"Whimsicality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is a morbid whimsicality that trenches closely upon monomania, and would be more tolerable in a lackadaisical school-girl, than in a mature, intelligent, and gifted woman. Some of your fantasies would be positively respectable in a Bedlamite, and you seem an anomalous compound of eccentricities peculiar to extreme ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... their now hardening faces, laughing in an endless sequence of quips and jests and polyglot fancies. The fancies were the reality to both of them, they were both so happy, tossing about the little coloured balls of verbal humour and whimsicality. Their natures seemed to sparkle in full interplay, they were enjoying a pure game. And they wanted to keep it on the level of a game, their relationship: SUCH ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... This mode of intellectual action when found united with natural sagacity becomes poetry, philosophy, wisdom, or prophecy in its various forms of manifestation. Without that gift of natural sagacity (odoratio quaedam venatica),—a good scent for truth and beauty,—it appears as extravagance, whimsicality, eccentricity, or insanity, according to its degree of aberration. Emerson was eminently sane for an idealist. He carried the same sagacity into the ideal world that Franklin showed in the affairs ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... young attitude in it, and I can scarce sufficiently express how little it could have conduced to the formation of prigs. Our father's prime horror was of them—he only cared for virtue that was more or less ashamed of itself; and nothing could have been of a happier whimsicality than the mixture in him, and in all his walk and conversation, of the strongest instinct for the human and the liveliest reaction from the literal. The literal played in our education as small a part as it perhaps ever played in any, and we wholesomely breathed inconsistency ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... in the form of an altogether different mollusc which is commonly known as the "bleeding-tooth shell," the gory stains about the base of the tooth being highly significant. The local example of the whimsicality of Nature owes its excellence to absolute purity. No fond mother crooning to her first-born ever looked on budding teeth more delightful in ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... upon Roast Pig"; the immortal characterization of "Mrs. Battle's Opinions upon Whist"; the pleasant personal touches in a score of the essays; the cry of stifled affection in "Dream Children"; the whimsicality of "Popular Fallacies"; each of these, and as many again unspecified might be made the subject of separate comment. Indeed, for variety in unity there are few books to compare with our Elia. In the opening essay—the first of the ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... that it is to-day! And it is you and I! And there has been an accident! And out of that accident—and everything that's gone with it—I have come out—thinking of something that I never thought of before! And there were marigolds!" he added with unexpected whimsicality. "You see I don't ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... his readers arises from many causes. There is his frank and curious self-delineation; that interests, because it is the revelation of a very peculiar nature. Then there is the positive value of separate thoughts imbedded in his strange whimsicality and humour. Lastly, there is the perennial charm of style, which is never a separate quality, but rather the amalgam and issue of all the mental and moral qualities in a man's possession, and which bears the same relation to these that ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... distressed woman said this to David Jenison a few hours later in the Portman library. They sat alone in the half-light. Stanfield's married sister had taken Christine off earlier in the evening, to a concert. Mrs. Braddock, in a spirit of whimsicality, forbore mentioning the appearance of David to the girl, planning to surprise her when she returned from the concert. If David was disappointed at not finding her, he went to considerable pains to hide the fact from the mother. ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... artistic sort, and it is handled with a freshness and originality that is unquestionably novel."—Boston Transcript. "A feast of humor and good cheer, yet subtly pervaded by special shades of feeling, fancy, tenderness, or whimsicality. A merry ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... away from Italy to Antony was also Tiberius Claudius Nero. He was holding a kind of fort in Campania, and when Caesar's party got the upper hand set out with his wife Livia Drusilla and with his son Tiberius Claudius Nero. This episode illustrated remarkably the whimsicality of fate. This Livia who then fled from Caesar later on was married to him, and this Tiberius who then escaped with his parents succeeded him in the office ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... with a mixture of whimsicality and earnestness he continued: "Do you remember the talk we had the other day ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane |
