"Freak" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... blotted out completely for an hour by some freak of the memory, comes back to him, and he sees his sullen, morbid boyhood changing into something worse still, until by slow degrees he became what ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... a century, the writing of many books, and the building up of a justly great and world-wide reputation between the two writings) strikes me as a singular, and, in a way, pleasing literary coincidence; singular, as a freak of subconscious memory for words, pleasing, as a verification in mature life of the writer's comparatively youthful observations of natural phenomena. I wonder if the author, or any others among his almost innumerable readers, have chanced to light ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... turning the little case over and over in his hands, again examining the clasps of it. His next freak was to snatch his pistol and look to the priming. I burst out laughing, for his antics seemed absurd. My laughter cooled him, and he made a great effort to regain his composure. But I ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... "What freak is this?" Sir Ralph said, angrily, when they entered. "Your mother has been anxious about you for the last two hours, and I myself was beginning to think that some ill must have befallen you. Why, what has happened to you, Albert, there is blood on ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... appeal to an Anglo-Saxon populace, which in its art must have something to catch hold of, like the tannin in its overdrawn tea. It loved to stand before this poster and pick out the easily recognized characters and argue (as Sypher, whose genius had suggested the inclusion of the freak had intended) what the hairy creature could represent, and, as it stood and picked and argued, the great fact of Sypher's Cure sank deep into their souls. He remembered the glowing pride with which he had regarded this achievement, the triumphal progress he made in a motor-car around the London ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... tenant of a large tract of country in Ulster, under one of the guilds or public companies of the city of London. From this branch of the family came Major John Whistler, father of the distinguished engineer, and the first representative of the family in America. It is stated that in some youthful freak he ran away and enlisted in the British Army. It is certain that he came to this country during the Revolutionary War, under General Burgoyne, and remained with his command until its surrender at Saratoga, when he was taken prisoner of war. Upon his return ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... devil! it is not the place for a man like you, a man who plays with crowns and scepters as a Bohemian plays with his balls; it is not the place of a serious man, I said, to be shut up in a box like some freak of natural history; for you must understand it would make all your enemies ready to burst with laughter, and you are so great, so noble, so generous, that you must have many enemies. This secret is enough to set ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... waiting to meet me, was Father Knickerbocker himself! I know not how it happened, by what queer freak of hallucination or by what actual miracle—let those explain it who deal in such things—but there he stood before me, with an outstretched hand and a smile of greeting, Father Knickerbocker himself, the Embodied ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... clergyman awaited his arrival in an adjoining parlor. O'Leary enters the room, where he finds, sitting at the table, with the whole correspondence before him, his brother friar, Lawrence Callanan, who, either from an eccentric freak, or from a wish to call O'Leary's controversial powers into action, had thus drawn him into a lengthened correspondence. The joke, in O'Leary's opinion, however, was carried too far, and it required the sacrifice of the correspondence and the interference of mutual friends; ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... curious freak, cap. You'll be interviewed by all the scientific folk in the kingdom, and I shouldn't wonder if you are not summoned to appear, and give evidence, before a select committee of the Royal Society. Four points ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... thinking. The officer at her side, looking down at her, was thinking also. He was fighting a slight mental struggle, a sort of combat he was quite unused to. Should he let the child go on in this wild freak? He knew the cottage by the sea; the peasant home would be dreadful to her. He knew that by that same day after to-morrow, life in lower Italy, with the dirty, coarse people about her would be a burden. Yet he hesitated. He fought the battle in this way: Should he ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... sky and the earth below! Over the house-tops, over the street, Over the heads of the people you meet, Dancing, Flirting, Skimming along. Beautiful snow! it can do nothing wrong. Flying to kiss a fair lady's cheek; Clinging to lips in a frolicsome freak; Beautiful snow, from the heavens above, Pure as an angel and ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Spanish flag, and was manned by Spaniards. They were phenomenally fast vessels, and simply laughed at the efforts of ships of the squadron to overtake them; but they had been caught in calms on three or four occasions, and boarded by means of boats; when, by a curious freak of fortune, if the boarding party happened to be British, it always proved to be the American that they had boarded; while, if the boarders happened to be American, it was the Spaniard that they found themselves meddling with. Thus, as there was no treaty existing between ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and exhibition took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the people were already wonted, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... the most modest and deprecatory way. The man who expresses an opinion, or even a doubt, on this subject, contrary to the ruling traditions, will have a swarm of angry critics buzzing about him. He will be called a heretic, a heathen, a cold-blooded freak of nature. As for the woman who hesitates to subscribe all the thirty-nine articles of romantic love, if such a one dares to put her reluctance into words, she is certain to be accused either of unwomanly ambition or ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... basket, full of cold fowls, salad, and wines; she also was in a new spring hat of purple, which made her rosy old face look like a china aster. Lavinia reposed upon the other seat; and the infants insisted on sharing the driver's seat, up aloft, that they might enjoy the prospect, which freak caused Flabeau's boy to beam and blush till his youthful ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... been over the road can be a safe or sympathetic guide. Tolstoi realized he could not be of service to the people he would uplift unless he lived among them, shared their trials and experienced their needs. The time has gone by when the musician and composer was considered a sort of freak, knowing music and nothing else. We know the great composers were men of the highest intelligence and learning, men whose aim was to work out their genius to the utmost perfection. Nothing less than the highest ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... develop and were fertile. Some of them presented a peculiarity in growth of the cotyledons and germ, both of which grew and protruded beyond the involuere before the nuts were ripe, indicating that the germ had not come to a state of rest during its usual period in the nut. This freak appeared in only eight of the nuts, a larger number having normally ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... Giobbe's wealth of sculptured frieze and floral scroll; the Ponte di Paradiso, with its Gothic arch; the painted plates in the Museo Civico; and palace after palace, loved for some quaint piece of tracery, some moulding full of mediaeval symbolism, some fierce impossible Renaissance freak of fancy. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... these wilds, I was one of about threescore of men who for three days traversed them in search of the dead. Then was the scenery of the mountains impressive, much beyond what can well be spoken. The bridal that loses the bride through some wayward freak of the fair may be sad enough; so also the train, in its dark array, that conveys the familiar friend to the chamber where the light of nature cannot come. But in this latter case, the hearts that still beat, necessarily know that their part is resignation, and suspense and anxiety mingle ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... report," the Papal Secretary was saying earnestly. "America seems rife with modernism. Free-masonry, socialism, and countless other fads and religious superstitions are widely prevalent there. Nor do I underestimate their strength and influence. And yet, I fear them not. There are also certain freak religions, philosophical beliefs, wrung from the simple teachings of our blessed Saviour, the rapid spread of which at one time did give me some concern. The Holy Father mentioned one or two of them ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... my horse and scrambled down on foot after Smith. I found him gathering berries and bushes as though his very soul were mad with botany; but as I had seen nothing of this in him before, I asked what strange freak ...
— A Ride Across Palestine • Anthony Trollope
... professed that the fugitive Adminius had ceded to him the kingship of the whole island, and sent home high-flown dispatches to that effect. He had no fleet, but drew up his army in line of battle on the Gallic shore, while all wondered what mad freak he was purposing; then suddenly bade every man fill his helmet with shells as "spoils of the Ocean" to be dedicated in the Capitol. Finally he commemorated this glorious victory by the erection of a lofty lighthouse,[126] probably at the entrance of ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... progress of a bill in Committee, but they enable him to delay it grievously. We divided seventeen times, and between every division this vexatious Irishman made us a speech of apologies and self-condemnation. Of the two who had supported him at the beginning of his freak one soon sneaked away. The other, Sibthorpe, stayed to the last, not expressing remorse like Shaw, but glorying in the unaccommodating temper he showed and in the delay which he produced. At last the bill went through. ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... love to her a la Voltaire, for she bought drawings of him which she never even looked at. He was, otherwise, a good young fellow, with a widowed mother to maintain; and the capital she has left is large enough to permit of such a freak of fancy——" ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... laugh at this freak of the old man's fancy, but to her surprise Humfrey coloured up, and looked so much out of countenance that a question darted through her mind whether he could have any such step in contemplation, and she began to review the young ladies of the neighbourhood, and to decide on each in turn ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... resemblance, there was a scrubby growth of weeds or lichen upon it, which against the sun looked for all the world like the wool on a colossal negro's head. It certainly was very odd; so odd that now I believe it is not a mere freak of nature but a gigantic monument fashioned, like the well-known Egyptian Sphinx, by a forgotten people out of a pile of rock that lent itself to their design, perhaps as an emblem of warning and defiance to any enemies who approached the harbour. Unfortunately we were never able to ascertain ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... tell you all these details, to you so paltry, and try to describe the vision of green with which my prophetic gaze clothes this bare rock—on which top some freak of nature has set up a magnificent parasol pine—it is because in all this I have found an emblem to ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... house on horseback. She was a fat, clumsy woman, and got on and off her horse with difficulty. Isaac knew that all the family were absent; but when he saw her come ambling along the road, he took a freak not to tell her of it. He let down the bars for her; she rode up to the horse-block with which every farm-house was then furnished, rolled off her horse, and went into the house. She then discovered, for the first time, that there was no one at home. After resting awhile, ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... returned to Val de Cire, and her husband, who had not expected her for some time, blamed her for a freak. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... when he heard of this freak of the Dey. He wrote to O'Brien,—"I frankly own, I would have lost the peace, and been myself impaled, rather than have yielded this concession. Will ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... said Mr. Hawley. "He's got the freak of being a popular man now, after dangling about like a stray tortoise. So much the worse for him. I've had my eye on him for some time. He shall be prettily pumped upon. He's a damned bad landlord. What business has an old county man to come currying favor ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... queer phase of life was dawning upon him! what a strange mission was coming to him from over the seas! what freak had destiny taken to send him his nephew's letter with its interesting detail, and this other one, on the same night! Guy's letter brought back an old friend in the freshness and vigor of his youth, with hand uplifted ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... Digby, Endymion Porter, and some others still spoke manfully for Montrose with the King, he is found back in Carlisle, late in July, with only his little band of Scottish adherents. Then ensued the strangest freak of all. With this very band he set out again distinctly southwards, as if all thought of entering Scotland were over, and nothing remained but to rejoin the King at Oxford. The band, however, had been but two days on their march when they ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... said there was? By the way, is not this freak of yours of going out into the roads to smoke, as you say, alone, rather a slight on your guest? Here is Mr. Wilde; how very amusing! we all seem to be drawn ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... care about that, so long as it does the business," replied Bumpus; and so the amateur doctor continued to dab each bite with the lavender-colored fluid until the patient looked as though he might be some strange freak intended ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... may not take your hand, sir, until you know me for what I am. There are none worse. I have been through the mire of hell itself. I have dishonorably betrayed a kinsman in the hope of gold. I had thought to kill. Only a freak of fate has stayed my hand. And there is more that ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... isolation and independency. Let him make the most of his individuality; yet, as Aristotle said, "Man is a political animal;" his nature apart from the nation is incomplete; sundered from that to which he belongs he seems a freak. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... knife had sculptured it. No hand had given a support to its uplifted arm. Even the dog which followed us appeared deceived, for he barked furiously at the strange intruder. There was to me a singular fascination in this solitary freak of nature; and, surrounded though I was by immeasurably greater wonders, I turned again and again to take a farewell look at this dark, slender figure, raising its hand, as if in threatening gesture to ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... confused. Their inquiry has ignored the age of the parents at marriage—or, better still, at the births of their respective children—and has assumed that the number of the family was the all-important point: a good example of that idolatry of number as number which is the "freak religion" of the biometrician. Supposing that the conclusion reached by this method be a true one—which it would need more credulity than I possess to assert—we must conclude that, somehow, primogeniture, as such, affects ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... for a month," he gave prompt explanation. "Under the latest law freak turned out at Albany, I'm too young to drive a motor vehicle safely on the public roads unless I have a licensed chauffeur alongside of me. Oh, ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... before this, two sturdy Englishmen and their sister had come to the New World, with a good deal of energy and some money. The freak that led them up the river to this place was their love of beautiful scenery. Land was cheap, and at first they tried farming, but presently they started a carpet factory, their old business, and being ingenious men, they made some improvements. Ralph Stanwood, another Englishman, ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... how calmly he is sleeping! Is it but a freak of the lamplight, or is there a smile upon his lips? Eustace takes the lamp and bends over him to see; and as he bends he hears Frank whispering in his dreams his mother's name, and a ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... band, were marching through Germany to cooeperate with the Austrians on the French frontiers. The more polished Germans were astonished at the barbaric character of their allies. A Russian officer, in a freak of passion, shot an Austrian postilion, and then took out his purse and enquired of the employer of the postilion what damage was to be paid, as coolly as if he had merely killed a horse or a cow. Even German law was compelled to wink at such ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... as he tells us, his "love was tried to some purpose." He became the victim of an extraordinary temptation—"a freak of fancy," Mr. Froude terms it—"fancy resenting the minuteness with which he watched his own emotions." He had "found Christ" and felt Him "most precious to his soul." He was now tempted to give Him up, "to sell and part with ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... Us'd him so like a base rascallion, That old Pyg — (what d'y' call him) malion, That cut his mistress out of stone, Had not so hard a-hearted one. 330 She had a thousand jadish tricks, Worse than a mule that flings and kicks; 'Mong which one cross-grain'd freak she had, As insolent as strange and mad; She could love none, but only such 335 As scorn'd and hated her as much. 'Twas a strange riddle of a lady: Not love, if any lov'd her! Hey dey! So cowards never use their might, But against such as will ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... these tiny pieces of earth, surrounded by thousands of miles of sea, the nearest land a group of islets like unto them, is found the gigantic tortoise, and in only one other place in the wide world, the Galapagos group of islands in the South Pacific. How, or by what strange freak of Dame Nature these curious reptiles, sole survivals of another age, should come to be found in this lonely spot, is a deep mystery, and one not likely to be unfolded now. At any rate, there they are, looking as if some ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... that the timorous-hearted among the witnesses turned their heads away. Those who were more resolute—or as the case might be, more morbid—and who continued to look, were made aware of a freak of physics which in accord, I suppose, with the laws of horizontals and parallels decrees that a man cut off short from life by quick and violent means and fallen prone upon the earth, seems to shrink up within himself and to ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... of the yellow-white sun ahead and wondered that such a relatively stable, inactive star could have produced such a tremendously energetic plasmoid that it could still do the damage it had done so far out. It had been a freak, of course. Such suns as this did not normally produce such energetic ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... and Irving Berlin, reading the signs of the times, decides to write The Blue Laws Blues. Fashions of thought change; other fashions, also. A girl who was born without hips or eyebrows and who in childhood was regarded as a freak, now finds herself, at the age of eighteen, exactly in the mode, thus proving that all things come to those who wait. Czecho-Slovakia is discovered. The American forces spent three days taking Chateau-Thierry and three years trying to learn to pronounce it. Ireland undertakes to settle ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... gratefully, and he began to sound me about Therese, but found my lips as tightly closed as the lid of a miser's coffer. I told him she was a child when I made the acquaintance of her family at Bologna, and that the resemblance between her brother and myself was a mere accident—a freak of nature. He happened to catch sight of a well-written manuscript on the table, and asked me if that superb writing was my secretary's. Costa, who was present, answered in Spanish that he wrote it. Gama overwhelmed him with compliments, and begged me to send Costa to him to copy some letters. I ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... to the ordinary shoe is another curious freak of fashion. If the Almighty in perfecting the human foot had found a high heel necessary it would have been provided. The artificial heel, especially the very high heel commonly used on shoes worn by women, is an insult to Nature, to the Creator. Some day, when we are ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... feared him, they were amiable in the main towards each other. There were certain members of the Family who might be described as perennial. They were of the nature of established institutions. Such were Stumpy, the freak-legged dachshund-setter; James Edward, the wild gander; Butters, the woodchuck; Melindy and Jim, the two white cats; Bones, the brown owl, who sat all day on the edge of a box in the darkest corner of the cabin; and Ananias-and-Sapphira, the green parrot, so named, as MacPhairrson was wont to ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... a strange freak for him to take, when he expressed his wish to join the mountain boys, and Ethan could ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... Captain Prescott. Some freak of the fancy has mastered you. I know nothing of the documents. How could I, a ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... think that the fellows will return, and if they do we must treat them as before," he observed. "The chances are that in a short time they will be all fast asleep. They attacked us in a drunken freak more than with ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... I was vexed from your experience to hear of such foolish proceedings at Bridge of Allan, contrary to canon and to common sense.... The green part of the dress which caused your wonder, naturally enough, is not a freak of new vestments, but is a foolish way which the Glenalmond students have adopted of wearing the hood, which our Bishops (not without diversity of opinion) had granted for those who had been educated at our College. It is a hood lined with green (Scottish thistle colour), and they have ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... creek bank. A yard or two farther and the brown horse and his burden must have gone over the terrible drop, as straight as a plumb-line, on to the awful rocks below. We could see where the brown had torn up the turf as he struck all four hoofs deep into it at once. Indeed, he had been newly shod, a freak of Jim's about a bet with a travelling blacksmith. Then the other tracks, the long score on the brink—over the brink—where the frightened, maddened animal had made an attempt to alter her speed, all in vain, and had plunged over the bank and ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... sense that his father's grave in Woodlawn was supposed to be sacred to him and to his mother, was overlooked in the silent contemplation of what an even less sophisticated person might have been justified in describing as a "freak." Nothing was farther from his mind, however, than the desire or impulse to be disrespectful. And yet, as he was about to turn away from this sombre pile, he leaned over and struck a match on one of the huge boulders. As he was conveying the lighted sulphur match,—with which Dowd's ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... at the moment of perpetrating the cruel joke, I felt that I wouldn't have missed the sight for anything. I was really extremely proud of my achievement, although conscious that I should have to pay dearly bye-and-bye for my freak in the way of "pandies" and forced abstention from food; but I little thought of the stern Nemesis at a later period of my life Providence ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... distorted. For, in the darkness of the hall, he heard the child crying and lamenting. He stopped and listened to it like a man who resolutely faces his destruction. And, as so many times, he asked himself; "Is this a freak of my imagination, a trick of my nerves?" No, the sound was surely real, was close to him. It thrilled in his ears keenly. He could not doubt its reality. Yet he acknowledged to himself that he could not actually locate it. Only in that respect ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... thinks, slovenly; but he is not slovenly: you could not have taken any more decision from him just then; you have had as much as is good for you: he paints over a great space of his picture forms of the most rounded and melting tenderness, and suddenly, as you think by a freak, gives you a bit as jagged and sharp as a leafless blackthorn. Perhaps the most exquisite piece of subtle contrast in the world of painting is the arrow point, laid sharp against the white side and among the flowing hair of Correggio's Antiope. It is quite singular how ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... plainly heard in the telegraph office adjoining. Friday morning the operator, a capable and long-suffering young woman, came over to complain to the doctor that she really found it impossible to carry out the duties of her office, if the feeble-minded Delilah Freak was to be incarcerated only six inches distant from her ear. It seems that Delilah spends her days yelling at the top of her lungs, and Miss Dennis states that she prefers to take telegraphic messages down in competition ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... this very simple process are, if we consider closely, simply numberless. The scientist must make acts of faith, certainly reasonable acts, yet none the less of faith, for all that: first, that his fly is not a freak of nature; next, that his lens is symmetrically ground; then that his observation is adequate; then that his memory has not played him false between his observing and his recording that which he has seen. These acts are so reasonable ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... to be seen for leagues. One of the arreoros, or muleteers, with me, a native of Madrid, remarked on the solitude of the spot, adding, with a sigh, "This was a different place when first I visited it." Within about half a mile from where we were then conversing was an astonishing freak of Nature. In the midst of the plain were about one hundred naked rocks rising abruptly from the surface, in detached groups, some of which were as high as St. Paul's, and many appeared like the spires of a cathedral. Pointing to these eminences, the muleteer went on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... [FN240] This freak is of course not historical. The tale- teller introduces it to enhance the grandeur and majesty of Harun al-Rashid, and the vulgar would regard it as a right kingly diversion. Westerns only wonder that such ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... and two coolies are going up to Gujerat where the famine is. I inclose a snapshot of the party. My effacement by the coolie is merely a photographic freak—his grin is the broadest part of him, poor fellow. In the autumn I go down to Bombay. I am deep in bacteriology, which reminds me of father and the first time I met you, ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... a good joke," he remarked, "to call upon others to uphold the dignity of one who is always at some freak or other to ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... Perchance the two species of unfortunates may comfort one another. Here are Quakers with the instinct of battle in them; and men of war who should have worn the broad brim. Authors shall be ranked here whom some freak of Nature, making game of her poor children, had imbued with the confidence of genius and strong desire of fame, but has favored with no corresponding power; and others, whose lofty gifts were unaccompanied with the faculty ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was a perpetual slamming of doors and creaking of timbers. The villainous little craft appeared to be in constant hesitation whether it would go to pieces or not; and I believe has since taken that freak into its head. The captain, as seamanlike a fellow as ever crossed my eyes, kept up our confidence, however, even in the most ugly moments; although it could not be denied that our expedition was something like a visit to the northern seas in a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... intercepted letters to the countess. Still he had to calculate on the various injuries Nevil had done to his constitution, which had made of him another sort of man for a struggle of life and death than when he stood like a riddled flag through the war. That latest freak of the fellow's, the abandonment of our natural and wholesome sustenance in animal food, was to be taken in the reckoning. Dr. Gannet did not allude to it; the Bevisham doctor did; and the earl meditated with a fury of wrath on the dismal chance that such a folly as this of one ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with more than adequate enthusiasm; if Marchmont were converted to him, who could still be obstinate? The two men began to talk, May falling more and more into silence. She did not accuse Marchmont of deliberate malice, but by chance or the freak of some mischievous demon everything he said led Quisante on to display his weaknesses. She knew that Marchmont marked them every one; he was too well bred to show his consciousness by so much as the most fleeting glance at her; yet she could have met such a glance ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... the sixteenth century a foreign influence received and borne as a yoke"—(that of the Italian Renaissance) "because no living generative force was there to throw it off—with results too often dreary beyond measure; and, finally, we shall meet this strange freak of nature, a soil without artistic initiative bringing forth the greatest initiator—observe, I do not say the greatest artist—the greatest initiator perhaps since Lionardo in modern art—except it be ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... latterly even these scenes had palled; and it came to him with a faint shock of surprise that he was beginning to remember with relief those few occasions on which such talks had ended, by reason, truly, of some mere wanton freak, in unconditional release.—Preposterous indeed that the only acts of his life hitherto viewed with self-contempt, were beginning to seem the only ones ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... man cracked enough to make freak wills and not cracked enough to have them disputed on the ground of insanity. What did you do to him at Marvis Bay? ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... walls, and she ran from one to another rejoicing over them. There was even a further surprise. Years ago an artist cousin had sketched her portrait in pastel crayons upon the color-wash of the wall. It had been done as a mere artistic freak, but like many such spontaneous drawings it had been an admirable likeness and a very pretty picture. It bore her name, "Ingred," in flourishy letters underneath. The whole of this had now been protected with a sheet of glass and enclosed by a frame. A table in the ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... have stated, they have heard that he gave sound advice, and was a good and profitable man to consult. Was it not a strange freak on the part of God, who plays sometimes jokes on us, to have granted so many perfections to ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... little Cyclops, with one eye Staring to threaten and defy, That thought comes next—and instantly The freak is over, The shape will vanish, and behold! A silver Shield with boss of gold, 30 That spreads itself, some Faery bold In fight ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... who sacrificed his own conscience to the capricious will or freak or fancy of a sovereign was accorded a low place in the estimate of the Precepts. Such an one was despised as nei-shin, a cringeling, who makes court by unscrupulous fawning or as cho-shin, a favorite who steals his master's affections by means of servile compliance; these ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... ad-agency tradetalk, 'house freak'] A hacker occupying a technical-specialist, R&D, or systems position at a commercial shop. A really effective house wizard can have influence out of all proportion to his/her ostensible rank and still not have to wear a suit. Used esp. of Unix wizards. The ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... fancy in this freak, we have partly lost the power of restraint and guidance. We distinguish an unlooked-for figure in our visionary scene. Among those ancestral people there is a young man, dressed in the very fashion of to-day: he wears a dark frock-coat, ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... once more on the Freak Dinner stunt. All our exclusive citizens will recall the Perambulator Parade Dinner, in which Last-Trick Todd, at his palatial home at Pilgrim's Pond, caused so many of our prominent debutantes to look even younger than their years. Equally elegant and more miscellaneous ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... queer freak of our human nature, that those who use the Bible in a dead, foreign language, unsuited for use in our public schools, should call our English version of the scriptures a sectarian book, and then oppose its use in our ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... where a pile of great timbers and plank had been cast up by the angry waters during a recent storm. There, resting on top of the heap of lumber and timbers, was a fine skiff apparently sound and whole. By some curious freak of the storm it had been gently deposited there and left to rest while great ships had been sorely wrenched and even wrecked. The boys lost no time in removing the skiff with Wyckoff's help. To drag it ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... whispering of two women, and felt two young, two timid hands on which his head was resting. He soon recovered consciousness, and by the light of an old-fashioned Argand lamp he could make out the most charming girl's face he had ever seen, one of those heads which are often supposed to be a freak of the brush, but which to him suddenly realized the theories of the ideal beauty which every artist creates for himself and whence his art proceeds. The features of the unknown belonged, so to say, to the refined and ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... gardeners could never twist and torture a plant into freak beauty more surely than the German system of government would compress the governed into a sham civilization. Australia would fight again sooner than that a German establishment should offend our sense of justice and menace our peace near ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... the class wished to have their profiles cut in silhouette by a wandering artist of the scissors, and interchanged by all the thirty-eight. Hawthorne disapproved the proposed plan, and steadily refused to go into the Class Golgotha, as he styled the dismal collection. I joined him in this freak, and so our places were left vacant. I now regret the whim, since even a moderately correct outline of his features as a youth would, at this ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... have stooped to punish, and to cook a sprat have passed all Paris through the net. But remembering the days when I myself attended the College of Burgundy, I set the freak to the credit of some young student, and, shrugging my shoulders, dismissed it from my mind. An instant later, however, observing that the fragments of the snowball were melting on the seat and wetting ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... of infantiloid constitution. The infantiloid is a sort of enlarged and lengthened child. The feminoid is ostensibly a man, with a good deal of woman in him. The infantiloid is a quite general type, but of course when typical is a freak, recognized and treated as such. How far the eunuchoid may deviate from the normal is suggested by the following description ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... it is some school-girl freak," Thorne went on. "Naturally, Miss Crawford must be very anxious, but don't make up your mind to the worst till ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... and inoculated himself again in the arm with the poisonous cocaine, and right in front of all the five people in the library, too,—the Earl, Thorneycroft, Launcelot, Tooter, and Hicks,—who stared at him as if he were a dime-museum freak; which indeed he ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... credit and for the welfare of the empire of which they are the guardians. But if, from whatever cause, they are unwilling to recall the noble lord, then I implore them to take care that he be immediately ordered to return to Calcutta. Who can say what new freak we may hear of by the next mail? I am quite confident that neither the Court of Directors nor Her Majesty's Ministers can look forward to the arrival of that mail without great uneasiness. Therefore I say, send Lord Ellenborough back to Calcutta. There at least he will find persons ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... so to speak, Is, my child, an awful freak; For if you get him in a stew, He'll blush quite red and glare at you. Yet if you eat much lobster salad, It will make you ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... absurdity, has closed a most lofty soul within that little miserable carcass. For wielding his sword and keeping his word, he is a perfect Don Quixote in decimo-octavo. He shall be taken care of.—But, oddsfish, my lords, is not this freak of Buckingham too ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... fitness. The discovery of the interpolated tales contained in this MS. (which has thus presumably lain unnoticed for a whole century, under, as one may say, the very noses of the many students of Arabic literature who would have rejoiced in such a find) has, by a curious freak of fortune, been delayed until our own day in consequence of a singular mistake made by a former conservator of the Paris Bibliotheque, the well-known Orientalist, M. Reinaud, who, in drawing up the Catalogue of the Arabic MSS. in the collection described (or rather misdescribed) ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... rude sports in vessels of the King; but I do not remember to have known any more serious result than the settlement of some ancient quarrel, or some odd freak of nautical humour, which has commonly proved as harmless as it has ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... News-Record staff was that their journal was too "respectable," too intelligent, to be widely read; that the "yellow journals" grovelled, "appealed to the mob," drew their vast crowds by the methods of the fakir and the freak. They professed pride in the News-Record's smaller circulation as proof of its freedom from vulgarity and debasement. They looked down upon the journalists of the popular newspapers and posed as the aristocracy ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... however, the Bill, after passing the Commons, was opposed and modified by the Lords, Defoe suddenly appeared on a new tack, publishing the most famous of his political pamphlets, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which has, by a strange freak of circumstances, gained him the honour of being enshrined as one of the martyrs of Dissent. In the "brief explanation" of the pamphlet which he gave afterwards, he declared that it had no bearing whatever upon the Occasional Conformity ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... melody the words of "The Village Coquettes;" while the quaint humour of Harley excited roars of laughter through the whimsicalities of "Is She His Wife?" and "The Strange Gentleman." Trifles light as air though these effusions might be, the radiant bubbles showed even then, as by a casual freak which way with him the breeze in his leisure hours was drifting. A dozen years or more after this came the private theatricals at Tavistock House. Beginning simply, first of all, with his direction of his children's frolics in the enacting of a burletta, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... freak of fate, Thad Brewster and his comrades of the Silver Fox Patrol find themselves in somewhat the same predicament that confronted dear old Robinson Crusoe; only it is on the Great Lakes that they are wrecked instead of the salty sea. You will admit that ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... followed along the ridge, meaning to watch from that elevated station the course she would take; although, indeed, he would not have been surprised if he had seen nothing, no trace of her in the whole nearness or distance; in short, if she had been a freak, an illusion, of a hard-working mind that had put itself ajar by deeply brooding on abstruse matters, an illusion of eyes that he had tried too much by poring over the inscrutable manuscript, and of intellect that was mystified ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... delightful comedy, The Roaring Girl (Mermaid Series, Middleton's Plays, volume ii), somewhat idealizing her, however. She seems to have belonged to a neurotic and eccentric stock; "each of the family," her biographer says, "had his peculiar freak." As a child she only cared for boys' games, and could never adapt herself to any woman's avocations. "She had a natural abhorrence to the tending of children." Her disposition was altogether masculine; "she was not for mincing obscenity, but would talk ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... altered his whole career. 'Tis with almost all of us, as in Monsieur Massillon's magnificent image regarding King William, a grain de sable that perverts or perhaps overthrows us; and so it was but a light word flung in the air, a mere freak of a perverse child's temper, that brought down a whole heap of crushing woes upon that family whereof Harry Esmond formed ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dimensions, found difficulty in accommodating at one and the same time my bodily members and the Latin language. Even my "Caesar" caused me less misery at this period than did the problem of the proper disposal of my hands and feet. Do what I would they were hopelessly (by some singular freak of nature) in my way. The breeding of all the Bolingbrokes would have been taxed to its utmost, I believe, to behave for a single instant as if they did ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... she contemplated some idle freak that might try his gallantry, perhaps his purse. But she was in earnest, if ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby |
