"Allusive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "lightenin' bugs," but from the voice and gestures of the singer Mrs. Martin confusedly felt that they were intended for HERS, and even the refrain that "she dressed so neat and looked so sweet" was glaringly allusive to her own modish mourning. Alternately flushing and paling, with a hysteric smile hovering round her small reserved mouth, the unfortunate gentlewoman was fain to turn to the window to keep her countenance until it was concluded. She did not ask him to repeat it, ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... introduce those touches of light, quaint, playful, airy realism into the most solemn poetry. It is what Virgil, Catullus, Theocritus, Milton, Landor, all did. Some persons grow angry with him for a certain tone of half-gay, half-sad, allusive tenderness, when he speaks of Oxford and the country round Oxford. I do not think there is anything unpleasing in this. So did Catullus talk of Sirmio; Horace of his Farm; Milton of "Deva's wizard-stream"; Landor ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... very handsome, and had over the centre a small oblong compartment in white marble, with a representation of the Company receiving their charter. The ceiling was stuccoed, somewhat similarly to the hall, with various subjects allusive to the Drapers' trade and to the heraldic bearings of the Company. Both the (dining) hall and this apartment were rebuilt after the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... wizards," and he vigorously recommends Theocritus as a model far superior to Pope because of the greater exactitude of his references to objects, and because of his more realistic appeal to the imagination. Description, Warton says, should be uncommon, exact, not symbolic and allusive, but referring to objects clearly, by their real names. He very pertinently points out that Pope, in a set piece of extraordinary cleverness—which was to be read, more than half a century later, even by Wordsworth, with pleasure—confines himself to rural beauty in ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... allusive change of epithet that gave Julia a little more courage. 'He was indeed, sir; and if I am very wrong, as I have often thought, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... If he should sleep a year, like dear old Rip, he would know, by the calendar of the flowers, what day of the month he awoke. He knows the story of trees, the arts of insects, the habits of birds and their parts of speech. His wealth of detail is amazing, but never wearying, and he is happily allusive to the nature-lore of the poets, and to the legends and myths of the woodland. He has the insight of Thoreau, the patience of Burroughs, and a nameless quality of his own—a blend of joyous love and wonder. His style is as lucid as sunlight, investing ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... but, as before, it was the latter only that I could ever count on for an intelligible word. For, unfortunately, the villains of the piece plotted without any regard to dramatic fitness or to my interests. Immersed in a subject with which they were all familiar, they were allusive, elliptic, and persistently technical. Many of the words I did catch were unknown to me. The rest were, for the most part, either letters of the alphabet or statistical figures, of depth, distance, and, once or twice, of time. The letters of the alphabet recurred often, and seemed, as far ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... conversation, as usual, but they made up a circle you couldn't find in the Court Guide. Nick had a sense that he knew "a lot of esthetic people," but he dealt in ideas much more than in names and addresses. He was genial and jocose, sunburnt and romantically allusive. It was to be gathered that he had been living for many days in a Saracenic tower where his principal occupation was to watch for the flushing of the west. He had retained all the serenity of his opinions and made light, with a candour of which the only defect was apparently ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Prior Fra Antonino, Fra Angelico painted an "Adoration of the Magi." As Pope Eugene IV. slept in this room when he came to Florence in 1442 to assist at the consecration of the church, it is probable that this Adoration allusive to the Epiphany, at which time the consecration took place, ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... for a time talk ceased to be allusive. But later, over our coffee, while the band was playing loudly some new American march, and Carlotta and Pasquale were laughing ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... of her own early achievements, kept Grandma Plympton so long that by the time she reached the sitting-room the absorbing topic had subsided from its first exclamatory stage and was being treated in a more allusive and general way. Grandma soon gathered from the allusions that Stephen Brown had at last met the lady ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... rearguard, Flandre, Swiss, Hundred Swiss, other Bodyguards, Brigands, whosoever cannot get before. Between and among all which masses, flows without limit Saint-Antoine, and the Menadic Cohort. Menadic especially about the Royal Carriage; tripudiating there, covered with tricolor; singing 'allusive songs;' pointing with one hand to the Royal Carriage, which the illusions hit, and pointing to the Provision-wagons, with the other hand, and these words: "Courage, Friends! We shall not want bread now; we are bringing you the Baker, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... partition of which amongst the tribes lies at the bottom of the allusive metaphor of my text, was given to them under the sanction of a supernatural defence; and the law of their continuance in it was that they should trust and serve the unseen King. It was He, according ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... gave him an excellent opportunity to study her closely. She was taller than most women and lithely powerful. There was nothing delicate about her—nothing spirituelle—on the contrary, she was markedly full-veined, cheerful and humorous, and yet she had responded several times to an allusive phrase with surprising quickness. She did so now as he remarked: "Somebody, I think it was Lowell, has said 'Nature is all very well for a vacation, but a poor substitute for the society of good men and women.' ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... showed outward tenderness to either: which was equally effective. He had learnt, or knew by instinct, that exclusiveness as to men and indifference as to women are the greatest influences on both. As he stood there, slowly interpreting to Ida, by graceful allusive signs, the words of the service, one could not think that behind his impassive face there was any feeling for the man or for the woman. He had that disdainful smile which men acquire who are all their lives aloof from the hopes of the hearthstone ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... revived the vision of Bertha Dorset, smiling, flattered, victorious, holding her up to ridicule by insinuations intelligible to every member of their little group. The thought of the ridicule struck deeper than any other sensation: Lily knew every turn of the allusive jargon which could flay its victims without the shedding of blood. Her cheek burned at the recollection, and she rose and caught up the letters. She no longer meant to destroy them: that intention had been effaced by the quick corrosion of Mrs. ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... Athenaeum, the Nation, and the Daily Chronicle. One can hardly fail to be impressed by the mere industry of a writer of reputed slack habits of work. The published volume of his selected essays is literary criticism, as learned and allusive as Matthew Arnold's, and as nicely poised, with the advantage of being poised in more rarified heights than Arnold's wings could hope to scale. In this book is his classic and most wonderful essay on Shelley, written before his strength began to flag, in which prose ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... mottoes, used by the nobility at tilts and tournaments, hung up there for a memorial.' As to Elizabeth herself, Camden states, that the enumeration of the various devices worn by her would fill a large volume. The generality, however, of the devices of that reign were fulsome flatteries, allusive to the Maiden Queen; such as—the moon, with the words, Quid sine te coelum? (What would Heaven be without thee?) or, Venus seated on a cloud, with, Salva, me Domina! (Save me, O lady!) The best of the time was worn ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... as The Warden (1855); as Jane Eyre (1847) and its too few successors; as Scenes of Clerical Life (1857); as Mary Barton (1848) and the novels which followed it, with others which it is perhaps almost unfair to leave out even in this allusive summary by sample, betokened a stirring of the waters, a rattling among the bones, such as is not common in literature. Death removed Thackeray early and Dickens somewhat less prematurely, but after a period rather barren in direct novel ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... sake of reaping laurels, and the Turks sow them with grain, and plant them with vines, and laugh at both our titles and our songs." When Fontenelle became an Arcadian, they baptized the new Pastor by their graceful diminutive—Fontanella—allusive to the charm, of his style; and further they magnificently presented him with the entire Isle of Delos! The late Joseph Walker, an enthusiast for Italian literature, dedicated his "Memoir on Italian Tragedy" to the Countess Spencer; not inscribing it with his Christian but ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... time that she had told her cook to broach one of the tins of corned-beef which no human wizard could coax into the store-cupboard again, if he shut the door after it. Diva would have been sure to say something acid and allusive, to remark on its excellence being happily not wasted on the poor people in the hospital, or, if she had not said anything at all about it, her silence as she ate a great deal would have had a sharp flavour. But Miss Mapp would have liked, especially when she went to take her ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... poem that represents a single action with some detail; there is another that represents a long and complex story in a summary and allusive way. The first kind may be called episodic in the sense that it takes up about the same quantity of story as might make an act in a play; or perhaps, with a little straining of the term, as much as might serve for one ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... her fire with coal oil on February 23. Her clothes fit the present Mrs. Hankins to a T." The ordinary Englishman will see the point of a jest like this (though his mind will not fly to it with the electric rapidity of the American's), but the more delicate forms of this allusive style of wit will often escape him altogether. Or, if he now begins to "jump" with an almost American agility it is because the cleverest witticisms of the Detroit Free Press are now constantly served ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... a gallery upon the upper panels of which are paintings representing former bishops of the diocese, beginning with Leofric. On the carved mantelpiece is the date, 1629, and the owls which constitute the punning, or allusive, arms of Bishop Oldham. Near the hall a road leads into the Close, passing the church of St. Mary Major, a modern building replacing a beautiful old one which appears to have been needlessly destroyed. On the eastern ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... sense of any exhibition always promptly committed him, and which, had it not been controlled by infinite tact, might have affected the nerves of those in whom enjoyment was less rotary. He was silent long enough to suggest his fearing that almost anything he might say would appear too allusive; then at last once more he took his risk. "Awfully jolly ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... let us simply add, by way of final characterisation, that in the preceding pages we have given but the merest fragment here and there of Aristotle's vast accomplishment. So wide is the range of his ken, so minute his observation, so subtle and complicated and allusive his illustrations, that it is doubtful if any student of his, through all the centuries in which he has influenced the world, ever found life long enough to fairly and fully grasp him. Meanwhile he retains his grasp upon us. ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... upon this subject, however, though with but a slight and allusive sentence or two, in reference to our friend the Green Dragon, and being at this moment pressed for time and room, we shall say no more upon the subject here, but enter at once into the Nag's Head, and lead the reader by the ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... place-name is used with allusive interest, the suggested incident being meant, like certain stories alluded to in the Anglo-Saxon "Beowulf," to set off, by comparison or contrast, the present situation. It is important for the poet to know, for example, that the phrase "flowers ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... relating to &c v.; relative to, in relation with, referable or referrible to^; belonging to &c v.; appurtenant to, in common with. related, connected; implicated, associated, affiliated, allied to; en rapport, in touch with. approximative^, approximating; proportional, proportionate, proportionable; allusive, comparable. in the same category &c 75; like &c 17; relevant &c (apt) 23; applicable, equiparant^. Adv. relatively &c adj.; pertinently &c 23. thereof; as to, as for, as respects, as regards; about; concerning &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... condemnation and the journey to Rome. Under this section are collected also the personal notices yielding their testimony to the genuineness of the letters in a manner not less striking, because incidental and allusive, than the testimony of the geographical section. The reader will linger here over the thought of the consolation and refreshment brought to the good Ignatius on his way to martydom. We learn to love ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... with the most elevated and dignified lessons of morality and virtue. The address of Demetrius to the aged Cali, on the dangers of procrastination[e]; Aspasia's reprobation of Irene's meditated apostasy[f]; and the allusive panegyric on the British constitution[g], may be enumerated, as examples of its excellence in sentiment ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... some men were engaged in conversation on the occurrence. It was allusive only, but knowing the dialect, Pierston and Marcia gathered its import easily. As soon as it had got light that morning one of the boats was discovered missing from the creek below, and when the flight of the lovers was made known it was inferred ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... practice in historical writing is here revealed, though it must be borne in mind that it was originally drawn up for the use of a Japanese student. The book is full of acute perceptions, fine judgments, felicitous epigrams—but it is too allusive, too fantastic; neither has it the balance and justice required for so serious and comprehensive a task. At the same time the learning it displays is extraordinary. It was written almost without books of reference, and out of the recollections of a ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... Tregelles 'as a close and careful quoter in general from the New Testament' [Endnote 49:2]. He may therefore be taken to represent a comparatively high standard of accuracy. In the following table the quotations which are merely allusive are included in brackets:— ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... reflected, to get to his present real sense of God's presence and to his personal subordination to God's purpose. It had been a little absurd, he perceived, to expect these girls to leap at once to a complete understanding of the halting hints, the allusive indications of the thoughts that now possessed his soul. He tried like some maiden speaker to recall exactly what it was he had said and what it was he had forgotten to say.... This was merely a beginning, ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... truer, for instance, than the manner in which the dazed and drunken dignity of Durdles illustrates a certain bitterness at the bottom of the bewilderment of the poor. Nothing could be better than the way in which the haughty and allusive conversation between Miss Twinkleton and the landlady illustrates the maddening preference of some females for skating upon thin social ice. There is an even better example than these of the original humorous insight of Dickens; and one not very often remarked, because of its brevity ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... Tarkington's principal defect.... Now this causes the more regret for the reason that he has what is next best to character in a novelist—that is, knack. He has the knack of romance, when he wants to employ it: a light, allusive manner; a sufficient acquaintance with certain charming historical epochs and the "properties" thereto pertaining...; a considerable experience in the ways of the "world"; gay colors, swift moods, the note of tender elegy. He has also the knack of satire, which he employs more frequently ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... Armenia, who wears a tall upstanding bonnet, mitred at the top exactly like a bishop's, with the exception that it has three incisions at the side instead of a single one. These separate incisions had no doubt a symbolical meaning amongst the native races, although their allusive properties are unknown to us; but it is not an unwarrantable inference, nor inconsistent with the customs of these nations as enduring at this day, to conclude that the numbers of one, two, or three, were appropriated as distinctions ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... Professor Hales is editing aims at being that very difficult and important something between the text-book for schools and the gracefully allusive literary essay. Dr. Garnett has done his part of the work admirably. Most readable is his book, written with a fine sense of proportion, and containing many independent judgements, yet even, so far as minor names and dates and ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... hunger the men had exchanged many allusive remarks regarding the Demon's bad ending, how nearly he had thrown the race away; and the meal being now over, and there being nothing to do but to sit and talk, Mr. Leopold, encouraged by William, entered on an elaborate and technical account of the race. The women listened, ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... wit are perhaps to be found in the works which have appeared since the "Reisebilder." The years, if they have intensified his satirical bitterness, have also given his wit a finer edge and polish. His sarcasms are so subtly prepared and so slily allusive, that they may often escape readers whose sense of wit is not very acute; but for those who delight in the subtle and delicate flavors of style, there can hardly be any wit more irresistible than Heine's. ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... to his mother, who had not an allusive habit of mind, she acquiesced placidly. Port was not good for gouty people. Their poor father suffered severely. Austin listened to her reminiscences and turned the talk to the drive. It had been more like driving through Paradise ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... and from thence I go on to Lord Jersey's. It is impossible not to allude to the degraded state of the Stage, but I have lightened it, and endeavoured to obviate your other objections. There is a new couplet for Sheridan, allusive to his Monody [2]. All the alterations I have marked thus ],—as you will see by comparison with the other copy. I have cudgelled my brains with the greatest willingness, and only wish I had more time ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... metuente solvi must surely be allusive to the dissolving pinions of Icarus—and mean, that deeds of private generosity are apt to melt from the recollection of mankind; while those of what is called heroic exertion go down to Posterity. For this ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... that it may exist in its fullest lustre, as in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, for instance, or in Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, in a composition utterly unadorned, with hardly a single suggestion of visibly beautiful things. Parallel, allusion, the allusive way generally, the flowers in the garden:—he knows the narcotic force of these upon the negligent intelligence to which any diversion, literally, is welcome, any vagrant intruder, because one can go wandering away with it ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... well, delighting Walter. She asked and received his permission to sing "my song," as she called it, and pleased him with it more than ever. He managed to get her into the conservatory, which was large, and there he talked much, and she seemed to listen much. It was but the vague, twilight, allusive talk which, coming readily to all men in love, came the more readily to one always a poet, and not merely a poet by being in love. Every one in love sees a little further into things, but few see clearly, ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... acknowledged that his style lacks the crowning grace of simplicity, but it is precisely by reason of its allusive quality that scholarly readers take pleasure in it. They like a diction that has stuff in it and is woven thick, and where a thing is said in such a way as to ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers |
