"Irrelevance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... indolence, his irrelevance and his easy mockery, lay a surprising and relentless maturity of purpose. His intention, as he stated it in college, had been to use three years in travel, three years in utter leisure—and then to become immensely rich ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... much of a wound," explained the old man with unconscious irrelevance. "He himself calls it a mere scratch. But my old woman took a fancy to him: he is young and well-looking, you understand. . . . She is clever at bandages too, so she has looked after him as if he were her ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... man, and then, watching the vigor of their movements, she thought they could hit very hard, but still there was a terrible attraction about the idea of being hit by a man. She asked her mother (with apparent irrelevance) had a man ever struck her; her mother was silent for a few moments, and then burst into so violent a passion of weeping that Mary Makebelieve was frightened. She rushed into her mother's arms and was rocked fiercely ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... chapter began, in an apparent irrelevance, with the name of St. Edward; and this one might very well begin with the name of St. George. His first appearance, it is said, as a patron of our people, occurred at the instance of Richard Coeur de Lion during his campaign in Palestine; and this, as ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... Mr. Cropper again. After the preliminary remarks in which he indulged, she said, with seeming irrelevance, that Saturday had ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... O my Aunt," responds Salam with lofty irrelevance. Then follows a prolonged pause, somewhat trying, I apprehend, to Aunt, and struggling with a yawn Salam says at length, "I will see ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... sorry and said so. Kenny, however, took immediate advantage of Garry's attitude to sidetrack what he considered the preposterous irrelevance of the shotgun, the one unessential thing in the studio, and point with rising temper to the statuette. It had, alas! been a birthday present from Ann Marvin, whose statuettes, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... could never take me unawares again. Now, with their red sneer on me, I knew that I had never really believed they would come back, and that I was as defenceless as ever against them ... As before, it was the insane irrelevance of their coming that made it so horrible. What the deuce were they after, to leap out at me at such a time? I had lived more or less carelessly in the years since I'd seen them, though my worst indiscretions were not dark enough to invite the searchings of their infernal ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... kind!" she answered with enthusiasm. "He has been a good son and brother; he is always helping people, and has more friends than any one in the district. I don't see why he cared for me," she added with seeming irrelevance. ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... goes Mr. Palmerston and the girl, anyway," said John, with eager irrelevance; "they seem to be ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... that this postulate is of our making, and involves a risk. It may be that experience refuses to confirm it, and convicts us instead of a 'mistaken identity.' In short, every identity we reason from is made by our postulating an irrelevance ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... fountain flows! He wrote for himself. The crowd, the verdict of his friends—what did all that matter? He wrote for himself; and for those who dare to risk the taste of that wine, which turns the taste of all else to a weary irrelevance! ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... quaintness of phrase, in fantastic vapourings and promises of the dreadful things that are going to be done to the enemy. They deal some shrewd hits at the glaring faults of their subject, his outrageous abuse of authorities, his profanity, his ribaldry, his irrelevance; but in point of the three last qualities there is not much to choose between him and them. One line of counter attack they did indeed hit upon, which was followed up for generations with no small success against the Nonconformists, and that is the charge of ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... with fine irrelevance, 'as an enemy this is a house I shall never make a call at. But look at the matter for a minute, ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... astonishment she seemed delighted by this conclusion. "Yes," she said, and she smiled radiantly, "and now you understand how it is that American girls won't go out to service, though the pay is so much better and they are so much better housed and fed—and everything. Besides," she added, with an irrelevance which always amuses her husband, though I should be alarmed by it for her sanity if I did not find it so characteristic of women here, who seem to be mentally characterized by the illogicality of ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... passage above quoted from Berlioz should be suspected of bias or irrelevance, we cite a few phrases from Cherubini's Treatise on Counterpoint and Fugue, of which, though the letter-press is by his favourite pupil, Halevy, the musical examples and doctrine are beyond suspicion his own. Concerning the 16th-century idiom, incorrectly but generally known as the "changing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... conscious of a change. Something delightful had happened, to which at first I couldn't give a name, but which presently shone out as the fact that there were but half as many people present and that these were chiefly the natural or the naturalised. We had been docked of half our irrelevance, our motley excess, and now physically, morally, aeesthetically there was elbow-room. In the afternoon I went to the Pincio, and the Pincio was almost dull. The band was playing to a dozen ladies who lay in landaus poising their lace-fringed parasols; ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the villainy of it. In the end, however, those who play with words lose their labour, and pregnant as they feel themselves to be with new and wonderful universes, they cannot humanise the one in which they live and rather banish themselves from it by their persistent egotism and irrelevance. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... true," said Erica, suddenly, and with seeming irrelevance, "then sooner or later we must learn it to be so. Truth MUST win in the end. But it is worse to wait for perfect certainty than for books at the museum," she added, laughing. "It is five minutes to nine I shall ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... come, the thirteenth of May has come, and so forth. The line trees are arrayed in tender green, and anon blossom along the length of the Unter den Linden, but it is not Germany's new summer, and it has that irrelevance which the murderer remarks when he is being led some beautiful spring morning to the scaffold to be killed. It was a fine morning, but not ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham |
