"Discursiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with deep enthusiasm, which he found in the old poet, met his conception of what a practical poem should be. And so, although the desultory maxims of the Works and Days give but a faint image of the comprehensive width and studied discursiveness of the Georgics, yet they present a much more real parallel to it than the learned trifling of Aratus or Nicander. For Virgil, like Lucretius, is no trifler: he uses verse as a serious vehicle for impressing his conviction; he acknowledges, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... with all the rhapsodic passion of a god creating a new world. He began with a preamble that would have broken a copy-reader's heart. He followed it up with atmospheric discursiveness that would have worn away an editor's blue pencil. He told how Steam and Steel were supposed to have crushed the Spirit of Romance out of the age. He pointed out how the modern city of stone and concrete seemed no longer to house that wayward and retrospective spirit ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... of his criticisms, which might well have been much bolder. The real attraction of the work he undertook was, that it would give him scope for widely-ranging comment; and it is the inevitable, by no means inartistic or unhealthy discursiveness of the treatment which makes it difficult to do justice to it. But we will venture upon a point or ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... with the essay on the Dravidian Pig, to a down-country paper, which printed both in full. The essay was rather highflown; but if the Editor had seen the stacks of paper, in Pinecoffin's handwriting, on Nafferton's table, he would not have been so sarcastic about the "nebulous discursiveness and blatant self-sufficiency of the modern Competition-wallah, and his utter inability to grasp the practical issues of a practical question." Many friends cut out these remarks and sent ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... embarrassed, apologetic even, in Richard Calmady's presence. He felt vaguely responsible as for some neglected duty, as though there was something somehow which he ought to set right. And this feeling harassed him, increasing the natural discursiveness and inconsequence of his speech. He was so terribly nervous of forgetting and of hurting the young man's feelings by saying the wrong thing, that all possible wrong things got upon his brain, with the disastrous ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... when in the first parliament of the Dominion the most prominent men of the provinces were brought into public life, under the new conditions of federal union. The debating power of the provincial legislative bodies is excellent, and the chief defects are the great length and discursiveness of the speeches on local as well as on national questions. It is also admitted that of late years there has been a tendency to impair the dignity and to lower ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... its overwhelming fantasy, which annihilates all chance of its possibility. The best short-stories represent a struggle between fantasy and fact. And the mediaeval monkish tale fails by reason of the discursiveness and huddling together of incidents, without regard to their dramatic values, which the moral application necessitates. In a word, both are deficient in technique—the concealed art which, when it has combined its materials so that they may accomplish their most impressive effect, causes the total ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... work, therefore, hurried on his business with an activity which nothing could discourage, neither Oriental discursiveness—that refined fair-spoken politeness, under which is hidden ferocity—nor coolly indifferent smiles, nor averted looks, invoking divine fatalism when human lies fail. The self-possession of this southerner, in whom was condensed, as it were, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet |
