"Exotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glass and paused, eyeing it. So far her appearance had had no value for her save as a stage asset. Now she looked at herself with a new, critical interest. Behind the footlights she was another person, blossomed into an exotic brilliance, took on fire and beauty with the music and excitement. Might not a man seeing her there be disappointed when he met her as she really was? She studied her face intently, viewing it at different angles, judging it by the ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... by no sectarian name, nor could they have told to what "party" they belonged. They troubled themselves with no theories of education, but mingled gentle nurture with "wholesome neglect." There was nothing exotic or constrained in the growth of Eric's character. He was not one of the angelically good children at all, and knew none of the phrases of which infant prodigies are supposed to be so fond. But to be truthful, to be honest, to be kind, to be brave, these ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... with arch inquiry, and even as she did so, either as the result of something which she read in the watching eyes, or by the action of some mysterious mental power, the pink flamed in her cheek, and lo! she was a rose herself; a wonderful, exotic rose, flaming from red to gold! Guest looked at her for a moment, and then hastily dropped his eyes. He was not by nature an impetuous man, but he had a conviction that if he looked at Cornelia any longer at this moment, he might say something ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... birth. Theatrical managers drew freely on the dramatic treasures of Danish literature, and occasionally, to replenish the exchequer, reproduced a French comedy or farce, whose epigrammatic pith and vigor were more than half-spoiled in the translation. The drama was as yet an exotic in Norway; it had no root in the national soil, and could accordingly in no respect represent the nation's own struggles and aspirations. The critics themselves, no doubt, looked upon it merely as a form of amusement, a thing to be wondered and stared at, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... He was about to stammer an excuse and fly, when one of the gentlewomen turned her eye on him for a moment, and so he sat down. The gentlewomen then resumed their conversation. He glanced cautiously about him. Elm-trees, firmly rooted in a border of Indian matting, grew round all the walls in exotic profusion, and their topmost branches splashed over on to the ceiling. A card on the trunk of a tree, announcing curtly, "Dogs not allowed," seemed to enhearten him. After a pause one of the gentlewomen swam haughtily towards him and looked him between the eyes. She spoke no word, ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... Chatsworth required 70,000 square feet of glass. Four miles of iron tubing are used in heating the building. There is a broad carriage way running right through the centre of the conservatory.[033] This conservatory is peculiarly rich in exotic plants of all kinds, collected at an enormous cost. This most princely estate, contrasted with the little cottages and cottage-gardens in the neighbourhood, suggested to Wordsworth ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... was not yet buried. When he looked upon her, he heard the old familiar sounds of the sea, of music and siren-voices of civilizations in their decay—breathed again the intoxicating atmosphere of that exotic, voluptuous, sensuous existence in which he had been reared and had lived, and with which he was saturated and from which he was striving to escape. But when he thought of Chiquita, he heard the murmur of forests and waters and saw the broad expanse of the plains ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... braided in a manner that suggested some Southern or Eastern, some remotely foreign, woman. She had a large collection of ear-rings, and wore them in alternation; and they seemed to give a point to her Oriental or exotic aspect. A compliment had once been paid her, which, being repeated to her, gave her greater pleasure than anything she had ever heard. "A pretty woman?" some one had said. "Why, her features are very bad." "I don't know about her features," a very discerning observer had answered; "but ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... sensation throughout those circles wherein the creations of intellect and imagination are felt, studied, and discussed. The author was one who, with a power which no one had wielded before him, carried off his readers into exotic lands, and whose art, in appearance most simple, proved a genuine enchantment for the imagination. It was the time when M. Zola and his school stood at the head of the literary movement. There breathed forth from Loti's writings an all-penetrating fragrance ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... from the carriage, and looked about with an air of calm, still enjoyment. The negro, it must be remembered, is an exotic of the most gorgeous and superb countries of the world, and he has, deep in his heart, a passion for all that is splendid, rich, and fanciful; a passion which, rudely indulged by an untrained taste, draws on them the ridicule of the colder ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... parentage—a girl from nowhere, with all the charm and beauty which a bringing up in the midst of wealth can give her. The hero is a young American of good family who first meets her at Palm Beach, Florida. Here is a background that Mr. Chambers loves—the outdoor life of exotic Florida, the everglades, the hunting, the shooting, and the sea—all in the midst of that other exotic life which goes with a winter resort and a large group of the idle rich. The story—already in its 150th thousand—is, perhaps, the author's ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... Hundreds of girls live in communities where this is absolutely impossible. What has religion to offer to a girl denied an education which will fit her for the life she must live, compelled to enter into a fierce struggle for daily bread while still a child, surrounded by every sort of cheap, exotic amusement behind which temptation lurks? Has it anything to offer in compensation, if it permits conditions to ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... white with two tall candlesticks to light it, and a silver bowl for flowers. It was by means of the flowers in the bowl that Marie-Louise expressed her moods. There were days when scarlet flowers flamed, and other days when pale roses or violets or lilies suggested a less exotic state of mind. ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... primrose is an exotic in American poetry, to say nothing of the snowdrop and the daisy. Its prominence in English poetry can be understood when we remember that the plant is so abundant in England as to be almost a weed, and that it comes early and is very pretty. Cowslip and ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... Beeston, an eminent physician, began a few years ago a physic garden adjoining to his house in this town; and as he is particularly curious, and, as I was told, exquisitely skilled in botanic knowledge, so he has been not only very diligent, but successful too, in making a collection of rare and exotic plants, such as are scarce to be equalled ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... Cibber ("Apology," chap. x.) complains that Rich paid extraordinary prices to singers, dancers, and other exotic performers, which were as constantly deducted out of the sinking salaries of his actors. In December, 1709, the Lord Chamberlain ordered that no new representations were to be brought upon the stage which were not necessary to the better performance of comedy or opera, "such as ladder-dancing, ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... how was a prince to enjoy tranquillity without the necessaries of life? In a short time a score of other buildings, including an opera-house and a barracks, had sprung up about the castle in the woods, while an immense outlying tract had been converted into a park with exotic attractions in the style of the time. Here, then, was need of expert forestry—whence the opening of the school as aforesaid. Once started, it became the duke's special pet and pride. His immense energy had found a new fad—that of the schoolmaster. He was bent on having a model training-school ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Mr. HERGESHEIMER has above all else the gift of suggesting atmosphere and colour (ought I not in mere gratitude to bring myself to say "color"?); his picture of Linda's amazing mother and the rest of the luxurious brainless company of her hotel existence has the exotic brilliance of the orchid-house, at once dazzling and repulsive. Later, in the course of her married life, inspiring and inspired by the sculptor Pleydon (in whose fate the curious may perhaps trace some echo of recent controversy), the story of Linda becomes inevitably less vivid, though ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... affectation of Gallicism had reappeared in Denmark; and the tragedies of Voltaire, with their stilted rhetoric, were the most popular dramas of the day. Johan Nordahl Brun (1745-1816), a young writer who did better things later on, gave the finishing touch to the exotic absurdity by bringing out a wretched piece called Zarina, which was hailed by the press as the first original Danish tragedy, although Ewald's exquisite Rolf Krage, which truly merited that title, had appeared two years before. Wessel, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... simplicity, and the despair of every woman who tried to copy it. The part was that of an Italian opera singer. The play pulsated with romance and love, glamour and tragedy. Sarah Haddon, in her flowing black velvet robe and her pearls and her pallor, was an exotic, throbbing, exquisite realisation of what every woman in the audience dreamed of being and every man dreamed ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... of expectancy, half animal glee, half spiritual joy; the "whole sunrise, not to be suppressed" is a limitless splendour, but the reflected beam cast up from the splash of her ewer and dancing on her poor ceiling is the same in kind; in the shrub-house up the hill-side are great exotic blooms, but has not Pippa her one martagon lily, over which she queens it? With God all service ranks the same, and she shall serve Him all this long ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... lay the verdant velvet of an English lawn shaded at the lower end by a clump of exotic trees, in the midst of which stood a Chinese pagoda with soundless belfries and motionless golden eggs. The greenhouse concealed the garden wall on the northern side, the opposite wall was covered with climbing plants ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... could get no other. Dear "Mother Monroe," as wise as she was good, and as tender as she was strong, who had nursed two generations of mothers in our village, was engaged at that time, and I was compelled to take an exotic. I had often watched "Mother Monroe" with admiration, as she turned and twisted my sister's baby. It lay as peacefully in her hands as if they were lined with eider down. She bathed and dressed it by easy ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the pictures on which his more popular fame rested disappeared early from the world, like the Battle of the Standard; or are mixed obscurely with the product of meaner hands, like the Last Supper. His type of beauty is so exotic that it fascinates a larger number than it delights, and seems more than that of any other artist to reflect ideas and views and some scheme of the world within; so that he seemed to his contemporaries to be the possessor of some unsanctified ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... sang, telling to spacious and exotic Yann the little tales and trifles of his city of Durl. And the songs welled up over the black jungle and came into the clear cold air above, and the great bands of stars that looked on Yann began to know the affairs of Durl and Duz, and of the shepherds that dwelt in the ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... into an invisible surge, then it is the fortune of one who remembers such as the Cutty Sark to choose different ships and other times. Why not choose them? They were comely ships, and now their time seems fair. Who would care to remember the power and grey threat of a modern warship, or the exotic luxury of a liner of this new era? Nobody who remembers the graciousness of the clippers, nor the pride and content of the seamen who worked them. To aid the illusion of the yew, I have one of those books which are not books, a Lloyd's Register of Shipping for 1880, that by some unknown circuitous ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... things; the great Symbolic Eye glanced wickedly out from the white beauty of her heaving breast; and as he surveyed her, thus resplendent in all the startling seductiveness of her dangerous charms, her loveliness entranced and intoxicated him like the faint perfume of some rare and powerful exotic, ... his senses seemed to sink drowningly in the whelming influence of her soft and dazzling grace; and though he still resented, he could not resist her mesmeric power. No wonder, he thought, that Sah-luma's eyes darkened with passions as they dwelt on her! ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... last, to dream of khaki uniforms and karnel sahibs who knew neither fear nor favor and who said things that were so. It is a mad world to the Himalayan Hillman where men in authority tell truth unadorned without shame and without consideration—a mad, mad world, and perhaps too exotic to be wholesome, but pleasant ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... a cupboard full of rye!'" he said. "Almost a goal! But not ONLY liquors, my little friend. Champagne—cases of it—caviar, canned grouse with truffles, lobster, cheeses, fine cigars, everything you could think of, erotic, exotic and narcotic. An orgy in cans and bottles, a bacchanalian revel: a cupboard full of indigestion, joy, forgetfulness and katzenjammer. Oh, my suffering palate, to have to leave it all without one sniff, one ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the tendencies of the Pleiade may be described as exotic, going forth, as they did, to capture the gifts of classical and Italian literature, on the other hand they pleaded strenuously that thus only could French literature attain its highest possibilities. In the scholarship of the time, side by side with the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... was a special expedient for the cure of a transitory evil. Republican institutions were in France an exotic growth, inconsistent with national traditions, and only welcome to classes which had neither the political intelligence nor the material resources to maintain their own ideals in the face of persistent opposition. It is significant that the charters ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... every single calorie, without exception. You continue this program for the rest of your life along with moderate daily exercise and high but reasonable dosages of vitamins, minerals, and also take a few exotic food supplements. The supplement program is not particularly expensive nor extreme, Walford's supplement program is more moderate than the life extension program I recommend for all middle-aged and ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... head and shoulders, drag in head and shoulders, lug in head and shoulders. Adj. irrelative^, irrespective, unrelated; arbitrary; independent, unallied; unconnected, disconnected; adrift, isolated, insular; extraneous, strange, alien, foreign, outlandish, exotic. not comparable, incommensurable, heterogeneous; unconformable &c 83. irrelevant, inapplicable; not pertinent, not to the, purpose; impertinent, inapposite, beside the mark, a propos de bottes [Fr.]; aside from the purpose, away from the purpose, foreign to the purpose, beside ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... there is always something a little exotic, almost artificial, in songs which, under an English aspect and dress, are yet so manifestly the product of other skies. They affect us like translations; the very fauna and flora are alien, remote; the dog's-tooth violet is but an ill substitute for the rathe primrose, ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... been stored in an upper hall. At this he proposed that the party reassemble above, where at least they might sit down and be comfortable. When I last saw J—— that evening he was sitting at the turn of the stairs behind an exotic shrubbery, where he had found a vagrant chair that had ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... which for Homer this actual world of art must have consisted, reached him in a quantity, and with a novelty, just sufficient to warm and stimulate without [200] surfeiting the imagination; it is an exotic thing of which he sees just enough and not too much. The shield of Achilles, the house of Alcinous, are like dreams indeed, but this sort of dreaming winds continuously through the entire Iliad and Odyssey—a child's dream after a day of real, fresh impressions ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... course, primarily wanted European foods rather than exotic Indian crops. The foods also had to be comparatively nonperishable and easily transported. Grains, particularly wheat, and processed meat (hams, salt pork, and such) especially met European preferences. Commercial production ...
— Agricultural Implements and Machines in the Collection of the National Museum of History and Technology • John T. Schlebecker
... doors cannot atone for the want of. After dinner was over, the whole company which was pretty numerous, adjourned from the table to the garden, a small, but well ordered spot of ground, at the lower end of which was a green-house, furnished with many curious exotic plants. While Natura was shewing this collection to those of his guests, who had a taste that way, others were diverting themselves with walking in the alleys, or set down in arbors, according as their different fancies inclined, as it is common for people ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... Joan as adequate compensation for three years' exile in the sheeplands, there was no telling. Perhaps he did not think much of her in comparison with the exotic plants of the atmosphere he had left; more than likely there was a girl in the background somewhere, around whom some of the old man's anxiety to save the lad revolved. Mackenzie hoped to the deepest cranny of his heart that it ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... its too-wide eyes and exotic mouth was gone. Instead, she saw her own purely cut features, but fired by such exultant adoration as lifted them to the likeness of a deity. The picture now was incredibly pure and passionate—the very flaming essence of love. Tears started ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... can never have of mushrooms," was one of the descriptions. It was, of course, guessed at once—"Enough;" and could there be a truer compliment to this strange exotic delicacy, which costs nothing but a walk in an early autumnal morning and is more choice than the rarest flavours ever designed by the most inspired of chefs? For certainly there has never been enough of them. I, at any ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various
... extirpation of native bird population by the rapid proliferation of the brown tree snake, an exotic, invasive species ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... "detestable invalid" she painted him. But need we withdraw charity from one, to give to the other? Need we rob Pauline to pay Peter? There should be easily a plenty of sympathy for both, for the woman infatuated with a strange, exotic genius, gathering him into her heart and home, only to find that she had taken upon herself the role of nurse as well as mistress; and to find her time and her vitality devoted to an invalid, while her own life-work as a famous writer was making demands on her ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... the gray water that laps at the sides of the boat, that rises and recedes in cruel waves, "like little pointed rocks." It is a desolate picture, and the tale is one of our greatest short stories. In the other tales that go to make up the volume are wild, exotic glimpses of Latin-America. I doubt whether the color and spirit of that region have been better rendered than in Stephen Crane's ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... causes why philosophy has such an evil name. Another question is, Which of existing states is suited to her? Not one of them; at present she is like some exotic seed which degenerates in a strange soil; only in her proper state will she be shown to be of heavenly growth. 'And is her proper state ours or some other?' Ours in all points but one, which was left undetermined. You may remember our saying that some living mind or witness of the legislator was ...
— The Republic • Plato
... your bearing to those about you. The critical attitude to society and individuals is a bad one for a successful practitioner of medicine to fall into. It is more than that—it is illiberal; it comes from a continued residence in a highly exotic society, in a narrow intellectual ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... and richness of her beauty. Her lustrous black hair was arranged as usual; but a wreath, formed of some delicate vine hung thick with drooping scarlet blossoms, ran like flowering flame around her head. Like the sumptuous exotic of Zenobia, it was an ornament which seemed to bloom out of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... current issues: extirpation of native bird population by the rapid proliferation of the brown tree snake, an exotic species ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... if such it might in truth be called: Clear soup, a smallish slice of rare roast beef cut shaving thin, gluten bread sparsely buttered, a cloud of watercress no larger than a man's hand, another raw apple and a bit of domestic cheese—nothing rich, nothing exotic, no melting French ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... volume that it is hardly possible to know which, i.e. whether instinct or structure, change first by insensible steps. Probably sometimes instinct, sometimes structure. When a British insect feeds on an exotic plant, instinct has changed by very small steps, and their structures might change so as to fully profit by the new food. Or structure might change first, as the direction of tusks in one variety of Indian elephants, which ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... reveled in a crime which lay on the borderland of the exotic and the grotesque. Like the French philosopher in Poe's "Tales of Mystery and Imagination," the savant who read his newspaper in a dingy Paris room, and solved by sheer force of intellect extraordinary criminal problems which baffled the shrewdest official minds, he felt in relation ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... their long-waisted but short skirted patience.... It is beyond the ken of my understanding to conceive, how those women should have any true grace, or valuable virtue, that have so little wit as to disfigure themselves with such exotic garbes, as not only dismantle their native lovely lustre, but transclouts them into gant-bar-geese, ill shapen-shotten-shell-fish, Egyptian Hyeroglyphics, or at the best French flirts of the pastery, which a proper English woman should ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... of a great conservatory. A dozen tropical growths mingled their odors into an indefinable whole; and the effect was akin to that of a subtle exotic drug, lulling the senses, filling the whole being with a languor, a relaxation, a pleasant enervation which it seemed well not to throw off. Outside on the prairie the sun burned harshly; within, the scented shadows shielded away the sun and wrapped round one a drugged warmth all its own. ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... had consecrated his existence. The manner in which the hunters of heretics performed their office has been exemplified by slightly sketching the career of a single one of the sub-inquisitors, Peter Titelmann. The monarch and his minister scarcely needed, therefore, to transplant the peninsular exotic. Why should they do so? Philip, who did not often say a great deal in a few words, once expressed the whole truth of the matter in a single sentence: "Wherefore introduce the Spanish inquisition?" said he; "the inquisition ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... morality. It is rather to elevate Humanity by showing that pure thoughts and gracious words are human, not divine; that the so-called "inspiration" is in all races cultivated to a certain point, and not in one alone; that morality is a fair blossom of earth, not a heaven-transplanted exotic, and grows naturally out of the rich soil of the loving human heart and the ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... work was rather rare, for I have only seen two specimens, and as it required unusual and exhaustive skill in needlework, the production was naturally limited. The practice was one of the exotic efforts of some one of large leisure and lively ambitions who belonged to the ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... all? I shall report your mind at rest. Come, it is time this little exotic should appear." Faith thought as she went with him, that she was anything but an exotic; she did not ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... to the pale, brown hair and beard.—So much for the detail of the young man's appearance. As a whole, that appearance was elegant as only French youth ventures to be elegant. Refinement enveloped Paul Destournelle—refinement, over-sensitised and under-vitalised, as that of a rare exotic forced into precocious blossoming by application of some artificial horticultural process. And all this—elaborately effective and seductive as long as one should happen to think so, elaborately nauseous when one ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... noticing the fondness of the Welsh for the 7-6, 8-7, and 8-7-4 metres. These are favorites since they lend themselves so naturally to the rhythms of their national music—though their newest hymnals by no means exclude exotic lyrics and melodies. Even "O mother dear, Jerusalem," one of the echoes of Bernard of Cluny's great hymn, is cherished in their tongue (O, Frynian Caerselem) among the favorites of song. Old "Truro" by Dr. Burney appears among their tunes, ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... he explained, and I began to eat with a keener appetite than I thought I had. It was a simple meal with a slightly exotic flavor, but without any strange dishes. During the course of it, I asked ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... the display of the choicest fruits of the season: the productions of the forcing-house, and the results of horticultural skill, appear in all their beauty. There are also conservatories, in which every beauty of the flower-garden may be obtained, from the rare exotic to the simplest native flower. The Floral Hall, close to Covent Garden Opera House, has an entrance from the northeast corner of the market, to which it is a sort of appendage, and to the theatre. Balls, ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... all our former grievances were feign'd, King James has been abused, and we trepann'd; Bugbear'd with popery and power despotic, Tyrannic government, and leagues exotic; The revolution's a fanatic plot, William's a tyrant, King James was not; A factious army and a poison'd nation, Unjustly forced ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... as follows:—two large wooden bowls (at least seven inches high and fourteen inches in diameter). One is placed at each end of the table. That at Columbine's end should contain persimmons, pomegranates, grapes and other bright exotic fruits. Pierrot's bowl has confetti and colored paper ribbons, the latter showing plainly over the edge. (If Columbine uses practical macaroons, put ...
— Aria da Capo • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... penal law (ritsu), although its Chinese original has not survived for purposes of comparison, was undoubtedly copied from the work of the Tang legislators, the only modification being in degrees of punishment; but the code, though it, too, was partially exotic in character, evidently underwent sweeping alterations so as to bring it into conformity with Japanese customs and traditions. Each of the revisions recorded above must be assumed to ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... quarter of a mile off in the heart of a little valley. Electric communication was established between this village and the master's house, which, far removed from all noise, seemed buried in a forest of exotic trees. ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... young girl, graceful and blooming, the object, in her turn, of the fickle admiration of the multitude, forgetful already of her who just now charmed them—tell me, Henri! do you not, as do the others, covet that beautiful exotic flower, and must not the poor comedienne weep for ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... of half a mind, lately," he said, more directly to Abner, "to do a large, serious thing based on local actualities; The City's Maw—something like that. My things so far, I know (none better) are slight, flimsy, exotic, factitious. The first-hand study of actuality, thought I——But no, no, no! It was a place fit only for a reporter in search of a—of a—I don't know what. I shall never drink coffee again; while as for ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... was a winning and lovely character of merits both spiritual and spectacular, and he brought to the big house an exotic atmosphere that was spicy with delights. The little boy prayed that this hero might be made again the man he once was; not because of any flaw that he could see in him—but only because the sufferer appeared ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... mind advances with the progress of society like all other sciences. The poetry of the last forty years already shows symptoms of life in exact proportion as it is imbued with this science. There is least of it in the exotic legends of Southey, and the feudal romances of Scott. More of it, though in different ways, in Byron and Campbell. In Shelley there would have been more still, had he not devoted himself to unsound and mystical theories. Most of all in Coleridge and Wordsworth. They ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... woodland, and afforded shelter to grazing flocks and herds. Huge water-willows dipped their drooping branches into the waves of the Ohio as they ran swiftly by. In front of the mansion were several acres of well-kept lawn. In its rear were two acres of flower-garden, planted with native and exotic shrubs. Vine-covered arbors and grottos rose here and there. On one side of the house was the kitchen garden, stocked with choice fruit-trees. Through the forest-trees an opening had been cut, which afforded an attractive view of the ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... whose verses are genuinely American, exotic and rich in color like the land in which written (a rare quality in the Spanish poetry of the period), was Bernardo de Balbuena (1568-1627: born in Spain; educated in Mexico). Balbuena had a strong descriptive faculty, but his work lacked restraint (cf. Grandeza ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... sapphire that he had watched from the same Riviera window, day in and day out, with the same vague but unceasing terror of life and the same forlorn sense of helplessness before currents of destiny that week by week seemed to grow too strong for him. He turned away from the soft, exotic loveliness of the sea and sky before him, with a little gesture of impatience. The movement was strangely like that of a feverish invalid turning from the ache of an ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... unequal towers which seem distinctive of Ansbach; at the St. Gumpertus end of the place where they both stand the dwellings are Gothic too, and might be in Hamburg; but at the St. Johannis end they seem to have felt the exotic spirit of the court, and are of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... eternally on the surface, chasing bits of driftwood. The literature he knows is the fossil literature taught in colleges—worse, in high schools. It must be dead before he is aware of it. And in particular he appears ignorant of what is going forward in other lands. An exotic idea, to penetrate his consciousness, must first become stale, and even then he is apt to purge it of all its remaining validity and significance ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... was a modern and a civilised man. I found the food filthy and the coffee horrible; the whole town stank in my nostrils, the landlord of the Good Intent on the quay had a stand-up quarrel with us before I could get even a hot bath, and the bedroom I slept in was infested by a quantity of exotic but voracious flat parasites called locally "bugs," in the walls, in the woodwork, everywhere. I fought them with insect powder, and found them comatose in the morning. I was dipping down into the dingy underworld of the contemporary state, and I liked it no better than I did ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... situations, wherefrom humanity does not always issue without serious blotches, he yet is free from pessimism. He has no nervous disorder, no "brain fag," he is no pagan, not even a nonbeliever, and has happily preserved his wholesomeness of thought; he is averse to exotic ideas, extravagant depiction, and inflammatory language. His novels and tales contain the essential qualities which attract and retain the reader. Some of his works in chronological order, omitting two or three novels, written when only twenty or twenty-one years ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... that Toru lacked to perfect her as an English poet, and of no other Oriental who has ever lived can the same be said. When the history of the literature of our country comes to be written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile exotic blossom of song. ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... After devoting pages to the Chateau, its grounds, pictures, and statues, and detailing exhaustively the riches of the Trianons, he blandly mentions the gardens of the Petit Trianon as containing "some fine exotic trees, an artificial lake, a Temple of Love, and a hamlet where the Court ladies played ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... try," he said. "It sounds like something that a barbarian, hating the delicate complexities and the restraints of a nobler life, might have said. From you it strikes me as wilful bad taste. . . . I have often wondered at your tastes. You have always liked extreme opinions, exotic costumes, lawless characters, romantic ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... Plaisance established the fact, that the theories—admitted by the study of geography—could not be brought into consideration. How should space and time be in existence when a few steps sufficed to convey us from the land of perpetual snow to the zone of exotic plants ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... purple, and three orange, and so on in slenderer circles to the tiniest diminishing. Mary Makebelieve wished she knew the names of all the flowers, but the only ones she recognized by sight were the geraniums, some species of roses, violets, and forget-me-nots and pansies. The more exotic sorts she did not know, and, while she admired them greatly, she had not the same degree of affection for them as for the ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... Handelian type of opera was the laughingstock of musical critics; they wondered how any audiences could have endured to sit through it, and why the fashionable society of London should have neglected native music for what Dr. Johnson defined as "an exotic and irrational entertainment." The modern reader's impression of an Italian opera of Handel's days is a story about some ancient or mediaeval hero whose very name is often to most people unknown; if he happens to be someone as famous as Julius Caesar, the familiar ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... clear back to the mountains by the winding line of woods that followed its bed. The trees themselves were not like any Kieran had seen before. There seemed to be several varieties, all grotesque in shape and exotic in color. There were even some green ones, with long sharp leaves that ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... citizens with pompous show, Rear the triumphal arch, rich with the exploits Of thy illustrious house; while virgins pave Thy way with flowers, and, as the royal youth Passing they view, admire, and sigh in vain; While crowded theatres, too fondly proud 10 Of their exotic minstrels, and shrill pipes, The price of manhood, hail thee with a song, And airs soft-warbling; my hoarse-sounding horn Invites thee to the Chase, the sport of kings; Image of war, without its guilt. The Muse Aloft on wing shall soar, conduct with care Thy foaming courser ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... saw and felt that nothing was common or accustomed, for the sunlight transfigured the meadows and changed all the form of the earth. Under the violent Provencal sun, the elms and beeches looked exotic trees, and in the early morning, when the mists were thick, the hills had put on ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... it. Something, too, struck us as if we had heard of the death of John May. A John May's death was a few years since in the papers. We think the tale one of the quietest, prettiest things we have seen. You have been temperate in the use of localities, which generally spoil poems laid in exotic regions. You mostly cannot stir out (in such things) for humming-birds and fire-flies. A tree is a Magnolia, &c.—Can I but like the truly Catholic spirit? "Blame as thou mayest the Papist's erring creed"—which and other ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... that reflects the stars. What real significance has the tropical radiance of the lotus flower, the sacred symbol of Buddhism, for the Mongolian lama in the cold and arid borders of Gobi or the wind-swept highlands of sterile Tibet? And yet these exotic ideas live on, even if they no longer bloom in the uncongenial soil. But to explain them in terms of their present environment would be ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... apathy and ennui on the splendid group around him. The glitter of the lights, the lustre of the jewels, and the graceful waving of the many-colored plumes, gave every thing a courtly, sumptuous appearance, and the air was heavy with odors, the fragrant offering of many a costly exotic. Suddenly every eye was turned on the door with, wonder and astonishment, and every voice was hushed as Lady ——— entered, her cheeks blushing from excitement, and her eye bright with anticipated triumph. She led the poor and humbly clad Ellen by the hand, who dared ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... all blown one way by the prevailing gale, grew as if huddled together for protection at the foot of the glen, but they were the exception that proved the rule; nevertheless, under the sheltering walls of the Castle Mrs. Fitzgerald had managed to acclimatize some exotic shrubs, and to cultivate quite a beautiful garden of flowers, for the temperature was uniformly mild, though the winds were boisterous. Brilliant St. Brigid's anemones, the poet's narcissus, tulips, jonquils, and hyacinths bloomed here almost as ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... at some of Harrington's other notions:—"The way propounded [Milton's] is plain, easy, and open before us: without intricacies, without the introducement of new or obsolete forms or terms, or exotic models,—ideas that would effect nothing, but with a number of new injunctions to manacle the native liberty of mankind; turning all virtue into prescription, servitude, and necessity, to the great impairing and ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... pathetically eager look peculiar to her age and caste in France, starving for the life she might not live till marriage should set her free. A pale and ineffective wraith beside Eve, whose beauty, relieved in candleglow against the background of melting darkness, burned like some rare exotic flower set before a screen of lustreless black velvet. And like a flower to the sun she responded to the homage of his admiration —which he was none the less studious to preserve from the sin of obviousness. For he was well aware that her ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... associations. If there was one thing in which Sally had proposed not to invest her legacy, it was a gold-mine; what she had had in view, as a matter of fact, had been one of those little fancy shops which are called Ye Blue Bird or Ye Corner Shoppe, or something like that, where you sell exotic bric-a-brac to the wealthy at extortionate prices. She knew two girls who were doing splendidly in that line. As Fillmore spoke those words, Ye Corner Shoppe suddenly looked ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... time, and even in the late spring and early autumn; but woe betide the enthusiastic amateur in winter, who, being possessed of one of these light greenhouse structures, has indulged in a few costly, exotic plants. They will be frozen, to a certainty! It is economy to pay a fair price in the beginning to secure a properly built greenhouse that will ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... good appetite, and asked the names of the different fruits which were placed upon the table. Fouquet replied that he was not aware of their names. The fruits came from his own stores: he had often cultivated them himself, having an intimate acquaintance with the cultivation of exotic fruits and plants. The king felt and appreciated the delicacy of the reply, but was only the more humiliated at it; he thought that the queen was a little too familiar in her manners, and that Anne of Austria resembled Juno a little too much, in being too proud and haughty; his chief ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... desirable fruit characters are added hardiness, productiveness and vigor of vine, the variety is surpassed by no other green grape. Diamond is a diluted hybrid between Labrusca and Vinifera and the touch of the exotic grape is just sufficient to give the fruit the richness in flavor of the Old World grape and not overcome the refreshing sprightliness of the native fox-grapes. The Vinifera characters are wholly recessive in vine and foliage, the ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... strange character in this setting, like an exotic plant in an old-fashioned garden, and his eccentricities aroused considerable amusement among the settlers, although he became in time a favorite with them, serving as a sort of counter-irritant to the strain of pioneer life. Men who trudged all day through the broiling sun turning furrows in that ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... chimney-sweeper, it may be only appropriate to offer a passing word on the genial subject of soot. Without speculating on its origin and parentage, whether derived from the cooking of a Christmas dinner, or the production of the beautiful colors and odors of exotic plants in a conservatory, it can briefly be shown to possess many qualities both useful and ornamental. When soot is first collected, it is called "rough soot," which, being sifted, is then called "fine soot," and is ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... changes all things, had ordained! Our sons shall see it leisurely decay, First turn plain rash, then vanish quite away. This thing has travelled, speaks each language too, And know what's fit for very state to do; Of whose best phrase and courtly accent joined, He forms one tongue, exotic and refined, Talkers I've learned to bear; Motteux I knew, Henley himself I've heard, and Budgel too. The doctor's wormwood style, the hash of tongues A pedant makes, the storm of Gonson's lungs, The whole artillery of the terms ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... is one of the necessities of their condition,—involving a perennial struggle with difficulties such as the natives of sunnier climes know nothing of. And thus it may be, that though our finest products are exotic, the skill and industry which have been necessary to rear them, have issued in the production of a native growth of men not ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... and deities of Babylonia were adopted by the Assyrians. But in Assyria they were always somewhat of an exotic, and even the learned class invoked Assur rather than the other gods. Assur was the personification of the old capital of the country and of the nation itself, and though the scribes found an etymology ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... these latitudes the moon, the great, glorious, calm tropical moon, is directly overhead—follows the centre line of the zenith—instead of being, as with us in our temperate zone, always more or less declined to the horizon. This, too, lends the night an exotic quality, the more effective in that at first the reason ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... avoid being conspicuous, she had already laid aside the white cap; but her beauty, enhanced by the coils of glossy hair which crowned her queenly little head, was so remarkable, so foreign-looking and striking, that she seemed like some rare exotic which, in all the luxuriance of its loveliness, had been transplanted from the land of palms to our colder soil. There was in her manner an odd mixture of pride and humility, dignity and modesty, which gave her all the reserve of a woman and the winsomeness of a child. Perhaps it was the ...
— Sister Carmen • M. Corvus
... ever met her, for she comes always at late night or early morning. But finding, in the depth of winter or in the bleak spring, the ground about strewed with the choicest of exotic flowers—not carefully arranged, but showered down by a reckless, desperate hand—we know that Flora Dorrillon ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... pose as a "friend of humanity," or a "friend of the working classes." The character, however, is quite exotic in the United States. It is borrowed from England, where some men, otherwise of small account, have assumed it with great success and advantage. Anything which has a charitable sound and a kind-hearted tone generally passes without investigation, ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... California, a consolidation of two rival papers, appeared a brief notice chronicling the death of an unidentified miner, whose assassin, also nameless, had escaped. Ensenada Rose, described as an exotic female of dubious antecedents and still more suspicious motives, had left the Eldorado on the morning after the shooting "for parts unknown." She was believed to hold some "key to the tragic mystery which it was not her purpose ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... me soon and honourably: then perhaps I may assist them to remove their ignominy, which I carry about with me wherever I go, and which is pointed out by my exotic laurel. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... one of the most native and democratic of our birds; He is one of the family, and seems much nearer to us than those rare, exotic visitants, as the orchard starling or rose-breasted grosbeak, with their distant, high-bred ways. Hardy, noisy, frolicsome, neighborly, and domestic in his habits, strong of wing and bold in spirit, he is the pioneer of the thrush family, and well worthy of ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... salvers, were so many as to seem ubiquitous; and in the saloon, presided over by Angela, there was a still choicer refreshment to be obtained at a tea-table, where tiny cups of the new China drink were dispensed to those who cared for exotic novelties. ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... room, amid the ramifications and interstices of so great a department, for a man or two who could help to count up or pack munitions, or, if that proposal were hopelessly wide of the mark, for the services of something even more recondite and exotic—an intelligent corpse-washer, for instance, or half a dozen astrologers. I felt I could distinguish myself, at a national crisis like this, in either capacity. Anyhow, it was only one more afternoon wasted—one ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... member of the League, Marx consented, in 1847, to present to that organization his views, and the result was the famous Communist Manifesto. Every essential idea of modern socialism is contained in that brief declaration. Unfortunately, however, outside of Germany, the Communist League was an exotic organization that could make little use of such a program. Its members were mostly exiles, who, by the very nature of their position, were hopelessly out of things. Little groups, surrounded by a foreign people, exiles ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... Uncle Chris, "taught me poker, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. Also an exotic pastime styled Craps,—or, alternatively, 'rolling the bones'—which in those days was a very present help in time of trouble. At Craps, I fear, my hand in late years had lost much of its cunning. I have had little opportunity of practising. But as a young man I was no mean exponent of the art. ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... regard to the city of Paris, it is to be remarked, that in that metropolis flourish a greater number of native and exotic swindlers than are to be found in any other European nursery. What young Englishman that visits it, but has not determined, in his heart, to have a little share of the gayeties that go on—just for once, just to see what they are like? How many, when the horrible gambling dens were open, did resist ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray |
