"Angularity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which is implied the keen, penetrating, inquiring mind (which in excess becomes curiosity), is marked by angularity of the strokes and finals; a small, generally neat, ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... Peggy? We need clap-bread; and, I reckon, I've time to get through with it to-night." Her voice had a sharp, dry tone in it, and her motions a jerking angularity ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... be tolerably succinct and unvoluminous; but some change in the right direction has been lately made by the introduction of what are called paletots, and other coats of various transitional forms between them and the shooting-jacket proper. In these a good deal of the stiffness and angularity of the regulation frock coat is got rid of, and they admit of adaptation to different statures and sizes. They have much comfort and convenience to recommend them, and it would be a great point gained if they were altogether adopted, and the frock-coat, which still ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... high-shouldered, ungainly child in the corner: his mother tells him to go to his book, and he wants to go to his play. Regard the swollen lips, the skin tightened over the nose, the distortion of his shape, the angularity of his whole appearance. Yet he is not an awkward child by nature. Look at him again the moment after he has given in and kissed his mother. His shoulders have dropped to their place; his limbs are free from the fetters that bound them; his motions are graceful, and the one blends harmoniously with ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... a thin, stiffened, flattened figure—she was accompanied by two other female forms, one old, the other young; not each a different grace, but alike all three in angularity, and in a cold haughtiness of mien. After reconnoitring with their glasses the party of gentlemen, these ladies quickened their step; and Lady Glistonbury, making her countenance as affable as it was in its nature to be, exclaimed, "My dear Lady Mary Vivian! have I the pleasure to see your ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... until the far end of the platform was reached. And there, once more, Honoria paused, her small head carried high, her serious eyes fixed upon the sunset. The rosy light falling upon her failed to disguise the paleness of her face or its slight angularity of line. She was a little worn and travel-stained, a little disheveled even. Yet to her companion she had rarely appeared more charming. She might be tired, she might even be somewhat untidy, but her innate distinction remained—nay, gained, so he judged, by suggestion of rough ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... at us in nervous astonishment, then shook hands with the newcomer, who greeted him bluffly, yet respectfully. Pomfret spoke with a strong Yorkshire accent, and had all the angularity of demeanour which marks the typical Yorkshireman. He came to announce that everything had been settled for the packing and transporting of Mr. Christopherson's library; it remained only to ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... answered the stranger: "not at all, it may be. There is a pleasant dimness and uncertainty in my mode of being. I am taken off my feet, as it were, and float in air, with a faint delight in my sensations. The grossness, the roughness, the too great angularity of the actual, is removed from me. It is a state that I like well. It may be, this is the way that the dead feel when they awake in another state of being, with a dim pleasure, after passing through the brief darkness of death. It ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... differing as it does so much from others of the myomorphic or mouse-like group of rodents. In these the general contour of the molar teeth is roundish oblong, the margins being wavy or indented, according to the convolutions of the enamel, but in the Voles there is a sharp angularity about these indentations; the marginal lines, instead of being in well-rounded curves, are sharply zigzag, forming acute angles. If you were to draw two close parallel zigzag lines it would give you some idea of the contour of these ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... gaping of this garment revealed a breast to be likened only to that of an old peasant woman who cares nothing about her personal ugliness. The fleshless arm was like a stick on which a bit of stuff was hung. Seen at her window, this spinster seemed tall from the length and angularity of her face, which recalled the exaggerated proportions of certain Swiss heads. The character of their countenance—the features being marked by a total want of harmony—was that of hardness in the lines, sharpness in the tones; while an unfeeling spirit, pervading ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... been better known for bravery than taste, for zeal than polish; and since there is always a correspondence between habits of thought and feeling and the external appearance, the physique of the race is more remarkable for rigor of muscle and angularity of outline, than for accuracy of proportion or smoothness of finish. Neither Apollo nor Adonis was in any way related to the family; and if either had been, the probability is that his kindred would have ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... literature were expressions of feminine sentiments; in fact, women played an important role in the history of Japanese belles lettres. Dancing was taught (I am speaking of samurai girls and not of geisha) only to smooth the angularity of their movements. Music was to regale the weary hours of their fathers and husbands; hence it was not for the technique, the art as such, that music was learned; for the ultimate object was purification of ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... shunned him. The Letter, on the contrary, charmed me; he seemed so self-contained, so wrapped up in his own thoughts. Besides, he bore a crest and a monogram and a superscription to be proud of. He was quite reserved; but before we passed Aden his angularity had so far worn off that I learned that he was commissioned to bear a message to a dainty young lady in the southwest of England. What the message was I could only guess. Letters are not nearly so frank about such matters as I have been taught to consider proper. ...
— Harper's Young People, March 2, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... had a living original for his horrid Caliban: for they are mostly selected from amongst fishermen, on account of their excellent knowledge of the coast, and most perfectly retain their amphibious characteristics. The good humoured Dutch looking face is, however, wanting; they have a savage angularity of feature, the effect of their antisocial trade; one feels a sort of creeping horror on approaching a fellow creature, armed at all points, in a lone and solemn place, the haunts of desperate men, and on whose tongue ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... all times and yet never crowded; for when the whirl of carriages is great in the middle regions you may find a hundred untrodden spots and silent corners, tenanted at the worst by a group of those long-skirted young Propagandists who stalk about with solemn angularity, each with a book under his arm, like silhouettes from a medieval missal, and "compose" so extremely well with the still more processional cypresses and with stretches of golden-russet wall overtopped by ultramarine. And yet if the Borghese is good the Medici is strangely ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the language as French is not its only peculiarity. There is in the style, apart from grammar or vocabulary, a rude angularity, a rough dramatism like that of oral narrative; there is a want of proportion in the style of different parts, now over curt, now diffuse and wordy, with at times even a hammering reiteration; ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... I have left to the last, because it is from an artist's point of view the most picturesque part of a Persian woman's anatomy. It may possibly lack fine chiselled features and angularity; and the first impression one receives on looking at a Persian woman's face is that it wants strength and character—all the lines of the face being broad, uninterrupted curves. The nose is broad and rounded, the cheeks round, the chin round, the lips ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... pink against the green hedge, clumps of daffodils rippled with little shudders of delight, even the statues of "Sir Benjamin Bundle" and "General Sir Robinson Cleaver" seemed to unbend a little from their stiff angularity. There were many babies and nurses, and children laughing and crying and shouting, and a sky of mild forget-me-not blue smiled protectingly upon them. Angelina's eyes were fixed upon the fountain, which flashed and sparkled in the air with a happy freedom that seemed to catch all the life ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... themselves in motion, rotating, advancing or retreating, and at the same time attempting to discriminate by the sense of sight between a number of Polygons of high rank moving in different directions, as for example in a ball-room or conversazione—must be of a nature to task the angularity of the most intellectual, and amply justify the rich endowments of the Learned Professors of Geometry, both Static and Kinetic, in the illustrious University of Wentbridge, where the Science and Art of Sight Recognition ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... sergeant on his job, it seemed to him that he had never seen a soldier work before. In figure, in pose, in action there was a perfection about him that awakened at once admiration and envy. Below the average height, yet not insignificant, erect, without exaggeration, precise in movement without angularity, swift in action without haste, he was indeed a ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... descended from austere and Puritanic farmers, and accustomed to wring their subsistence from an unwilling soil, possess the sterling virtues of human nature along with a stiff-jointed awkwardness of manner, and a sharp angularity of thought, which renders them unpleasing even to those who respect them most. A Yankee ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... Olliver passed for a masculine woman, boisterous and good-humoured, though somewhat lacking in the lesser proprieties and affectations which passed for delicacy of feeling. But with all her angularity and mannish ways, she was a fine mother wasted: and in her heart she knew it. There are too many such among us. A mystery of pain and unfulfilled hope which there seems no justifying, save that at times the world is the gainer by their individual loss; and Frank ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... this conversation Flor's dances flagged. They existed, to be sure, but with an angularity that made them seem solutions of problems, rather than expressions of emotion; they were merely mechanical, for she had lost all interest in them. They became at last so listless as to exhibit, to more serious eyes, signs of grace in the girl. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various |
