"Oddity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it gets resurrected. I suppose the real reason is that it is funny, at least to our eyes. When Bill Nye spells wife with "yph" we can't help being amused. Now Bill Nye's bad spelling had absolutely no point to it except its oddity. At times it was extremely funny, but as a mode it led easily to widespread and pointless imitation. It was the kind of thing—like poetry—that anybody can do badly. It was most deservedly abandoned with execration. ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... 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 ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... they must inevitably be recognized, he never preached a sermon a second time as long as there was even one boy in the School who had heard it on its first delivery. This was a very sensible precaution; but he little knew that some of his most elaborate passages had, by their sheer oddity, imprinted themselves indelibly on the memories of the hearers, and were handed down by oral tradition. One such especially, about a lady who used to visit the hospitals in the American War, and left a bun or a rose on the pillow of the wounded ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... 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
... But somehow 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 sake of his self-respect. And Jill. It was ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the surface. They imagine that a woman whose virtue is not always on the qui 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 ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... vivid, eager way of telling the story of the triumph of his shrewdness over the dealer's ignorance, would have made a subject for a Dutch painter; but it was all thrown away upon the audience. Mother and daughter exchanged cold, contemptuous glances.—"What an oddity!" they ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... them had noticed the little by-play. All eyes were on the track, which was being cleared for the first heat of another race. The free-for-all horses were being led away blanketed. The crowd cheered "Lu-Lu" as she went past, a shapeless oddity. The backers of "Mascot", ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... friend," said Ferruci, laying his stern hand on the shoulder of this oddity, "this gentleman wishes you to ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... business; and the people of Glaston were talking about their curate's sermons. Alas, it was about his sermons, and not the subject of them, that men talked, their interest mainly roused by their PECULIARITY, and what some called the oddity of the preacher. ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... Bell nor Mr. Thornton was in a laughing humour; so the oddity of any of the speeches which the former made was unnoticed by them. Mr. Bell whistled, without emitting any sound beyond a long hissing breath; changed his seat, without finding comfort or rest while Mr. Thornton sat immoveably still, his eyes fixed on one spot ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... The oddity of the grouping stupefied Coleman. It was anarchy, naked and unashamed. He could not imagine how such changes could have been consummated in the short time he had been away from them, but he laid it all to some startling necromancy on the part of Nora Black, some wondrous play which ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... "I am an oddity among a nation of self-made men," Little Billy once told Martin. "They all commenced at the bottom and ascended fortune's ladder, whereas I started at the top and descended. And what a descent! I hit every rung of that ladder with ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... consequence. But long before they were magistrands, the best of them had a profound respect for the librarian. Not a few of them repaired to him with all their difficulties; and such a general favourite was he, that any story of his humour or oddity was sure to be received with a roar of loving laughter. Indeed I doubt whether, within the course of a curriculum, Mr Cupples had not become the real centre of intellectual and moral life in ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... most 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
... 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 ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... shop fer one year alone would pay it, and after that I'd be a free man. She said in the summer I could prop up both these flap sides, to cut off the sun, an' the wind would blow clean through. She said the very oddity of the thing would draw trade, that I could have the picture of the lion painted out an' a big boot an' shoe put in place of it. Oh, I can't begin to tell you all she said. She'd 'a' been talkin' till now if I hadn't traded: Besides, betwixt me'n you, she give ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... An oddity in the new series will be the absence of the faces of Washington and Franklin. The first stamps issued by the Postoffice Department were the 5 and 10 cent stamps of 1847. One of these bore the head of Washington ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... "She's a perfect oddity," said Mrs. Hale. "See those two centre tail-feathers, so very long, barred with black and tipped ...
— Jimmy, Lucy, and All • Sophie May
... reserved for man, it is the vision of Venice seen from the water. This sight greeted Emerson at the age of thirty. The famous city, as he approached it by boat, "looked for some time like nothing but New York. It is a great oddity, a city for beavers, but to my thought a most disagreeable residence. You feel always in prison and solitary. It is as if you were always at sea. I soon ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... for a u, or the change or omission of a punctuation mark, which may involve claims to thousands of dollars. Even the separation of one word into two may reverse the meaning of the sentence, yet not betray itself by any oddity of phrase, as when the atheist who had asserted that "God is nowhere" found himself in print standing sponsor for the statement that "God is now here." The same trick of the types was played on an American political writer in his own paper regarding his pet reform, which he meant to assert ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... it was to end was as little known to himself as to any of its readers. But genius is a master as well as a servant, and when the laughter and fun were at their highest something graver made its appearance. He had to defend himself for this; and he said that, though the mere oddity of a new acquaintance was apt to impress one at first, the more serious qualities were discovered when we became friends with the man. In other words he might have said that the change was become ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... you, dear. There now, that was my purchase. I set my mind on having you—buying you, as that is your word. I have paid my price, and got my bargain, and—you know, I was always an oddity, and rather ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... listened with apparent attention to the flatteries addressed to her, she darted every now and then a glance keen as a steel blade towards him and his companion. He was perfectly adroit in playing off one woman against another, and it struck him with a pleasant sense of oddity, how perfectly unconscious his sweet and saintly neighbor was of the position in which she was supposed to stand by her rival; and poor Mary, all this while, in her simplicity, really thought that she had seen traces of what she would have called the "strivings of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... whiteness. His look was uninviting, resembling (but without his sourness) that of our great philanthropist. I know that he did good acts, but I could never make out what he was. Contemporary with these, but subordinate, was Daines Barrington—another oddity—he walked burly and square—in imitation, I think, of Coventry—howbeit he attained not to the dignity of his prototype. Nevertheless, he did pretty well, upon the strength of being a tolerable antiquarian, and having a brother a bishop. When the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... description. Born, I believe—bred, certainly, in a hunting stable, far more of his life passed in the saddle than elsewhere, it was not a little characteristic of my friend Harry to have selected this piece of Yorkshire oddity as his especial body servant; but if the choice were queer, it was at least successful, for an honester, more faithful, hard-working, and withal, better hearted, and more humorous varlet never drew curry-comb over horse-hide, or ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... ceremony possible. He would have ordered his officers out in epaulets and the full dress "Kossuth" hat of the period, but epaulets had been discarded during the war and not yet resumed on the far frontier. So the rank and file alone were called upon to appear in the black-feathered oddity a misguided staff had designed as the headgear of the array. "Pecksniff's" half-dozen doughboys, therefore, with their attendant sergeants and corporals in the old fashioned frock and felt, and a still smaller squad of troopers in yellow-trimmed jackets and brass-mounted forage ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... spectacle of Mr. Swinburne taking Mr. Carlyle to task, as he recently did, for indelicacy, has an oddity all its own, so far as I am concerned I cannot but concur with this critic in thinking that Carlyle has laid himself open, particularly in his 'Frederick the Great,' to the charge one usually associates with the great and terrible name of Dean Swift; ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... my blacks, who 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 ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... being at the same time a marvellous and absolutely genuine autobiography." His ultimate burst of appreciation is a beautifully characteristic example of what has before been called Saintsburyese—not because of any obscurity in it, but because of its oddity of phrase and metaphor: ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... 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
... 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, like King ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... 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
... Turning over the leaves now, and recalling to mind the hilarity they used to excite even among the least impressionable audience whenever they were fluttered (there are not a dozen of them altogether) on the familiar reading-desk, one marvels over the success of such an exceedingly small oddity as over the remembrance, let us say, of the brilliant performance of a fantasia ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... 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
... 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 say something in the next lecture. The absolute is said to perform ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... dislike of Apollonius which he had continued to combat in vain, it would be a useless torture to his brother to refresh in his mind all that he must be glad to have forgotten. He would easily find an excuse for refusing to obey a command which only oddity had suggested. The conclusion of the letter contained a teasing insinuation of a relation between our hero and his cousin's youngest daughter, of which his home town was talking. His brother sent his regards to her as his ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... me piteously. Not a vestige seemed to be left of the raging, shouting creature of my first visit, who was Napoleon at one moment, and Shakespeare at another. Mr. Dexter of the morning was a mild, thoughtful, melancholy man, who only recalled Mr. Dexter of the night by the inveterate oddity of his dress. His jacket, on this occasion, was of pink quilted silk. The coverlet which hid his deformity matched the jacket in pale sea-green satin; and, to complete these strange vagaries of costume, his wrists ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... 