"Anecdotal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... happened to one hero, but it is highly reasonable to imagine that it really happened to all of them. Such a story, for instance, is that of a great man having his strength swayed or thwarted by the mysterious weakness of a woman. The anecdotal story, the story of William Tell, is as I have said, popular, because it is peculiar. But this kind of story, the story of Samson and Delilah of Arthur and Guinevere, is obviously popular because it is not peculiar. It is popular as good, quiet fiction is popular, because it tells ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... above the steak, lost in the vista of years. These anecdotal attacks worried his wife, who feared for her hot food; but the others ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... and Helene had ensured their seclusion from any one who might drop in by a whispered word to the hall porter as they passed into the house. It seemed to her that she had never found Mr. Sabin more entertaining, had never more appreciated his rare gift of effortless and anecdotal conversation. What a marvelous memory! He knew something of every country from the inside. He had been brought at various times during his long diplomatic career into contact with most of the interesting people in the world. He knew well ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Tragedy of a Comic Song" is essentially one of those productions in which the reader is expected to collaborate. The author has deliberately contrived certain voids of narrative; and his reader is expected to populate these anecdotal wastes. This is asking more than it is fair to ask of a Magazine Enthusiast. No genuine Magazine reader cares for the elusive or allusive style in fiction. "The Tragedy of a Comic Song" won't do for Bouverie Street, however well and completely ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... is capable of communicating the highest pleasure, and yielding the best instruction. Indeed biography, because it is instinct of humanity, is the branch of literature which—whether in the form of fiction, of anecdotal recollection, or of personal narrative—is the one that invariably commends itself to by far the ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... Squire married and in the bride's train came General Grantly with all the patience and enthusiasm and friendly anecdotal powers of your true angler; and in his train came like-minded brother officers to whom, it must be conceded, Hilary Ffolliot was always ready ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... have always tried to injure France. The maximum did great harm to the Revolution. Legally Louis XVI. should never have been condemned; a jury would have acquitted him. Why did Charles X. fall? Napoleon was a great man, and the facts that prove his genius are anecdotal: he took five pinches of snuff a minute out of a pocket lined with leather made in his waistcoat. He looked into all his tradesmen's accounts; he went to Saint-Denis to judge for himself the prices of things. Talma was his friend; Talma taught ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... excellent articles on the behavior and mental life of these animals may be counted on one's fingers; and not more than half of these are experimental studies. I shall, in this brief historical sketch, neglect entirely the anecdotal literature, since my own work is primarily experimental, and since its results should naturally be compared with ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... brilliant scarfs; and slowly moving down the street, stopping occasionally to speak to the various clusters of men, there went the beneficent if somewhat untidy figure of the Catholic father, in whose company we had breakfasted, a fat, jolly, anecdotal inheritor of the mantle of some founder of the Missions. The sun took absolute and merciless possession of the street. You put your hand in your pocket for the smoked glass through which you observed the last eclipse. Everything seemed bleached,—the white buildings, the yellow ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... the compiled "Natural Histories" has been discarded, and the Author has endeavoured to present, in interesting conversational and often anecdotal style, the results of experience by himself and his personal friends; at the same time freely availing himself of all the known authorities ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... scope of the present work to give the varieties of Domestic Cattle; for these the reader is referred to the many excellent works already published on the subject. It will be sufficient in this place to notice a few interesting facts—statistical, anecdotal, &c.—in ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... is that I am absolutely certain How and When to Be Your Own Doctor will be recognized as Truth by some of my readers and rejected as unscientific, unsubstantiated, or anecdotal information by others. I accept this limitation on my ability to teach. If what you read in the following pages seems True for you, great! If it doesn't, there is little or nothing I could do to ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... An Anecdotal Guide to the British Painters and Paintings in the National Gallery. E. V. Lucas. Illustrated. Fcap. 8vo. ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... of a story I heard—' began Reece slowly. Reece's observations were not frequent, but when they came, did so for the most part in anecdotal shape. Somebody was constantly doing something which reminded him of something he had heard somewhere from somebody. The unfortunate part of it was that he exuded these reminiscences at such a leisurely rate of speed that he was rarely known to succeed in finishing any ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... brought to practical affairs a singularly sane and sober temperament. In 'Ratseis Ghost' (1605), an anecdotal biography of Gamaliel Ratsey, a notorious highwayman, who was hanged at Bedford on March 26, 1605, the highwayman is represented as compelling a troop of actors whom he met by chance on the road to perform in his presence. ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... me!" he confessed. Before luncheon was over, he had dragged out the two or three best stories in his wanderer's pack, and especially that one, which he saved for late firesides and the high moments of anecdotal exchange, about the charge at Caloocon. She drank down these tales of hike and jungle and firing-line like a seminary girl listening to her first grownup caller. For his part, youth and the need of male youth to spread its bright feathers ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... from the cabinet, was always delightful. He had more of easy pleasantry in his manner than any favourite of English recollection. Lord Eldon, in his anecdotal book thus tells—"Lord North had gone, at the Prince of Wales's desire, to reconcile the King to him. He succeeded, and called on the Prince to inform him of his success. 'Now,' said he, 'let me beseech your Royal Highness in future to conduct yourself differently. Do ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... pyramids, "the Supreme" had its anecdotal history, in which the Egyptians gave free rein to their imagination. We know that its plan had been rearranged in the course of building, that it contained two sepulchral chambers, two sarcophagi, and two mummies: these modifications, it was said, belonged ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... had played before the crowned heads of Europe, the aching heads of American capital, and even the shaved head of a South Sea prince. There was a layout of anecdotal gifts, from the molar tooth of the South Sea prince set in a South Sea pearl to a blue-enamelled snuff-box encrusted with the rearing-lion coat of arms of a ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... an anecdotal account of the revolutionizing impact of the new technology on his previous methods of research in the field of classics. His account, by extrapolation, served to illustrate in part the arguments made by MICHELSON concerning ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly |
