as Moliere could treat it, the grand machinery of a Shakespeare, together with the portrayal of the most subtle shades of passion (the one treasury left untouched by our predecessors)—for ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... thin, incisive voice. 'You mentioned the fact before. On the other hand, you have taken six to my knowledge, M. de Berault. You have lived the life of a bully, a common bravo, a gamester. You, a man of family! ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... clear, peremptory voice, short, sharp, incisive, and decisive. The clerk called Bolton heard it in the lobby, and scuttled into the street with a rapidity that contrasted drolly enough with the composure and slowness with which he had been brushing his hair and titivating his ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... fixed his keen gray eyes on Paul's face as he spoke. His speech was rather incisive, considering how little he had seen of Paul. Perhaps he intended that it should be, for he watched the effect of ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... court. Trescorre had aged in the intervening years. His delicate features had withered like a woman's, and the fine irony of his smile had taken an edge of cruelty. His face suggested a worn engraving, the lines of which have been deepened by a too-incisive instrument. ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... been two years among them and he counted it two years of failure. He had been too outspoken for them; they resented sullenly his direct and incisive tirades against their pet sins. They viewed his small innovations on their traditional ways of worship with disfavour and distrust and shut him out of their lives with an ever-increasing coldness. He had meant well and worked hard and he ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... spirit, point, antithesis, piquance, piquancy; verve, glow, fire, warmth; strong language; gravity, sententiousness; elevation, loftiness, sublimity. eloquence; command of words, command of language. Adj. vigorous, nervous, powerful, forcible, trenchant, incisive, impressive; sensational. spirited, lively, glowing, sparkling, racy, bold, slashing; pungent, piquant, full of point, pointed, pithy, antithetical; sententious. lofty, elevated, sublime; eloquent; vehement, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... around, dreading the keen satire of Uncle Dan and the incisive ridicule of Aunt Constance, but she relieved his mind ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... Washington presided was held at Tuskegee, January 20 and 21, 1915. A woman, the wife of a Negro farmer, was testifying when she said: "Our menfolks is foun' out dat they can't eat cotton." As the outburst of laughter which greeted this remark died down, Mr. Washington said in his incisive way: "What do you mean?" The woman replied: "I mean dat we womenfolks been tellin' our menfolks all de time dat they ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... neither as a fencing ground for propagandists nor for puling poets, this new Sudermann piece will please. It has triumphed in Berlin and Munich. Its people are portraits taken from fashionable West End Berlin, while the dialogue, witty, incisive, and also characteristic, is one of the consolations of a play that does not for a moment produce any illusion. There are plenty of striking episodes, but logic is lacking, not only the logic of life, but the logic of the theatre. No living playwright knows better how to arouse suspense ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... garrison town she had married with the excellent young officer, making a trifling indisposition of her mother a pretext for escape. On the night before her departure the four girls huddled in her bed after the opera and listened to an incisive account of her brief but distasteful period of matrimony. Not that she suffered from tyranny. Quite the reverse. Of her several suitors she had cannily engineered into her father's favor a young man of pleasing appearance, good title and fortune, but quite without character ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... long-lived. In a moment of inspiration, a cowboy pulled out his jackknife and carved his home brand on the shining case. Bud could have said more than he did when he discovered it. Later another contingent, not to be outdone, followed this cowboy's incisive example and carved its brand on the piano. Naturally it became a custom. No visitor in boots and chaps left the cabin without first having carved ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... second satire, is largely autobiographical. It shows, as does The Powers of the Pen, some clever turns of phrases, pithy expressions, and amusing images. It also contains incisive criticism of corruption in the Church, of declining respect for Christianity, and, what seems to Lloyd almost the same thing, of a collapsing class structure. The Church wardens, "uncivil and unbred! / Unlick'd, ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... most incisive of our satirists will not let himself degenerate into an illustration of Mr. Herbert Spencer's theory that man repeats himself, ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... never lowered nor raised his incisive, high-bred voice for any man. His reply left no doubt of the question. "No, Mr. Upham," said Doctor Prescott. "You must pay me in money for medicine. I have enough wood of ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... that I'm sick of these dinners. I've told you so before, and yet you had the impertinence to-night to give another and not say a word to me about it." The voice had a cold, incisive note in it—the touch of steel to ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... they were singularly alike. Thus, each had the same proud, self-reliant carriage, the same large, brilliant eyes, serene brow and firm mouth, the same repose of manner, the same clear, incisive enunciation. Neither could move in any company, ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... her brother gave her such a terribly incisive look—a look so like a surgeon's lancet—that she was frightened at her courage. And he answered her in words that corresponded to the look: "It may not prevent me, either, from losing the society ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... so establish the bond between it and the general history of mankind. This psychologic ability contributes vastly to the interest aroused by Mr. Dubnow's historical works outside of the limited circle of scholars. There is a passage in one of his books[1] in which, in his incisive manner, he expresses his views on the limits and tasks of historical writing. As the passage bears upon the methods employed in the present essay, and, at the same time, is a characteristic specimen of our author's style, I take ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... had already thrashed in another sense, an intellectual beating. 'It is very probable,' writes Sir David Brewster in his biography, 'that Newton's idleness arose from the occupation of his mind with subjects in which he felt a deeper interest.' Nobody could have penned a more incisive indictment against the imbecility of an education system that forces all boys, irrespective of their wishes or talents, into a fixed groove. It was Newton who, in answer to an inquiry as to ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... that, when any one subject especially occupies the public mind, those known to be interested in it are compelled to listen to many weary platitudes. Lady Byron's remarks, however, caught my ear and arrested my attention by their peculiar incisive quality, their originality, and the evidence they gave that she was as well informed on all our matters as the best American statesman could be. I had no wearisome course to go over with her as to the difference between the General Government ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Webling was shocked—by the vulgarity, no doubt. "Swine" do not belong in dining-room language—only in the platters or the chairs. Marie Louise caught an angry look also in the eye of Nicholas Easton, though he, too, had been incisive in his comments on the theme of the dinner. His English had been uncannily correct, his phrases formal with the exactitude of a book on syntax or the dialogue of a gentleman in a novel. But he also was drinking too much, and as his lips fuddled he had trouble ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... amount of moral courage and of intellectual ability. James was a ripe scholar, with a considerable fund of shrewdness, of mother-wit, and ready repartee. His canny humour lights up the political and theological controversies of the time with quaint incisive phrases, with puns and epigrams and touches of irony which still retain their savour. His reading, especially in theological matters, was extensive; and he was already a voluminous author on subjects which ranged from predestination to tobacco. But his shrewdness and learning only left him, in ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... sweat blood to get. . . . Won't let his daughter marry a man that has a drop of this 'hound's' blood in his veins, hey?" Page had snarled. "Well, you just watch the old 'hound' close his jaws." Suddenly he became the masterful, domineering man the world knew; he addressed Maillot in the curt, incisive tones which never ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... am certain, can obtain the necessary permission to have me verify the official verdict of suicide. When we have done that, we shall have cleared away much doubt and uncertainty." His speech was now crisp, clear, incisive. "Is there any reason why we cannot ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... note that the French popular airs are those most calculated to strike the imagination, the best-modulated melodies are taken over by the people; clearness of thought, the intellectual simplicity of an idea attracts them; they like the incisive sayings that hold the greatest number of ideas. France is the one country in the world where a little phrase may bring about a great revolution. Whenever the masses have risen, it has been to bring men, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... heed the foreman's scoffing. Instead, he began in a low incisive voice the narration of his experiences of the previous night, beginning with the bear hunt and ending with his finding his way out of the ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... I thought I caught a faint sound, as of the creaking of a boom; and at the same instant the two look-out men on the forecastle, forgetting, in the imminence of the danger, their instructions to be silent, simultaneously shouted, in sharp incisive tones: ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... looked after him with a puzzled look, then summed up his opinion in one word, sharp, incisive, and to ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... substance, was the story told by the showman, and Bucky's incisive questions were unable to shake any portion of it. As to the missing locket, the man explained that it had been broken off by accident and lost. When he discovered that only half the secret was contained on the map section he had returned the paper to the locket and ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... thoughts struck the voices from the adjoining dining-room, Mr. Clarke's sharp and incisive, the bishop's suave and unctious. Suddenly a stray sentence arrested her attention and she listened with her glass half-way ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... work, The City of God, amidst the clear dissolution of a mighty past and the dim presage of a problematical future, and died at Hippo, his episcopal city, in 430, whilst the Vandals were besieging it. St. Augustine is more largely a convert and a rigorist even than St. Paul when St. Paul is most incisive. But here he shall testify only to the natures of Eternity and of real time, a matter in which he remains unequalled in the delicate vividness and balance of his psychological analysis and religious perception. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... and done, he is the absolute and all-round cynic that he would seem to be. The palpable endeavour to make out the worst of every one—including himself—gives a certain flavour of unreality to his conversation; but, in spite of this peculiarity, he is an engaging talker. His language is racy and incisive, and he talks as neatly as he writes. His voice is pleasant, and his utterance deliberate and effective. He has a keen eye for absurdities and incongruities, a shrewd insight into affectation and bombast, and an admirable impatience of all the moral and intellectual qualities ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... handed to Joan across the luncheon table at the Plaza. She read the characteristic effusion with keen amusement. She could hear the old lady's incisive voice in every word and the tap of her stick across the hall as she laid the letter in the box. How good to see the country again and go through the woods to the old high place where she had turned and found Martin. How good to go back to that old prison house as an independent ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... express her surprise that he should prefer such a request upon no acquaintance at all, that he should even faintly expect her to grant it, and so on, all the while leaning languishing upon his breast with all her weight. Whereupon Mr. Middleton lost patience and with incisive sarcasm ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... were "pinnacled in mid-heaven" in unutterable isolation, blank forgotten units, in a white, wonderful, illuminated world, without permanence or solidity. Our voices sounded thin in the upper air. The keen, incisive wind that swept the summit, had no kinship with the soft breezes which were rustling the tasselled cane in the green fields of earth which had lately gleamed through the drift. It was a new world and without sympathy, ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... in the hard, incisive manner which I had heard him use in the lecture theatre, and it was evident enough that his design was to prepare Andrews for something which he contemplated. Facing the Scotsman where he sat hunched up in the big armchair, dully ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... Nicholas's brain. Each syllable was like the incisive tap of a hammer. They fell on a wound ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... follows with The Angel of the Odd (October, 1844, Columbian Magazine), perhaps the best of his humorous stories. The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether (November, 1845, Graham's Magazine) may be rated higher, but it is not essentially a humorous story. Rather it is incisive satire, with too biting an undercurrent to pass muster in the company of the genial in literature. Poe's humorous stories as a whole have tended to belittle rather than increase his fame, many of them verging on the inane. There are some, however, which ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... murder, and soon the enforced silence began to be broken by hurried questions and angry exclamations. A man cursed over the loss of his money and a woman sobbed hysterically. Suddenly, Darrell's incisive tones rang through ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... college were vastly superior to their opponents, but Sullivan and Bartlett were nevertheless strong men and thoroughly prepared. Sullivan was a good lawyer and a fluent and ready speaker, with great power of illustration. Bartlett was a shrewd, hard-headed man, very keen and incisive, and one whom it was impossible to outwit or deceive. He indulged, in his argument, in some severe reflections upon Mr. Webster's conduct toward Wheelock, which so much incensed Mr. Webster that he referred to Mr. Bartlett's argument in a ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... was singularly well equipped for it. He had the qualifications—scholarly training and the power of scientific observation, a background of broad theological and scriptural information, a familiarity with legal learning and practice, as well as a command of vigorous and incisive language—which were certain to make his ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... so without a smile; with his overcoat buttoned up to the chin, his tall hat pressed down to his eyes, and between the two his incisive features and his keen, stern glance, he looked the ideal detective of fiction and the stage. What I looked God knows, but I did my best to glower and show my teeth at his side. I had thrown myself into the game, and it was ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... the employment of a knife-edged hardened steel instrument, so arranged as to be set at any required angle, and its edge caused to penetrate the surface of a cylindrical bar of soft steel or brass. This bar being revolved under the incisive action of the angularly placed knife-edged instrument, it thus received a continuous spiral groove cut into its surface. It was then in the condition of a rudimentary screw; the pitch, or interval between the threads, being determined by the greater or ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... are wholly unlooked for amongst us Friends, and that description of any part of the Lord's works is as unnecessary and carries with it as little of what we mean as can be. Incidents are greater than description, as the telling to me how a tree looked when it was in full foliage is not near so incisive as that the tree fell with a great crash during a storm in the night. Therefore it would be using needless language, which a Friend's discipline enjoins him to beware of, for me to say how friend Hicks's daughter might have seemed to those to whom I wished to impart how she seemed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... led the way without a word through the driveway, and finding the street clear, hurried on rapidly. Her mind, strangely stimulated, was working in quick, incisive flashes. Her work was not yet done. The Sparrow was safe, as far as his life was concerned; but her possession of even the necklace would not save the Sparrow from the law. There was the money that was gone from ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... in reading his letters and dispatches, one is surprised sometimes at the incisive thought and its vigorous expression. There is a passage in which he describes the way in which his soldiers would occasionally desert into some town which he was besieging. "They knew," he writes, "that they ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... were working with strained faces at their highest speed. The windows had been smashed by shrapnel, and bits of glass and things crunched under foot. The room was full of noises—the crackle of the telephones, the crooning of the woman, the croak of the wounded old man, the clear and incisive tones of the general and his brigade-major, the rattle of not too distant rifles, the booming of guns and occasionally the terrific, overwhelming crash of a shell bursting in ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... not much feeling in it perhaps—even Vera, who read it with partial eyes, could not help noting the fact—but, after all, it was in a sense a matter of business; and so she was able to find consolation in its clear, incisive phrasing. She was glad when it was finished, more glad still when they had strolled down to the pillar box outside the gates, and dropped the envelope in it. Their relations were on a definite footing now, and she ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... Amabel, who had developed a painful desire to make herself useful, having divined the altered state of the family finances, was pulling out basting-threads, with a puckered little face bent over her work. She was a very thin child, but there was an incisive vitality in her, and somehow Fanny and Ellen contrived to keep ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... beginning of 1570, and the Admonition was printed at Stirling a few months later. In the same year Buchanan wrote that curious tract called the Chameleon, a satirical attack upon Lethington, which is not very brilliant either in language or conception, and fails altogether in the incisive bitterness which characterises most of Buchanan's other political papers. "It is at least equal in vigour and elegance to that of most compositions in the ancient Scottish language," says Buchanan's biographer, but ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... congenial task. Thus the commendation bestowed by Lucullus on the way in which the probabile had been handled appertains to Catulus. The exposition of the sceptical criticism would naturally be reserved for the most brilliant and incisive orator of the party—Cicero himself. These conjectures have the advantage of establishing an intimate connection between the prooemium, the speech of Catulus, and the succeeding one of Hortensius. In the prooemium the innovations of Philo were mentioned; Catulus then showed that the only object ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... instance, is written in the same measure as "Locksley Hall," fifteen syllables, divided by a pause, into groups of four trochees, and of three and a half—the last syllable forming the rhyme. It is admirably suited to the sustained and incisive manner in which the argument is carried on. "Ixion" in "Jocoseria," is in alternate hexameter and pentameter, which the author also employs here for the only time; it imitates the turning of the wheel on which Ixion is bound. "Pheidippides" ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... nominated Abraham Lincoln as the Republican candidate for United States Senator to succeed Senator Douglas in the National Legislature. On June 16th—after such nomination—Mr. Lincoln made to the Convention a speech—in which, with great and incisive power, he assailed Mr. Douglas's position as well as that of the whole Democratic Pro-Slavery Party, and announced in compact and cogent phrase, from his own point of view, the attitude, upon the Slavery question, of ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... with as much hatred and scorn as his former earnestness commanded respect and sympathy. When, for instance, he tells us, "it would also argue ingratitude towards my genius if I were not to rejoice that to the faculty of an incisive, analytical criticism was added the innocent pleasure in artistic production," it may astonish him to hear that, in spite of this self-praise, there are still men who maintain exactly the reverse, and who say, not only that he has never possessed the gift of artistic production, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... encounter on the hillside at Troezene, the seizure in Phormio's house, the coming of Democrates and his boasts over the captives, the voyage and the pursuing. The son of Neocles never hastened the recital, though once or twice he widened it by an incisive question. At the ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis |