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 ever. ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 more. I have known coves with a better gift ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... one piece which was rusty, he called out in an authoritative tone, "Whose rusty gun[79] is this?" when Mr. Coleridge said, "is it very rusty, Sir?" "Yes Cumberbatch, it is" said the officer, sternly. "Then, Sir," replied Mr. C. "it must be mine!" The oddity of the reply disarmed the officer, and the poor scholar ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... smiling at the oddity of the question, 'couldn't be carried on without one. No man, sir, acquainted with the facts established by Harvey relating to the circulation of the blood, can doubt that I have ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... he surveyed the plainly furnished sitting-room, with open fireplace, a many colored rag-carpet on the floor, old-fashioned chairs, and dozens of pictures on the walls. They caught his eye at once, mainly because of the oddity of the frames, which were evidently home-made, for it was too dark to see more, and then a door was opened, and Uncle Terry invited him into a lighted room where a table was set. The elderly lady was standing at one end of ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... to write, there were two streams flowing in his brain, and these were, like everything else about him, inconsistent with one another. The faithful tender colour of modern life competed with the preposterous oddity of burlesque erudition. When he started the annals of Tristram Shandy, the Rabelais vein was in the ascendant, and there is plenty of evidence that it vastly dazzled and entertained readers of that day. But it no longer entertains us very much, and it is the source of considerable ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Oddity of the Classical Romance. Its importance. The Troy story. The Alexandreid. Callisthenes. Latin versions. Their story. Its developments. Alberic of Besancon. The decasyllabic poem. The great Roman d'Alixandre. Form, &c. Continuations. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... pieces composing the Hecatompathia, 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 History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... a 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... us a passable portrait of Her late Majesty Queen Victoria, have no equal for variety. The stamps of the first South African Republic, made in Germany, are very appropriate in their roughness of design and execution. For oddity of appearance the palm must be awarded to those of Asiatic origin, such, for instance, as the stamps of Afghanistan, of Kashmir, and most of the local productions of the Native States of India, marking as they do their own independent attempts to work up to European ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... begun a reply, when the old minister made his appearance. He was a tall, well-built man, with strong features, rather handsome than otherwise; but his hat hung on his occiput, gave his head a look of weakness and oddity that by nature did not belong to it, while baggy, ill-made clothes and big shoes manifested a reaction from the over-trimness of earlier years. He greeted the doctor with ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... 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 partaking of the ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... window, Soames recognized the oddity of the crowd below him. An ordinary, curiosity-seeking crowd would contain a considerable percentage of women. This did not. There were shouting voices which Soames heard faintly. They were orators declaiming ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... not a disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet he, too, in his way was an idealist, and for all his oddity a man of intellectual integrity, a trifle exaggerated perhaps in its methods and illustrations, but true to his convictions of right and duty, as Emerson would have had him be. For was it not Emerson who exclaimed, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... 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 quite a ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... and wise writer has said, "Cultivate the physical exclusively, and you have an athlete or a savage; the moral only, and you have an enthusiast or a maniac; the intellectual only, and you have a diseased oddity,—it may be a monster. It is only by wisely training all of them together that the complete man may ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... who discovered the shop in her wanderings through the West End, which she desired to know even to its remotest crannies, and its oddity seized her imagination when she discovered that for all its fierceness it was kept by a gentle little old Scotsman, who most ferociously desired the destruction of society, but most gently helped all who needed help and most wholly ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... 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 ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... (importance) 642. principle, nature, constitution, character, type, quality, crasis^, diathesis^. habit; temper, temperament; spirit, humor, grain; disposition. endowment, capacity; capability &c (power) 157. moods, declensions, features, aspects; peculiarities &c (speciality) 79; idiosyncrasy, oddity; idiocrasy &c (tendency) 176; diagnostics. V. be in the blood, run in the blood; be born so; be intrinsic &c adj.. Adj. derived from within, subjective; intrinsic, intrinsical^; fundamental, normal; implanted, inherent, essential, natural; innate, inborn, inbred, ingrained, inwrought; coeval ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the thinker is impatient of squinting and side-glances 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 or the few, but from the sky,—if he is no subordinate, but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... the wings and body of an owl that happened by accident to hang dead and dry from the rafter of a barn. This owl, with the nest on its wings, and with eggs in the nest, was brought as a curiosity worthy the most elegant private museum in Great Britain. The owner, struck with the oddity of the sight, furnished the bringer with a large shell, or conch, desiring him to fix it just where the owl hung: the person did as he was ordered, and the following year a pair, probably the same pair, built their nest in the conch, and laid ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... there is no pretence to reverse the condemnation of those faults, for which the poet has duly suffered. The extravagances are and will remain what they were. Nor can credit be gained from pointing them out: yet, to put readers at their ease, I will here define them: they may be called Oddity and Obscurity; (Oddity) and since the first may provoke laughter when a writer serious (and this poet is always serious), while the latter must prevent him from being understood (and this poet has always something ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... was not, 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: ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... to build near it, when she 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 ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... before the new mill—the same men who had so solicitously challenged her attention with their bows a couple of hours ago—turned as she approached and suddenly dispersed. It was not until this was repeated by another group that its oddity forced itself upon her still angry consciousness. Then the street seemed to be full of those excited preoccupied groups who melted away as she advanced. Only one man met her curious eyes,—the engineer,—yet she missed the usual critical smile with which ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... and button-holed down with floss silks. All sorts of forms are employed for these figures—stars, crescents, circles, trefoils, shields, palm-leaves, griffins, imps; and little wheels and comets in feather-stitch and cat-stitch are inserted between, to add to the oddity of the whole. These forms can be bought at a low price in almost any fancy shop. A good deal of ingenuity and taste can be shown in arranging and blending the figures richly and brilliantly, without making them too bright and glaring. Table-covers in this work should have falls of ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... 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 making plots to get rid of him, and ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... 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 Lieutenant," and Jonson, besides ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... brotherhood of bastard chivalry; and this ornament, conjoined to his train of whiskered warriors, seemed to render him a very type of the church militant. His eminence is extremely bulky; and my pilgrims were wicked enough to be much amused by the oddity of his pomp and pride. Nor did the postillion spare his facetiousness on the occasion; for you are aware that in France, as in most other parts of the continent, the servile classes use a degree of familiarity in their intercourse with their betters, to which ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... and the remainder of the song is in something like the pleasingly hoarse voice of a prairie warbler, or a black-throated green. It is soft and very pretty; not so perfect a piece of art as the vesper sparrow's tune,—few bird-songs are,—but taking for its very oddity, and at the same time tender and sweet. More than one writer has described it as resembling the song of the white-throat. Even Minot, who in general was the most painstaking and accurate of observers, as ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... 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 ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... the Bell telling? It is old, very old, as we have already observed; it was there long before grandmother's grandmother was born; and yet it is but a child in comparison with the Au-mann, who is quite an old quiet personage, an oddity, with his hose of eel-skin, and his scaly Jacket with the yellow lilies for buttons, and a wreath of reed in his hair and seaweed in his beard; but he looks very pretty ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... 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 volumes in the series, and of course other ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... empty. I fell in love with all the poets one after another; but being of an impressionable nature the last acquaintance disgusted me with the rest. I had made of myself a great warehouse of odds and ends, so that having no more thirst after drinking of the novel and the unknown, I became an oddity myself. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... neither 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... to Belton, as soon as thou canst. Yet whether thou goest or not, up I must go, and see what I can do with the sweet oddity myself. The moment these prescribing varlets will let me, depend upon it, I go. Nay, Lord M. thinks she ought to permit me one interview. His opinion has great authority with me—when it squares with my own: and I have assured ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... will be hanged if I attempt to draw her out!" he said to himself; and meanwhile he was roaming afield and plucking personal impressions in great fragrant handfuls. All this, as I say, was natural, given the man and the situation; the only oddity is that he should have fancied himself able to persuade the person most interested that he ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... mattered, and talk was but the sparkling outflow of trivial thought. What heroes we made of sturdy, unemphatic boys, how we repeated each other's jokes, what merciless critics we were of each other, how little allowance we made for weakness or oddity, how easily we condoned all faults in one who was good-humoured and strong! How the little web of intrigue and gossip, of likes and dislikes, wove and unwove itself! What hopeless Tories we were! How we stood ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is an amazing factor in human life. One may say that anything fashionable is accepted and that anything unfashionable is banned. But that does not help one to explain to one's self the oddity of some social conventions. ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... from time to time to glean a hint for their own mimetic reproduction. Two children playing at soldiers are far more interesting to each other than one of the scarlet beings whom both are busy imitating. This is perhaps the greatest oddity of all. "Art for art" is their motto; and the doings of grown folk are only interesting as the raw material for play. Not Theophile Gautier, not Flaubert, can look more callously upon life, or rate the reproduction more highly over the reality; ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the room from cupboard to cupboard, from shelf to shelf, in search of some new oddity. His eyes fell at last on an odd chest, pleasantly and quaintly carved, which stood in a ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... have had some qualities, for which his caricaturists will not give him credit. He must have been shrewd, with all his oddity, and well acquainted with the science of the world, with all his trifling. He must have known the art of pulling the strings of parliament, before he could have managed the puppet show of power with such unfailing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... horrible competition and actuality of the age of manufactures. It was like giving a sacked bank manager a satchel and sending him to a dame's school. Nor was the third stage of this career unconnected with the oddity of the others. On leaving the school he was made a clerk in a lawyer's office, as if henceforward this child of ridiculous changes was to settle down into a silent assistant for a quiet solicitor. It was exactly at this moment that his fundamental rebellion began to seethe; it seethed more ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... "Good-bye, Jim! Good-bye, Maggie!" cried a rotund, snappy American drummer, and was answered with cheery, honest wishes for "the success of his business." Two young Americans with the same identical oddity of gait walked to and fro, and a little black Frenchman, with a frightful star-shaped scar at the corner of his mouth, paraded lonelily. A middle-aged French woman, rouged and dyed back to the thirties, and standing in a nimbus of perfume, ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... Their very oddity showed the spirit of Art that dictated them. There were no pretty, well-finished, young-ladyish sketches of tumble-down cottages, and trees whose species no botanist could ever define;—or smooth chalk heads, with ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the house, Lyon having noticed an oddity of construction in the smoking-room; and the Colonel explained that it consisted of two distinct parts, one of which was of very great antiquity. They were two complete houses in short, the old one and the new, each of great extent and each very ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... 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 merry ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... lived his queer sedulous life, month after month, year after year, known among the studios as a quaint oddity, drawn out indulgently by the men, somewhat petted, monkey-fashion, by the women, forgotten by both when out of their presence, but developing imperceptibly day by day along the self-centring line. A kindly adviser suggested ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... time I had become seized with the idea that here was what is called 'a character.' I had, as it were, caught on to the whimsical oddity of the man, and liked it. Indeed, he would have been a singularly dull dog who failed to recognise this man's quaint good-humour as something jolly and kindly and well-meaning. The gentleman spoke by the aid, not alone of his mouth, but of ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... Roger. He had changed his clothes, and appeared in his accustomed business suit; its neat creases and quiet colour made him again the responsible, unromantic lawyer I had known, and took away the last vestige of dramatic oddity from the situation. It all seemed ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... voice unfolded his philosophy, and as he did so Marty became dazed and aghast, gazing at his boss as if Joe had turned into some unthinkable zoological oddity. Into Marty's prim-set life, with its definite boundaries and unmysterious exactness, was poured a vapor of lunacy. Finally Joe wound ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... 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
... palms before applying; a rich powdering of talcum; and decorations applied by Pat Valdo with his red and black paint-sticks—these give an effect that startles the amateur when he considers himself in the mirror. Topped with a skull-cap of white flannel (on which perches a supreme oddity in the way of a Hooligan hat) and enveloped in a baggy Pierrot garment—one is ready to look about and study the dressing room, where our fellows, in every kind of gorgeous grotesquerie, are preparing for the Grand Introductory Pageant—followed ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... that a lecture upon these topics written for England may be read to America. Evermore thanks for the brave stand you have made for Spiritualism in these writings. But has literature any parallel to the oddity of the vehicle chosen to convey this treasure? I delight in the contents; the form, which my defective apprehension for a joke makes me not appreciate, I leave to your merry discretion. And yet did ever wise and philanthropic author use so defying a diction? As if society were not sufficiently ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... attention, heels and knees together, shoulders squared, head and eyes straight to the front, the left hand, fingers extended, after the precise teachings of the ante-bellum days, the right hand raised and held at the salute. Strange figure indeed, yet soldierly to the last degree, despite the oddity of the entire make-up. The fur-trimmed cap of embroidered buckskin sat jauntily on black and glossy curls that hung about the brawny neck and shoulders. The buckskin coat, heavily fringed as to the short cape and the shorter skirt, was thickly covered with Indian ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... of being meant like a bird's wooing for an audience near and beloved. Deronda began by looking at her, but felt himself presently covering his eyes with his hand, wanting to seclude the melody in darkness; then he refrained from what might seem oddity, and was ready to meet the look of mute appeal which she turned toward him ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... are most exquisite Satires. The comic Entertainments of Shakespear are the highest Compositions of Raillery, Wit and Humour. Johnson conveys some Lesson in every Character. Shakespear some new Species of Foible and Oddity. The one pointed his Satire with masterly Skill; the other was inimitable in touching the Strings of Delight. With Johnson you are confin'd and instructed, with Shakespear unbent and dissolv'd in Joy. Johnson excellently concerts his Plots, and all his Characters unite in the one ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... them to me here, and I will transcribe them and send them off." I replied that I could do them as quickly myself. The old man smiled. "You do not send letters in shorthand. I can take a hundred and forty words a minute, and you can do your correspondence and go away." The oddity of the proposal attracted me. I agreed to dictate. The old man took out his notebook, and in ten minutes the work was done. We came back in an hour, and by that time each letter was transcribed in a beautiful, delicate longhand. I handed the scribe a shilling, ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... oddity, having the shape of a spinning top. Shell is thin, and its rich meat is easily extracted on account of its peculiar shape. ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... feel the deep significance underlying the myths we present—the poetry and imperishable beauty of the Greek, the strange and powerful conceptions of the Scandinavian mind, the oddity and fantasy of the Japanese, Slavs, and East Indians, and finally the queer imaginings of our own American Indians. Who, for instance, could ever forget poor Proserpina and the six pomegranate seeds, the death of beautiful Baldur, the luminous Princess Labam, the stupid ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... "The Hall of Fantasy," together with "The Intelligence Office" and "A Virtuoso's Collection," also remnants of old-fashioned ingenuity. In such fantasy Hawthorne found a better channel for that play of his mind which had earlier sought expression in the grotesque; oddity of thought he had in plenty, and the sense of oddity was often as far as his humorous faculty reached, for it was perceptive rather ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... greater part of your life to pulling your way up, pushing your way up, fighting your way up, the ladder of status to be satisfied to associate with your social superiors on the basis of being a nine-day-wonder, an oddity to be met at cocktail parties and spoken to for a ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... the need of an oddity, a novel note which should make itself heard among the clamors for Belgian relief, for Polish relief, for Armenian succor, for German, French, Italian, Russian ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... Darwin. Late in life he discovered Blake and was fascinated. What Trelawny cared for in literature was Imagination, the more sublime the better, while in life he had a taste for Truth and Freedom. He was always something of an oddity. He loathed superstition, cant and snobbery and said so in a way that gave much pain to the nicest people. He was of that disconcerting sort which, excelling in all that ordinary people admire, admires, for its part, what they hate—the abnormal and distinguished. He was ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... specialized in fine white paper of the highest quality. But while the book attracted considerable attention it did not immediately divert the demand for laid paper, since it was looked on more as an oddity than as a serious achievement. Baskerville was strictly an artist: he took unlimited time and pains, he had no regard for the prevailing market, and he produced sporadically; also, he was harshly criticized and even derided for ...
— Why Bewick Succeeded - A Note in the History of Wood Engraving • Jacob Kainen
... days following, so many selfdestructions succeeded this one that the grass became known in the papers as the Green Horror. Perhaps a peculiar sidelight on human oddity was revealed in most of these suicides choosing to immolate themselves, not in the main body of the grass, but in one of the many smaller nuclei ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... difficult to do justice to the fine qualities of Maximilian. Perhaps he was not really so eccentric as he seems. The oddity of his doings and sayings may be perhaps more properly attributed to his having been a thorough German. The genial men of that nation, even to-day and since it has come more into line in point of ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... records we 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 for ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... sooner displayed, than a great quantity crowded together. There is very seldom anything extraordinary in the appearance and address of a good writer; whereas a dull author generally distinguishes himself by some oddity or extravagance. For this reason I fancy that an assembly of grubs must ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... or three days, 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 to ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... the oddity of his saying this gravely; she was thinking that the pleasantest incident of her life—so it pleased her to qualify these too few days in Rome, which she might musingly have likened to the figure of some small princess ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... singular entry will appreciate its oddity if no one else does. After making it, one of the lawyers, on recovering from his astonishment, ventured to enquire: 'Well, Lincoln, how can we get ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... Mrs Fidler seemed to be looking very severely at him, as if rather resenting his presence, and sundry thoughts of his being an interloper began to trouble the lad, as he wondered how things would turn out. Every now and then, too, something was said which suggested an oddity about his uncle, which would give rise to all sorts of unpleasant thoughts. Still nothing could have been warmer than his welcome; and every now and then something cropped up which made the boy feel that this was not to be a temporary place of sojourning, ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... men had to know Harry Boyce a long time before they remarked that his eyes were not quite of the same colour. The common English grey-green-blue was in both of them, but one had a bluer glint than the other. The oddity, when it was discovered, seemed to make the challenge of the eyes more defiant and more baffling, as though they gleamed from the shadow of ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... affectation in Sterne, to be sure; but still the characters of Trim and the two Shandies[1] are most individual and delightful. Sterne's morals are bad, but I don't think they can do much harm to any one whom they would not find bad enough before. Besides, the oddity and erudite grimaces under which much of his dirt is hidden take away the effect for the most part; although, to be sure, the book is ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... over the room. The name was very odd, and an oddity is always to be laughed at by the average person, boy or man. Did you ever think of that, my dear pedagogue; you who would fain amuse children, and yet will spit them upon the spear of public ridicule by asking them to tell their names out loud in public, before all the rest ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... I was afraid of a renewal of the engagement; I 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 simply had ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... 