"Extravagant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a funeral sermon. She was, in a few words, the stay of all my affairs, the centre of all my enterprises, the engine that by her prudence reduced me to that happy compass I was in, from the most extravagant and ruinous project that fluttered in my head as above; and did more to guide my rambling genius, than a mother's tears, a father's instructions, a friend's counsel, or all my own reasoning powers could do. I was happy in listening ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... a very young man, is about to enter on public life, having an inordinate opinion of himself, and an extravagant ambition. Socrates, 'who knows what is in man,' astonishes him by a revelation of his designs. But has he the knowledge which is necessary for carrying them out? He is going to persuade the Athenians—about what? Not about any particular ...
— Alcibiades I • (may be spurious) Plato
... in his schemes of foreign policy and conquest, his domestic life was clouded with the deepest anxiety, in consequence of the declining health of the queen, and the eccentric conduct of his daughter, the infanta Joanna. We have already seen the extravagant fondness with which that princess, notwithstanding her occasional sallies of jealousy, doated on her young and handsome husband. [10] From the hour of his departure she had been plunged in the deepest dejection, sitting day and night with her eyes fixed on the ground, in uninterrupted silence, or ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... moment, as the essence of his spirit and his attitude. He disengaged, he would be damned if he didn't—they were both phrases he repeatedly used—his responsibility. The simplest, the sanest, the most obliging of men, he habitually indulged in extravagant language. His wife had once told him, in relation to his violence of speech; that such excesses, on his part, made her think of a retired General whom she had once seen playing with toy soldiers, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... forwarding this great and dubious undertaking, and God forbid I should add so unreasonable a charge as your liberality points at. I am very frank in money matters, and always take my price when I think I can give money's worth for money, but this is quite extravagant, and you must think no more of it. Should I want money for any purpose I will readily make you my banker and give you value in reviews. John Ballantyne's last remittance continues to go off briskly; the devil's in you in London, ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... that wherever he rested his friendly eye there fell an influence as pleasant as the September sun—as if he could make grapes and pears or even human affection ripen by looking at them. What was odd in him was a certain mixture of the correct and the extravagant: as if he were an adventurer imitating a gentleman with rare perfection or a gentleman who had taken a fancy to go about with hidden arms. He might have been a dethroned prince or the war-correspondent of a newspaper: he represented both enterprise and tradition, good manners and ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... Mason or Morel had opened a branch establishment at Hanby House. Though the staying guests could not do much for the good things set out, they were not wasted, for the place was fairly taken by storm shortly before the advertised hour of meeting; and what at one time looked like a most extravagant supply, at another seemed likely to prove a deficiency. Each man helped himself to whatever he fancied, without waiting for the ceremony of an invitation, in the usual ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... of our dinner was a roast lamb, served on a large circular wooden board, the head being split in twain, and laid on the top of the pyramid of dismembered parts. We had another jovial evening, in which the wine-cup was plied freely, but not to an extravagant excess, and the usual toasts and speeches were drunk and made. Even in returning to rest, I had not yet done with the pleasing testimonies of welcome. On entering the bed-chamber, I found many fresh and fragrant flowers inserted in the ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... by an arrangement which failed when applied to those of the widow, and her opinions by the simple process of looking at everything from one point of view. Her forte was dress and general ornamentation; not that Miss Letitia was extravagant—far from it. If one may use the expression, she utilized for ornament a hundred bits and scraps that most people would have wasted. But, like other artists, she saw everything through the medium of her own art. She looked at birds with an eye to hats, and at flowers with reference to ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... had ever dreamed of in her youthful days. She felt very affluent. All things considered, it was quite as well that Peyton had quit this earthly scene after two years of married life for "Kitty" had rapidly developed extravagant tastes and there were many "scenes." Her old associates saw her no more, and later the new ones often wondered why the dashing young widow did not ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... what they found out against him—then the Government took all his money, and your mother had to manage as well as she could with the little property left her by your grandfather. She ought to have owned all the country round, but your great-grandfather was an extravagant man, Boris Andreievitch! and he sold everything ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... Gabalis; or the Extravagant Mysteries of the Cabalists, exposed in Five Pleasant Discourses on the Secret Sciences. Done into English by P. A. (Peter Ayres), Gent., with short Animadversions. London printed for B. M., printer to the Royal Society of the Sages at the Signe of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... else, he would have put himself terribly into her father's power. He was willing to submit to such pecuniary burden in the matter as his conscience told him that he ought to bear; but Mr. Snow's ideas on the subject of recompense night be extravagant; and therefore,—as regarded Snow the father,—he thought that he might make some slight and delicate use of the meeting under the lamp-post. In doing so he would be very careful to guard Mary from her father's ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... in every age; and, until a very recent period, all who wished to "point a moral or adorn a tale," about unreasoning ambition, extravagant pride, and the formidable frenzies of free will when leagued with free power, have never failed to blazon forth the so-called madman of Macedonia as one of the most glaring examples. Without doubt, many of these writers adopted with implicit credence traditional ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... rupture that followed between the brothers, Josephine retained her position in the heart and home of her uncle without espousing the cause of either; and her father was too prudent not to recognize the near and prospective advantages of such a mediator. Accustomed to her parents' extravagant denunciations, and her uncle's more repressed but practical contempt of them, the unfortunate girl early developed a cynical disbelief in the virtues of kinship in the abstract, and a philosophical resignation to its effects upon her personally. Believing ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... for he knew not how long, Honore de Balzac entrusted his interests to his mother. They were of such opposite temperaments, the one imaginative and extravagant, staking his whole life and fortune on fabulous figures, and the other precise, calculating and rather austere, that they could hardly be expected to understand each other, and frequent clashes had blunted all their tenderer impulses. Mme. de Balzac could not understand her son's ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... Coga, who had studied at Cambridge, and was said to be a bachelor of divinity. He was indigent, and "looked upon as a very freakish and extravagant man." Dr. King, in a letter to the Hon. Robert Boyle, remarks "that Mr. Coga was about thirty-two years of age; that he spoke Latin well, when he was in company, which he liked, but that his brain was sometimes a little too warm." The ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... lacerated named certain nobles, as if by means of their clients and other low-born persons known as criminals and informers, they had employed various artifices for injuring them. This infernal delegate, carrying his investigations to an extravagant length, presented a malicious report to the emperor, in which he told him that such atrocious crimes as many people had committed at Rome could not be investigated nor punished without the ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... acquiescence, submitting in a forced conformity, and believing, not without cause, that a tide which flowed so hotly would before long turn and ebb back again. Among the Reforming clergy there was neither union nor prudence; and the Protestants, in the sudden sunshine, were becoming unmanageable and extravagant. On the bench there were but four prelates who were on the moving side,—Cranmer, Latimer, Shaxton, and Barlow,[528]—and among these Cranmer only approved the policy of the government. Shaxton was an arrogant braggart, and Barlow a feeble enthusiast. Shaxton, who had flinched ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... was a cosmopolitan public. Groups of Italian women crooned to each other in their soft voices over the bargains for babies displayed at the spring opening; factory girls compared notes, chattered, calculated, tried to resist, and ended by an extravagant choice; the German women looked and priced and bought nothing; the Hungarians had evidently spent their money on arriving. From the store window wax figures of the ideal woman, clad in latest Parisian garb, with golden hair and blue eyes, gazed down benignly into the faces uplifted ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... fever-fits of his illness, the wasted politician first begged piteously that they would not send him home unplaced, and then he would break out in the most extravagant and pompous boasts about his position, his Congressman and his influence. When he came to himself, he was silent, morose, and bitter. Only once did he melt. It was when he held Col. Mason's hand and bade him good-bye. Then the tears came into his eyes, and what he would have said ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... in a state of extravagant delight. Most men have a secret treasure somewhere. The miser has his golden hoard; the virtuoso his pet ring; the student his rare book; the poet his favourite haunt; the lover his secret drawer; but Cosmo ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... model gowns for next season at the Countess of Severn's new dressmaking, drawing-rooms whither all snobdom crowded and shoved to get near the trade-marked coronet, and where bewildering young ladies strolled haughtily about all day long, displaying to agitated Gotham the most startling gowns in the extravagant metropolis. ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... extravagant we'll go bankrupt, and then we won't any of us have jobs.... Still, I am willing to raise you ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... all most natural and right if any other woman than Amy were in question," said Mr. Enderby; "but one never knows to what extravagant lengths ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... Foljambe completely, which must explain why he went into his drawing-room, shut the door, and looked out of the window when the second cab arrived. She opened the door, put her arms inside, and next moment emerged again with Tipsipoozie on the end of the chain, making extravagant exhibitions of delight. Then to Georgie's horror, the drawing-room door opened, and in came Tipsipoozie without any chain at all. Rapidly sending a message of love in all directions like a S. O. S. call, Georgie put a small ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... that amounted almost to a moral conviction, he refused to include the house and potato-patch in the property. When the company had yielded the point, he declined, with equal tenacity, to part with it to outside speculators on even the most extravagant offers. In vain Mrs. Mulrady protested; in vain she pointed out to him that the retention of the evidence of his former humble occupation was a green blot upon ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... 'I too am a poet.' Nothing in Tasso's character was more tenacious than the consciousness of his vocation and the kind of self-support he gained from it. Like the melancholy humor which degenerated into madness, this sense of his own intellectual dignity assumed extravagant proportions, passed over into vanity, and encouraged him to indulge fantastic dreams of greatness. Yet it must be reckoned as a mitigation of his suffering; and what was solid in it at the period of which I now am writing, was the certainty of his rare ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... deny but that the pedagogue sometimes surprises me, with the novelty of his opinions; but they are extravagant. I have condescended, oftener than became me, to shew how full of hyperbole and paradox they were. Still he as constantly maintained them, with a kind of congruity that astonished me, and even rendered many of ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... the plains—father came to be considered the boss of the train. There was a ranch near the road, kept by a Frenchman, who had an Indian wife. He had grown rich selling whisky and provisions, and wood and hay. When the half-frozen men, with their hungry teams, came by, he charged them extravagant prices; if they objected he blustered and threatened until he usually scared them into paying what he asked. Father and his train camped there one cold night, and some of the men went up to buy wood and hay; but he asked such high prices for them that they went back and ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... eroded into galleries, balconies, alcoves, and Gothic caves that lent to them an additional weird and wonderful aspect, while the reverberating turmoil of the ever-descending flood was like some extravagant musical accompaniment to the extraordinary panorama flitting past of rock sculpture ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... characters, they have paid little attention to facts, to the costume of the times of which they pretend to treat, or to the general principles of human nature. They have been faithful only to their own puerile and extravagant doctrines. Generals and statesmen are metamorphosed into magnanimous coxcombs, from whose fulsome virtues we turn away with disgust. The fine sayings and exploits of their heroes remind us of the insufferable perfections of Sir Charles ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to say extravagant, was the great cathedral, which was laid out on strange 'lines,' having a huge circular chapel or pavilion of immense height in front, whose round roof was capped by a vast bulbous spire, in shape something after the pattern of a gigantic mangel-wurzel! ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... and extravagant hour in a seed and bulb store resulted in my getting all the flower favorites I had loved in my childhood. I also bought the seeds of all vegetables which Dicky and I liked, and a few more, and put them in Mr. ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... document, as given by Mather, an absolute misrepresentation of the transaction, and places Phips in the attitude of having disregarded the advice of the Ministers, in suffering the trials to proceed as they did; throwing upon his memory a load of infamy, outweighing all the florid and extravagant eulogies showered upon him, in the Life: verifying and fulfilling the apprehensions he expressed in his letter of the fourteenth of October, 1692: "I know my enemies are seeking to turn it ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... his warning "Th' extravagant and erring spirit hies "To his confine, whether in sea or air, "Or earth, or ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... object of prosecution. At a time in which the press has been the grand instrument of the subversion of order, of morals, of religion, and, I may say, of human society itself, to carry the doctrines of its liberty higher than ever it has been known by its most extravagant assertors, even in France, gave occasion to very serious reflections. Mr. Fox treated the associations for prosecuting these libels as tending to prevent the improvement of the human mind, and as a mobbish tyranny. He thought proper to compare them with the riotous assemblies ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... really travelled in a vast orbit round the sun, objects in surrounding space should appear to change their positions, unless their distances were on a scale which, to the narrow ideas of the universe then prevailing, seemed altogether extravagant.[22] The existence of such apparent or "parallactic" displacements was accordingly regarded as the touchstone of the new views, and their detection became an object of earnest desire to those interested in maintaining them. Copernicus himself made the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... very pleasant little dinner. It is never slow if Cullingworth is about. He is one of those men who make a kind of magnetic atmosphere, so that you feel exhilarated and stimulated in their presence. His mind is so nimble and his thoughts so extravagant, that your own break away from their usual grooves, and surprise you by their activity. You feel pleased at your own inventiveness and originality, when you are really like the wren when it took a lift on the eagle's shoulder. Old Peterson, you remember, used to have a similar effect upon you ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... honeymoon, and had lost all comfort in life before my friends had done wishing me joy. Yet I chose with caution—a girl bred wholly in the country, who never knew luxury beyond one silk gown, nor dissipation above the annual gala of a race ball. Yet she now plays her part in all the extravagant fopperies of fashion and the town with as ready a grace as if she never had seen a bush or a grass-plot out of Grosvenor Square! I am sneered at by all my acquaintance, and paragraphed in the newspapers. She dissipates my fortune, and contradicts all my humors; yet the worst of ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... extravagant! Why is it selling one's soul to sit down and figure out what's the best thing to do?" He hesitated, hating to add hurt to hurt, not wanting to say that his father's fight should have been with the revolutionists, that his life was ineffective ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... howsoever hidden, the young man himself was wasting valuable hours off in day-dreams. In the one shabby big chair of the hall bedroom he sat and smoked a pipe, and stared at a microscopic fire in a toy grate. It was extravagant of David Lance to have a fire at all, but as long as he gave up meals to do it likely it was his own affair. The luxuries mean more than the necessities to plenty of us. With comfort in this, his small luxury, he watched the play of light and shadow, and the pulsing of the live ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... private room in an Ottawa hotel, the latter raised his eyebrows questioningly. He knew his employer in all his moods; and he was not in the least afraid of him. There was, though most of those who did business with him failed to perceive it, a vein of almost extravagant generosity in ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... These extravagant misrepresentations do infinite damage to the Confederate cause and to the Confederate leaders in history. They reveal in strong light the method by which those leaders were willing to impose and actually ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... taking a throw for the "gal." The crowd presents a singular contrast of beings. Some are dressed to the very extreme of fantastic fashion, and would seem to have wasted their brains in devising colours for their backs; others, aspiring to the seriously genteel, are fashioned in very extravagant broadcloth; while a third group is dressed in most niggardly attire, which sets very loosely. In addition to this they wear very large black, white, and grey-coloured felt hats, slouched over their heads; while their nether ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... extravagant wives, who will run them in debt; and when once in debt, it is no easy matter in this country to get out of it. They must insure their lives for the money which they borrow; and as the house of agency will be gainers by their demise, of course they will not be ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... me so many hundred thousand dollars every year, and I will let your ships alone," said the piratical ruler of Algiers. The terms were agreed to. Congress seemed to think that now all danger to commerce was overpast, and a navy would be an extravagant toy. But when, not long afterward, French cruisers seized American ships, and English cruisers claimed the right (and exercised it) to take seamen from our vessels without leave, Congress perceived the folly of ...
— Harper's Young People, July 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... those who possess calm and even dispositions cannot witness without laughing an excess of mad anger or of impotent rage. In general we do not take seriously those feelings to which we ourselves are strangers; we consider them extravagant and amusing. "How can one be a Persian?" To laugh is to detach one's self from others, to separate one's self and to take pleasure in this separation, to amuse one's self by contrasting the feelings, character, and temperament ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... a versatile entertainer devoted to the amusement of mixed audiences? And I confess that sometimes when I see a certain style of young lady, who checks our tender admiration with rouge and henna and all the blazonry of an extravagant expenditure, with slang and bold brusquerie intended to signify her emancipated view of things, and with cynical mockery which she mistakes for penetration, I am sorely tempted to hiss out "Petroleuse!" It is a small matter to have our palaces set aflame compared with ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... everything—possibly to request an interview with my aunt, such as Squire Haycock had undergone, "but," as I said to myself with a beating heart, "to have a very different result." If the dwelling solely on one idea be a species of madness, then was I undoubtedly mad—nothing was so wild and extravagant as to appear impossible to my heated fancy. I was always expecting and ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... to the Masons a little later they were not only indignant but very genuinely worried. Walter declared that he would "catch that man and wring his neck before the day was up," which boast, though extremely extravagant, brought strange comfort to Nan, shocked as she had been by ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... Bones, with his extravagant surprise. "Are you certain, young miss? This day of all days—and it's a Thursday, too," ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... on the tea-kettle, too," she told herself, "and be real comfortable and extravagant for once, and have a cup of tea ready when they come," for the good lady had no intention of going to bed, assuring herself she would not sleep if she did. So, moving about, she refilled the lamp, and drawing the machine nearer the stove, ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... Epochs of Painting, said: "In the last ten years of his career, and occasionally before, Turner was extravagant to an extreme degree; he played equally with nature and with his colors. Light, with all its prismatic varieties, seems to have been the chief object of his studies; individuality of form or color he was wholly indifferent to. The looseness ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... much more difficult to reconcile the character of trading nations with the qualities that are improperly called great, than that of any other. A commercial nation naturally will be just; it may be generous; but it never can become extravagant and wasteful; neither can it be incumbered with the lazy and the idle; for the moment that either of these takes place, commerce ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... perceived that there was dissension between her uncle and cousin, but she had not associated herself with it. She was sure that it was about money, for evidently Allan had lived an extravagant life when he was abroad. So, when he said to her one morning, "Mary, father and I cannot agree at present, and I think I will go away for a few weeks;" ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... it that the gardener got on with the local people? How was it that they stood on the road to speak with him, shouting their extravagant laughter at ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... telling him, Mrs. Austen told, for a wonder, the truth, though as will sometimes happen even to the best of us, not all the truth. It were extravagant to have expected it of her. But she told all that she thought good for him; more exactly good for Margaret; more ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... gentlemen of the lower classes, a word with you. How can you, with your small incomes, hope to be well off, if you are more extravagant than those ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... mediaeval romance. Yet with all his mock-heroic notoriety, the toller Pueckler was by no means destitute of those practical qualities which tempered the Teutonic Romanticism, even in its earliest and most extravagant developments. He was skilled in all manly exercises, a brave soldier, an intelligent observer, and—his most substantial claim to remembrance—the father of landscape-gardening in Germany, a veritable magician who transformed level wastes ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... were profusely adorned with colors, much like those worn by the wild red man upon a holiday! Looking toward the sunrise, one saw mysterious, deep shadows and bright prominences, while on the opposite side there was really an extravagant array of variegated hues. Between the gorgeous buttes and rainbow-tinted ridges there were narrow plains, broken here and there by dry creeks or gulches, and these again were clothed scantily with poplars and sad-colored ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... meeting, a sympathetic friendship was formed between the two writers; they had the same literary aspirations, the same love for work, the same love of luxury and extravagant tastes, the same struggles with poverty and ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... to produce among a group of Indian warriors, with whom it was a species of religious principle never to forget a benefit, or to forgive an injury. Fortunately, the previous explanations of Hist had prepared the minds of the Hurons for something extravagant, and most of that which to them seemed inconsistent and paradoxical, was accounted for by the fact that the speaker possessed a mind that was constituted differently from those of most of the human race. Still there were one or two old men who had heard similar doctrines from the missionaries, ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... many rhetorical and extravagant. In after days it appeared so to Rousseau himself, and he claimed no more for it than that he had tried to tell the truth. Before he learned that he had won the Dijon prize and that his work had taken Paris by storm, he was surely ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... account. In a very short period he had become my debtor to a large amount, when, having taken a long draught of port, he did precisely what I had been coolly anticipating—he proposed to double our already extravagant stakes. With a well-feigned show of reluctance, and not until after my repeated refusal had seduced him into some angry words which gave a color of pique to my compliance, did I finally comply. The result, of course, did but prove how entirely the prey ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... mountains," said Barton to Harley, his brother correspondent. "That you can get a dinner in a dozen courses, if you want it, and every course good; that it has real porcelain-lined bath-tubs, and beds sure to cure the worst case of insomnia on earth. Do you think this improbable, this extravagant but most fascinating ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... should smile! but these is the best I got. I got another part to this hat, though, and another pocket belongs with these britches." (He alternated the crown and rim of a hat, but was never extravagant enough to wear them at one time.) "Ain't I clean? I cleaned ...
— The Story of Patsy • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... love with the picture—he would probably have smiled at the notion—but he had a curious feeling that he would meet the girl some day, and that it would then be a privilege only to speak to her. This was, after all, not so extravagant a fancy as it might appear, for romance, the mother of chivalry and many graces, still finds shelter in the hearts of such men as him from the wide spaces of the newer lands. Shrewd as they are, and practical, they see visions now and then, and, what ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... Pike's collar is!" Isabella had said. "Did you ever! You extravagant boy! It is good enough for a lady's bracelet. You had better give it to me! It will make the finest ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... had recently bestowed a number of valuable shares in the Grand Company upon the brother of Angelique, making the fortune of that extravagant young nobleman. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... itself is a somewhat dull and unsympathetic place with nothing more for the edification of the visitor than a melodramatic chasm, the surrounding country is worthy the most extravagant epithets. The mountains have the gloomy barrenness, the slate-grey colour of volcanic ranges; they encircle the town in a gigantic amphitheatre, rugged and overbearing like Titans turned to stone. ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... the order to take Hebert. Several people in the village insinuated that Acquet and Hebert were irreconcilable enemies and that Manginot was on the wrong track; but the detective's head was now swelled with importance and he would not draw back. Following his extravagant deductions he decided that the complicity of Gousset, convicted of drinking and playing skittles the whole way, was undoubted, and the poor man was arrested in his village where he had returned to his wife and children to recover from his excitement. At last Manginot, evidently animated ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... denser and denser but smaller and smaller as it gradually neared its existing dimensions. How long a time it took to do it is for our present purpose relatively unimportant: the cruel physicists will only let us have a beggarly hundred million years or so for the process, while the grasping and extravagant evolutionary geologists beg with tears for at least double or even ten times that limited period. But at any rate it has taken a good long while, and, as far as most of us are personally concerned, the difference of ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... liberties of their country, resolved to exert themselves in opposing what they conceived to be a violation of those liberties; and the bill, with its alterations, was rejected by a majority of five voices. The success of their endeavours was celebrated with the most extravagant rejoicing, as a triumph of patriotism over the arts of ministerial corruption; and, on the other hand, all the servants of the crown, who had joined the popular cry on this occasion, were in a little time dismissed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... this and that report, they suspected something else, they had been told that certain things had been said or done. Nothing definite could be obtained, and there was no proof whatever of any of the extravagant and incredible charges. Similar proceedings took place in Lincoln and York, and also in Scotland and Ireland; and in all places the results were the same, and the matter dragged on ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... got the money somewhere. It always has struck me that if you have not extravagant habits, and do not live up to your income, you must have a certain sum to lay by at the end of the year. Have I not ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of francs," Sogrange declared. "There are few men in Paris more extravagant than I, and I think that we Frenchmen know what extravagance means. But I cannot spend my income. Do you think that it is for the sake of gain that I have come across the Channel to add the Clenarvon diamonds to ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the Jesuits, however, was based on isolation of their missions, and how this might have worked is matter at least for speculation. It was on account of the isolation which they practised that it was possible for the extravagant calumnies which were circulated as to their rule and riches to gain belief. It was on account of isolation that the first conflicts arose betwixt them and the authorities, both clerical and lay. ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... venture into, and what to escape." I waked with this thought; and was under such inexpressible impressions of joy at the prospect of my escape in my dream, that the disappointments which I felt upon coming to myself, and finding that it was no more than a dream, were equally extravagant the other way, and threw me into a very great dejection ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... is really so mediocre. . . And Cloete smiles, but isn't surprised, because he had put all these notions himself into her empty head. . . What your husband wants is enterprise, a little audacity. You can encourage him best, Mrs. Dunbar. . . She was a silly, extravagant little fool. Had made George take a house in Norwood. Live up to a lot of people better off than themselves. I saw her once; silk dress, pretty boots, all feathers and scent, pink face. More like the Promenade at the Alhambra than a decent home, it looked to me. ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... it is true that his methods of war were very simple, and his blows those of a sledgehammer. But simplicity of design and vigour of execution are often marks of the very highest military ability. "Genius," says Napier, "is not extravagant; it is ardent, and it conceives great projects; but it knows beforehand how to attain the result, and it uses the simplest means, because its faculties are essentially calculating, industrious, and patient. It is creative, because its knowledge is vast; it is quick and peremptory, not because it ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... relevancy if all the buildings asked for were necessary for the transaction of public business, as long as we have the money to pay for them; but inasmuch as a large number of the buildings proposed are unnecessary and their erection would be wasteful and extravagant, besides furnishing precedents for further and more extended reckless expenditures of a like character, it seems to me that applications for new and expensive public buildings ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... is quite warm. We can't afford to be extravagant; and I daresay,' he added, with a backward jerk of his thumb towards the door, 'like the rest of her tribe, she'll know how to charge. Sit down there, and ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... some time watching the hurrying figures of the miners as they moved to and fro, but his mind was far away. Somehow Zip's luck, in spite of the excessive figures which extravagant minds had estimated it at, only took second place with him. He was thinking of the man who had journeyed to Spawn City. He was worrying about him, ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... "The Decision," which she had arranged as a play. There were but five characters in the play, which was the story of a girl who, holding a position as private secretary in the home of a man of wealth, discovers that his daughter, a girl about her own age, has been unduly extravagant and, needing money, has forged a check in her father's name. While she deliberates as to what is to be done, the father discovers the forgery, and taxing his daughter with it, she becomes panic-stricken ...
— Madge Morton's Secret • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... Lady M—, to me, "it is bad economy making dresses at home, but I really cannot afford to pay the extravagant prices charged by Madame Desbelli. My bills are monstrous, and my poverty, but not my will, consents. Still it does make such a difference in the appearance, being well-dressed, that if I could, I never would have a dress made at home; but the saving ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... now—perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be a transcendental language in the most extravagant sense. Possibly the power of literally distinguishing these "shades of abstraction"—these attributes paralleled by "artistic intuitions" (call them what you will)-is ever to be denied man for the same reason that the beginning and end of a ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... yielding because they dared not refuse. To refuse would mean the departure of Norman with the firm's most profitable business. It costs heavily to live in New York; the families of successful men are extravagant; so conduct unbecoming a gentleman may not there be resented if to resent is to cut down one's income. The time was, as the dignified and nicely honorable Sanders observed, when these and many similar low standards did not ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, cross the Rockies, and on to California. It seems as if that would be a grand summer programme. But my lawyer writes me that the man in charge at Mostyn is cutting too much timber and is generally too extravagant. Then there is the question of Rawdon Court. My finances will not let me carry the mortgage on it longer, unless I ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... faculty of theology, who were not content with the progress which had been made, and who desired more sweeping and radical changes. Such a party ever exists in all reforms; for there are some persons who are always inclined to ultra and extravagant courses. Carlstadt was a type of such men. He was learned, sincere, and amiable, but did not know where to stop; and the experiment was now to be tried, whether it was possible to introduce a necessary reform, without annihilating also all ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... doubt that her fortune will come in very handy for Hawley. As to the girl herself, I think she has made a very good choice. She has plenty of money for both, and as he has managed to keep up on his younger son's portion, he can have no extravagant tastes, and will make her a very good husband. There is no other engagement ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... her mental and bodily health. Hallucinations, to which she had been always subject, became more and more frequent. She conceived herself to be specially favoured by Christ, who appeared to her in the most extravagant forms. At last, by dint of fasting and lacerating her flesh, she succeeded in reducing herself to such a state of ecstatic suffering that she belies'ed herself to be undergoing in her own person ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 'Germany began the war. It is proper that Germany should take the first steps towards ending the war, but something more than vague generalizations is necessary. At present there is nothing to talk about. There are no terms, not even extravagant and ridiculous terms, that can be discussed as a possible basis of settlement. Thus far there has been no evidence of good faith in the repeated German professions of a desire for peace. In consequence nobody takes them seriously until there is at least a tentative proposal of terms. When that ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... written in Western Europe. In England as elsewhere most of these poems were inevitably of mediocre quality and imitative in substance, ringing the changes with wearisome iteration on a minimum of ideas, often with the most extravagant use of conceits. Petrarch's example was still commonly followed; the sonnets were generally composed in sequences (cycles) of a hundred or more, addressed to the poet's more or less imaginary cruel lady, though the note of manly independence introduced by Wyatt is frequent. First of the ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... this Miss Todd was the doctor's daughter, of whom I had heard Boller speak in the most extravagant terms, and now it seemed to me that his praise had quite failed to convey an adequate idea of her charms. She was very fair, very pink and white, with a Psyche knot of shimmering hair; a tall, slender ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... those who can perceive the labour, time, difficulties and contrivance, which the awkwardness of the ground created, may better be able to say, if L.250 for every thing, is unreasonable. At all events, it is not a charge, but I leave it to you; and in case you deem it extravagant, am ready to submit the whole to the valuation of any competent person. What regards the drawing, planning and superintending, Donovan, and the brass-cutter, in completing the two pieces of furniture, I am determined not to accept any thing for; these you ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... claims attention. In singing, as in the sister arts, the laws which govern Style must be apprehended and understood before Individuality can be given full scope. Otherwise, what to the executant would appear as original might, to correct taste and judgment, appear ridiculous and extravagant. A genius is sometimes eccentric, but eccentricity is not genius. Vocal students should hear as many good singers as possible, but actually imitate none. A skilled teacher will always discern and strive to develop the personality of the pupil, will be on the alert to discover latent features ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... his respective helpmates in years gone by. When Waitstill's mother first asked her husband to buy her a new dress, and that was two years after marriage, he simply said: "You look well enough; what do you want to waste money on finery for, these hard times? If other folks are extravagant, that ain't any reason you should be. You ain't obliged to take your neighbors for an example:—take ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... elsewhere, enables us to pronounce them a people of general intelligence, refinement of manners, personal accomplishments, and true politeness. As to their style of dress and mode of living, were we disposed to make any criticism, we should say that they were extravagant. In refined and elevated conversation, they would certainly bear a comparison with the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... miracle of the Virgin, the priests provided for the old fiddler for the rest of his days. In return for this the old man surrendered the golden slippers, which, it is also said, the reverend fathers carefully locked away in the treasure-chest, lest the Virgin should again be tempted to such extravagant almsgiving. ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... the onion, and they finish up by consuming the pumpkin butter. The groom doesn't appear among the guests; he is under the special care of several female relations in another apartment, and is probably being fed with tid-bits from the henna-stained fingers of old women, who season them with extravagant and lying stories of the bride's beauty, and duly impress upon him his coming ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... expressed in the cotton States. It had its first ebullition in 1832, when South-Carolina assumed the right to nullify the revenue laws of Congress. Since that time the North has continually been accused of an aggressive policy. Various extravagant pretenses have from time to time been raised up by the South, and urged as causes for dissolving the Union. They have always, until recently, been met by ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... benefactor, to strike one's father and mother on offering you food".—"Justice and injustice is the same throughout the universe," and, as in the worst community force always, in some respects, is at the service of right, so, in the worst religion, the extravagant dogma always in some fashion proclaims a supreme architect.—Religions and communities, accordingly, disintegrated under the investigating process, disclose at the bottom of the crucible, some residue of truth, others ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... still worse, and that is the suppression of all government. For, it is owing to government that human wills form a harmony instead of chaos. It serves society as the brain serves a living being. Incapable, inconsiderate, extravagant, engrossing, it often abuses its position, overstraining or misleading the body for which it should care, and which it should direct. But, taking all things into account, whatever it may do, more good than harm is done, for through it the body stands ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... portrayal of the ancient regime, the bombast and credulity of the day overflows in the most extravagant exaggerations (Buchez et Roux, XXXI., 300, Report, by Saint-Just, February 26, 1794.): "In 1788, Louis XVI. Caused eight thousand persons of both sexes and of every age to be sacrificed in the rue Meslay and on the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and labored like a common menial. Visitors were attracted by this novel spectacle. The income of the house increased as their respect for the hostess lessened. No anecdote of her avarice was too extravagant for current belief. It was even alleged that she had been known to carry the luggage of guests to their rooms, that she might anticipate the usual porter's gratuity. She denied herself the ordinary necessaries of life. She was ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... family, related by marriage or by illegitimate descent to that house. A considerable proportion of the Government political pensioners are Marathas. Many of them own villages or hold tenant land, but as a rule they are extravagant in their living; and several of the old Maratha nobility have fallen very much in the world. Pensions diminish with each generation, but the expenditure shows no corresponding decrease. The sons are brought ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... number of presents were made to them, and it would really have done your heart good, reader, to have witnessed the extravagant joy displayed by them on receiving such trifles as bits of hoop—iron, beads, knives, scissors, needles, etcetera. Iron is as precious among them as gold is among civilised people. The small quantities ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... extravagant, which he seemed to use because he could not repress them, he told his frozen listener that his whole nature, heart and soul, had been for years bound up in Lady Joan; that he had again and again been tempted to deliver himself by death from despair; that if he had to live without ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... preferring the more underdone part. The fat should be sought near the line 3 to 4. Some connoisseurs are fond of having this joint dished with the under-side uppermost, so as to get at the finely-grained meat lying under that part of the meat, known as the Pope's eye; but this is an extravagant fashion, and one that will hardly find favour in the eyes of many economical British ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... thing was impossible," replied Berkeley; "the plantation was mortgaged to the hub before Jim was born. The Byrds have been extravagant for generations, and a crash was inevitable. Old Mr. Byrd could barely meet the interest, even before the loss of Cousin Mary's money. During the last years of his life some of it was added to the principal, which made it harder work for Jim. But for Jim's management, ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... in February. And there the cost was great. Sibylla was not one to go to work sparingly in any way; neither, in point of fact, was Lionel. Lionel would never have been unduly extravagant; but, on the other hand, he was not accustomed to spare. A furnished house in a good position was taken; servants were imported to it from Verner's Pride; and there Sibylla launched into all the follies of the day. At Easter she "set her heart" upon a ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... have seen, was not drawn from any one land, but it was in the majority composed of Normans and Bretons; we can therefore understand the extravagant superstition which must bear the ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... sweet creature. How he wished that she really were his sister! But, then, the idea of that fair, golden-haired, blue-eyed, white-robed angel being the sister of such a robust, rugged, sunburned boy as himself! The thought was so absurd, extravagant, impossible, that the poor boy heaved an ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... that neighbors were less likely to drop in if the house was closed up. She was one of those people who are stingy without motive or reason, even when they can gain nothing by it. She must have known that skimping the doctor in heat and food made him more extravagant than he would have been had she made him comfortable. He never came home for lunch, because she gave him such miserable scraps and shreds of food. No matter how much milk he bought, he could never get thick cream for his strawberries. Even when he watched his wife lift it from the milk ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... to stay and play awhile. There will be a few weeks more. One will find extravagant diversions in Munich during the next few weeks. I am already Egelhofer's right-hand man. I will organize the Soviet army, assist in the conduct of the government, try to buy coal from Rathenau in Berlin, make speeches, compose earth-shaking proclamations, and end up smoking a cigarette in front ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... and had taken her place in the comparatively small set which made up New York society, Mrs. Palgrave was an optimist. As a fiction-fed girl she had expected, with a thrill of excitement, that after marriage she would find herself in a whirlpool of careless and extravagant people who made their own elastic code of morals and played ducks and drakes with the Commandments. She had accepted as a fact the novelist-playwright contention that society was synonymous with flippancy, selfishness and unchastity, and that the possession of money and leisure ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... some of their teaching is untrue absolutely, but it is certainly untrue relatively, because they do not hold the "proportion of the faith," and by excluding some truths and presenting others in an extravagant form they distort the whole ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... prison; and when he was later raised to the pontificate, he remembered the outrage, and anew excommunicated Photius. A.D. 886 saw the fall and imprisonment of Photius, and union might have been maintained but for the extravagant demands of the Roman pontiff, who required the degradation of all priests and bishops ordained by Photius. The Greeks indignantly refused, and at last the great schism took place, which severed from each other entirely the ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... had been more congenial and helpful. But she had little society, less and less as she grew older that was congenial to her, and her mind preyed upon itself; and the mystery of her birth at once chagrined her and raised in her the most extravagant expectations. She was proud and she felt the sting of poverty. She could not but be conscious of her beauty also, and she was vain of that, and came to take a sort of delight in the exercise of her fascinations upon the rather loutish young men who came in her ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... show that there is nothing extravagant in the supposition of the density of the ether being directly as the square roots of the distances from the axis, we will take a fluid whose law of density is known, and calculate the effect of the centrifugal force, considered ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... foreign residents to get away from Paris to more peaceful towns in the south and west. The railway stations are so crowded that it is almost impossible, at the Gare of Saint-Lazare or at the Quai d'Orsay to get anywhere near the booking office. Motor-cabs are being hired at extravagant prices to convey families to Tours, Orlans, Le Mans, or Bordeaux. The bearing of the public however by no means resembles that of "nerves," ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... inclined to select the most honorable place which could be found within the limits of the city. Some proposed a beautiful temple on the Capitoline Hill. Others wished to take it to the senate-house, where he had been slain. The Senate, and those who were less inclined to pay extravagant honors to the departed hero, were in favor of some more retired spot, under pretense that the buildings of the city would be endangered by the fire. This discussion was fast becoming a dispute, when it was suddenly ended by two men, with swords at their sides and knees ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... his father," said Abel Baragar with dry emphasis. "Phenie Tyson was extravagant-wanted this and that, and nothin' was too good for her. Abner spoilt his life gettin' her what she wanted; and it ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in nearly all amateur draining, the unnecessary frequency of the lateral drains; the extravagant size of the pipes used; and the number of useless angles which result from an unskillful arrangement, would amount to an expense equal to ten times the cost of the proper superintendence, to say nothing of the imperfect manner in which the work is executed. A common impression ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... Academy; in 1772 ambassador to Vienna on the question of the dismemberment of Poland; in 1777 made Grand Almoner of France; in 1778 Abbot of St. Vaast and cardinal; in 1779 succeeded his uncle as Archbishop of Strasburg, and became Abbot of Noirmoutiers and La Chaise. He led a gay, luxurious, and extravagant life rather than performed his clerical duties; he had political ambitions, but he was never able to overcome the predisposition against him with which Marie Antoinette had come to France. He was a dupe of Cagliostro, and of Mme. de Lamotte-Valois, ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... the cruelly brief, well-written announcement, and all the top-heavy aerial erection his vanity had heaped up lay shattered around him. Poor boy! shall we not pity him? From very childhood, though so silent and undemonstrative, he had fed himself with extravagant visions and wild speculations. All this had been merely an amusement, though an unhealthy one. The dreamer had scarcely entertained the idea of his dreams possibly proving true. But the train was laid for a future explosion—the imagination was diseased, and so when the watchmaker's ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... had a fond and extravagant grandmother, you were almost sure to have also a clove apple. That is to say, a fine firm winter apple, stuck as full of cloves as it could hold, then allowed to dry very, very slowly, in air neither hot nor cold. The cloves banished decay—their ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... the same kind is now passing in India. Anew taste, not without some political ingredients, has sprung up for the ancient literature of the country; amore intelligent appreciation of their real merits has taken the place of the extravagant admiration for the masterworks of their old poets; there is a revival in the study of Sanskrit, asurprising activity in the republication of Sanskrit texts, and there are traces among the Hindus of ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... his assiduous endeavours to ingratiate himself into my favour; and does not this extravagant civility of Captain Mirvan give him reason to suppose that it meets with our general approbation? I cannot thimk upon this subject without inexpressible uneasiness; and yet I can think of ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... permanent intoxication, a giddy frenzy, that never subsides. How often have his facetious jests stirred up the minds of the populace? and what an excitement was produced among the mob by the new liveries, and the extravagant ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... only reply by a look. She had long worshipped Mr. Pickwick at a distance, but here she was, all at once, raised to a pinnacle to which her wildest and most extravagant hopes had never dared to aspire. Mr. Pickwick was going to propose—a deliberate plan, too—sent her little boy to the Borough, to get him out of the ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... editor's room. All the eclecticisms of style are met with in this unheard of idiom, in which apocalyptic phrases jostle cock and bull stories, in which the rusticity of a popular saying is wedded to extravagant periods from the same mold in which Cyrano de Bergerac cast his tirades; in which the paradox, that spoilt child of modern literature, treats reason as the pantaloon is treated in a pantomime; in which irony ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... There, where life forever bubbles a cheap and exceedingly dry champagne of a very doubtful exhilaration, he did now and again find a poor respite from regret till time blunted the edge of his sorrows. And when his sorrow was no longer acute, he had formed a reckless and extravagant habit of life from which, even when the reason for it had passed, he never sought to free himself: indeed, it never ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... much extravagant speculation has been wasted upon this question of the distribution of seeds. The ambition of each new writer has seemingly been to hit upon some new theory of distribution. The "bird theory" is a failure, as we have shown; nor do they invariably fly due east or west, so ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... easy, rattling, gentlemanly fellow, and nobody's enemy but his own. His wife, they say, is dreadfully extravagant: and, indeed, since his marriage, and in spite of his wife's large income, he has been in the Bench several times; but she signs some bills and he comes out again, and is as gay and genial as ever. All mercantile speculations ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of Sumatra or Borneo, and well known to our botanists by the name of Laurus camphora, L. He further informed me that the Chinese never mix the Sumatran camphor with that from Japan, but purchase the former for their own use, at the before-mentioned extravagant price, from an idea of its efficacy, probably superstitious, and export the latter as a drug not held in any particular estimation. Thus we buy the leaves of their tea-plant at a high rate and neglect herbs, the natives ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... Last, and greatest luxury of all, Ruth actually ordered a tea-basket to be handed into the carriage at a half-way station; one basket to do duty for two, but still a deliberate extravagance, when refreshments had been provided from home; and oh, dear me, how delicious it was to be extravagant for once! ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... a smile, and bowed in return to the salutation of the page, whose stiff reception of his advances he imputed to the proud pettish disposition of a Scotch boy, trained up in extravagant ideas of family consequence and personal importance, which his acquaintance with the world had not yet been sufficient ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... French, that they "have a book upon every subject." But Dr. Johnson was not only capricious as regards temper and variable humors, but as regards the inequality of his knowledge. Incoherent and unsystematic was Dr. Johnson's information in most cases. Hence his extravagant misappraisement of Knolles, the Turkish historian, which is exposed so severely by Spittler, the German, who, again, is himself miserably superficial in his analysis of English history. Hence the feeble credulity which ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... think. The one thought in my head was that he had surprised me in his room. For three whole days I found myself unable to raise my eyes to his, but blushed always to the point of weeping. The strangest and most confused of thoughts kept entering my brain. One of them— the most extravagant—was that I should dearly like to go to Pokrovski, and to explain to him the situation, and to make full confession, and to tell him everything without concealment, and to assure him that I had not acted foolishly as a minx, but honestly ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... class interests, while the lot of the peasantry,—the bulk of the nation,—despite the spasmodic efforts of the paternal government, steadily grew worse under the unrelieved burden of taxation. Then, too, the king was extravagant in maintaining his mistresses, his court, and his favorites. His excessive vanity had to be appeased by expensive entertainment and show. He preferred the spectacular but woeful feats of arms to the less pretentious but ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... of chivalry a knight vowed in somewhat extravagant language eternal love to his particular lady fair, wore her glove or her guerdon on his helmet, and swore to protect it with his life. Family ties and domestic joys were cultivated. The wife of a knight was often herself a warrior. Fair ladies have ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... the bookcase with his back to the door. He stood absolutely still, his head and shoulders bowed over the book he was manifestly not reading. In this attitude he had an air of masterly indifference to time, of not caring how long he waited, being habituated to extravagant expenditure of moments and of days. Absorbed in some inward and invisible act, he was unaware of Nina ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... finds some, one of his employees is robbing him, the most natural thing to do is to look into the habits of them all. If he discovers that one is living beyond his means, he naturally probes a little farther; and, if his habits prove to be extravagant, the suspicion increases." ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... the duke, "with Lord Borodaile. She is prodigiously extravagant; and Borodaile affects to be prodigiously fond: but as there is only a certain fund of affection in the human heart, and all Lord Borodaile's is centred in Lord Borodaile, that ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... man, literary forms and species commonly die of their own excess. Romances were multiplied, and imitated; professional poets, not content with marvels that had now become familiar, sought for a new sensation in extravagant language and incident. The tales became more and more sophisticated, elaborate, grotesque, and unreal, until, in the fourteenth century, a stout townsman, who ticketed bales in a custom- house, and was the best English poet of his time, found them ridiculous. In ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... not a clear appreciation of the past. The past, like the country through which we walk, becomes indistinct as we advance. My position is like that of a person wounded in a dream; he feels the wound, though he cannot recollect when he received it. Come, then, thou regenerate man, thou extravagant prodigal, thou awakened sleeper, thou all-powerful visionary, thou invincible millionaire,—once again review thy past life of starvation and wretchedness, revisit the scenes where fate and misfortune conducted, and where despair received thee. Too many diamonds, too much ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... rendisse ce matin ici, qu'il me presenteroit a elle, qu'il y seroit avant moi, ou que, s'il n'y etoit pas encore, je demandasse une mademoiselle Marton. Voila tout, et je n'aurois garde de lui confier notre projet, non plus qu'a personne: il me paroit extravagant a moi qui m'y prete. Je n'en suis pourtant pas moins sensible a ta bonne volonte. Dubois, tu m'as servi, je n'ai pu te garder, je n'ai pu meme te bien recompenser de ton zele; malgre cela, il t'est venu dans l'esprit de faire ma fortune: en verite, il n'est point ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... Ned, whose cheeks had turned very red, for though not so extravagant as the American painted, he was fain to own to himself that he had some such ideas in connection with the dusky warriors who ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... not going to be a really extravagant woman, Merry," he said. "To tell the truth, I hate extravagance, although I equally hate stinginess. You will have no lack of money, child, but money is a great and wonderful gift and ought to be used to the best of best advantages. It ought never to be wasted, ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... seventeen summers and her lovely face, the most extravagant little doll in the whole city, and that is not saying a little, but the most elegant, charming—a perfect sylph! It was now about eleven months since I had first become acquainted with the bewitching creature; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... now Anne's bed. Sir Julius, son to Sir Ferdinando, had had it made in Venice against his wife's first lying-in. Early seicento Venice had expended all its extravagant art in the making of it. The body of the bed was like a great square sarcophagus. Clustering roses were carved in high relief on its wooden panels, and luscious putti wallowed among the roses. On the black ground-work of the panels ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... St. Laurence. Its two windows are filled with glass to the memory of past mayors. The dates, 1860 and 1862, sufficiently suggest their artistic merit. Several old monuments are upon the north wall, one of 1648 with an extravagant inscription to Thomas Purefoy, a boy of nine; another to Mrs. Bathona Frodsham, a daughter of the John Hales who bought so much monastic property, and founded the Grammar School. The tomb of his first wife, Frideswede, near ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... reform was not extravagant. He mainly urged that only two good tracks should be maintained, and the road be not allowed to spread out into as many as half-a-dozen very bad ones, presenting high ridges and deep ruts, full of big stones, and many quagmires. Breaking out into ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... I used the statement: "England's claim for the domination of the sea, and therein for the domination of the world, remains a great danger to the peace of the world." To this view I adhere firmly. Let us take it for granted that the most extravagant hopes of our most reckless dreamers are fulfilled, that England is crowded out of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and is involved in a long-lasting war with the native Indians. An impossibly large dose of political naivete is needed in order to make us believe that England ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... and restrained on the other hand by their habitual reverence for their feudal princes. Artevelde stepped forth, and in their startled ears pronounced the word "Resist!" His eloquence was well seconded by the grasping severity of a needy and extravagant court, until gradually combining their wrath and intelligence with the energies of the populace jealous of their rights, the merchants and citizens of the cities of Flanders rose upon the bears and butterflies who infested and robbed them, and, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... for Anne Boleyn, was not without some control over his passions; and if appetite had been the moving influence with him, he would scarcely, with the eyes of all the world fixed upon his conduct, have passed so extravagant an insult upon the nation of which he was the sovereign. The precipitancy with which he acted is to me a proof that he looked on matrimony as an indifferent official act which his duty required at the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various |
