"Oddity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Of the oddity of inventing as a remedy for the inconveniences resulting from this situation a supernumerary conceptual object called an absolute, into which you pack the self-same contradictions unreduced, I will ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... the summer and beginning of the autumn, at the Manor, and was the constant companion of the squire in his field-sports. Mr Huntingdon had taken care to satisfy himself that his new friend, though somewhat of an oddity, was a man of substance. True, he was only living in bachelor style, and possessed no landed property; but then he was able at all times to command ready money, and was reputed by persons who had long known him to be the holder of a large amount in the funds, ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... their uncouth barbarism, a sort of dancing, which they execute to the sound of an instrument, somewhat resembling a Mandoline, but considerably larger, and which is highly diverting, from the extreme vivacity of the steps, and the oddity of the contortions and grimaces, with which they exhibit it. For a grotesque dance there can hardly be ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... of an oddity in his way; but he was a man who only a few months since was most unlikely to have fallen a victim to popular anger. He was about forty years of age, and had lived altogether at Minas Cottage, five or six miles from Cong, as you pass up the head of Lough Corrib, on ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... by a course which, by its oddity, drew every eye, but it did not come up to our expectations. There was a circular tray around which were displayed the signs of the zodiac, and upon each sign the caterer had placed the food best in keeping with it. Ram's vetches on Aries, a piece ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... luxury, one of the many angel-gifts that had fallen like dew upon us—and passed forth between the tall stone gate-posts, as uncertain as the wandering Arabs where our tent might next be pitched. Providence took me by the hand, and—an oddity of dispensation which, I trust, there is no irreverence in smiling at—has led me, as the newspapers announce while I am writing, from the old Manse into a Custom House! As a story-teller, I have often contrived strange vicissitudes ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the playhouse to look after you—I am frightened out of my wits—I have left my mother at home with the strangest sort of man, who is inquiring after you: he has raised a mob before the door by the oddity of his appearance; his dress is like nothing I ever saw, and he talks of kings, and ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... spent in pondering on this national oddity, and are free to admit that the conclusions arrived at are not so satisfactory as could be wished. Nevertheless, in default of any better explanation of the phenomenon, what we have to say may possibly carry a degree ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... oddity," said Mrs. Hale. "See those two centre tail-feathers, so very long, barred with ...
— Jimmy, Lucy, and All • Sophie May
... and reminds the student of Renaissance art. Conversely, the scholastic plays on words which they contain do not stamp them out as medieval. Both of these qualities are rococo and superficial rather than essential and distinctive in their style. After making due allowances for either element of oddity, a true connoisseur will gratefully appreciate the spontaneous note of enjoyment, the disengagement from ties and duties imposed by temporal respectability, the frank animalism, which connects these vivid hymns to Bacchus ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... dusty. He found Lincoln just emerging from the depot. He had on a thin suit of summer clothes, his coat being a linen duster, much soiled. His whole appearance was decidedly shabby. He carried in his hand an old-fashioned carpet-sack, which added to the oddity of his appearance. Major Wilcox says if it had been anybody else he would have been rather shy of being seen in his company, because of the awkward and unseemly appearance he presented. Lincoln immediately ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... few words with Miss Ambient. Her husband presently followed her, and there being no other company we went to dinner. The impression I received from that repast is present to me still. There were elements of oddity in my companions, but they were vague and latent, and did n't interfere with my delight It came mainly, of course, from Ambient's talk, which was the most brilliant and interesting I had ever heard. I know not whether he laid himself ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... it did do. We left Duchie that very night, and though she paid us frequent visits, she was Cousin Susan's for life. I fear indulgence dulled her moral sense. She was an immense happiness to her mistress, whose silent and lonely days she made glad with her oddity and mirth. And yet the small creature, old, toothless, and blind, domineered over her gentle friend—threatening her sometimes if she presumed to remove the small Fury from the inside of her own bed, into which it pleased her to creep. Indeed, I believe it is too ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... while all eyes should be turned together to the same. Thought is growing agreement, and that in which the race cannot meet me is some whim or notion, a personal crotchet, not a cosmic and eternal truth. Genius is freedom from all oddity, is Catholicity,—and departure from it so much departure in me from Nature and myself. We say a man is original, if he lives at first, and not at second hand,—if he requires a new tombstone,—if he takes law, not from the many ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... considerate manner. She took me up into an upper hall, where there were a couple of curious chimney-pieces and a fine old oaken roof, the latter representing the hollow of a long boat. There is a certain oddity in a native of Bourges - an inland town if there ever was one, without even a river (to call a river) to encourage nautical ambitions - hav- ing found his end as admiral of a fleet; but this boat- shaped roof, which is extremely graceful and is ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... in rather a melancholy mood to the end. The long straight vista from the Foscari to the Rialto, the great middle stretch of the Canal, contains, as the phrase is, a hundred objects of interest, but it contains most the bright oddity of its general Deluge air. In all these centuries it has never got over its resemblance to a flooded city; for some reason or other it is the only part of Venice in which the houses look as if the waters had overtaken them. Everywhere else they reckon with them—have chosen them; here alone ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... interview with Serjeant Snubbin, which he so positively insisted upon. We may wonder now-a-days would any K.C. of position have condescended to allow such a proceeding? I fancy it would be thought "irregular:" though perhaps ex gratia, and from the oddity of the proposal, it might ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... and colored a little the next moment, recognizing the oddity of her speech, and her little laugh was ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... that old Sir Jasper, being a bachelor, would leave his fortune to his two nephews. But he was an oddity, and as the title must go to young Jasper by right, the old man said Maurice should have the money. He was poor, young Jasper rich, and it seemed but just, though Madame Mere was very angry when she learned how the will ...
— The Abbot's Ghost, Or Maurice Treherne's Temptation • A. M. Barnard
... the person to whom he had opened the door of the house—the magnificent house at the corner of the Place Malesherbes and the Rue Montchanin—and, at the sight of the little gray-haired, ill-shaven man, whose long and far from immaculate frock-coat matched the oddity of a figure to which nature had been anything but kind, ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... suddenly recollected that this must be the elm vista of which the privacy was so stringently insisted upon, by her invalid tenant at the Warren Lodge. She fled into the wood at once, and, when she was safe there, laughed at the oddity of being a trespasser in her own domain. She made a wide detour in order to avoid intruding a second time; consequently, after walking for a quarter of an hour, she lost herself. The trees seemed never ending; she began to think she must possess a forest as well as a park. At last she saw ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... would be impossible to repair them without having proper likenesses as his guides, he proposed to the Frenchman to make an entirely new composition of the old materials, and one which should attract attention by its oddity. This was agreed to, and the result was a hideous and ungainly figure, which Powers proposed should be called the "King of the Cannibal Islands," but to his amazement the Frenchman advertised it as the embalmed body of a South Sea man-eater, "secured at immense expense." Powers declared ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... that he could not understand the matter; Theodora also thought it a very mysterious thing. The oddity of the circumstance seemed to make a great impression on her mind. At last she declared that she was determined to know what became of those Sweets, and asked me to sit up with her one night ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... where the bales of wool were piled to the ceiling with little aisles of passage between, were moved to explanation by the alert, inquiring glances of this dainty visitor. So she quickly learned the difference between Turkish and Scottish fleeces, and remarked to her guide on the oddity of the sorted ones, "that look just like whole sheepskins, legs and tail and all, with the skins left out." In the scouring room she saw the wool washing and passing forward through the long tanks of alkaline baths; and in the "willying" ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... home, Simon, to his grandson's surprise, declared himself in favour of his working at the Mortgrange library. But the idea tickled his fancy so much, that Richard wondered at the oddity of ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... at this to make out a little what he thought, and the first thing that put itself in evidence was of course the oddity, after all, of their game, to which he could but frankly allude. "We're doing, at the best, in trying to temporise in so special a way, a thing most people would call us fools for." But his visit ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... like no English person that Althea had ever seen. She engaged at once the whole of her attention, but at first Althea could not have said whether this attention were admiring; her main impression was of oddity, of something ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... head through the opening, and suffered it to fall to her feet. Something seemed forgotten, and after some little search, she found a small cotton bag, into which she dropped a polonce, then secured it beneath the blanket. Queerly enough she looked, thus accoutered; but apparently the oddity of her appearance never once crossed her mind, for, stepping across the floor, she held the pieces of paper over the lamp till ignited, then quickly thrust them one by one between the small crack or chink in the center of the door. It was of wood, old and dry, and caught like ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... vive, will be easier to overcome than a prude; even experience does not undeceive them. How often are they exposed to a severity all the keener that it was unexpected? Their custom then, is to accuse women of caprice and oddity; all of you use the same language, and say: Why such equivocal conduct? When a woman has decided to remain intractable, why surprise the credulity of a lover? Why not possess an exterior conformable to her sentiments? In a word, why permit a man to love her, when she does not care ever to ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... He laughed. "Well said, oddity. I am not displeased to see you act with some spirit: but I repeat my charge; be quiet. Your interference ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... The oddity and incongruity of her attire attracted attention. Women came out of their houses and crossed to the doors of neighbours to look after her. Even the boys playing at the corners looked up as ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... as the wall drapes. The two chairs were hidden under similar drapes, the small square table covered by a mantle of deep blue and gold which fell to the floor. Beyond all of this the solitary bit of furnishing was the object on the table whose oddity caught and held his eye; a thin column of crystal like a ten-inch needle, based in a red disc and supporting a hollow cap, the size of an acorn cup, in which was a single stone or bead of glass, he knew not which. He only knew that ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... committed to the flames. Then he went home with a story of illness, of a business enterprise which had won his fancy, of necessary visits to the far west; which were all true, but not in the sense in which Sonia took these details. They not only explained his absence, but also excused the oddity of his present behavior. He hardly knew how he behaved with her. He did not act, nor lose self-confidence. He had no desire to harm her. He was simply indifferent, as if from sickness. As the circumstances fell in with her inclinations, though ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... favorite councillor of King Ptolemy—called Philometor (the lover of his mother)—turned pale at these words, cast a sinister glance at the old man and beckoned to the young Roman; he however was not inclined to follow, for the scolding old oddity had taken his fancy—perhaps because he was conscious that the old man, who generally showed no reserve in his dislikes, had a liking for him. Besides, he found nothing to object to in his opinion of his companions, so he turned to Eulaeus and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... house as he had. People always wanted her. Her frankness in running after him showed him her sense of her position, her popularity, her attraction. How could she think she was undignified? No doubt she thought him an oddity who must be treated unconventionally. He felt ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... is remarkable for his extraordinary powers as a linguist, and for the originality of his character, not to speak of the wonderful adventures he narrates, and the ease and facility with which he tells them. He kept us laughing a good part of breakfast time by the oddity of his remarks, as well as the positiveness of his assertions, often rather startling, and, like his books, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... effecting an extraordinary consumption of food and alcoholic liquids: yet it was not for this that Pierston dreaded her presence, but lest, in conversing with Avice, she should open the girl's eyes to the oddity of her situation. Avice could see for herself that there must have been two or three servants in the flat during his former residence there: but his reasons for doing without them seemed never ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... was great to see her wearing a hoop and farthingale, with high-heeled shoes, and a dirty cap of Brussels lace, so much too large for her that it gave her face a ridiculously diminutive expression. When I had first seen her, she was attired, most becomingly, in deep mourning. There was an air of oddity, in short, about the dress of the whole party, which, at first, caused me to recur to my original idea of the "soothing system," and to fancy that Monsieur Maillard had been willing to deceive me until after dinner, that I might experience no uncomfortable feelings during ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... already published several books which had aroused attention through the oddity of their themes, and their gratifying success had made it possible for him to establish himself in a comfortably furnished bachelor apartment on the corner of the rue de Vaugirard and the ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... mentioned the fact that he had that morning received letters from their parents and friends, announcing their arrival; but the oddity of it was that he seemed to know, at sight, the right name for each boy, and the right boy for ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard
... room from cupboard to cupboard, from shelf to shelf, in search of some new oddity. His eyes fell at last on an old chest, pleasantly and quaintly carved, which stood in a dark ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... The oddity of the answer posed the American, and Barny took advantage of the diversion in his favor, ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... a fashion, but she never again set foot across the granite doorstep of the Winslow cottage. Probably the poor woman's mind was slightly affected; it is charitable to hope that it was. It seems the only reasonable excuse for the oddity of her behavior during the last twenty years of her life, for her growing querulousness and selfishness and for the exacting slavery in which she kept ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... quite took to Jack Penny, saying that he was an oddity, but not a bad fellow. I began to like him better myself, though he did nothing to try and win my liking, being very quiet and distant with us both, and watching us suspiciously, as if he thought we were always ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... life in the capital worthy of commendation. The generality of the people, she said, were much the same as in England—a mixture of good and bad. All she met behaved themselves very decently according to their rank. "Now and then," she adds, "an oddity breaks out, but none so extraordinary but that I could match them in England. There is a heartiness among them that is more like Cornwall than any I have known, and great sociableness." Cornwall, it must be remembered, is largely Celtic. She writes, again, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... personage did not drink wine. He sent his servant to quarrel with Goble because he had not been given iced water. While he was tapping on the table I took occasion to observe him. His was a physiognomy to strike the stranger, not by reason of its nobility, but because of its oddity. He had a prodigious length of face, the nose long in proportion, but not prominent. The eyes were dark, very bright, and wide apart, with little eyebrows dabbed over them at a slanting angle. The thin-lipped mouth ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... it were the oddity of William Harewood's face, or the novelty of his perfect insouciance in the household whither care had come only too early—some infection seized on the young Underwoods, and before the end of the evening meal, if the 'goings on' were not equal to those in the precincts, they were, at any rate, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... method and progression of the work, any of that headlong self-asserting capriciousness, which, if not discernible in the plan of Teufelsdrockh's Memoirs, is yet plainly to be seen in the structure of the sentences, the lawless oddity, and strange heterogeneous combination and allusion. The principle of this difference, observable often elsewhere in modern literature (for the same thing is to be found, more or less, in many of our most genial works of imagination,—Don ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... two which may be interesting on account of the oddity of their method—there was, for instance, an early device, similar in principle to the calling apparatus of the automatic telephone, which involved the turning of a movable disk so that a projection on its circumference pointed successively ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... supported and displayed; for Shakespear has contrived all the incidents to illustrate the gluttony, lewdness, cowardice, and boastfulness of the fat old knight: and Jonson, has, with equal art, displayed the oddity of a wimsical humourist, who could endure no ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... Many of the streets are lined with trees on the banks of the canals. On the whole, the students were more interested in Amsterdam than in any other city they had visited, partly, perhaps, on account of its oddity. As long as there was light to see, they continued their rambles, and then retired early, in order to be prepared for a fresh start ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... remember just when the departure comes, when one leaves the past and strides into the future, but I think that moment befell me in this cafe ... for it was the first time I had ever seen a cat there. He was a lazy, splendid animal. In New York he would have been an oddity, but in Paris there are many such beasts. Tawny he was and soft to the touch and of a hugeness. He was lying on the bar and as I stroked his coat he purred melifluously.... I stroked his warm fur and thought how I belonged to the mystic band (Gautier, Baudelaire, Merimee, all knew the secrets) ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... before us very readily as a boy, for I had a mind of vigorous appetite, but since I have grown mentally to man's estate and developed a more and more comprehensive view of our national process and our national needs, I am more and more struck by the oddity of the educational methods pursued, their aimless disconnectedness from the constructive forces in the community. I suppose if we are to view the public school as anything more than an institution that has just chanced to happen, we must treat it as ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... his forefinger under his left eye, and pulled down the corners of his mouth. To a man acquainted with the language of signs, this meant that the Englishman understood Italian, and was an oddity into the bargain. The young man smiled slightly and touched his forehead, in answer to Mattei's sign, as though to indicate that every Englishman had a bee in his bonnet. Then he sat down beside them, and began to look very attentively, though not impertinently, ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... imposing monuments are those of Caterina Cornaro (or Corner) the deposed queen of Cyprus, in the south transept; of three Cardinals of the Corner family; and of the Doges Lorenzo and Girolamo Priuli, each with his patron saint above him. The oddity of its architecture, together with its situation at a point where a little silence is peculiarly grateful, makes this church a favourite of mine, but there are many buildings in Venice which ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... object!" thought the publican, staring at this oddity, who had seated herself on the porch seat and had placed on the ground a great wicker basket ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... scientists faced one of the figures, which I recognized as that of William II, and I, a little tardily, saluted with them. And now we turned sharply on our heels and saluted the second figure of these twin German heroes. For German it was unmistakably in every feature, save for the one oddity that the Teutonic face wore a flowing beard not unlike that of Michael Angelo's Moses. As we moved forward my eye swept in the lettering on the pedestal, "Unser Alte Deutche Gott," and I was aware that I had acknowledged my allegience ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... works at the king's house, a good league from here. He is an oddity who has run away himself so often that he is more familiar with the inaccessible spots of the island than with ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... before my kind hosts had finished their narrations, and I was not sorry, after all the exercise I had taken, to return to my cell, where everything invited to repose. I was charmed with the neatness and oddity of my little apartment; its cabin-like bed, oratory, and ebony crucifix; in short, everything it contained; not forgetting the aromatic odour of the pine, with which it was roofed, floored, and wainscoted. ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... of the old forms has made no way in those countries. Italy is contentedly stagnant. America has produced a good many showy books, the typography, paper, and illustrations of which are, however, all wrong, oddity rather than rational beauty and meaning being apparently the thing sought for both in ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... and untaught she was, and how her natural cunning had been sharpened by necessity and privation, he scarcely doubted it. And yet he pitied her so much, and felt so unwilling to have a matter of such gravity disturbing the oddity of their acquaintance, that he thought, rather than receive fifty pounds down, he would have ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... have greeted this last declaration with the sympathy it deserved, might have commended the noble aspirations of his kinswoman. But what struck him, rather, was the oddity of so sudden a sharpness of pitch in an intercourse which, an hour or two before, had begun in perfect amity, and he burst once more into an irrepressible laugh. This made his companion feel, with intensity, how little she was joking. "I don't know why ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... while pouring forth with the greatest earnestness and enthusiasm, without any other help than that of some illegible notes, an uninterrupted flow of learning and thought from the deep and pure fountain of the inner life; and thus with all the oddity of the outside, at once commanding the veneration and confidence of every hearer; imagine all this, and you have a picture of Neander, the most original phenomenon in the literary world ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... to be short, but we had time to become acquainted with a characteristic naval oddity known as the bumboat. Diligent inquiries among the old sailors on board the "Yankee" failed to enlighten me as to the derivation of the name, but the consensus of opinion was that these floating peddlers sold articles which, to use a slang ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... this oddity did not change his feelings. Jill could be in danger from creatures Vale said were not human. Lockley didn't wholly accept that non-human angle, but something was happening there and Jill was in the middle of it. So he went to see about it for the ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... life at Lissoy one little child strikes us all with deepest interest and love, and yet he was an oddity to those who knew him, not as we do now, but as he was—a dull boy, and ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... creations of Literature only; she alone is the real thing. All the quaintness of childhood, its originality, its tenderness and its teasing,—its infinite, unconscious drollery, the serious earnestness of its fun, the fun of its seriousness, the natural religion of its plays, and the delicious oddity of its prayers,—all these waited for dear Little Prudy to embody them. Sam Weller is not more piquant; Hans Anderson's nutcrackers and knitting-needles are not more thoroughly charged with life. There are six little green ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... are naturally inclined to believe in "good copy." And, after all, they have got many more excuses for doing so than the ordinary man realises. Nobody can have anything to do with a newspaper without being amazed at the strangeness, the oddity, the topsy-turvy sensationalism of life, when once it is laid bare ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... in the usual sense of the word, a teacher. He is not to be found in the Stoa or the Grove, with official aspect, expounding a system of doctrine. He is "the garrulous oddity" of the streets, putting the most searching and perplexing questions to every bystander, and making every man conscious of his ignorance. He delivered no lectures; he simply talked. He wrote no books; he only argued: and what is usually styled his school must ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... go down the field to that last squad and tell Tom Warren that I sent you. And say," he continued, as the candidate started off, and he was struck anew with the oddity of the straw hat and wrinkled trousers, "you had better tell him that you are the man that punted ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... eat nothin' much between meals. See you've been buyin' some of the old cap'n's pictures. He's a oddity, but there's gold on that ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... seemed to shift in unison a foot to the right, returning immediately to their original position with a jerk. Then he rose, and went toward the door, catching sight of his face in a mirror as he passed. It was very pale, and he crinkled his nose at it derisively, and then smiled at the whimsical oddity of his reflected expression. On the threshold he paused, looking toward the west, blazing with the red and saffron ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... could not, and need not, do anything about, as if it were the normal tendency in them in their several ways. We all of us know that modern art is not haphazard, it is not hit or miss in its intention at least, certainly not the outcome of oddity, of whim, or of eccentricity, for these traits belong to the superficial and cultivated. We have found that with the best moderns there has been and is inherent in them the same sincerity of feeling, ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... what is called an oddity, and his treatment of me, though uniformly kind, flowed less from affection and tenderness than from a sense of obligation and duty. Indeed, I seldom even spoke to him except at meal-times, and then his manner ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... expression, was at length brought forward and put in the place of the first dancer, who rushed out of the tent to cool himself. In this manner five or six couples exhibited alternately, obtaining more or less applause, according to the oddity of their grimaces. At length a witty fellow, in consequence of some whispering and tittering among the ladies, advanced and gave me the koonik, which challenge I Was obliged to answer by standing up to dance, and my ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... scream of the young oddity, and, enchanted with this excess of zeal, came down to the first floor, for he was, in truth, working in his room ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... is growing less interesting, less mysterious, less manifold, at any rate to the outer eye. The mise-en-scene of external life is less rich in colour and in contrast. Magnificence, squalor, oddity, historic survivals, and picturesque personalities grow rarer year by year. Everybody writes a grammatical letter in conventional style, wears the clothes in fashion, and conforms to the courtesies of life. It is right, good, and wise: but a little dull. It is the lady-like age, the epoch ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... this chapter, however, I shall glance at the distribution, not of any implement connected directly and obviously with the utilization of natural products, but of a downright oddity, something that might easily be invented once only and almost immediately dropped again. And yet here it is all over the world, going back, we may conjecture, to very ancient times, and implying interpenetrations of bygone peoples, of whose wanderings perhaps we may never unfold the ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... Grieve, Sept. 15, 1863;' the lower, 'Louise Stephanie Grieve, Sept. 15, 1863.' They were written in bold round-hand, and could be read at a considerable distance. During the nine months they had been there, many a rustic passer-by had been stopped by them, especially by the oddity of the name Suveret, which ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... oddity. Her wandering life, I presume, accounts for it; but she is altogether unlike any girl I ever know. I am certain," with a little malicious glance, "she will be your style, ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... short for his age, being only a little over five feet in height. The other men used to say that Little Jim was not made right, for while his body was big enough for a six-footer, his legs were very short, and the fact that he was rather inclined to be fat added to the oddity of ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... nature (with ulterior views, d'ye see, to a fat benefice in the gift of the worshipers of Ariamius), he would pronounce that the sign of a hardening heart and a softening brain. Yes, that would be his sinister construction. But it's nothing more than the oddity of a genial humor—genial ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... plumbed for their hearts you would find in all a stone. In their normal state they have the prettiest exterior, stake their friendship at every turn, are captivating alike. The same badinage dominates their ever-changing jargon; they seek for oddity in their toilette, glory in repeating the stupidities of such and such actor who is in fashion, and commence operations, it matters not with whom, with contempt and impertinence, in order to have, as it were, the first move in the game; but, woe betide him who does ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... the door, head up, he listened. They had observed the oddity before. The melancholy note of the Mahlemeut never yet had failed to stir his sombre little soul. He was standing now looking up at the latch, high, and made for white men, eager, breathing fast, listening to ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... of saying that he is our head, the captain of our salvation, the perfect humanity in which our life is hid! Yet it has its dignity. When one has got over the oddity of these last six lines, the figure contained in ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... and a sailor, fond of conviviality, of gaming and a stiff glass of grog, but never off his guard. He went by the name of "Tom Bowline." The seventh was as broad as he was long; the cockpitonians dubbed him "Toby Philpot." He was an oddity, and fond of coining new words. He knew the ship had three masts and a sheet anchor. He was a strict disciple of Hamilton Moore, fond of arguing about dip and refraction, particularly the former, as he put it in practice on himself, being sometimes found with ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... usually follow the wishes of the bride in the matter of dress. Should she desire any particular style of dress, entailing considerable expense, on account of novelty or oddity, she usually presents them the outfit, which it is permissible ...
— The Book of Good Manners • W. C. Green
... the fact that he knew everything that his textbooks could tell him about sex and copulation he still had the quaint notion that the reason why Judge Carter and his wife were childless was because they had not yet gotten around to Doing It. He made no attempt to correlate this oddity with its opposite in Jake Caslow's ladies of the night who seemed to go on their ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... Malvolio especially later; though Shakespeare never employed the method of humours for an important personage. It was not Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade "the humour" into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour Out of Breath," Fletcher later, "The Humourous ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... incident not in the spirit of detraction; for in the paragraph there was nothing of puff, though certainly something of oddity—but as a tint of character, indicative of the appetite for distinction by which, about this period, he became so powerfully incited, that at last it grew into a diseased crave, and to such a degree, that were the figure allowable, it might be said, the mouth being incapable of supplying ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... One oddity about the book is that throughout it conversations are merged into single paragraphs. This made it a little hard to get the paragraphing correct in our rendition, but we think we have got it almost ...
— The Log House by the Lake - A Tale of Canada • William H. G. Kingston
... "was very poor authority on the subject, being a bachelor when he wrote that passage. Probably in after life his opinions underwent a change on the subject. I am aware of his oddity ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... treble was singing it over and over again in childish sort, with so little appreciation of the meaning of the words that the oddity of the ditty was the first thing to attract my attention ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... owing to the crowd of Masqueraders. Bull Baitings, Races of Gondoles, and other Amusements, too tedious to enumerate, also take place. But among the several Shows which attract the eyes of the Populace, I cannot forbear describing one which is remarkable for its oddity, and perhaps peculiar to the Venetians. A number of Men, by the help of Poles laid across each other's Shoulders, build themselves up almost as children do Cards—four or five Rows of 'em standing one above the other, and lessening ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... She was laughed at, as she had expected to be, and people said they should think Tom would be ashamed of himself; but it soon appeared that he was not to blame, and what reproach was offered was on the score of his wife's oddity. There was nothing about the mill that she did not understand before very long, and at the end of the second year she declared a small dividend with great pride and triumph. And she was congratulated on her success, and every one thought of her project in a ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... may seem an oddity— I deem it a most portable commodity, A sort of magic wand, Which, if 'tis used with ingenuity, Although a utensil of much tenuity, In place of something ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... emphasis we read these stanzas so as to make the rhymes perceptible, even tri-syllable rhymes could scarcely produce an equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we feel here in finding rhymes at all in sentences so exclusively colloquial. I would further ask whether, but for that visionary state, into which the figure of the woman and the susceptibility of his ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... partnership with Laura's husband. As for the baronet's daughter—for we must get everybody into the concluding tableau—why there she is—that lady cutting bread and butter for the children, with as matronly an air as Werter's Charlotte: she is my wife; and we laugh to this day at the oddity of that First Interview which led to so happy ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... girlish and cracked; darting in and out of the cottages, scolding this matron with a lurking smile in every tone, hugging that baby, boxing the ears of the other little tyrant, passing this one's rent, and threatening that other with awful vengeances, but it was a very lovely oddity. Their property was not large, and she knew every living thing on the place down to the dogs and pigs. And Miss Jemima, as the people always called her, transferring the MISS CROWTHER of primogeniture to the younger, who kept, ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... did manage to get on that period, however, were very much confused, and there was never any way of telling anything at all, for certain. It's easy to see what caused the confusion, of course: telepathy in an imbecile is rather an oddity—and any normal adult would probably be rather hesitant about admitting that he was capable of it. That's why we have not found another subject; we must merely sit back and wait ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... strange environment. He was the more conscious of a general strangeness because he was so completely an urban product. Yet he and Holden were vastly less aware of the real strangeness about them than men of previous generations would have been. They did not notice the oddity of croaking sounds, like frogs, coming from the tree-tops. When they had threaded their way among leaning charred poles and came to green stuff underfoot and merely toasted foliage all around, Cochrane heard a sweet, ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... silence—at least, on the part of the three younger. It was long before Narcissus was able to fall asleep, for he kept picturing the elder woman with burning cheek and open eyes in a kind of 'listening fear' beneath the coverlet; and the oddity of the thing was so original, so like some conte of a Decameron or Heptameron, with the wickedness left out. But at last wonder gave place to weariness, and sleep began to make a still odder magic of the situation. The difficulty of meeting at breakfast next ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... I answered, "still unexplained. Consider the oddity of the conception, sire, the secrecy of the performance, the hour, the mode, all the surrounding circumstances! I can imagine a man currying favour with the basest and most dangerous class by such means. I can imagine a conspiracy recruited by such means. ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... head; the clothing was ragged and dirty, and in some cases was really of ancient style; some wore roughly made garments of the skin of the tigre. Each band had its leader, and each tried to outdo the others in the oddity of performance, vigor of dancing and coarseness of jest. Much fun and laughter were caused by their antics. Meantime, boys and young women were busied as waiters. Cups of steaming atole, delicious tortillas, hot tamales were distributed until ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... asking the servants if that was the house of Mr. Tonson, they assured me, with great simplicity, that no such gentleman lived there. I named the Kit-Cat Club, as accustomed to assemble here; but the oddity of the name excited their ridicule; and I was told that no such Club was held there; but, perhaps, said one to the other, the gentleman means the Club that assembles at the public-house on the Common. Knowing, however, that I was at the right place, I ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... here nor there. The oddity of our adventure was in discovering such an establishment in such a place. Since that time we have often had similar surprises, especially in New England, where curious industries have established themselves in the most out-of-the-way nooks. In a hamlet of three or four houses ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... the Moronval Academy himself took his pupils—his children of the sun, as he called them—out for their daily walks; and the comings and goings of this singular party gave the finishing touch of oddity to the appearance of the ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... speculation that it is often exciting to ride a good horse in Belgium? What theory does the poem after that, "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," express, except that it is also frequently exciting to ride a good horse in Africa? Then comes "Nationality in Drinks," a mere technical oddity without a gleam of philosophy; and after that those two entirely exquisite "Garden Fancies," the first of which is devoted to the abstruse thesis that a woman may be charming, and the second to the equally abstruse thesis that a book may be a bore. Then ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... not very easy to discover at first; for Scoutbush felt so strongly the oddity of taking a pretty young woman into his counsel on a question of sanitary reform, that he felt mightily inclined to laugh, and began beating about the bush, in a ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... stark bewilderment. He knew the history of Leah's necklace. It was merely an oddity, and nothing more—a freak piece of costume jewelry made from fragments of an Arizona meteorite. Leah had worn the necklace a dozen times before, without any trace of the weird phenomena ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... in assisting my daughter Sophia in her part of the task." Sophia is a lovely creature, just what she should be. We are not quite sure of Mr Burchell: possibly he may look too young; he was a character, and must have borne about him some little acquired oddity, sturdy, and not undignified. In the illustration he is too prettily genteel; but we do not wish to see any but Sophia—delightful, loving, lovable Sophia. In the background, Moses lies on the ground with his book, and the vicar has rather too suspicious a look; but we can forgive him that, and, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... class of names which does gladden us, partly from their oddity, and partly from a feeling at first sight that they are names really suggestive of something which has happened,—and this is apt to turn out the fact. Thus, Painted-Post, in New York, and Baton-Rouge, in Louisiana, are honest, though quaint appellatives; Standing-Stone ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... through the hall, the mother made a little deprecating noise in her throat, and fidgeted in her chair. As soon as Marcia opened the sitting-room door, Mrs. Gaylord modestly rose and went out into the kitchen: the mother who remained in the room when her daughter had company was an oddity almost unknown in Equity. ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... of a sale), he may find in a chapter concerning the likeness between certain men and parrots some wise remarks on ridiculous eccentricities in literature. 'In inferior minds,' says the Doctor,'the love of originality shows itself in oddity.' 'There is many a sober innovator,' he continues, farther on,' whose delight it is ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... rising barrister. He comes our circuit, and I occasionally employ him, when I am obliged to go to law about such a thing as an unsound horse. He generally brings me through—or rather that grin of his does—and yet I don't like the fellow, confound him, but I'm an oddity—no, the one I like, and whom I generally employ, is a fellow quite different, a bluff sturdy dog, with no grin on his face, but with a look that seems to say I am an honest man, and what cares I for any one? And an honest man he is, and something ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... and died in a fit of merriment induced by hearing that the American people ruled themselves. In like fashion, the average person grins or guffaws at sight of a stranger in an outlandish costume, although, as a matter of fact, the dress may be in every respect superior to his own. Simply, its oddity somehow tickles the risibilities. Such surprise is occasioned by contrasting circumstances. When a pompous gentleman, marching magnificently, suddenly steps on a banana peel, pirouettes, somersaults, and ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... "but it isn't true. Anyhow: I want every one of those cars checked for any oddity, no matter how small. If there's an inch-long scratch on one fender, I want to know about it. If you've got to take the cars ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Greek art; the frieze, of course, proves nothing, being mere artisan work. But the man who made what one may as well call "The Theseus" and "The Ilissus," the man whom one may as well call Phidias, crowns the last vital movement in the Hellenic slope. He is a genius, but he is no oddity: he falls quite naturally into his place as the master of the early decadence; he is the man in whom runs rich and fast but a little coarsened the stream of inspiration that gave life to archaic Greek sculpture. He is the Giotto—but ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Keppel was every inch a sailor, and sometimes did some very strange things, which would annoy his superiors; but the very oddity of his actions gained the hearts and confidence of those who served under him, and he could rely on every one acting as one machine ...
— Notes by the Way in A Sailor's Life • Arthur E. Knights
... hint from Harriet's letter, which was very sentimental about her own loneliness and lack of opportunity, in contrast with Aurelia, who was seeing the world. That elegant beau, Sir Amyas, had just given a sample to tantalise their rusticity, and then had vanished; and here was that oddity, Mr. Arden, more wearisome and pertinacious than ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... himself to our customs and the discipline of the ship. He was very cleanly in his personal habits, and paid much attention to his dress, which was always kept neat and tidy. I was often much amused and surprised by the oddity and justness of his remarks upon the many strange sights which a voyage of this kind brought before him.' The Nemesis steamer underweigh puzzled him at first; he then thought it was 'all same big cart, only got him shingles (wooden roofing-tiles, so called) on wheels!' Neinmal spoke ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... volume, half in dreaming of a beloved mistress deceased. The casement being thrown open at the fluttering of the bird's wings, the bird itself perches on the most convenient seat out of the immediate reach of the student, who, amused by the incident and the oddity of the visitor's demeanor, demands of it, in jest and without looking for a reply, its name. The raven addressed answers with its customary word, 'Nevermore'—a word which finds immediate echo in the melancholy heart of the student, who, giving ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... may be he likes you for being so. He is odd, you know; but his oddity never troubles me." And she resumed her sewing with ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... rejoiced in the crooked up-and-down hill streets; the thoroughly French domestic architecture of a place that thus denied having been English for a hundred years; the porte-cocheres beside every house; the French names upon the doors, and the oddity of the bellpulls; the rough-paved, rattling streets; the shining roofs of tin, and the universal dormer-windows; the littleness of the private houses, and the greatness of the high-walled and garden-girdled convents; the breadths of weather-stained ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... barrister. He comes our circuit, and I occasionally employ him, when I am obliged to go to law about such a thing as an unsound horse. He generally brings me through—or rather that grin of his does—and yet I don't like the fellow, confound him, but I'm an oddity; no, the one I like, and whom I generally employ, is a fellow quite different, a bluff sturdy dog, with no grin on his face, but with a look which seems to say I am an honest man, and what cares I for anyone. And an ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the appearance of Franklin at the French court in plain clothes, and in the white hats worn by the last generation of radicals. Originality of nature is sure to show itself in more ways than one. The mention of George Fox's suit of leather, or Pestalozzi's school name, "Harry Oddity," will at once suggest the remembrance that men who have in great things diverged from the beaten track, have frequently done so in small things likewise. Minor illustrations of this truth may be gathered in almost every circle. We believe that ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... (1732-1804), a Pole residing at Berlin, was a curious personage, interesting alike for the variety of his productions and the oddity of his mental make-up. He possessed a surprising capacity for assimilation. It was this that enabled him to excel, whether he imitated the style of the Bible or the style of mediaeval authors. Hebrew and Aramaic he handled with the same ingenious skill. All his works he attributed to some ancient ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... is the blossom of a cactus—the "prickly-pear," as we call it in Eastern gardens, where we cultivate it for its oddity, I suppose. When the sojourner in this land of flowers sees, opening on all sides of this inhospitable-looking plant, rich cream-colored cups, the size of a Jacqueminot bud, and of a rare, satiny sheen, she cannot ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... crucial test. We both wrote for a minute or two. Somehow, in Hilda's presence, I forgot at once the strangeness of the scene, the weird oddity of the moment. That sombre plain disappeared for me. I was only aware that I was with Hilda once more—and therefore in Paradise. Pison and Gihon watered the desolate land. Whatever she did seemed to me supremely right. If she had proposed to me to begin ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... was a rich man and an oddity; one of those who love to surprise folk. Moreover, he had no children, and detected his nephews and nieces being unnaturally civil to him. "Waiting to cut me up," was his generous reading of them. So with ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... no other preconception than that which we have attempted to give him, would doubtless be startled at the strangeness of the style which prevails more or less throughout them. They are not careless, headstrong, passionate, confused; but they bear a constant look of oddity which seems at first mere wilful wantonness, and which we only afterwards find to be the discriminating stamp of original and strong feeling. This— this feeling, rooted in profound susceptibility and matured into a central vivifying power—is, we should say, the author's most extraordinary distinction. ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... corner of New Mexico was worked over by the roundup, and again the mustang bunch was seen. The dark colt was now a black yearling, with thin, clean legs and glossy flanks; and more than one of the boys saw with his own eyes this oddity—the mustang was a born pacer. Jo was along, and the idea now struck him that that colt was worth having. To an Easterner this thought may not seem startling or original, but in the West, where an unbroken horse is worth $5, and where an ordinary saddlehorse is worth $15 or $20, ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... coach-door. "Not content with writin' up 'Pickwick,' they put 'Moses' afore it, which I calls adding insult to injury." "It's odd enough, certainly," said Mr. Pickwick. When he was casting about for a good name for his venture, it recurred to him as having a quaint oddity and uncanniness. And thus it is that we owe to Bath, and to Bath only, this celebrated name. It is said that he rushed into the publisher's office, exultingly proclaiming ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... became firm friends, and the oddity of the gentleman—mainly that of blessing everything he could think of—was no objection in Tom's mind. The young inventor and Ned Newton went on many trips together, Mr. Damon being one of ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton
... without changing a muscle of his face, but I saw that he too was of Mrs. Norton's opinion as to his master's oddity when he once got a notion in ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... friends to witness and enjoy the discomfiture of his "oddity," but the bright retort turned the tables against him, and established the opinion with them that Ralph instead of being half-witted was at any rate on that occasion very ready-witted. They said they would not have lost the sight of seeing ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... further oddity, that above the nape of his neck was a whitish tuft which, though he took great pains to conceal it, continually obtruded through the darker hair like the cottontail on the back of ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... knew that it was forever set aside. But I felt that his overtaking the wagon would bring an additional trouble to the father and the mother; indeed, I was afraid that the old man might kill him. Strange fellow Chyd was, and I liked him as an oddity, as something wholly different from myself or from any impulsive being. He was not cruel—he ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... essays of Elia a life story not far removed from actuality, though it would be wanting in any hint of tragedy. It is this intimacy which at once attracts and repels readers, attracts all those who are, in however small a degree, kindred spirits, and repels, perhaps, others. The quaintness, oddity, flippancy, are wrought together with deep thought, poetry, and feeling to a wonderful degree. The very diversity of theme and manner—this varying change from grave to gay, from lively to severe—is indeed but a reflection of life itself, ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... The oddity of the question from such a being and the queer Normandy accent amused the girl, and she burst out laughing. She did not answer the question, but going over to a man seated at another table whispered to him. Then they both looked at ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... regard the enjoyment of a technical tip, of a piece of literary experience, as a counterpoise to her grief. Strange to say, none the less, I couldn't help fancying after I had seen her a few times that I caught a glimpse of some such oddity. I hasten to add that there had been other things I couldn't help fancying; and as I never felt I was really clear about these, so, as to the point I here touch on, I give her memory the benefit of every doubt. Stricken and solitary, highly accomplished and now, ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... life-size porcelain cats, coloured a purplish maroon, with sparkling yellow glass eyes, and an abundance of fantastic yellow spots. These cats had been bought by him as a souvenir of England and English art, for he was much struck by their oddity. He had been offered others—for instance, white ones with little coloured landscapes printed all over their backs and sides—surely as idiotic an embellishment as any insane potter could devise—but although these had sorely tempted him he had finally decided in favour ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... sweet MURMURING and which brings you freshness in your den! I would chat discreetly with you between two pages of your novel, and I would make that fantastic grating of the chain [Footnote: The chain of the tug-boat going up or coming down the Seine.] which you detest, but whose oddity does not displease me, keep still. I love everything that makes up a milieu, the rolling of the carriages and the noise of the workmen in Paris, the cries of a thousand birds in the country, the movement of the ships on the waters; I love ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... an oddity. He called his shanty the White Stag Hotel; and had, chalked up on a board, a figure, under which he had written "The White Stag. Accommodation for man and beast." Except, however, a gallon of whiskey, a jar of beef-tallow, ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston
... tree-clump could be seen, facing the junction of the sandy road with the metalled, the front and the swinging signboard of "The Goat in Boots." And here, that its two more ordinary-looking members might shed the oddity which they owed to the company of the third, the party was ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... Hardy's novels or pastoral poetry, is, to say the least, lacking in variety. Indeed, if the truth must be told, the conversation of country people, generally speaking, and an occasional, very occasional, character or oddity apart, is undeniably dull, and I hope it will not be imputed to me for hardness of heart that, after some long-winded colloquy or endless reminiscence, sententious and trivial, I have thought that Gray's famous line should really have ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... colour of this Irish society of which Bernard Shaw, with all his individual oddity, is yet an essential type? One generalisation, I think, may at least be made. Ireland has in it a quality which caused it (in the most ascetic age of Christianity) to be called the "Land of Saints"; and which still might give it a claim ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Miss Rosetta, all her old maidishness and oddity falling away from her like a garment, and all her innate and denied motherhood shining out in her face like a transforming illumination. "Oh, the sweet, dear, ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... understood by their class. For this purpose the senior lieutenant of each regiment was the chief of the regimental club, and there was a general chief for the whole army. Offenses against good manners, faults of meanness, or oddity of behavior, were discouraged by admonitions, given privately by the chief, or publicly in the convivial meetings of the club. Moral pressure might be carried so far in an aggravated case, as to cause the culprit to resign his commission. ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... Young's oddity and absence of mind are gathered from other sources besides these stories of Mrs. Montagu's, and gave rise to the report that he was the original of Fielding's "Parson Adams;" but this Croft denies, and mentions another ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... has great power; but its power is owing to the force of the serious writing, and to the oddity of the contrast between that and the flashy passages with which it is interlarded. From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. You laugh and are surprised that any one should turn round and travestie himself: the drollery is in the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... favour," said the magistrate, making exactly the inference to which Ratcliffe was desirous to lead him, though he mantled his art with an affectation of oddity. ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... seemed gently humorous before—it was more than that now, with this stern business gravity injected into it. The bankers discussed the monument with me. We met several times. They proposed an indestructible memorial, to cost twenty-five thousand dollars. The insane oddity of a monument set up in a village to preserve a name that would outlast the hills and the rocks without any such help, would advertise Elmira to the ends of the earth —and draw custom. It would be the only ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... presumption, the young neophyte might not have dared to enter the presence of the master to whom we owe our admirable portrait of Henry IV., if chance had not thrown an unexpected assistance in his way. An old man mounted the spiral stairway. The oddity of his dress, the magnificence of his lace ruffles, the solid assurance of his deliberate step, led the youth to assume that this remarkable personage must be the patron, or at least the intimate friend, ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... though called sonnets, are in a curious form of eighteen lines practically composed of three six-line stanzas rhymed A B, A B, C C, and not connected by any continuance of rhyme from stanza to stanza. The special and peculiar oddity of the book is, that each sonnet has a prose preface as thus: "In this passion the author doth very busily imitate and augment a certain ode of Ronsard, which he writeth unto his mistress. He beginneth as followeth, Plusieurs, etc." Here is a complete ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... see him and enjoyed extremely the duration of delay—these things, it is to be conceived, were early signs in him that his relation to his actual errand might prove none of the simplest. He was burdened, poor Strether—it had better be confessed at the outset—with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... game, and so convinced is the ordinary person that queerness is of necessity contemptible, that when she did anything which was unusual, its reason was never examined, nor did the possibility that it might be better done in that way occur to anybody. It was merely a new evidence of her oddity. ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... contrast less remarkable in the quality of character which each selects. Thackeray looks at life from the club-house window, Dickens from the reporter's box in the police-court. Dickens is certainly one of the greatest comic writers that ever lived, and has perhaps created more types of oddity than any other. His faculty of observation is marvellous, his variety inexhaustible. Thackeray's round of character is very limited; he repeated himself continually, and, as we think, had pretty well emptied his stock of invention. But his characters are ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell |