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 ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... but rather as figures in the popular imagination. As such, Davis was credited with all the qualities of a powerful statesman; while Lincoln showed as a not ill-meaning, but grotesquely inadequate and misplaced oddity, a sort of mere accident of mob-favor, and made abundant mirth for the mirthful: how justly the event has perhaps demonstrated. Among the Northern generals, I think that the only one who became to some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... heart. For a few moments he seemed to forget my presence. For this I was glad, for it gave me a little time to recover from my astonishment, and to consider rapidly what it might mean. As I look back now, and think of the oddity of the situation, I rather wonder at my own self-possession. It was a sufficiently trying position. At first I thought it was a hoax, an intentional piece of practical fun, of which I was to be the object. But even in the moment allowed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... not, said he, understand Sisenna; I am circumvented; I fear that some snare is laid for me. What does he mean by sputatilica? I know that sputa is spittle: but what is tilica? The court laughed at the oddity of a word so strangely compounded. Rufio accusante Chritilium, Sisenna defendens dixit quaedam ejus SPUTATILICA esse crimina. Tum Caius Rufius, Circumvenior, inquit, judices, nisi subvenitis. Sisenna ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... quitted their seats to get near him. Swift went up to the country gentleman, and in a very abrupt manner, without any previous salute, asked him, "Pray, Sir, do you know any good weather in the world?" After staring a little at the singularity of Swift's manner and the oddity of the question, the gentleman answered, "Yes, Sir, I thank God I remember a great deal of good weather in my time."—"That is more," replied Swift, "than I can say; I never remember any weather that was not too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry; but, however God Almighty ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... stormed Lady Jane Preston's door and forced her way upstairs, in spite of Mary's entreaties to the contrary, had the footman who received her card given her the least encouragement; but that functionary, no doubt struck by the oddity of her appearance, placed himself in the front of the door, and declared that he had positive orders not to admit any strangers to his lady. On which Mrs. Hoggarty clenched her fist out of the coach-window, and promised that she would have him ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... speeches; accomplished facts you believe not because you see them but because you hear them from smart critics. You are easily duped by some novel plan, but you refuse to adhere to what has been proved sound. You are slaves to every new oddity and have nothing but contempt for what is familiar. Every one of you would like to be a good speaker, failing that, to rival your orators in cleverness. You are as quick to guess what is coming in a speech as you are slow at foreseeing ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... of this "gentleman of acknowledged genius and sovereign popularity," we have never been able to discover. If oddity were always originality, if quaintness and beauty were synonymous, if paradox were necessarily wisdom, we should be ready to grant that Mr. Tupper is a wise, beautiful and original thinker. But thought, after all, is an affair of mind, and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... interpretation is only part of the oddity of this chapter. Several other aspects are worth pondering. The whole chapter has a well-worn feeling, as though the author had told and re-told it many times. It reads like a deposition, taken down by a police ...
— The Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel • Arthur W. Orton
... 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, high-pitched trilling which came from a half-inch hole ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... forget, if seen only once. He had the mark of those dark and passionate Westland Scotch, who before Burns and after have given many such dark eyes and dark emotions to the world. But in him the unmistakable strain, Gaelic or whatever it is, was accentuated almost to oddity; and he looked like some swarthy elf. He was small, with a big head and a crescent of coal-black hair round the back of a vast dome of baldness. Immediately under his eyes his cheekbones had so high a colour that they might have been painted scarlet; three black tufts, ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... it. He put the old cant of the lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness with a certain impudent freshness which gave at least a momentary pleasure. He was helped in some degree by the arresting oddity of his appearance, which he worked, as the phrase goes, for all it was worth. His dark red hair parted in the middle was literally like a woman's, and curved into the slow curls of a virgin in a pre-Raphaelite picture. From within this almost saintly oval, however, his face projected ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... be better for us to believe'! This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we OUGHT to believe': and in THAT definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to believe what it is BETTER FOR US to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... as one may be in an oddity, seemed not otherwise impressed. 'Twas something, however, that she remained ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the waiter absent-mindedly in that tongue—did not make her less different, for she was 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 ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... 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
... of the Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge mountains is filled with a quaintness of expression. Many of their words and phrases that attract through their oddity were at one time in popular use and grammatically correct. These people are clinging to the dialect of their fathers who were Anglo-Saxons. The use of "hit" for "it" is not confined to the mountains, but the Old English grammars ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... nothing in the act which could have moved a stranger to anything but a smile at the oddity of it, but it touched Paul almost to tears when the gray old man lugged out of his coat-tail pocket a whole newspaper, and having pinched from it a most economical fragment, singed his fingers at the bars in the act of lighting it. He had laughed at that little quaintness ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... such an 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 ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... would come back to me, the oddity of that spectacle in the hollow—a man in a red fealdag, with his hide-covered buckler grotesquely flailing the grass, he, in the Gaelic custom, making a great moan about his end, and a pair of bickering rooks cawing away heartily as if it was ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... dark, pretty eyes - and the most 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 re- peated in another ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... brought some 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 joke for anything. Macgregor wisely entered ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... nor indeed can any drawing exceed in beauty the line that leads from the flank along the ribs and arm of Mars up to his lifted elbow. The whole design, like one of Piero di Cosimo's pictures in another key, leaves a strong impression on the mind, due partly to the oddity of treatment, partly to the careful work displayed, and partly to the individuality of the artist. It gives us keen pleasure to feel exactly how a painter like Botticelli applied the dry naturalism of the early ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... plumes, and thick knit gloves, dark also. The gentleman looked astonished, but said nothing; and imagine her consternation, when she found herself in the centre of the dress circle, in the midst of unveiled necks and arms, thin white dresses, and white kid gloves. At once the oddity of her mistake flashed across her; but she bore it with unparalleled firmness, and enjoyed the music notwithstanding. The lorgnettes attracted by her costume, found a very sweet face to repay them, and her naive and enthusiastic criticism interested her companion ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... now comforted him with the example of Xerxes, as I had before done with that of the king of Sweden; and soon after we sat down to breakfast together with much cordial friendship; for I assure you, with all his oddity, there is not a better-natured man in the world than ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... expression of this kind that she made her entrance after I had exchanged a few words with Miss Ambient. Her husband presently followed her and, there being no other company, we went to dinner. The impressions I received at that repast are present to me still. The elements of oddity in the air hovered, as it were, without descending—to any immediate check of my delight. This came mainly, of course, from Ambient's talk, the easiest and richest I had ever heard. I mayn't say ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... 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 in ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... I get there," answered Kitty. "I suppose it's like all other places; there's a house and some girls; and if we are asked to tea, why we'll get tea, and they'll think me no end of an oddity, and I'll think them a lot of muffs; but that don't matter. Oh, my dears, if you only saw Old Ireland, and if you only knew the free life we have there, and the beautiful air that comes blowing in from the broad Atlantic. Why, it's smothered I'll be in this queer place. I doubt if I'll stay ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... first noticed the Drainger house because of its oddity. Then I was impressed by its air of speechless and implacable resentment. So far as I could observe it was empty; no foot disturbed the rank grass or troubled the dismal porches. The windows were never thrown open to the sunlight. The front door, in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... You were going on the enemy's territory, and you were in peril all the time. Now you come off in a schooner, which appears to be loaded with cotton, and how or where you picked her up is a mystery to me;" and the commander indulged in a laugh at the oddity of the young officer's reappearance. "Your messenger reported that the Trafalgar would sail at three o'clock in the morning, and I judge that she ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... into a hearty laugh; I could not help it: and he, reddening, looked round himself, and round himself, to see if anything was amiss in his garb. The man, the man! honest friend, I could have said, (but had too much reverence for my husband,) is the oddity! Nothing amiss in the garb. I quickly recollected myself, however, and put him in a good humour, by proper marks of my gracious acceptance. On reflection, I could not bear myself for vexing the honest man when he ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... been, dreading in the sudden awakening from sleep: from ghosts or spirits of the dead; thieves, that is to say, worthy fellows very much alive, and having undoubtedly, in as much as they are Japanese thieves, faces of the most meritorious oddity. I am not in the least frightened, now that I know precisely what to expect, and we will immediately set to work to ascertain the truth, for something is decidedly moving on Madame Prune's roof; some ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... better footing, and hired a couple of servants to assist him in carrying it on; and there he settled down, a kind, talkative, inscrutable young man, six feet three in his stockings, with an iron constitution and a friendly voice. He soon began to take rank in the district as a bit of an oddity: it was not much to be wondered at from the first, for he was always full of notions, and kept calling the plainest common-sense in question; but what most raised the report upon him was the odd circumstance of his courtship ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you have heard of Dr. Hartwell's intended journey to the East? What an oddity he is! Told me he contemplated renting a bungalow somewhere in heathendom, and turning either Brahmin or Parsee, he had not quite decided which. He has sold his beautiful place to the Farleys. The greenhouse plants he gave to mother, and all the statuary and paintings are to be sent ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans |
