"Vagary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was lonesome without you. So when I saw that it comforted her a bit to have someone to cook for, I encouraged the fellow. I told him he'd nothing to look for from me, for his father is richer than I am nowadays; but he's just the sort to like vagary." ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... simple story over there of this Mrs. John Fletcher which interested and helped me much. This saintly gifted woman told of a dream which came to her with such vividness as to seem to her mature mind more than a common passing vagary of sleep. In her dream she was engaged in an intense struggle with an evil spirit. She was having a most ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... have reformed is, that servants should be restrained from throwing themselves out of place on every idle vagary. This might be remedied were all contracts between master and servant made before a justice of peace, or other proper officer, and a memorandum thereof taken in writing. Nor should such servant leave his or her place (for men and maids might come under the same ...
— Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business • Daniel Defoe
... deeper in despair. The blind themselves laughed in the face of Hauey when he offered to teach them to read. How pitiable is the cramped sense of imprisonment in circumstances which teaches men to expect no good and to treat any attempt to relieve them as the vagary of a disordered mind! But now, behold the transformation; see how institutions and industrial establishments for the blind have sprung up as if by magic; see how many of the deaf have learned not only to read and write, but to speak; and remember that the faith and patience of ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... frame of spirit the whole day: calm, kind attentive—half matronly, and half girlish. The three who had been longest acquainted with her expected every instant to see her capricious spirit break out in some whimsical change or sportive vagary. But their fears were quite unnecessary. Undine continued as mild and gentle as an angel. The priest found it all but impossible to remove his eyes from her; and he often ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... folk, and which has received the title, 'Music of the Future;' looking forward to a time when, perhaps, men's senses will be preternaturally quickened to comprehend its discordant harmonies. It is something akin to that vagary of religious sentiment, which, whatever may be its merits, whatever its satisfaction for a spiritually illuminated chosen few, is, nevertheless, beyond the present ken and comprehension and spiritual compass of most mortals, and may be called the Religion ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... last this double shore is a petrified history of two nations, mutually shadowed by a mad vagary of fate with the lust of conquest, which makes them fly at each other's throats directly ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... and deceit, has not been of any substantial value in this inquiry. It may afford to those who have experienced any positive visitation from another world a very comforting and indisputable proof. To most sane people it is a humiliating and ludicrous vagary. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... mechanical attempt to retrieve his buffoon's reputation, for he was really very much in love, and very serious in his desire to be married in quite the ordinary way. With a rather lack-lustre eye he noticed the amusement of his friends at his last vagary; but when Winifred Ames entered the ballroom a nervous vivacity shook him, as it has shaken ploughmen under similar conditions, and for just a moment he felt ill at ease in the lonely lunacy of his flowered waistcoat and olive-green knee-breeches. He danced with her, then ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... and I stuck to it gallantly: all afternoon I continued selling that infernal stock, all afternoon it continued skying. I suppose I had come (a frail cockle-shell) athwart the hawse of Jay Gould; and, indeed, I think I remember that this vagary in the market proved subsequently to be the first move in a considerable deal. That evening, at least, the name of H. Loudon Dodd held the first rank in our collegiate gazette, and I and Billson (once more thrown upon the world) were competing for the same clerkship. The ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... There—I cannot describe it. It must be seen first afar off, and then close, to understand the vagaries of splendour in which Nature indulges here. And yet the Norantea, common in the high woods, is even more splendid, and, in a botanist's eyes, a stranger vagary still. ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... make all men do what they wanted them to do—against their wills. Perhaps they couldn't. Perhaps they could. There are more ways of coercing them than by brute force. But in any case what has this preposterous vagary to do with ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... exotic, delights in the aroma of Khalid's cigarettes and Khalid's fancy. And that he might feel at ease, she begins by assuring him that they have met and communed many times ere now, that they have been friends under a preceding and long vanished embodiment. Which vagary Khalid seems to countenance by referring to the infinite power of Allah, in the compass of which nothing is impossible. And with these mystical circumlocutions of ceremony, they plunge into an intimacy which is bordered by the metaphysical on ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... cases of excess of parts the extra part or member is manifestly derived from the same ovum, and even the same part of the ovum, being merely the effect of a redundancy and vagary of growth. Such cases include most instances of extra digits or other organs, and even of double monsters, as manifested by the fact that such extra organs grow from the normal identical organs. Hence ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... obliged me and my niece, sir," said the baronet, tremulously; and then, with a forced and sickly smile, he added: "Some foolish vagary of Lucretia, I suppose; I must scold her for it. Say nothing about it, however, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... suggested the idea that we were standing on nothing, or, at best, nothing better than dissolving quicksands, which were liable at any moment wholly to slide away and leave us; and it required some strength of mind to resist the vagary, and prevent it from effecting a troublesome lodgment in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... principle, e.g. mechanics, is always seen in the higher, e.g. in the phenomena of life, further tended to perplex them. Plato's doctrine of the same and the other ruling the courses of the heavens and of the human body is not a mere vagary, but is a natural result of the state of knowledge and thought at which ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... pray'd To Saint aid Virgin Mary; But one there was that stood composed Amid the waves' vagary; As staunch as rock, a true game-cock ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... that by some vagary of chance—of fate if you will—I had struck a surface area where breathable air still remained. I swam, striving to plan, to think where I might be swimming. Yet it was all a phantasmagoria, with only the ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... Lempriere's fables blur together In cloudy symbols of the weather, And Aphrodite rose from frothy seas But to illustrate such hypotheses. With years enough behind his back, Lincoln will take the selfsame track, And prove, hulled fairly to the cob, A mere vagary of Old Prob. 120 Give the right man a solar myth, And he'll confute ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... throbbed; he was in an overwrought mood. He was ready for any illusion, susceptible to any vagary of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to his men friends—to some of them—this treasure to which he always returned the more enamoured for his vagary and its opportunity of comparison. Women he would not permit. In general, he held that all women, the respectable no less than the other kind, put mischief in each other's heads and egged each other on to carry out the mischief already there in embryo. In particular, he would have felt that he ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... went up his back. Then he remembered, he felt, he saw his little attic room, in the old home back among the wheat-hills of the Northwest. Six thousand miles away! He would never see that room again. What unaccountable vagary of memory had ever recalled it to him? It faded out ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images consumed before a fire—that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed—that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the forest—or that spits and kettles only danced a fearful-innocent vagary about some rustic's kitchen when no wind was stirring—were all equally probable where no law of agency was understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... respectable are they! how cordially do men prize them, when a woman knows how to render them estimable." I fear ——- will be convinced of this but too late. I am glad to find, however, that the idea so often urged (in vain) by me, is not a mere vagary of my own brain, but is supported by so ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Hood, wife of Edward P. Hood, and daughter of Ezra Goddard. It is now given to the public without addition or alteration, and with but a slight abridgment. A strange and startling story it certainly is. Perhaps the reader will cast it aside at once as a worthless fiction,—the idle vagary of an excited brain. The compiler, of course, cannot vouch for its truth, but would respectfully invite the attention of the reader to the following testimonials presented by those who have known the narrator. The first is from Edward P. Hood, with whom Mrs. ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... half. The local invention of Perpendicular at Gloucester, and its spreading abroad by the great Bishops of Winchester forty or fifty years later, is a remarkable fact; but it is a small matter to this fiction. So strange a vagary need no longer be discussed; but it is worthy of a place in the memory among odd delusions. As an honest delusion, it is at least more respectable than making Alfred found things at Oxford ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... Very orderly, irresistible without vagary, now became the fire's progress. Terrible in its absolute precision, in its measured advance down the wind, this implacable river of flame rolled down the city. Far ahead of the actual fire itself ran its fatal forerunner, the ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... till and drain the ground, and to make looms, and ships, and railroads, and steam ploughs, and electric telegraphs, and all the things which you see in the Great Exhibition; and to foretell famine, and bad weather, and the price of stocks and (what is hardest of all) the next vagary of the great idol Whirligig, which some call Public Opinion; till at last he grew as rich as a Jew, and as fat as a farmer, and people thought twice before they meddled with him, but only once before they asked him to help them; for, because he earned his money well, he ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... It was by no vagary of chance that the demand of women for the higher education came simultaneously with the change from the old industrial home to the new, more purely domestic home. (It may be a higher, nobler type of home. We are not ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... to view The strangeness and vagary of the feat: Laughing indeed! with twenty minds to call From his inner bed-chamber the Forty forth, Who watched all night beside their monarch's bed, With naked swords and torches in their hands, And ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... spoke undoubtedly expressed the general feeling. The necessarily evil consequences of the practice which he justified seemed to be still speculative and inferential, and to the national indifference which followed the war the demand of Mr. Jenckes for reform appeared to be a mere whimsical vagary most ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various |
