"Penultimate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where the curtain falls, as the saying goes, on a note of interrogation. An unemphatic ending, as I understand it, is a deliberate anticlimax, an idyllic, or elegiac, or philosophic last act, following upon a penultimate act of very much higher tension. The disposition to condemn such an ending off-hand is what I am here pleading against. It is sometimes assumed that the playwright ought always to make his action conclude within five minutes of its culmination; but for such a hard-and-fast rule I can find ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... that 'nobler,' pronounced as 'nobiler'—[Symbol (metrical): U-shape below the line]—, was the poet's word, and that the accent is to be placed on the penultimate of 'memory.' As to ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... appeared of late, like a penultimate branching-out of the old classical trunk, or, better still, like one of those excrescences, those polypi, which decrepitude develops, and which are a sign of decomposition much more than a proof of life—there has appeared ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... presented themselves in that light to the person most nearly concerned—by name Mr. Peter Fishwick; and moving him to grasp at the forlorn hope presented by a vacant stewardship at one of the colleges, brought him by coach to Oxford. There he spent three days and his penultimate guineas in canvassing, begging, bowing, and smirking; and on the fourth, which happened to be the very day of Sir George's arrival in the city, was duly and handsomely defeated without ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... To be puffectly candid, I've thought the same once or twice when I've caught sight of myself in a mirror at a big moment, when I was all worked up!—Big moments are vury suiting, but on ordinary days" (Cornelia put a strong accent on the penultimate), "my nose," she closed one eye to regard with the other the sharp little tip of the member in question, "there's no getting away from it, that my nose is a set-back! It's a mean little thing, without a mite of dignity. And I'm kinder washed-out and pasty by your English roses! Do you ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... what was that?—but of his confidence, of his spirits and, what was more to the point, of his system. The whole occasion on which the first symptom flared out is before me as I write. I had met them both at dinner: they were diners who had reached the penultimate stage—the stage which in theory is a rigid selection and in practice a wan submission. It was late in the season and stronger spirits than theirs were broken; the night was close and the air of the banquet ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... Words on Religion, under the title of Antepenultimate Words on Religion. As Mr. Pitts observes in his arresting Preface, "Finality, in a time of upheaval, is a relative term, and I hope, at intervals of six months or so, to publish my penultimate, quasi-ultimate and paulo-post-ultimate views on the vital beliefs which underlie the fantastic superstructure of dogmatic theology." The new work will be illustrated with three portraits of the author ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, July 25, 1917 • Various
... water-raising engine, described in the last article in the 'Century' of Inventions. The 'Century' itself had been presented to the king and commons some months previously. This invention, coupled with its penultimate and antepenultimate ninety-ninth and ninety-eighth inventions, may indeed be justly considered as the wonder of the 'Century,' since, when united with the sixty-eighth, they appear, in Partington's opinion, to suggest all the data essential for the construction ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Remembrance The Sun The Flower Unstable Equilibrium The Unit of the World By the Railway Side Pocket Vocabularies Pathos The Point of Honour Composure Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes James Russell Lowell Domus Angusta Rejection The Lesson of Landscape Mr. Coventry Patmore's Odes Innocence and Experience Penultimate Caricature ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... call [Greek: hupostasis]. For the word person seems to be borrowed from a different source, namely from the masks which in comedies and tragedies used to signify the different subjects of representation. Now persona "mask" is derived from personare, with a circumflex on the penultimate. But if the accent is put on the antepenultimate[61] the word will clearly be seen to come from sonus "sound," and for this reason, that the hollow mask necessarily produces a larger sound. The Greeks, too, call these masks [Greek: prosopa] from the ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius |
