"Queerness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and the distinguished politician on his left, and followed by the three high officials and a score of reporters. Turning neither to the right nor the left, he proceeded straight on into the great bar room, where the queerness of his walk and raiment attracted no little attention among the well dressed gentry who nightly meet there to discuss over well compounded punches all affairs appertaining to the welfare of the state. And here, having quenched ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... Saxon derivation. Such a word, for instance, as 'pyramidally,' gives one at once an immediate sense of something mysterious, something extraordinary, and, at the same time, something almost grotesque. And this subtle blending of mystery and queerness characterises not only Browne's choice of words, but his choice of feelings and of thoughts. The grotesque side of his art, indeed, was apparently all that was visible to the critics of a few generations back, who ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... to dae the nicht?' Willie pursued, his mind simmering with curiosity. Macgregor had been very queer since his aunt's visit of the previous afternoon, and the arrival of a letter, eagerly grabbed, had by no means mitigated the queerness. Willie was convinced that something had gone wrong between Macgregor and Christina. He would not be sorry to see the engagement broken. Macgregor would have more time and cash to spend on his friends. On the other hand, Christina was undoubtedly a 'clinker' in her way, ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... grace and vivacious energy this game involves! And then the attendant distractions,—the pinching together of the hand, to form the needed notch, the perfect art of which, like fist-clenching, is unattainable by woman, who substitutes some queerness all her own,—the fierce grasping and propulsion of the cue,—the loving reclension upon the table when the long shots come in,—the dainty foot, uprising, to preserve the owner's balance, but, as it gleams suspended, destroying the observer's,—all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... of clothes and adornments, and answering by short fragments of laughter which had more fidgetiness than mirth in them, remarks that were made from time to time by Mrs. Dewy and Mrs. Penny, who were assisting her at the toilet, Mrs. Day having pleaded a queerness in her head as a reason for shutting herself up in an inner bedroom for the whole morning. Mrs. Penny appeared with nine corkscrew curls on each side of her temples, and a back comb stuck upon her crown like ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... That evening she wrote a letter to Augustus Cabot in Boston. "He is a good boy," she wrote, referring to Galusha, "but queer—oh, dreadfully queer. It's his father's queerness cropping out, of course, but it shouldn't be permitted to develop. I have set my heart on his becoming a financier like the other Galushas in our line. Of course he will always be a Bangs—more's the pity—but his middle ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... from the ranks of the conventional—if such ranks exist at all. The remark of the old Scotch divine to his good wife: "Everybody's queer but thee and me, Nancy, and sometimes I think thee a little queer," sums up human nature admirably. We seldom recognize our own queerness, but are prone to mark the erratic temperaments of others, and this is rather more comfortable than to be annoyed by a ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... in pyjamas and slippers. He explained that he found it too hot to sleep below, so had come up on deck in the hope of being able to cool off a bit prior to having another try. He fell into step alongside me, and began to talk in a low voice, presently turning the conversation to Kennedy and the queerness of his seemingly rooted conviction that we should be attacked. I let him talk on until he appeared to have said all that he had to say upon the subject and was about to go below again, when ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... his or her part and strove in imagination to conceive how they would act and feel as old men and old women, they grew more interested, and more sensible of the mingled pathos and absurdity of the project, and its decided general effect of queerness. They all set themselves to make a study of old age in a manner that had never occurred to them before, and never does occur to most people at all. Never before had their elderly friends received so much ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... and the queerness of this setting, Peter felt that he was the central figure of a dream. The pungent odor of remote incense, the distant tinkling of a bell, the stamping and pawing of the mules and the brooding figure in silk and gold at his side, took him back across the ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... smacked his face, but Silas was Silas, and his good looks and seeming innocence, and something really charming that lay away at the back of his character and gave colour to this personality, managed, somehow, to condone his queerness of conduct. ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... said Lucy, startled at his queerness, but pretty sure that he would explain later; it was not his habit to leave her in doubt as ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... very impersonal, and after a moment or two she began to raise her first finger and to let it fall on the arm of her chair so as to bring back to herself some consciousness of her own existence. She was next overcome by the unspeakable queerness of the fact that she should be sitting in an arm-chair, in the morning, in the middle of the world. Who were the people moving in the house—moving things from one place to another? And life, what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing, ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... fused that, even when we suspect that it may have some expressiveness on its own account, we are nearly incapable of disentangling it. As William James has remarked, a word-sound, when taken by itself apart from its meaning, gives an impression of mere queerness. And when it does seem to have some distinctive quality, we do not know how much really belongs to the sound and how much to some lingering bit of meaning which we have failed to separate in our analysis. For example, because of its initial "s"-sound ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... was "light-fingered." At that time in Peter's life "light-fingeredness" carried with it no opprobrium whatever. It was simply a fact about Ida May, as were her sloe eyes and curling black hair. His reflections renewed his perpetual sense of queerness and strangeness that hall-marked every phase of Niggertown life since ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... about her. Neither, after the first allusions, did the two men expatiate upon Mrs. Osmond—a theme in which Goodwood perceived as many dangers as Ralph. He felt very sorry for that unclassable personage; he couldn't bear to see a pleasant man, so pleasant for all his queerness, so beyond anything to be done. There was always something to be done, for Goodwood, and he did it in this case by repeating several times his visit to the Hotel de Paris. It seemed to Isabel that ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... his party reached the family settlement at Osawatomie. With characteristic queerness the old man did not enter with his sons, Oliver, Jason and John, Jr., and their caravan. He stopped alone on the roadside two miles ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... shaped like ploughshares, and shod with metal; iron anchors, with four flukes; prodigious wooden mallets, used for driving stakes; and various other implements, still more unfamiliar, of which you cannot even imagine the purpose. The indescribable antique queerness of everything gives you that weird sensation of remoteness,—of the far away in time and place,—which makes one doubt the reality of the visible. And the life of Yaidzu is certainly the life of many centuries ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... her, frowning, as though trying to understand or else to explain this queerness of his father's. Next minute he found himself clasped firmly in her arms. He was very thin and light—much thinner than the ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... saying that a man who has been alone in the jungle for more than a year is never quite sane all his life after. People credited Moriarty's queerness of manner and moody ways to the solitude, and said it showed how Government spoilt the futures of its best men. Moriarty had built himself the plinth of a very god reputation in the bridge-dam-girder line. But he knew, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... verb "to steal," because it always made her brother uncomfortable. For Stevie was delicately honest. Certain simple principles had been instilled into him so anxiously (on account of his "queerness") that the mere names of certain transgressions filled him with horror. He had been always easily impressed by speeches. He was impressed and startled now, and ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Edmund's "queerness," and determined to hold her own, settled herself deliberately opposite her visitor, and was soon complaining in her shrill voice of the loneliness of the place and the damp of the climate. Melrose never once looked at his wife. He was paler than usual, with an eager combative aspect, quite new ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... extraordinarily near-sighted, and whatever they did to other objects they magnified immensely the kind eyes behind them. Blessed conveniences they were, in their hideous, honest strength—they showed the good lady everything in the world but her own queerness. This element was enhanced by wild braveries of dress, reckless charges of colour and stubborn resistances of cut, wonderous encounters in which the art of the toilet seemed to lay down its life. She had the tread of a grenadier and ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... definite object before him in his researches seems very doubtful. "He was makin' himsel' a' the time," said Mr. Shortreed; "but he didna ken maybe what he was about till years had passed: at first he thought o' little, I dare say, but the queerness and ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... remember the distinctive philosophical systems advocated by the respective writers. To the students these philosophers represent a group of peculiar people differing one from the other in their degrees of "queerness." One system is as far removed as another from the life that the student experiences; no system helps him to find himself. An introductory course in philosophy should begin with the problems of philosophy; ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... should be ancient, caring nothing for the fashions and the changes and the disintegrations of Meiji (1). That old cemetery behind my garden would be a suitable place. Everything there is beautiful with a beauty of exceeding and startling queerness; each tree and stone has been shaped by some old, old ideal which no longer exists in any living brain; even the shadows are not of this time and sun, but of a world forgotten, that never knew steam or electricity or magnetism or—kerosene oil! Also ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... his own, and he is the one, she judges, who should feel afraid. She, indeed, asks him, does he not fear?... But the opposite takes place. With her love, ardent as his own, frankly given him, all his courage comes back, "And fear, alas!" he observes, a little disconcerted at the queerness of this new experience, "fear, which I never learned,—fear, which you had hardly taught me,—fear, I believe, I, dullard, have already forgotten it!" Bruennhilde laughs in delight—all of joy and laughter is their love after this up on ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... other. They kept the name Dayton, which they had taken after leaving their father. As for Mr. Hickson, at first he did not try to find his sons, but after his anger died away he felt lonely and wanted them back. He felt that it was because of his queerness that they ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Great West • Laura Lee Hope |
