"Ironic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seemed to be of a sacrificial nature. She was sweet and gentle with every one,—with me in particular, I may say,—and there was something positively humble in her attitude of self-abnegation. Where she had once been wilful and ironic, she was now gentle and considerate. Nor was I the only one to note these subtle changes in her. I doubt, however, if the others were less puzzled than I. In fact, Mrs. Titus was palpably perplexed, and there were times when I caught her eyeing me with distinct disapproval, as if she ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... Heidegger, which Hogarth had not long before stigmatised pictorially in the plate known to collectors as the "large Masquerade Ticket." As verse this performance is worthless, and it is not very forcibly on the side of good manners; but the ironic dedication has a certain touch of Fielding's later fashion. Two other poetical pieces, afterwards included in the Miscellanies of 1743, also bear the date of 1728. One is A Description of U—n G— (alias New Hog's Norton) in Com. Hants, which Mr. Keightley has identified with Upton ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... four of us sat as solemn as statues—I don't think one of us smiled. It was during the second Act that I suddenly laughed. I don't know that anything very comic was happening on the stage, but I was aware, with a kind of ironic subconsciousness, that some of the superior spirits in their superior Heaven must be deriving a great deal of fun from our situation. There was Vera thinking, I suppose, of nothing but Lawrence, and Lawrence thinking of nothing but Vera, and Nina thinking of nothing but Lawrence, and the audience ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... sound from the orchestra pit, and the curtains parted on "Salome." The setting for "Salome" is an imaginative creation of the scene painter's art. The high steps to the palace door to the right, the cover of the cistern, backed by ironic roses in the center, and beyond the deep night sky and the moonlight on the distant roofs. Two cedars cut the sky, black and mournful. Against this background "Salome" moves like a tigress, the costumes of the court glow with a dun, barbaric splendor, and the red fire from the tripods ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... indignation and shivering a bit with fear of the man, she stopped short, midway down the ramp to the "lower level," and momentarily contemplated throwing herself upon his mercy and crawling out of it all with whatever grace she might; but his ironic and skeptical ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... head, around, to speak to the woman behind him. The light above struck blind on the glass in one eye, but the other danced with a genial, a mad scintillation. The light of it caught like contagion, and touched the merest glancer at him with the spark of its warm, ironic mirth. The question which naturally rose to Flora's lips—"Who in the world is that?"—she checked; why, she didn't ask herself. She only felt as she followed Clara, trailing away across the floor, that the interest of the evening which had promised so well, beginning with the ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... favourite instrument, the dialogue, to its highest splendour, and to this day he remains by far its most distinguished proficient. In the 2nd century a.d. Lucian of Samosata achieved a brilliant success with his ironic dialogues "Of the Gods," "Of the Dead," "Of Love" and "Of the Courtesans." In some of them he attacks superstition and philosophical error with the sharpness of his wit; in others he merely paints scenes of modern life. The title of Lucian's most famous collection ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... it both feared and fascinated. Whenever he was not looking, she could not take her eyes away. In the pictures in her mind, it showed itself most often in ironic rage; yet he could look at her with an expression that wooed the softest of thoughts in her heart. Then she felt a slave, and would have given him the world, held in her fingers, the gift would have ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... of the ordinary seaman who sat at Singleton's feet. Young Charley was lean and long-necked. The ridge of his backbone made a chain of small hills under the old shirt. His face of a street-boy—a face precocious, sagacious, and ironic, with deep downward folds on each side of the thin, wide mouth—hung low over his bony knees. He was learning to make a lanyard knot with a bit of an old rope. Small drops of perspiration stood out on his bulging forehead; he sniffed strongly from time to time, ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... of this cow one is able, indeed one is almost obliged, to feel the soul of a goddess. The incredible is accomplished. The dead Egyptian makes the ironic, the skeptical modern world feel deity in a limestone cow. How is it done? I know not; but it is done. Genius can do nearly everything, it seems. Under the chin of the cow there is a standing statue of the King Mentu-Hotep, and beneath her the king kneels ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... left in her mind, of the child's initiative and executive ability, was destined to be dissipated by the rather heroic measures sometimes resorted to by a superior agency taking an ironic hand in the game of which we have been too ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... relish the story the papers would make of it. So he and the physician devised a statement for the press to the effect that the Weblings died of something they had eaten. The stomach of Europe was all deranged, and Sir Joseph had been famous for his dinners; there was a kind of ironic logic in his epitaph. ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... the most ironic strength of these kinds of archival electronic resources is that many of the teachers AM interviewed were desperate, it is no exaggeration to say, not only for primary materials but for unstructured primary materials. These would, they thought, foster personally motivated research, ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... in so far as they were essential to his deeper understanding of life. His code was noblesse oblige and he privately damned it as a superstition foisted upon him by his ancestors. He was sentimental and ironic, passionate and indifferent, frank and subtle, proud and democratic, with a warm capacity for friendship and none whatever for intimacy, a hard worker with a strong taste for loafing— in the open country, book in hand. He prided himself upon his iron will ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... four weeks. At length—what was bound to happen—the weakest snapped. A week went by, and Charlie did not come. Emily haunted the porch in an ironic appearance of freedom. Mrs. Drainger, in some subtle way, knew that she had won, that the girl was eternally hers. Emily's face was pitifully white: she was suffering. Was it love? Or was it her passionate hatred of the prison ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... not imagine what he had misinterpreted so flatteringly to himself. But what did it matter? How like ironic fate, to pierce him with a chance shaft when all the shafts she ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... stimulate efficiency, or calculatingly and in cold blood put other agents in to wreck a concern in the interests of a rival. It was a matter of fees. Mern could defend the ethics of such procedure with interesting arguments; he had been an inspector of police and held ironic views of human nature; he had invented an anticipatory system, so he called it, by which he "hothoused" criminal proclivities in a person in order to show the person's latent possibilities up to an employer before damage had been wrought to the employer's business or ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... to arrest him. And while his friend tries desperately to resist the agents of the force, he contemplates the brutal scene with an ironic smile. ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... the remembrance that he was the old man who bankrupted himself to save his son from the gallows. He knew that this very house, which remained as the last refuge, was mortgaged again as when his father and mother had come into it before he was born. The ironic ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... a failure; he stood for nothing in the world of achievement; for all the difference that his going made, he might never have been born. Then a thought as startling as the tangible appearance of some ironic, grinning imp flashed to his mind. Who was he, Bruce Burt, to criticise his partner, Slim? What more had he accomplished? How much more difference would his own death make in anybody's life? His ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... rival? This is becoming dramatic!' Lady Bridget's voice was amusedly ironic, but she carried her head erect. 'Tell me about the woman at the ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... been simple enough to admit his premises. Towards men who have some logical capacity his tone is that of respectful impatience; but as he goads on the reluctant and resentful victims of his reasoning, who loiter and limp painfully in the steps of his rapid deductions, he seems to say, with ironic scorn, "A little faster, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... considered ingratiating. He sauntered up to the three younger men, who stood in a group smoking as they waited for their hostess, and introduced himself with a little too evident assurance—nevertheless it is to be doubted whether he received the intended impression of faint and ironic chill: there was no hint of understanding ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... his lips as he saw them fade into the yawning gulf of moonlit distance,—going in different directions toward their ranches—an ironic smile, ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... details of the visit, when Alzugaray came home, and seeing a light in Caesar's room, went in there. Alzugaray was quite lively. The two friends passed the persons met that day in ironic review, and in general they were agreed about everything, except about valuing ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... way? Somehow, the dream had faded, the bright goal vanished and was lost. After a year of pre-med at the University of Southern Cal, he had given up medicine; he had become discouraged and quit college to take a laborer's job with a construction company. How ironic that this move should have saved his life! He'd wanted to work with his hands, to sweat and labor with the muscles of his body. He'd wanted to earn enough to marry Joan and then, later perhaps, he would have returned to finish his courses. It all seemed so far away now, his reason for ...
— Small World • William F. Nolan
... to the smoking-room. He himself mixed the cocktails. He talked to me. We discovered that we had mutual acquaintances. Never shall I forget that face, that ironic and distant look, that sad and melodious voice. Ah! Colonel, gentlemen, I don't know what they may say at the Geographic Office, or in the posts of the Soudan.... There can be nothing in it but a horrible suspicion. Such a man, capable of such a ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... Girls, that we sat and strove, even though we drew the line at playing with them and at knowing them, when not of the swarming cousinship, at home—if that felt awkwardness didn't exactly coincide with the ironic effect of "Gussy's" appearances, his emergence from rich mystery and his return to it, our state was but comparatively the braver: he always had so much more to tell us than we could possibly have to tell him. On reflection I see that the most completely rueful period couldn't after all greatly ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... Drop their leaves with a faint, sharp hiss of contempt, While a car at the end of the street goes by with a laugh; As by degrees The poor bells cease, and the Night is exempt, And the stars can chaff The ironic moon at their ease, while the dim old church Is peopled with shadows and sounds and ghosts that lurch In ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... for Jane. The only thing that seemed possible to her in her simple reasoning, was to prevent such catastrophes for the future. It was not that pity was misplaced when shipwreck came, nor that charity ever failed. She understood, without being conscious of it, the ironic severity of Jesus, who would have no sudden pity and heart-searching on account of His poor. He had come into the world for righteousness and for judgment, and the judgment and righteousness both declared, not at the time of disaster or human appeal, nor with sudden loud ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... just at this season, is a most inhospitable looking pasturage, and the unbroken glare of white makes my eyes ache.... There's one big indoor task I finally have accomplished, and that is tuning my piano. It made my heart heavy, standing there useless, a gloomy monument of ironic grandeur. ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... suspected that Pan had silken cords to draw him. He had always averted his eyes from the god—that is to say, within reason. Yet now Daniel, on perhaps a couple of fine mornings a week, in full Square, with Fan sitting behind on the cold stones, and Mr. Critchlow ironic at his door in a long white apron, would entertain Samuel Povey for half an hour with Pan's most intimate lore, and Samuel Povey would not blench. He would, on the contrary, stand up to Daniel like a little man, and pretend with all his might to be, potentially, a perfect arch-priest ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... Partly the change was owing to disappointment: life had not become so highly cultured, literature had not prospered so much, nor displayed so broad a diffusion of intelligence and taste, as had been expected. Pope's Dunciad, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and ironic satire on the state of literature under "Augustus" (George II, the "snuffy old drone from the German hive"), brilliantly express this indignation with the intellectual and ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... said Staniford, listening in ironic safety, "you overawe us all. I never did sing, but I think I should want to make an effort ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... of the above drama was suggested by two or three rather meagre pages of the 'Islendingasaga' of Sturla Thordsson (ed. Vigfusson, ch. 146). To my notion, the poet has succeeded admirably in reproducing the cool coloring, the ironic-pessimistic attitude, that uncompromisingly masculine sentiment we know so well in their refreshing acerbity from the best sagas. Not the least meritorious thing in the play, by the way, is the very slight insistence on Thorolf's relations to Helga, notwithstanding ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... half-buried experiments in rhyme, assonance and polyphony. This part of the paper will examine Jurgen and call attention to the distorted sonnet printed as a prose soliloquy on page 97 of that exquisite and ironic volume. It will pass to the subsequent Figures of Earth and, after showing how the greater gravity of this volume is accompanied by a greater profusion of poetry per se it will unravel the scheme of Cabell's ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... that the House would appreciate the course which had induced him to seat himself below the gangway. The House cheered very loudly, and Mr. Boffin was the hero of ten minutes. Mr. Daubeny detracted something from this triumph by the overstrained and perhaps ironic pathos with which he deplored the loss of his right honourable friend's services. Now this right honourable gentleman had never been ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... meeting the other's ironic fence with crude thwacks. 'Do you think a God-fearing congregation would offer office ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... and almost unique judgment passed upon Tacitus at the bottom of page 133 and the top of page 134, or again, the excellent sub-ironic passages in which he expresses the vast advantage of metaphysical debate: which has all these qualities, that it is true, sober, exact, and yet a piece of laughter and a contradiction of itself. It is ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... straight on home, and had been within an ace of doing so. An omen, wasn't it? Five minutes she and Mr. Canning had talked, over so-called horses' necks provided by his sedate host, and before the end of that time she had perceived an interest dawning in the young man's somewhat ironic eyes. With the usual of his sex one could have counted pretty definitely on the thing's being followed up. However, Mr. Canning, the difficult, had merely saluted her fascinatingly, and retired to re-maroon himself in the rural villa of his kinsmen, the Allison ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... he know that he was the danger in the case? If he did he did not show any apprehension. His white face, typically French, with its rather long nose, slightly flattened temples, faintly cynical and ironic lips and small but obstinate chin, was almost ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... a surprisingly accurate statement. Kendall gave the exact answer. He meant to give an ironic comment. For the mathematics had been perfectly correct, only Buck ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... pretty nearly made an end of James Fenimore Cooper, we believe. His fellow-countrymen fell on him, tooth and nail. We didn't take so kindly to criticism in those days as we do now, when it merely tickles the fat on our ribs, and we respond with the ironic laughter you profess to like so much. What is the drift of the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... implacable enemy. She was not tender any more. She was the Christine who had faced bailiffs and his father's strange, gay friends—ice-cold and bitter and relentless. She took the pictures from him. With a terrible ironic calm she sorted them from his pockets, and spread them out on the table like a pack of cards. He dared not look at her. He was afraid to see what she was seeing. She had torn open the door of his secret chamber, and there in that blasting light was his treasure, ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... saying, "I had to come over to see Isabelle married, but I shall go back after a look around—not the place for me!" He laughed and waved his cane towards the company with an ironic sense of his inappropriateness to an ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... flared once more with the name of Larrabee Harman, and we read that there was "no hope of his surviving." Ironic phrase! There was not a soul on earth that day who could have hoped for his recovery, or who—for his sake—cared two straws whether he lived or died. And the dancer had been right; one of her legs was badly broken: ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... superior to anything of Beyle's and equal to anything of Flaubert's or Maupassant's. But the real cause of admiration is the nature of the grasp itself. Here, and perhaps here only—certainly here in transcendence—Balzac grapples with, and vanquishes, the bare, stern, unadorned, unbaited, ironic facts of life. It is not an intensely interesting book; it is certainly not a delightful one; you do not want to read it very often. Still, when you have read it you have come to one of the ultimate things: the flammantia moenia ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... through, the dominating fact is that it is "Henry James" speaking—Henry James, with whose delicate, ironic mind and most human heart we are in contact. There is much that can be learned in fiction; the resources of mere imitation, which we are pleased to call realism, are endless; we see them in scores of modern ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and a small chin. The other was much more solidly built—a girl of seventeen, in a plump phase, which however an intelligent eye would have read as not likely to last; a complexion of red and brown tanned by exercise; an expression in her clear eyes which was alternately frank and ironic; and an inconvenient mass of golden ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the secretary with ironic seriousness. "Takes your mind off that silly trouble. At your ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... the faintest interest in the debate. Yet he knew all about it, and that I had to open it." But he was glad that his father showed no interest in the debate. Clara had mentioned it in the presence of Maggie, with her usual ironic intent, and Edwin had ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... doubt you could," answered Mr. Green with a fresh leer, that contained this time something ironic. "I nothing doubt it! But by your leave, I'll pursue my ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... a certain ironic aspect in his position as the dictator of this famous New England magazine. The fact that his manner was impatiently energetic and somewhat startling to the placid atmosphere of Park Street was not the thing that really signified its break with its past. But here was a Southerner ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... act as an angel". There is a sub-ironic touch in this phrase which should not be overlooked. Cf. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... philosopher; he is highly imaginative and picturesque; many of his passages might be styled, like those of Macaulay, "purple," for at times he rises to a high pitch of feeling and oratory. Yet this has been urged against him by some critics. The ironic remark has been repeated, in regard to Bergson, which was originally made of William James, by Dr. Schiller, that his work was "so lacking in the familiar philosophic catch-words, that it may be doubted whether any professor has quite understood it." There is in his works ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... uncontesting that its foundering seemed at hand. The waters poured back and forth at her waist, as though holding her body captive for the assaults of the active seas which came over her broken bulwarks, and plunged ruthlessly about. There was something ironic in the indifference of her defenceless body to these unending attacks. It mocked this white and raging post-mortem brutality, and gave her a dignity that was cold and superior to all the eternal powers could now do. She pitched helplessly head first into a hollow, and a door flew open under ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... from Miko. And then his ironic voice. "We will not bother you, Haljan. There is no hurry. You will be hungry in good time. And sleepy. Then we will come and get you. And a little acid will help you to ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... had turned his face away and was plucking the lobes from a frond of fern. "A brave resolve, Father," he said, with an ironic note. "But you have not yet told me what brings you off ...
— The Broken Soldier and the Maid of France • Henry Van Dyke
... sentiments which direct his powers are not so fine as Heywood's. He depresses the mind, rather than invigorates it. The eye he cast on human life was not the eye of a sympathizing poet, but rather that of a sagacious cynic. His observation, though sharp, close, and vigilant, is somewhat ironic and unfeeling. His penetrating, incisive intellect cuts its way to the heart of a character as with a knife; and if he lays bare its throbs of guilt and weakness, and lets you into the secrets of its organization, he conceives his whole work is performed. This criticism ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... "poetry"—if you do this, you are not likely to leave it unfinished. And before you reach the end you will have encountered *en route* pretty nearly all the moods of poetry that exist: tragic, humorous, ironic, elegiac, lyric—everything. You will have a comprehensive acquaintance with a poet's mind. I guarantee that you will come safely through if you treat the work as a novel. For a novel it effectively is, and a better one than any written by Charlotte Bront or George Eliot. In reading, it ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... do not reveal much literary ability. But their writer saw with open eyes, eyes that were disposed to caricature the peculiarities of others. This trait, much clarified and spiritualized in later life, became a distinct, ironic note in his character. Possibly it attracted Heine, although his irony was on ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... foreman's attitude with a wave of the hand that dismissed any counterargument. But there was an ironic gleam in his eye. ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... thought contrary to the form of words. Its seeming praise is really condemnation; its compliments are insults. Its advantage lies in the difficulty its victim experiences in making a reply. It is useful in chastising follies and vices; but as a rule ironic touches are to be preferred to continuous irony. The following is from Thackeray: "So was Helen of Greece innocent. She never ran away with Paris, the dangerous young Trojan. Menelaus, her husband, ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... was a clean-minded little person, her people were of the clean-minded type, therefore she did not understand all that this ironic speech implied, but she gathered enough of its significance to cause her to turn first red and then pale and then to burst into tears. She was crying and trying to conceal the fact when Hannah returned. She bent her head and touched her ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... very great Clamour against some late Performances of Authorship, and the unprecedented Criticisms introduc'd" make such an essay as he writes "absolutely necessary." Yet there is no clear indication of just what works occasion this necessity. The ironic reference to Mr. Dennis at the end of the first paragraph, taken together with the praise of Mr. Pope's translation of Homer and the allusion to "the malicious and violent Criticisms of a certain Gentleman ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... preoccupied to wonder how his mother would take this visit; but he welcomed Mr. Langhope's departure, hoping that the withdrawal of his ironic smile would leave his daughter open to gentler influences. Mr. Tredegar, meanwhile, was projecting his dry glance over the scene, trying to converse by signs with the overseers of the different rooms, and pausing now and then to contemplate, ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... and tragic duality of all life's energies, it is the bridge to every eternity which is not merely a spectral condition of earth disembowelled of its lusts. For sex holds the substance of the image. But we must remember with Heine that Aristophanes is the God of this ironic earth, and that all argument is apparently vitiated from the start by the simple fact that Wagner and a rooster are given an analogous method of making love. And therefore it seems impeccable logic to say that all that is most unlike the rooster is the most spiritual part of love. All ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... God's; that St. Peter was crucified sooner than obey Nero—and the Prior cried out for silence; and that he could not hear his Christian King likened to the heathen emperor. Monk after monk would rise; one following his Prior, and disclaiming personal learning and responsibility; another with ironic deference saying that a man's soul was his own, and that not even a Religious Superior could release from the biddings of conscience; another would balance himself between the parties, declaring that the distinction of duties was insoluble; that in such a case as this it was ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... infinitesimal, and yet it was real. In a while we had gained sea room; in a while more we were fairly under sailing way, and the cliffs had begun to drop from our quarter. With one accord we looked back. Percy Darrow waved his hand in an indescribably graceful and ironic gesture; then turned square on his heel and sauntered away to the north valley, out of the course of the lava. That was the last I ever ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... politely and hospitably, but with every moment that passed I grew more acutely conscious of something deterrent behind his courtesy. A sense of a strong personality in the background, not actually hostile as yet, but ironic and critical, set me instinctively and instantly on guard. Not that I actually suspected the man; but to take him straightway into my confidence was simply impossible. A man of another temperament might have done so—and quite possibly have ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... a gift of beautiful buildings and grounds, "regretted they could not take any of the children, as their orphanage was exclusively for their denomination." The mother did not respond to the doctor's ironic suggestion that she should "turncoat" ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... or go into retirement. She was always leaving abruptly for Europe, and every once in a while she did something quite uncanonical; enjoying wickedly the consternation she caused among the serenely regulated, and betraying to the keen eyes of the New Yorker an ironic appreciation of the immense wealth which enabled her to do as she chose, answerable to no one. Her husband was uxorious and she had no children. She had seemed to Price more restless than usual of late and ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... he was lost he knew! A single glance at his judges made him certain of it, and from this moment his features wore a calm and contemptuous smile, an unchangeable expression of scorn. With an ironic curiosity he followed his judges through the labyrinth of artfully contrived captious questions by which they hoped to entangle him; occasionally he gave himself, as it were for his own amusement, the appearance of voluntarily being caught in their nets, until ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... woman-kissed, my life that seemed to me as bright, every second of it, as bright ducats rushing in a pleasant plenteous stream from one hand to another, was after all intended to be no more than a kind of ironic commentary on, and petty contrast to, the life of ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... to stand with his offering held out Allerton had no choice but to take up the letter and break the seal. He read it with little grunts intended to signify ironic laughter, but which betrayed no ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... dependent on the appreciation of a master for his happiness. The new Braithwaite both in body and character had hardened. His gray eyes had concentrated into command. His clean-shaven cheeks and small military mustache gave him an expression which was tolerantly ironic. The moment you saw him, you knew beyond question that he was ruthlessly aware of what he wanted out of life. He was a sword which had lain hidden in its scabbard and was now withdrawn, glistening, ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... with glee. The aboriginal sense of humor may not be highly developed, but it is easily aroused. The friends of the outraged brave stamped up and down the dirt floor in spasms of mirth. They clapped him on the back and jabbered ironic inquiries as to his well-being. For the moment, at least, Dud was as popular as a funny clown ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... have been!" and a thin ironic smile hovered on his lips— "And you carried it off well! But—the poor child!—what an ordeal for her! You can hardly have felt it so keenly, being seasoned to hypocrisy for so many years!" Her eyes flashed up at him indignantly. He raised ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... condition of dejection that, a week before the evening we are describing, she had been obliged to order a box at the Gaiety Theatre, she, who, like all optimists, habitually frequented those playhouses where she could behold gloomy tragedies, awful melodramas, or those ironic pieces called farces, in which the ultimate misery of which human nature is capable is ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... had passed. His men respected but did not understand him. They wove a legend about his name. They said he had come to France wanting to be killed, but that no bullet could touch him. And even those who scoffed, when they saw him, unruffled and strangely solitary, moving about with almost ironic contempt of danger, wondered if there might not be ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... generation of 1850." Now mere discouragement, except as a passing mood, though extremely natural, is also a little contemptible—pessimism-and-water, mere peevishness to the "fierce indignation," mere whining compared with the great ironic despair. As for Consolation, which in form as in matter strongly resembles part of the Strayed Reveller, I must say, at the risk of the charge of Philistinism, that I cannot see why most of it should not have been printed ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... Armine might guess at a bitter truth of his nature, and shrink from him, despite the powerful attraction he possessed for her, despite her own freedom from scruple, her own ironic and even cruel ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... of blood-brothers," assented Maggard with an ironic flash in his eyes, "an' now Blood-brother Bas, go over ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... words the cripple fixed upon the speaker the hard ironic eye of one toughened and defiant in misery, and, in the end, grinned upon him with his unshaven face ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... burst with stitches in the side had a brilliant organizer of the fete stuffed them full with preliminary meat. Oh, droll! oh, delicious! oh, rare for Antony! And now a young man noticeable by his emaciated face and his premature baldness was drawing to the front amid ironic cheers. When the grotesque racers had passed by, noble cavaliers displayed their dexterity at the quintain, and beautiful ladies at the balconies—not masked, as in France, but radiantly revealed—changed their broad smiles to the subtler smiles of dalliance. And then suddenly the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... was a large part of his endowment. His cool irony associated him more closely to the Schlegels than to Novalis, with his life-and-death consecrations. His absurd play-within-a-play, Puss in Boots (1797), is delicious in its bizarre ragout of satirical extravaganzas, where the naive and the ironic lie side by side, and where the pompous seriousness of certain complacent ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a fairly tall man, with a big head, big features, and a beard. His characteristic expression denoted benevolence based on an ironic realisation of the humanity of human nature. He was forty-six years of age and looked it. He had been for more than twenty years at the Treasury, in which organism he had now attained a certain importance. He ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... ironic slant in the words or not, he paused a moment before he said: "Want to start her ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... themselves that we learn much of what we know about the jongleurs; and one of not the least amusing[134] deals with the half-clumsy, half-satiric boasts of two members of the order, who misquote the titles of their repertoire, make by accident or intention ironic comments on its contents, and in short do not magnify their office in a very modern spirit ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... When I got here, the only light burning was in Simon's study—otherwise the house was in darkness, which seemed to me an ironic commentary on my foolish gesture! The study light went out almost immediately, but I lingered on. I sat down on a fallen log in the deep shadow of those trees—there, to the right of the path—and began to think back to old times. One discovery I made was that I hated ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... in the same, amused, ironic strain, "because I've been traveling about, half my life, to get it cured, Germany and France, everywhere! And there ain't no such animal! ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... problem incapable of solution, or, rather, of which all possible solutions are equally unsatisfactory and undesirable. The playwright cannot too soon make sure that he has not strayed into such a no-thoroughfare. Whether an end be comic or tragic, romantic or ironic, happy or disastrous, it should satisfy something within us—our sense of truth, or of beauty, or of sublimity, or of justice, or of humour, or, at the least or lowest, our cynical sense of the baseness of human ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... concerned himself more to beat the Federalists than he ever exerted himself to defeat the British. In his opinion, campaigning ought to have its regular alternations of activity and repose, but he never knew when activity should begin. To make the condition more supremely ironic, Morgan Lewis, now in his fifty-ninth year, whose knowledge of war, like Dearborn's, had been learned as a deputy quartermaster-general thirty years before, was ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... "Miss Snowe," used to occasion me much inward edification. What contradictory attributes of character we sometimes find ascribed to us, according to the eye with which we are viewed! Madame Beck esteemed me learned and blue; Miss Fanshawe, caustic, ironic, and cynical; Mr. Home, a model teacher, the essence of the sedate and discreet: somewhat conventional, perhaps, too strict, limited, and scrupulous, but still the pink and pattern of governess-correctness; whilst another ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Baedeker—'fatiguing but repaying')—was disclosed to him after the effort of the climb, he had doubtless felt the existence of some great, dignified principle crowning the chaotic strivings, the petty precipices, and ironic little dark chasms of life. This was as near to religion, perhaps, as his practical spirit had ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... guessed in him a man whom an incurable habit of investigation and analysis had made gentle and indulgent; inapt for action, and more sensitive to the thoughts than to the events of existence. Withal not crushed, sub-ironic without a trace of acidity, and with a simple manner which put people at ease quickly. They had a long conversation on the terrace commanding an extended view of the town ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... naked feet; that was how you could tell you were awake. The door of the Morfe drawing-room opened into Mamma's old bedroom at Five Elms, and when she came to the foot of the bed she saw her father standing there. He looked at her with a mocking, ironic animosity, so that she knew he was alive. ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... unable to deny this chronometry, felt that an ironic Providence was punishing him for his attentions to ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... world, repletion, extravagance, disorders, disease, warfare, and death. In reality Abbot Epicurus had captured all the best things the world can hold and established them at Beeleigh, leaving only the dregs. And at the same time, by a supreme master-stroke of ironic skill, he persuaded those stupid dregs that in spurning them he had ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... the Christmas I spent out in Nebraska," Mr. Lamson was saying. He was probably the most travelled man in town. Every time he told a story, he went a little farther West. (Harry Squires disconcerted him on one occasion by asking in his most ironic manner if he didn't think it would be a good idea to settle in California when he got there, and Mr. Lamson, after thinking it over, stopped his subscription to The Banner.) "Yes sir; that was a terrible winter. I don't know as I ever told you about it, but we had to drive ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... of fire and meaning, of laughter and friendliness; his mouth curved into the finest sweet smile in the world, as also it could curl into a look of scorn which could scathe as finely. He had a keen wit, and could be ironic and biting when he chose, but 'twas not his habit to use his power malevolently. Even those who envied his great fortunes, and whose spite would have maligned him had he been of different nature, ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... majority were present when the opinion was delivered, the fifth being indisposed. Remarks Justice Jackson in his concurring opinion in United States v. Bryan (339 U.S. 323 (1950)), in which the ruling in Christoffel was held to be inapplicable: "It is ironic that this interference with legislative procedures was promulgated by exercise within the Court of the very right of absentee participation denied to Congressmen." Ibid. 344. It seems unlikely that the Christoffel decision seriously ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... served to heighten Mr. Thompson's embarrassment—like a flank attack while he was in the act of waving a flag of truce. But he perceived that there was no malice in the words, only a flash of ironic humor. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... In ironic response to the pleas of the Regulators, the Governor of North Carolina summoned a force of one thousand militia men and led them into the western settlements. At the end of the day, May 16, 1771, two hundred and fifty of the two thousand Regulators who had gathered with ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... found his handwriting difficult to read at the best of times, and undecipherable in hard pencil on thin paper, handed the letter over to the faithful Bakkus, who read it aloud with a running commentary of ironic humour. This Andrew did not know ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... opposition paper had come out with a red-hot article condemning the administration for reckless extravagance. It had especially condemned Dugan for burdening the city with new bonds to create an unneeded park, and the whole thing had ended with a screech of ironic laughter over the—so the editor called it—fitting capstone of the whole business, the purchase of two dongola ...
— The Water Goats and Other Troubles • Ellis Parker Butler |
