"Incongruous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I know the truth about anything till I've read them both!" said Mrs. Plumer brightly, tapping the table of contents with her bare red hand, upon which the ring looked so incongruous. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... that are not infrequent in the use of metaphor. A metaphor should not be blended with plain language in the same sentence, nor should it be extended too far. The latter fault is called "straining the metaphor." Two incongruous metaphors should not be used in the same sentence. In the following lines from Addison his muse is first conceived of as a steed that needs to be restrained with a bridle, and then as a ship that is eager ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... is awakened in the bosom: too simple, however, in itself for a stage-plot, though impressive and interesting as a narrative, Mr. Colman has jumbled up with it metal of a lower kind, and so rudely alloyed the gold of Florian, that the value of it is rather injured. Such a mass of incongruous beauties we do not recollect to have seen. A tale of the most pathetic kind is interwoven with low comedy—the most lofty sentiments, the most exalted virtues, and heroism and magnanimity strained almost beyond the limits of probability, are checkered by uncouth pleasantries, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... capabilities. It has been said of Artaxerxes, that the attempt then made to apply recitative to the English language is unsuccessful; but it may be asked, whether the long continued popularity of this work may not, in some degree at least, be owing to the absence of the incongruous mixture of speech and song. However this may be, it is at least a singular coincidence, that the single opera of our language, in which dialogue does not break and interrupt the unity and consistent action of the drama, should ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... scorn. She was not altogether a pleasant woman to look upon. Her cheeks were thin and hollow, her eyes a little too prominent, some hidden expression which seemed at times to flit from one to the other of her features suggested a sensuality which was a little incongruous with her somewhat angular figure and generally cold demeanour. But that she was a woman of courage and resource history ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... him. Prince Caramanico, then viceroy of Sicily, had scientific leanings, and was easily won over to the project of building an observatory, a commodious foundation for which was afforded by one of the towers of the viceregal palace. This architecturally incongruous addition to an ancient Saracenic edifice—once the abode of Kelbite and Zirite Emirs—was completed in February, 1791. Piazzi, meanwhile, had devoted nearly three years to the assiduous study of his new profession, acquiring a practical knowledge ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... Blacktons, and Peggy and Paul, who were busy over some growing geraniums in the dining-room window, faced about with a forced and incongruous appearance of total oblivion to everything that had happened. It lasted less than ten seconds. Joanne's lips quivered. Aldous saw the two little dimples at the corners of her mouth fighting to keep themselves out of ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... just off the Vlamertinghe road about half a mile our side of Ypres. Its grounds are ploughed up by shells and bombs, but most of the fountains and wretched garden statuary remains with the fishponds which perhaps gave the villa its army name, and rustic bridges most egregiously incongruous with the ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... faculties so strong and richly matured, reduced now even to imbecility! The image of death I could withstand, for it is the lot of mortals, but the spectacle of such a mind associated with living extinction, appears incongruous, and to exceed the power of possible combination. Those who witnessed the progressive advances of this mournful condition were prepared for the event by successive changes, but with my anterior impressions, if in his present state I were ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... execution of his plans for the public benefit, and the fulfilling his duties as Protector. But, extreme in all things, given up to immediate impressions, he entered with ardour into this new pursuit of pleasure, and followed up the incongruous intimacies occasioned by it without reflection or foresight. The council-chamber was deserted; the crowds which attended on him as agents to his various projects were neglected. Festivity, and even libertinism, became ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... for which Steele stood sponsor, and was very patiently traduced and calumniated, as he acknowledges to Congreve, in the Dedication prefixed to "The Drummer." There is nothing in the style or manner of any of the three that appears incongruous with such a supposition; and the nature of their principal contents seems to support it. They consist chiefly of pleasantries and oblique strokes, apparently on persons of fashion, in that age, of both sexes. It appears from the Dedication to "The Drummer," that Steele had Addison's direct injunctions ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... the smoking-room, and chatted with a popular composer and one or two men he knew. It was while the waiter was holding out the coffee-tray to him that Mary Ann flashed upon his consciousness. The thought of her seemed so incongruous with the sober magnificence, the massive respectability that surrounded him, the cheerful, marble hearth reddened with leaping flame, the luxurious lounges, the well-groomed old gentlemen smoking eighteenpenny cheroots, the suave, noiseless satellites, that Lancelot ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... sorrowful at the thought that they might not meet again. Trimble Rogers fished out his battered little Bible and quoted a few verses, as appeared to be his habit on all solemn occasions. Jack Cockrell knew him well enough by now to find it not incongruous. Among this vanishing race of sea fighters had been many a hero of the most fervent piety. Their spirit was akin to that of Francis Drake who summoned his crew to prayers ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... turmoils. The blue sky, seen beyond a gaunt profile of one of the farther summits that defined its craggy serrated edge against the ultimate distances of the western heavens, seemed of a singularly suave tint, incongruous with the savagery of the scene, which clouds and portents of storm might better have befitted. The little graveyard, which John Dundas discerned with recognizing eyes, albeit they had never before rested upon it, was revealed suddenly, ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... manifesting its desire for excitement in idle changes of subject and purpose. Incapable of true imagination, it will seek to supply its place by exaggerations, incoherencies, and monstrosities; and the form of the grotesque to which it gives rise will be an incongruous chain of hackneyed graces, idly thrown together,—prettinesses or sublimities, not of its own invention, associated in forms which will be absurd without being fantastic, and monstrous without being terrible. And because, in the continual pursuit of pleasure, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... were no contemporary painters strong enough for the task, and the honours of the enterprise belong almost exclusively to Smirke's "Seven Ages" and one or two plates from the lighter comedies. The great "Bible" of Macklin, a rival and even more incongruous publication, upon which some of the same designers were employed, has fallen into completer oblivion. A rather better fate attended another book of this class, which, although belonging to a later period, may be briefly referred to here. The "Milton" of John Martin has distinct individuality, ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... from the graceful movement of some of the little poems, that Esther must have had ambition as a writer. Then, again, she seemed so wholly, simply, passionately, a woman, to love and be loved, that all thought of anything else in her nature or her life seemed incongruous. ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... time to have friends of her own to stay with her; she might ask the Raymonds, or some of the quiet, clerical families (the real elite, be it observed) to spend a day or drink tea, but the dinner and ball life was too utterly incongruous for an elderly heiress. When it came to the elderly heiress poor Miss Wells was always shut up in utter despair—she who thought her bright-locked darling only grew handsomer each day of ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... presently move across the stage, now in shouting crowds of sword-armed men, now in pitiable incidents of small account, are to be properly understood, and their dramatic setting, stirring blood-thrilling, incongruous as they must be and can only be. I feel that something will come—I even know it. I have been talking vaguely about this and about that; have begun preparing colours, as it were, in the usual careless fashion without explanations or digressions—until ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... artistic, but its effect was deeper than mere prettiness. It was cool, though the autumn sunshine streamed in, and the girl had somehow impressed her personality upon it. Soft colorings, furniture, even the rather incongruous mixture of statuettes and ivory carvings, blended into a harmonious whole, and the girl made a most satisfactory central figure, as she sat opposite him in her unusually thoughtful mood. He felt the charm of her presence, though he could hardly have analyzed it. As he said, it was not even needful ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... savage the outburst, so raucous the voice, so charged with angry chagrin—the whole so incongruous with soft dreams and evening light—that 'twas in a shiver of terror my sister and I turned to discover whose presence had ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... die and should remain as white clothed ghosts in heaven forever they would be an incongruous environment and abiding scandal to the immortality of the Son of God Himself. A living, immortal man shining in a glorified human body surrounded by bodiless souls forever! What a contradiction that would be, what a scandal, indeed. It would be the declaration that the Son of ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... obligation to give the State her full representation on the score of the alleged irregularity of the government through which she has expressed her will; and there does seem to me, in this connection, something incongruous in the proposition that we may impose upon the people a government without legal sanction and demand their obedience to and support thereof, said government meanwhile determining the character of its successors and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... He was aware that he must seem awkward in the role of brother, and he suspected that the little man had noticed it; possibly the little man was one of those keen-witted and humorously inclined persons who find amusement in the incongruous. ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... and mused. She was tall and stately, but her figure was well developed, and her form softly moulded. He admired her immensely. How incongruous an outcome from a clerical family! "It's curious," he said, gazing hard at her, "that you should ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... tastefully-furnished house in the middle of it would have been as incongruous as a new patch in an old garment, and no one dreamt of disturbing the traditional aspect of the place by any attempt ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... not harmonize. If I felt it borne in upon me that I must be a profane fellow to prove my manliness, I would choose another diet than spoon victuals to nourish my formidable zest for naughtiness. Rare beef or wild game would be less incongruous. There are times when a man may be excused for using objectionable language. Stress of righteous indignation, seasons of personal conflict with hansom cabmen, large-headed street car conductors, ubiquitous, never-dying expectorators and many ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... fine, clean-cut nose; the jaws were heavy and brutal; yet the menace of the face was not in these, but in the thin straight lips which closed like the shears of Fate. A cruel smile gathered about the lips as he answered the questions of the court. There was something peculiarly incongruous in the jovial, happy-go-lucky name to which this ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... would tell that person most sincerely there is not a particle of fatuity, shall I call it, in that avowal; cannot be, seeing that from the beginning and at this moment I never dreamed of winning your love. I can hardly write this word, so incongruous and impossible does it seem; such a change of our places does it imply—nor, next to that, though long after, would I, if I could, supplant one of any of the affections that I know to have taken root in you—that great and solemn one, for instance. I feel that if I could get myself remade, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... you, O man! thus to find glory in an act, performed by a nation, which you condemn as a crime or a barbarism, when committed by an individual? In what vain conceit of wisdom and virtue do you find this incongruous morality? Where is it declared that God, who is no respecter of persons, is a respecter of multitudes? Whence do you draw these partial laws of an impartial God? Man is immortal; but nations are mortal. Man has a higher destiny than nations. Can nations be less amenable to the supreme moral ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... on one of the slippery haircloth chairs, facing the mantel where the single candle threw its tiny light afar. Little by little the room crept into shadowy relief—the melodeon in the corner, the what-not, with its burden of incongruous ornaments, and even the easel bearing the crayon portrait of the former mistress of the house, ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... many remarks on persons, I have found not one of a censorious, cynical, envious, or unfriendly nature. Youth is often captious and keenly critical; partly because youth generally has an ideal, partly, perhaps chiefly, from mere intellectual high spirits and sense of the incongruous; occasionally the motive is jealousy or spite. Murray's sense of fun was keen, his ideal was lofty; of envy, of an injured sense of being neglected, he does not show one trace. To make fun of their masters ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... be," cried the empress. "There is no sympathy between Austria and Prussia, and peace will never come to Europe until one succumbs to the other. No dependence is to be placed upon alliances between incongruous nations. In spite of our allies, the English, the Dutch, and the Russians, the King of Prussia has robbed me of my province; and all the help I have ever got from them was empty condolence. For this reason I have sought for alliance with another power—a power which will ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... stores from the Agrippina and Bahama had perforce been conducted. Everything, in fact, was in the wildest confusion. The ship herself was dirty and unsettled, and her decks below lumbered in all directions with all manner of incongruous articles. No one was berthed or messed, nothing arranged or secured. Spare shot-boxes, sea-chests, and heavy articles of baggage or cabin furniture were fetching away to the destruction of crockery and other brittle ware, and the no small danger ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... that each, through some undefined attraction, was veering toward the other. Neither might be aware of this; but it was surely true. Little as social creeds influenced Anice, she could not close her eyes to the incongruous—the unpleasant features of this strange situation. And, besides, there was a more intimate and personal consideration. Her own feeling toward Fergus Derrick was friendship at first, and then she had ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Works where severe Knowledge and Judgment are chiefly exercis'd; those superior Productions of the Understanding must be express'd in a clear and strong manner, without intervening Strains of Wit or facetious Fancies, which, were they admitted, would appear incongruous and impertinent, and diminish the Merit of the Writing. Hence Wit has no place in History, Philology, Philosophy, or in the greater Lyrick or Epick Poems; the two last of which containing either the Praises ...
— Essay upon Wit • Sir Richard Blackmore
... deal of her time "in the moon with Phil" as she put it, departed for Crest House, carrying Philip with her "for inspection," as he dubbed it somewhat ruefully. He wasn't particularly enamored of the prospect of being passed upon by Carlotta's friends and relatives. It was rather incongruous when you came to think of it that the lovely Carlotta, who might have married any one in the world, should elect an obscure village store keeper for a husband. But Carlotta herself had no qualms. She ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... you concerned at the back-slidings of so near a relation; a man of his years and infirmities: These are fine doings, truly — This is a rare example, set by a guardian, for the benefit of his pupils — Monstrous! incongruous! sophistical!' — I thought it was but an act of justice to set her to rights; and therefore explained the mystery. But she would not be undeceived, 'What (said she) would you go for to offer for to arguefy me out of my senses? Did'n't I hear him whispering to her to hold ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... coat and hearty English face looked incongruous, as at sight of the blue and white uniform he came forward with all the hospitable courtesy due to a post-captain. There was shaking of hands, and doffing of cocked hats, and calling for wine, and pipes, and coffee, in the Alhambra-like ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and horses, and little humorous donkeys, browse together in the meadows, and come down in troops to the river-side to drink. They make a strange feature in the landscape; above all when they are startled, and you see them galloping to and fro with their incongruous forms and faces. It gives a feeling as of great, unfenced pampas, and the herds of wandering nations. There were hills in the distance upon either hand; and on one side, the river sometimes bordered on the wooded spurs of ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... course of nature."—Bp. Butler cor. "Then the not-interposing is so far from being a ground of complaint."—Id. "The bare omission, (or rather, the not-employing,) of what is used."—Campbell and Jamieson cor. "The bringing-together of incongruous adverbs is a very common fault."— Churchill cor. "This is a presumptive proof that it does not proceed from them."—Bp. Butler cor. "It represents him in a character to which any injustice is peculiarly ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... odes, whereunto, I must plainly confess to, you, I have seen yet nothing parallel in our language." The criticism was just. It is when Milton escapes from the shackles of the dialogue, when he is discharged from the labour of uniting two incongruous styles, when he is at liberty to indulge his choral raptures without reserve, that he rises even above himself. Then, like his own good Genius bursting from the earthly form and weeds of Thyrsis, he ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a proviso that might eventually defeat free trade by postponement. After some finessing, the Government showed a determination to go on with both bills. Lord John Russell and the Whigs saw their opportunity, and to the dismay of the First Lord, he found the strange, incongruous, unprecedented combination of Irish Repealers, Tory Protectionists, Whigs, and Manchester League-men prepared to vote against him on his Irish Coercion Act. The debate on it occupied six nights. It was closed on the 25th of June by Mr. Cobden; the division ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... ingenious home-maker often finds that the worse a thing is, the better it can be made by competent and careful study. To complete and adapt incompetent things to orderliness and beauty, to harmonise incongruous things into a perfect whole requires and exercises ability of a high order, and the consciousness of its possession is no small satisfaction. That it is constantly being done shows how much real cleverness is necessary ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... prairie. Her greatest accomplishments consisted of some skill in bakery and the handling of half-broken teams; but she had once or twice given him what he recognised as excellent advice. There was something incongruous in the situation, but, as usual, he preferred ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... in waking has had the confused memory of a dream in which events have been so mingled and mixed as to present no uniform narrative, but only a mass of strange and incongruous occurrences, without object or connexion, may form some notion of the state of restless excitement my brain suffered from, as the many and conflicting ideas my late adventures suggested, presented themselves to my mind in ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... thing to save the Skip; and never let any Man Reproach the Gallunarian King with breaking the Treaty of Division, and disregarding the Faith and Stipulations of Leagues; for this is an Action so inconsistent with it self, so incongruous to common Justice, to the Reason and Nature of things, that no History of any of these latter Times can parallel it, and 'tis past the Power of Art to make any reasonable Defence ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... right to be there, since they lead to nothing, lend view to nothing, clamour for bronze and sculpture to explain their existence as niches and receptacles for statuary. It is nevertheless indubitably true that these incongruous and misplaced elements, crowded together, leave a strong impression of picturesque force upon the mind. From certain points and angles, the effect of the whole, considered as a piece of deception and insincerity, is magnificent. It would ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... had a strain of melancholy in it, partly the result of chronic asthma, and partly, no doubt, of a melancholic temperament. This strain, being constant, sometimes had a curiously incongruous effect as contrasted with the subject or circumstances in hand. Whether hailing the dawn of the millennium; holding playful converse with a child, making a speech before the Board,—under whatever rhetorical conditions, Mr. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... it was an old incident, that he had never spoken a word to the young man he had seen, and that he had only seen him once for a few minutes. The reason of his remembering him so well was that he had been struck by his appearance, so strangely incongruous in the circumstances, and that had made him look very sharply at him. Over two years had passed since, but it was still distinct in his memory. He had come to a small frontier settlement, a military outpost, on the extreme north-eastern border of the Republic, and ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... too incongruous in its ineptitude with the serious, brooding and enigmatic glance he turned ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... matter-of-fact tone (obviously assumed) which was very incongruous with the feeling it excited in Cecily. She could not hear the ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... Henry on the bridge staring after him, and as he went towards the Grafton Street gate, there was something slightly incongruous about his look. ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... one takes the pains to analyze the standard he will be impressed by the perfect co-relation of harmony of all parts of the dog, from the tip of his broad, even muzzle, to the end of his short screw tail. Nothing incongruous in its makeup presents itself, but a graceful, symmetrical style characterizes the dog, and I firmly believe that any change whatever would be ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... possible, the bent of their own minds, or whatever it is they have in place of minds. It is the attitude of the sensible hen towards her ducklings, when she has had frequent experience of their incongruous ways, and is satisfied that they know best what is good for them; though, of course, their ways seem peculiar to her, and she can never entirely sympathize with their fancy for going into water. I ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... coarse exaggerations in the work of his imitators. The swaggering attitude, the freedom of gesture, and the dramatic expression, shorn of the strength and earnest emotion from which they sprang, became disagreeably incongruous in the pictures of the feeble painters who ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... my windows is the barn where my Catholic men are having High Mass, and where in half an hour, if alive, we shall have our service too. There was a good precedent for stables, I believe, 1915 years ago, so we do not view it as incongruous, but I understand that High Mass is unusual, and no doubt a great honour to the Regiment. I hear that our leave does not come off till January 6th. That puts me into the trenches to-morrow night again, for a short time. Last night, about 10.30 o'clock, I was ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... Cartwright, and three or four more officers riding. After them came the caissons and the other ammunition wagons, and then more warriors, hundreds and hundreds, joining in that ferocious whining chorus. The red coats of the British officers lent a strange and incongruous touch to this scene ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... ladies in his wild train: the mother to whom he was spiritual physician, director, and guide; the gentle and silent daughter who was his wife; flaming over the Continent and through all the troubles in Scotland with these incongruous followers behind him, then coming back to drop the two tame sparrows in the quiet nest which their mother had left for love of him! All we know of them is that in their early childhood he did not spare the rod; yet was grieved to see them ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... parallel. The divergence is not less impressive. In contrast with the solid political unity into which the various and incongruous elements have settled themselves, the unity of the Christian church is manifested by oneness neither of jurisdiction nor of confederation, nor even by diplomatic recognition and correspondence. Out of the total population of the United States, amounting, according to ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... (the Spaniard), under the pretence of a superannuated transgression, contrary to the opinion of the more honest sort of gownsmen, who maintained that his Majesty's pardon lay inclusively in the commission he gave him on his setting out to sea; it being incongruous that he, who remained under the notion of one dead in the law, should as a general dispose of the lives of others, not being ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... didn't say it. The brutality of his expression slowly changed as he looked at her. A gentle light stole slowly, and it seemed with difficulty, into his eyes, where it looked as out of place as the love-light in the eyes of a tiger. But there was no mistaking it. However incongruous it was there, and the lips that had been framing a cruel retort merely gave utterance ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... the old mare's back, and Jarvis, at the bits of the young horse, were bringing back the plough undamaged by its brisk career across the field. Jarvis certainly presented a somewhat incongruous appearance in his afternoon attire, as he plunged along the furrows in foot-gear not intended for locomotion over freshly ploughed land. Jake rose to his feet, answering the queries of Ferry at his side as ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... to do but sit down and wait. The very chairs were of an architecture and upholstery incongruous to them. They knew something of luxury, but not of this school. There was nowhere for them to look that something alien did not meet their eyes. So they ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... the sheriff heavily, "was a preliminary; like they say in the sporting papers. The big event is that you're goin' to say your adoos to Socorro without bein' allowed to make any farewell announcement. The reason is that you an' Socorro is incongruous—like a side-saddle on a razor-back hog. Socorro won't stand for you a minute longer. You're a Public Favorite which has lost its popularity an' which has become heterogeneous to the established order of things. In other words, ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... dead. Yet he lingered. And now, at the sight of her bruises, he rushed forward with inferior regrets. He will bear study, this weeping one. Of all the sprawling Mallares, he alone lacks logic. But I will come to him later. The plot is more entertaining than this incongruous spectator weeping and hissing out ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... idea for England at the time, it was a fairly well established tradition on the Continent, and Handel may very likely have seen a similar entertainment in Italy. The subscribers to the opera would see little in it that was incongruous. They were accustomed to see singers in all operas wearing dresses that differed very little from their own, and scenery which recalled their own Italianate gardens and palaces; Handelian opera, in any case, left little ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... themselves obtain admittance, that they will not be allowed to continue members after they are known to be such; nor will it be well taken, if, on any pretense whatever, any shall attempt to introduce or impose any youth upon this seminary, whose character shall be incongruous to, and militates against, the highest, chiefest, and dearest interests of ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... ranking Shakspeare the great poet of Nature, it is meant that he had the purpose and the power to think what was natural, and to select and follow it,—that, among his thick-coming fancies, he could perceive what was too fine, what tinged with personal vanity, what incongruous, unsuitable, feeble, strained, in short, unnatural, and reject it. His vision was so strong that he saw his characters and identified himself with them, yet preserving his cool judgment above them, and subjecting all he felt through them to its test, and developing it through this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... fierce, tender and hospitable. The inner life of his household is exceedingly charming, because one is astonished to find the graces and accomplishments of womanhood displayed in a scene which has a certain sort of savage rudeness about it after all, and where all kinds of incongruous accidents are visible in the service of the table, in the furniture of the house, in its decorations, menials, and surrounding scenery."[18] The Southerners themselves took its incongruities much as a matter of ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... which may be cited for and against this theory the objector may argue that the generally extravagant praise bestowed upon Soma through the Veda is in any one case merely particularized, and that it is not incongruous to say of the divine soma-plant, "he lights the dark nights," when one reads in general that he creates all things, including the gods. On the other hand, the advocate of the theory may reply that everything which does not apply to the moon-god Soma ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... upon the dismal aspect of the chimney and orchard, round which so many horses and wagons had not gathered since the daughter of the house was long ago married here. There was a sprinkle of gray in his hair, and he remembered the jollities of the wedding,—incongruous recollection,—and once more he looked at the stark figure, its face covered with a white cloth, which had been done in a sentiment of atonement for the unseemly ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... delicate hands and feet! I hear the ignorant patois of the East Side underworld. I smell the brimstone in his suppressed rage at my dislike. There's something uncanny in the sensuous droop of his heavy eyelids and the glitter of his steel-blue eyes. There's something incongruous in his whole personality. I was afraid of him the moment ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... grown up amid the incongruous society of models and artists and, as it were, in the fumes of paradoxes and pipes. A little creature, she served as a plaything for this painter without talent, and he allowed her to romp, bound and leap on the divans like a kitten. Moreover, the child lighted ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... perhaps hypaethral; there is no central court, and other apartments form distinct blocks. For possible geographical reasons for this duality of type see CRETE. In spite of many comparisons made with Egyptian, Babylonian and "Hittite'' plans, both these arrangements remain incongruous with any remains of prior or contemporary structures elsewhere. Whether either plan suits the "Homeric palace'' does not affect the present question. (4) A type of tomb, the dome or "bee-hive,'' of which the grandest examples ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the Boer burgher was none the less incongruous than the physical appearance of the majority of them, although no expensive uniform and trappings could have been of more practical value. The men of the Pretoria and Johannesburg commandos had the unique honor of going to the war in uniforms ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... serpentine. A man's is jerks, hops, convulsions, and acute angles. The woman is light, airy, indistinctly defined. Airy movements are in keeping. The man is sombre in hue, grave in tone, distinctly outlined; and nothing is more incongruous, to my thinking, than his dancing. The feminine drapery conceals processes and gives results. The masculine absence of drapery reveals processes, and thereby ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... McDonald, J. Ramsay, quoted McDowell, Mary E. McNamara, Maggie Mahoney, Hannah (Mrs. Nolan) Maloney, Elizabeth Marot, Helen Marriage, an unstandardized trade and factory life and organization Marriage, and the working-woman Married woman, as a half-time worker as a wage-earner economic status of incongruous position of Married women and the labor movement Matthews, Lillian, quoted Maud Gonne Club Maurice, F.D. Mead, George H. Merriam, Charles E. Mill, John Stuart Minimum wage, employers' objections to for the immigrant in Australia ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... it has its place as one of the instruments of poetical effect, is a dangerous element to handle. Spenser's age was very insensible to the presence and the dangers of the grotesque, and he was not before his time in feeling what was unpleasing in incongruous mixtures. Strong in the abundant but unsifted learning of his day, a style of learning, which in his case was strangely inaccurate, he not only mixed the past with the present, fairyland with politics, mythology with the most serious ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... the day, for I am now Estaiblished!" and Francesca, clad in Miss Grieve's Sunday bonnet, shawl, and black cotton gloves, entered, and curtsied demurely to the floor. She held, as corroborative detail, a life of John Knox in her hand, and anything more incongruous than her sparkling eyes and mutinous mouth under the melancholy ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... if the widow had taken a fancy to some nice girl and had had her to live in the house. But Mrs. Ogilvie did not take fancies to nice girls. She loved Jane Erskine, but disguised the feeling under a sort of whimsical indifference. And the friendship seemed incongruous enough if one came to think of it. Jane, with her wholesome love of outdoor life, her fresh beauty, her heedlessness of learning and ignorance of books—what had Jane in common with Mrs. Ogilvie in her Parisian gowns ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... led me to suspect 'more was meant than met the ear.' Whenever this chord is touched, my heart instantly becomes tremulous; and with sensibility so painful as fully to lay open its weakness; against which I must carefully and resolutely guard. It is these incongruous these jarring tokens that engender doubt, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... to him, only his arm keeping her from falling. A man had thrown his coat about her, and Garland pulled it over her, then, looking down, saw her feet, bare and scratched in pointed, high-heeled slippers. The sight of them, incongruous reminders of the intimate aspects of life, brought him down to the moment and her place ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... coats, hats, and mackintoshes. At the right, where a fire glowed and blazed under a huge open chimney-place, there were low chairs and divans drawn up to mark off a space for orderly domestic occupation. The irregularity of every thing outside—the great table in the centre of the hall strewn with an incongruous litter of caps, books, flasks, newspapers, gloves, tobacco-pouches; the shoes, slippers, and leggings scattered under the benches at the sides—all this self-renewing disorder of a careless household struck Thorpe with a profound surprise. It was like nothing so much as a Mexican ranch—and ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... believed he had taxed the forbearance of the powers above to the extremity of endurance and that this was the result. It might have seemed to him a waste of pomp and ammunition to kill a bug with a battery of artillery, but there seemed nothing incongruous about the getting up such an expensive thunderstorm as this to knock the turf from under an ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... three days. Latish, on the very first day of the hiring, close upon dark, he had despatched imperative orders to Phippun and Company to take the glass out of his house on the spot. And why? Because, as he maintained, there was a fault in the glass causing an incongruous and absurd reflection; and he was at that moment awaiting the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... at Overstow was certainly a strange and incongruous one, consisting as it did of persons who seemed all in league with each other, the master-criminal whose shrewd, steel-grey eyes were so uncanny, and his accomplices and underlings who all profited and grew fat upon the great coups planned by Rayne's amazing mind. The squire of Overstow mesmerized ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... considerable extent, despotic though his power is supposed to be. It is opinion, in the last resort, that governs every where,—under an absolute monarchy quite as determinedly as under a liberal polity like ours or England's. There is a large party in France, composed of the most incongruous materials, which has the profoundest interest in misrepresenting the policy of the Imperial government, and which is full of men of culture and intellect,—men whose labors, half-performed though they are, must have considerable effect ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... to doubt that if that faith should prove to be incompatible with our knowledge, or necessary want of knowledge, some other hypostasis of men's hopes, genuine enough and worthy enough to replace it, will arise. But that the incongruous mixture of bad science with eviscerated papistry, out of which Comte manufactured the positivist religion, will be the heir of the Christian ages, I have too much respect for the humanity of the future to believe. Charles the Second told his ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... almost to a minute. When you are received as a guest in a friend's house, consider compliance with the hours and habits of the family, as a natural return for the hospitality which is shown to you. There is something incongruous in seeing a young person deranging, by his unpunctuality, the economy and regularity of a whole household. And do not suffer the kindness and indulgence of your parents to induce you, when with them, to be less attentive to punctuality than you are, when ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... display of landscape gardening as well as architecture, but the former has been neglected. The one thing that strikes a stranger and almost bewilders him is the vivid colors. They seem unnatural and inappropriate for a sacred city, but are not more incongruous than other features. ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... with the ease of happy youth and her flushed cheeks were pinker than her simple gown. She looked farther removed from her occupation than any woman in the room and to Dr. Harpe, following her with her eyes, the connection seemed incongruous. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... saddle, his expression ugly and defiant, and yet touchingly helpless, the look of a boy in trouble and at bay. The horseman came into sight on the trail below, riding hard, a middle-aged man in a dark sack suit and a straw hat, an oddly incongruous figure and manifestly weary. He rode bent forward, and now and again he raised his eyes from the trail and searched the wall above with bloodshot, ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... forced to pull up and halt. In the meantime some slow but steady operations went on with a perseverance that was highly creditable; and it was now that, having a little agreeable leisure to observe and look about him, he began to examine the extraordinary costumes of the incongruous society in which, to his astonishment, he found himself a party. We must, however, first account for the oddness and incongruity of the apparent characters which they were ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... by a committee. The proposition met with able advocacy and also with some warm opposition. It is illustrative of the crude conceptions regarding the uses of books which prevailed in the minds of some members, that the library was objected to on the somewhat incongruous grounds of embracing too many editions of the Bible, and a number of the French writers in skeptical philosophy. It was gravely proposed to pack up this portion of the library, and return it to the ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... Walked much alone, shunned companionship rather than sought it, worked as he walked, and was marked down as a 'pot-hunter.' He 'worked while he ate, he cut down his sleep, and for him the penalty came, not in a palpable, definable illness, but in an abrupt, incongruous reaction and collapse.' With rage he looked back on these insensate years of study which had weakened him just when he should have been ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... till it seems as if a repetition of it must produce bodily effects dire to contemplate, yet that happens to be the very story you must tell. What can you do? I answer, "Make believe." The device seems incongruous with the repeated warnings against pretence; but it is necessary, and it is wise. Pretend as hard as ever you can to be interested. And the result will be—before you know it—that you will be interested. ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... there are a winter sea and a summer sea, brilliantly different, with a delicate variety between the hastening blue of spring and the lingering blue of September. There you bathe from the rocks, untroubled by tides, and unhurried by chills, and with no incongruous sun beating on your head while your fingers are cold. You bathe when the sun has set, and the vast sea has not a whisper; you know a rock in the distance where you can rest; and where you float, there float ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... man, he put out the lights of the three seven-branched candlesticks which illumined the beautiful old room; and, as he moved about, he suddenly became aware that nearly opposite the door giving into the staircase lobby was a finely-carved, oak, confessional-box. What an odd, incongruous ornament to ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... be conveyed by this scene is one of the beautiful, vivid life of the sea all about—sunshine on the deck in a great flood, the fresh sea wind blowing across it. In the midst of this, these two incongruous, artificial figures, inert and disharmonious, the elder like a gray lump of dough touched up with rouge, the younger looking as if the vitality of her stock had been sapped before she was conceived, ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill |
