"Incoherency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time forth they were brothers in everything but personal appearance. Then he told his secret over again, with the addition of being pathetic on the subject of Miss Wackles, who, he gave Mr Quilp to understand, was the occasion of any slight incoherency he might observe in his speech at that moment, which was attributable solely to the strength of his affection and not to rosy wine or other fermented liquor. And then they went ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... place where his wife and children lived. A surgeon was sent for: he bled her, she gave signs of returning life, and before the dawn gave birth to a female infant. After this event she lay for some hours in a kind of stupor; and if at any time she spoke, it was with a quickness and incoherence that plainly evinced the total deprivation ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... man was not aware of the incoherence of his words, while Milady was reading with her lynx's eyes the very ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... exclaimed with weak incoherence, and a few minutes later he was bending over the records with Corrigan—the latter making sundry copies on a pad of paper, which he placed in a pocket ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... incoherence and at last into silence. Agatha, holding his hands in hers, watched him as he sank away from her into some realm whither she could not follow. Either his hour of sanity and calmness had passed, and fever had taken hold upon his system; or fatigue, mental and physical, had overpowered ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... till dusk. The confession which Mrs. Hannaford made to her niece went further than that elicited from her either by Olga or Dr. Derwent. In broken sentences, in words of shamefaced incoherence, but easily understood, she revealed a passion which had been her torturing secret, and a temptation against which she had struggled year after year. The man was unworthy; she had long known it; she suffered only the more. She had been imprudent, once or twice all ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... three or four languages, and was successful in most things he undertook, though he seems to have been incapable of remaining constant to anything for long. As a business man he wasted his capital, and even in the execution of his crimes he showed frivolity and incoherence. At Lyons, he hired a carriage, in which he placed the corpse of Gouffre and after driving about the streets with Gabrielle Bompard like a madman, left the body of his victim in a spot near which people ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... don't be cross! I only came to look for you," he said with nervous incoherence. "I didn't mean to be out late. I couldn't help ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... anything about it,' she said, with plaintive incoherence. 'Only I can't think why people should always be making disturbances. Dora! Doesn't everybody you know think it wicked to go ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Monthly borrowed Southey's figure of the Italian and Flemish painters, and called The Ancient Mariner "the strangest story of a cock and bull that we ever saw on paper ... a rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence." The belated review in the British Critic was probably written by Coleridge's friend, Rev. Francis Wrangham, and was somewhat more appreciative than the rest. For further details, consult Mr. Thomas Hutchinson's reprint (1898) of the Lyrical Ballads, pp. ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... moment. He had simply babbled on uttering empty phrases, letting slip a few enigmatic words and again reverting to incoherence. He was almost running about the room, moving his fat little legs quicker and quicker, looking at the ground, with his right hand behind his back, while with his left making gesticulations that were extraordinarily incongruous with his words. Raskolnikov ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... him dream and desire. He had been tossed by it to a height so vertiginous as to involve a retreat from the table; but the next day he had dropped with a resounding thud at the very feet of his apparition. On the following, with an equal incoherence, a sacrifice even of his bewildered sisters, whom he left behind, he made an heroic effort to escape by flight from a fate of which he already felt the cold breath. That fate, in London, very little later, drove him ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... discussion of the details of this iniquitous tariff would only enrage us to a point of incoherence. Perhaps a short list of some of the things you will have to do without under the new arrangement will serve ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... observer of English manners than the very moderate degree in which wise arrangement, in the French sense of a scientific economy, has ever been invoked; a fact indeed largely explaining the great interest of their incoherence, their heterogeneity, their wild abundance. The French, all analytically, have conceived of fifty different proprieties, meeting fifty different cases, whereas the English mind, less intensely at work, has never ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... its fruits,—and the fruits of chance are incoherence, incompleteness, unsteadiness, the stammering utterance of blind, unreasoning force. A coherence that binds all the geological ages in one chain, a stability of purpose that completes in the beings born to-day ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... which arrived in a day or two, appeared from its redundancy and incoherence to be the composition of Miss Yvette Seymour Stukeley, and bade Major Decies either send or bring the infant ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... long while my thoughts were as aimless as my progress, but gradually out of the incoherence one idea crystallized. It was not an idea to be proud of. My bitterness of heart produced the natural result, that was all—a burning desire to be revenged upon somebody. I contemplated revenging myself upon everybody who had anything ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... Patmore kept her rules, and was improving—but Dash came uppermost. The order of our thoughts should be the order of our writing.) Goes he muzzled, or aperto ore? Are his intellects sound, or does he wander a little in his conversation? You cannot be too careful to watch the first symptoms of incoherence. The first illogical snarl he makes, to St. Luke's with him! All the dogs here are going mad, if you believe the overseers; but I protest they seem to me very rational and collected. But nothing is so deceitful as mad people to those ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... to oppose gave way, the Duca's astonishment at his victory swelled his weakness to violence; and he raved of duties and obligations, of paternal authority, of the obedience of children and children-in-law, in all the boundless, self-assured incoherence of feebleness suddenly let ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... than St. Peter's of Rome. There is a grandeur of unity and a sense of a single cultus in it which the Renaissance never reached in anything. Even from the days of Orcagna there is an element of mixed motives and incoherence in the best of Italian architecture and sculpture. It requires colour to effect that which Norman or Gothic art could produce more grandly and impressively with shade alone. It is the difference between a garden and a forest. This is shown in the glorious mediaeval ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Fallacies in the connection of premises and conclusion, that cannot be detected by reducing the arguments to syllogistic form, must depend upon some juggling with language to disguise their incoherence. They may be generally described as Fallacies of Ambiguity, whether they turn upon the use of the same word in different senses, or upon ellipsis. Thus it may be argued that all works written in a ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... firm yet painful resolution dyed her cheek as she spoke, and checked her tears. Alarmed as she was by the incoherence yet connection of her words when attached to Lord Alphingham's hints, which still lingered on her mind, yet the high-minded Lady Gertrude felt as if Caroline's honourable determination had struck a new chord of sympathy within ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... something apologetic in the manner, if not in the language, of the speaker; and his words seemed to indicate, if possible, an excuse for the incoherence of his address, in the physical fatigue which he had undergone—in this way to divert suspicion from those mental causes of excitement, of which, in the present situation, he felt somewhat ashamed. Pouring out a glass of liquor, and quaffing it without pause, he motioned to the lieutenant ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... as to its origin and Carrick's connection thereto were interrupted by a tearful incoherence on the part of the reviving girl. Her bosom heaved convulsively, her eyes opened wide and startled into life. She arose to a sitting posture glancing around as a child might who has been suddenly awakened from slumber. Carter still knelt at her side with ready arm ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... inspiration. I must win to the centre of the crowd, and a crowd is invariably indulgent to a drunkard. I hung out the glaring sign-board of crapulous glee. Lurching, hiccoughing, jostling, apologising to all and sundry with spacious incoherence, I plunged my way through the sightseers, and they gave me passage with all the good-humour ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... round in a further leap to the door, which had been closed by Sir Claude the instant their voices had risen. She fell back against it and, even while denouncing and waving off Mrs. Wix, kept it closed in an incoherence of passion. "You don't take her, but you bundle yourself: she stays with her own people and she's rid of you! I never heard anything so monstrous!" Sir Claude had rescued Maisie and kept hold of her; he held her in front of him, ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... colours and arrest all the activities of a nation's normal life, and demand a dreadful sacrifice in blood and tears. There was only a sense of stupefaction which seemed to numb the intelligence of men so that they could not reason with any show of logic, or speak of this menace without incoherence, but thrust back the awful possibility with one word, uttered passionately and repeated a ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... ever!" declared he, with emphatic incoherence. And without more words he hurried down the steps, and in another minute was rattling rapidly homeward, astonishing Dolly herself by the speed which he ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... looked at Simon with wonder, and—must I confess it?—with envy. How could he have obtained this treasure? In reply to my questions, I could just gather from his drunken statements (of which, I fancy, half the incoherence was affected) that he had been superintending a gang of slaves engaged in diamond-washing in Brazil; that he had seen one of them secrete a diamond, but, instead of informing his employers, had ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... resemblance between the story of this play and that of Fletcher's "Fair Maid of the Inn": but Fletcher's play, with none of the tragic touches or interludes of superb and sombre poetry which relieve the incoherence of Webster's, is better laid out and constructed, more amusing if not more interesting, and more intelligent if ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... some incoherence, told him what Jarvo had come to them to propose, and heightened his own excitement by plunging into the business of that night and the next, as he had had it from ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... sententious phrases uttered in a soft voice. After the Revolution, the epoch at which he first came into notice, the good man stuttered in a wearisome way as soon as he was required to speak at length or to maintain an argument. This stammering, the incoherence of his language, the flux of words in which he drowned his thought, his apparent lack of logic, attributed to defects of education, were in reality assumed, and will be sufficiently explained by certain events in the following history. Four sentences, precise as algebraic formulas, ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal. What, then, must have been my amazement when I heard the Frenchman speak what he had just spoken, and when I could not help acknowledging that he had spoken the truth. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... talk. Paul tried to follow him on paper, but the task was hopeless. Darco talked with a choking incoherence and at a dreadful pace. It was as if a big-bellied bottle were turned upside down, and as if the bottle were sentient and strove to empty the whole of its contents at once through a narrow neck. At last a meaning began to declare ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... dates also, for New Orleans, the advent of two better things: street-cars and the fire-alarm telegraph. The frantic incoherence of the old alarum gave way to the few solemn, numbered strokes that called to duty in the face of hot danger, like the electric voice of a calm commander. The same new system also silenced, once for all, the old nine-o'clock gun. For there were not only ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... that the said substitutes, the economies and ingenuities that protested, in their dumb vague way, against weakness of situation or of direct and applied faculty, were in themselves really a revel of spirit and thought. It had indeed again an effect of almost pathetic incoherence that our brave quest of "the languages," suffering so prompt and for the time at least so accepted and now so inscrutably irrecoverable a check, should have contented itself with settling us by that Christmas in a house, more propitious ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... piano below jingled more vivaciously than ever, and a sound of shrill laughter pierced through the notes. Afraid to sit silent, lest he should seem unsympathetic and sceptical, Rolfe murmured a few harmless phrases, tending to nervous incoherence. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... of the Count d'Orbigny will permit it. The presence of your royal highness alone can calm the despair of the prince. He wishes to watch every night by his daughter till the day when she shall be buried in the grand ducal chapel. I have accomplished my sad task, madame; be so kind as to excuse the incoherence of this letter, and accept the expression of respectful devotion with which I have the honor to be your loyal highness's very ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... want to slap somebody. "Why should I love you? Why should I?" she would ask amazed sometimes when somebody was trying—somebody was always trying—to propose to her. But she never got a real answer, only further incoherence. ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... invisible, was almost too holy to gaze upon. Riches, station, honors, kindred, he had resigned them all, more than half a century since, in his love for the poor and his longing after truth. Here was none of the wavering or vagueness or incoherence of a wandering, delirious death. He was going to his clear, eternal calm. With a smile of perfect peace he said: "To your Majesty I commend the poor; and this that remains of me I give to be burned." And that, his last gift, was indeed ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... sort of salad note, written both to "He" and "She" (as they said in old duetts)—once again, excuse every incoherence. I am still very ill—and have ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... with interest, and looked at him attentively. It was evident that though Captain Lebyadkin had left off drinking he was far from being in a harmonious state of mind. Drunkards of many years' standing, like Lebyadkin, often show traces of incoherence, of mental cloudiness, of something, as it were, damaged, and crazy, though they may deceive, cheat, and swindle, almost as well as anybody if ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... The Pastoral Sentiments must have a Connection Plain and Easy. Affirming that tho' Incoherence, may add a neglegence and simple loosness to Pastoral, yet 'tis not such a Negligence or Simplicity as ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... them prior to the war. These remarkable utterances, which he repudiated in less than a year afterward, were emphatically endorsed by the President, who entered upon the same theme at a dismal length, freely indulging in his habit of bad English and incoherence of thought. I was disgusted, and sorry that the confidence of so many of my radical ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... balance the simple construction against the Midrashic interpretation of the text, we are annoyed to feel how he is drawn in opposite directions by two tendencies. We realize that in consequence his works suffer from a certain incoherence, or lack of equilibrium, that they are uneven and mixed in character. To recognize that he paid tribute to the taste of the age, or yielded to the attraction the Midrash exercised upon a soul of naive faith, is not sufficient, for in point of fact he pursued the two methods at the ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... such a cosmic trap would be in no mood to negotiate or make promises, if any sort of beachhead to the future could be set up. They would pour through and the world of the present must simply dissolve into incoherence. There could be no peace. It ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... each section of the edifice to the support of the section following after it. No sentence demands any less attention than another, nor is there any in which one may not at every step verify the connection or incoherence of the parts.[3221]—The procedure used in arranging a simple sentence also governs that of the period, the paragraph and the series of paragraphs; it forms the style as it forms the syntax. Each small edifice occupies a distinct position, and but one, in the great ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... as the models of dramatic composition. In the play of Ducis, accordingly, Hamlet thinks, talks, and acts pretty much as any other human being would do, who should be compelled to speak only in the verse of the French tragedy, which necessarily excludes, in a great degree, any great incoherence or flightiness of sentiment. In some respects, however, the French Hamlet, if a less poetical personage, is nevertheless a more interesting one, and better adapted to excite those feelings which are most within the command of the actor's genius. M. Ducis has represented ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... many obstacles, he was taking the first steps in that direction. An initial difficulty lay in the mental aberrations of the King, whose conduct still caused intense anxiety or annoyance.[682] Scarcely a day passed without a lapse into incoherence or violence. Moreover, his conversation often showed a lack of discrimination, being the same to the Queen, the physicians, or the servants. He made the most capricious changes, turning off the Queen's favourite coachman, and making grooms footmen, and footmen grooms, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... audience; and Daniel, when he sees my friend Greenhat come in, can give him a good hint, and cry out, 'This is only for the saints! the regenerated!' By this force of action, though mixed with all the incoherence and ribaldry imaginable, Daniel can laugh at his diocesan, and grow fat by voluntary subscription, while the parson of the parish goes to law for half his dues. Daniel will tell you, 'It is not the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... not offer my book to the public at all if I knew of another work in English studying even with my incoherence the Italian poetry of the time mentioned, or giving a due impression of its extraordinary solidarity. It forms part of the great intellectual movement of which the most unmistakable signs were the French revolution, and its numerous brood of revolutions, of the first, second, and third ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... where at her suggestion Lambert related in letter-form the tragic misfortunes of the Cambremers, which he had just learned. On her return to Villenoix, Pauline took her fiance with her where she noted down and understood his last thoughts, sublime in their incoherence; he died in her arms, and from that time forth she considered herself the widow of Louis Lambert, whom she had buried in one of the islands of the lake park at Villenoix. [Louis Lambert. A Seaside Tragedy.] ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... the clock by which he had started was fast, and he was home in good time. The circumstance tended to render his story more worthy of credence than it might otherwise have proved. But his evident terror, and the very incoherence of his narrative, ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... means of raising a single shilling. Escourt, with whom he had some previous acquaintance, had informed him, as they met at the door of the office, that I had just paid him the large sum of L3,500. These facts, coupled with my paleness and incoherence; my pretending that the key was at my lodgings, while he perfectly knew that my father had given it me a moment before in the office; above all, my telling him that I was not going home, and appointing him for the next morning, ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... black sorrow reigned throughout the night. There were tears and linguistic prayers. There were tinklings of little bells, while humans called shrilly to vulgar officials along the wires. From a mass of incoherence the officials learned that some evil-hearted ruffian had entered the thirty-thousand-dollar garden and ...
— A Night Out • Edward Peple
... people, kings egotistical and concerned solely about themselves, kings lovable and beloved, kings sombre and dreaded or detested. As we go forward and encounter them on our way, all these kingly characters will be seen appearing and acting in all their diversity and all their incoherence. Absolute monarchical power in France was, almost in every successive reign, singularly modified, being at one time aggravated and at another alleviated according to the ideas, sentiments, morals, and spontaneous instincts of the monarchs. Nowhere else, throughout the great European ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... aiming at elegance and precision, Lyly attained a lucidity almost unequalled among his contemporaries. His attention to form saved him from the besetting sin of Elizabethan prose,—incoherence by reason of an overwhelming display of ornament. His very illustrations were subject to the restraint which his style demanded, being sown, to use his own metaphor, "here and there lyke Strawberries, not in heapes, lyke ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... Then, from dissonance and incoherence, the music merged into Gounod's Ave Maria. And, from swaying, Hade began to walk. To and fro, urged by the melody, his feet strayed. Now he was in full view, between the half-open curtains. Now, ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... written was conceived in a style which recalled that of his earlier work, what he played was like that of another man. It was music of a world raucous and uncontrolled. There were in it a disorder and a violence, and incoherence which had no resemblance at all to the powerful order and logic which were everywhere present in his other music. These unconsidered improvizations, escaping the scrutiny of his artistic conscience, sprang, like the cry of an animal, from the flesh rather than ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland |
