"Misfit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... social rank and standing rather than to leadership qualities. In fact, that is the chief defect in a society which builds up rank and social station; leadership falls then to men by virtue of birth, financial status or some non-relevant distinction. All one has to do is to read of the misfit leaders England's "best" turned out to be in the early part of the late war to realize how inefficient and untrustworthy such leadership may be. One meaning of democracy is that no man is a leader by virtue of anything but his virtues, and that opportunity must be ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... more I muse on those stories old The more philosophy they unfold Of husbands docile and women bold, And Satan's purposes manifold; Ah, many a couple halve their fare With that mistaken and misfit air That the world and all are ready to swear To ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... But when she left school and went up to Oxford, she began to develop and expand mentally, and took her own line, and by the time she was twenty she was, as I never was, a red-hot nationalist. We were neither of us ever inclined to Judaism in religion; we shook off the misfit of Anglicanism at an early age (we both refused at fifteen to be confirmed), but didn't take to our national faith, which we both disliked extremely. Nor did we like most of our fellow Jews; I think as a race we are narrow, cowardly, avaricious, and mean-spirited, and Rosalind thinks we are ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... to the attic with a lantern and dragged from obscurity two frightful misfit suits of the first bicycle cuff-on-the-pants period, that were ripening in the camphor chest for future missionary purposes, announcing that these, together with some flannel shirts, would be his summer outfit, while this morning I went into town and did battle at a sale of substantial, dollar ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... ring of harshness. "Believe me, I am not accustomed to being ranked with the saints," he said. "How shall I get away from your halo? I warn you, it's a most awful misfit. You'll find it out presently, and make me suffer for ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... know why the east wind aggravates life to unhealthy people. It made Mr. Polly's teeth seem loose in his head, and his skin feel like a misfit, and his ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... the rags department," said he. "I've kind of always liked to rig out swell when I could. You know how I hate cheap things, Moll. This suit set me back sixty-five. Anything in the wearing apparel line has got to be just so, or it's to the misfit parlors for it, for mine. If I work I won't have so much coin to hand over to the little ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... was not precisely what the newspapers reported; that simplified things for Tony, as far as they were concerned; and I was careful not to fling at him a single embarrassing question. As dinner went on he lost the worried look he had brought with him, a look that was a misfit for his merry personality. He glanced often with a rather pathetic wistfulness at me, which I read very easily and shamefacedly; and at last he broke out with information concerning a torchlight procession that would set forth ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the stranger sadly. 'However much they may misfit me, they do not misfit my sorry ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... himself to the crowd in the street in the guise of an officer, and so make off. But now—with his fingers on the bolts—misgivings assailed him. He was physically not much like any policeman he had ever seen; and the blue tunic with its brass buttons was a wretched misfit on his slight body. He doubted whether his disguise would pass unchallenged—doubted so strongly that he doubled suddenly to the back door, flung it open, and threw himself out into the black strangeness of the ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... a poet, as all the world is well aware; and your thorough-paced lawyer is not less born a lawyer; while the junction of these two most militant incompatibles clearly bears out the hackneyed quotation as above, with the final misfit, that is, "non fit." Your poetaster at the bar is that grotesque ideal, which Flaccus thought so funny that his friends must laugh; (although really, Romans, it is possible to contemplate a sort of sphinx figure, "a human head to a horse's ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... get your licence, Doc,' he demands, when Peets tells him how it's spelled, 'to jam in that misfit "c"? Me havin' drove stage for twenty years, I've seen as much scenery as any gent present, an' should shore know how it's spelled. Scenery is what you sees. "S-e-e" spells see; an' tharfore I contends that "S-e-e-n-r-y" spells scenery. That "c" you springs on us, Doc, is a solecism, an' as much ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Stopping over night at Angola I proceed to Buffalo next morning, catching the first glimpse of that important " seaport of the lakes," where, fifteen miles across the bay, the wagon-road is almost licked by the swashing waves; and entering the city over a " misfit" plank-road, off which I am almost upset by the most audaciously indifferent woman in the world. A market woman homeward bound with her empty truck-wagon, recognizes my road-rights to the extent of barely room to squeeze past between her wagon ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... microscope alone revealed them to the eye. There is a chance for the thinker in most any of these places that have grown out of this process of finest subdivision of work. The hardship comes only when the mind cannot get interested in the work. In many cases this is undoubtedly due to a misfit, but in most cases it seems to be due to a false notion that there is nothing there ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... she wants well enough, but somehow I just can't do it. I might at one time, but I couldn't now to save my neck from the loop. The old man is plumb right. When a feller's love gets cold on the inside he can't warm it up by external applications. He's a matrimonial misfit, and the sooner he realizes it and is resigned the ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... have a large soiled Asiatic elephant visiting us now, which we suspect belongs to you. His skin is a misfit, and he keeps moving his trunk from side to side nervously. If you have missed an elephant answering to this description, please come up and take him away, as we have no use for him. An elephant on a place so small as ours is more of a ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... word is 'cultivable land.' As to its appropriateness, you can judge for yourselves. I do not know who bestowed upon it this misfit of a name, but it must have been a hardy explorer, who did it in a fit of spleen ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... coral branches were you might watch, whilst Paddy fished, all sorts of things disporting on the sand patches and between the coral tufts. Hermit crabs that had evicted whelks, wearing the evicted ones' shells—an obvious misfit; sea anemones as big as roses. Flowers that closed up in an irritable manner if you lowered the hook gently down and touched them; extraordinary shells that walked about on feelers, elbowing the crabs out of the way and terrorising ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... erected a monument of warning against the Ego. Since his time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure. The tailor adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to his patron's wants. The tailor's object, in this volume, is to fit young men, in universities or elsewhere, to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency; ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... consequence of this plan will be a reduction of failures for the pupil in those subjects whose continued pursuit would mean increased failure. The second consequence may be to relieve teachers of hopeless cases of misfit in any subject, for if the pupils no longer have intolerable subjects imposed on them the teachers will come to demand only tolerable work in the subjects of their choice. The third consequence will probably be to encourage pupils to find themselves by trying out ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... I feel," he responded, lighting a pipe. "You do have a nice gang of them round. There's Candish, for instance. He looks like an advertisement for a misfit tailor, and he's fairly putrid ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... sense as the Milky Way from the earth? What reason was there for thinking that this crusade of his for better schools had any sounder foundation than hia dream of being president, or a great painter, or a poet or novelist or philosopher? He was just a hayseed, a rube, a misfit, as odd as Dick's hatband, an off ox. He was incompetent. He picked up a pen, and began writing. He wrote, "To the Honorable the Board of Education of the Independent District of ——" And he heard a tap at the door. ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... raised her head as he appeared, and met his gaze defiantly, her face flushing red with shame or some kindred feeling. He was struck by a strange likeness between her hard look and the frown with which the old woman at the door had received him; and this, or something in the misfit of her gown, or the glimpse he had of a stocking grotesquely fine in comparison of the stuff from which it peeped—or perhaps the cleanliness of the step she was scouring, since he seemed to instant, just one ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... favorable impression. He had for some time been intending to procure a new suit, but hesitated on account of the expense. Now with a new position in prospect, and a liberal salary he no longer delayed, but purchased a neat black suit—a misfit—for seventeen dollars, and a few small articles of which ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger
... was to come to him in glimpses—sprang from the air as of a general large misfit imposed on the narrow room by the scale and mass of its furniture. The objects, the ornaments were, for the sisters, clearly relics and survivals of what would, in the case of Mrs. Condrip at least, have been called better ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... an obituary column in The Times. As for artists, they, unless they happen to have achieved commercial success or canonization in some public gallery, are pretty sure to be family jokes. Thus, all his finer feelings will be constantly outraged; and he will live, a truculent, shame-faced misfit, with John Bull under his nose and Punch round the corner, till, at some public school, a course of compulsory games and the Arnold tradition either breaks his spirit or makes him a ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... it is to cast mortals into the holes that most misfit them) sometimes, when she has got them there, takes pity, and contemptuously lifts them. Pet was in a hole of hardship, such as his dear mamma never could have dreamed of, and such as his nurture and constitution made trebly disastrous for him. He had taken a chill ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... smiling a little at their blunders. "I can't say I am exactly sorry to see the Reverend Philander N. Glaves transferred,"—his tone was mildly sarcastic,—"for he was a misfit in South Avenue Church. We didn't want him in the first place, but we tried to be decent to him during his year's sojourn with us. However, that's neither here nor there. When three times in succession we are given a man we don't want, I think it is time to kick. We have ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... from his five years of misfit rule in Queen's Park when many of his good offices there are mainly forgotten. It was rather pitiful to observe how incapable Mr. Rowell was of giving vent to his great talents in that Legislature. He did not understand the lingo. Most of it was too piffling ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... or tenderfoot, or greener or chechako, or counter-jumper, owin' to what part of the country you misfit into. We thought you wouldn't have no ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... went down, the potatoes rotted in Grant's bins and his grocery effort was on a par with his horse trading. He then tried the ice market but that became watered stock on his hands and again he was a failure. Later on in life 'mid roar of cannon and rattle of musketry the misfit found his element. Here he was so sure of his calling he made his motto, "I'll fight it out on this line if it takes all summer," and to the general, who could not drive a horse trade, or corner the potato market, or deal ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... maid," the bridegroom muttered, "is fresh from Nature's hands; her boudoir is not cluttered with strings and pins and bands; she does not paint her features, or wear rings on her paws; she's one of Nature's creatures, and lives by Nature's laws. Her foot, she does not force it into a misfit shoe; nor does she wear a corset to squeeze her frame in two. That frame has got upon it no clothes she does not need; she wears no bughouse bonnet that makes man's bosom bleed. This maid, this weaker vessel, has movements swift and free, and she can run and wrestle, and she can climb ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... process, moral character may be shaped and strengthened; but it will not be transformed if it is dross in the first place. That is something which every combat leader has learned in his tour under fire; the man of whom nobody speaks good, who is regarded as a social misfit, unliked and unliking, of his comrades, will usually desert them under pressure. There are others who have the right look but will be just as quick to quit, and look to themselves, in a crisis; underneath, they are ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... fled. His face was thin and pale, his hands white, his body flabby. Clothes and all, he weighed but one hundred and thirty-five pounds. Some old garments had been given him—a cheap brown coat and misfit pair of trousers. Also some change and advice. He was told ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser |
