"Bizarre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... players, and on from the shouting tennis players to the teasing golfers, and back from the teasing golfers to the peaceful writing-room, where in a great, lazy chair by the open window he settled down once more with unwonted morbidness to brood over the grimly bizarre ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... exaltation—irony and grotesquerie, keen insight into "the black thoughts of men," and insistent awareness of the quick passing of all good things, diablerie and mordancy. Strange, then, should be his love passages and strange too, they are at times, ranging from the bizarre delight of "In Kerry" to the triumphing nobility of Deirdre's farewell to Alban. One thinks of Mr. Hardy and one thinks of Donne as ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... coarse black hair joined the scalp. And there was not the least evidence of make-up on the face. Nevertheless, Orme did not feel warranted in giving up the marked bill without a definite explanation. The little man was a comic figure, but his bizarre exterior might conceal a dangerous plot. He might be a ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... central group of eight palaces are the Palace of Machinery and the Palace of Fine Arts (p. 105, 112), serving architecturally to balance the scheme. East of the exhibit palaces is the Joy Zone, a mile-long street solidly built with bizarre places of amusement. Balancing the Zone on the west is the State and Foreign section, with the live-stock exhibits, the polo field, race track and stadium beyond, at the western extremity of the grounds. The state buildings stand along two ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... them after they have become common. Understanding is more valuable when it encompasses the things that tend to separate and distinguish men than when it is limited to the things that unite them. There is nothing so bizarre that art may not express it, provided it ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... decriant ta medicine, Et de ses propres mains mina Les fondemens de sa machine: Tres rarement il opina Sans humeur bizarre ou chagrine, Et, l'esprit qui le domina Etait ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... followed at Papeete Grief caught numerous and bizarre glimpses of Aloysius Pankburn. So did everybody else in the little island capital; for neither the beach nor Lavina's boarding house had been so scandalized in years. In midday, bareheaded, clad ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... him. But the next man was worse—hygienic. While with this creature I read Poe for the first time, and I was singularly fascinated by some of his grotesques. I tried—it was an altogether new development, I believe, in culinary art—the Bizarre. I made some curious arrangements in pork and strawberries, with a sauce containing beer. Quite by accident I mentioned my design to him on the evening of the festival. All the Philistine was aroused in him. 'It will ruin my digestion.' 'My friend,' I said, 'I am not your ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... the fifth century arose the powerful dynasty of the Merovingians, one of the most picturesque royal houses in the roll of history. In their records we see the clash of barbarism with advancement, the bizarre tints of a semi-civilization unequalled in rude magnificence. Giant shadows of forgotten kings stalk across the canvas, their royal purple intermingling with the shaggy fell of the bear and wolf. One, ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... the second room was rude and bizarre, but not without a singular originality and even tastefulness of conception. What had been the counter or "bar" of the saloon, gorgeous in white and gold, now sawn in two and divided, was set up on opposite sides of the room as separate dressing-tables, decorated ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... governments, and with an intense pride in education. In the South, gentlemen of good old English families lived like feudal lords among their slaves and cultivated manners quite as assiduously as morals. Of forms of the Christian religion, the Atlantic coast presented a bizarre mixture. In the main, New England was emphatically Calvinistic and sternly Puritanical; Virginia, proudly Episcopalian (Anglican); and Maryland, partly Roman Catholic. Plain-spoken Quakers in Pennsylvania, Presbyterians and Baptists in New Jersey, and German ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... traditional standard. And this was, in substance, what Darwin did. There are many species in which the male, singly or with others, practises antics or sings during the love-season before the female; and when all such cases, or rather those that are most striking and bizarre, are brought together, and when it is gratuitously asserted that the females do choose the males that show off in the best manner or that sing best, a case for sexual selection seems to be made out. How unfair the argument is, based on these carefully selected ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... High-bowed and pooped, and curved like the crescent moon, it was the strangest craft that he had ever seen. Even as he gazed it glided on nearer and nearer, and at last beached itself noiselessly on the sands before his own feet. A score of figures as bizarre and outlandish as the ship itself now thronged its high forecastle—really a castle in shape and warlike purpose—and leaped from its ports. The common seamen were nearly naked to the waist; the officers looked more like soldiers than sailors. What struck him more strangely was that ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... cast a quick glance toward the tree, then, still on her knees, covered her face and shuddered. For a long time, it seemed, I gazed toward the tree without sight conveying any mental effect whatever. Quite aside from my dazed state, the thing was too bizarre; it gave no foothold to experience for ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... was very soft and white, and the care with which it was arranged indicated a certain harmless vanity in it. There was something a little conscious, too, about her dress—an effect difficult to describe without exaggeration. It was not bizarre nor "artistic," but you would have understood at once that its departures from the prevailing mode were made on principle. If you took it in connection with a certain resolute amiability about her smile, you would be entirely prepared to ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... believe me when I tell you that I am more than sorry I shall not be able to come to you to-day? I was caught in an annoying but superficial motor smash-up last night and the broken windshield has made a bizarre spectacle of me, but I shall be my normal self again in a few days. My sister, Mrs. Beekman, will call to-morrow and I shall present my apologies in person at the earliest possible moment, if ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... be noted that the above responses are partly true and partly false. The error they contain renders them unacceptable. Most of the failures are due to misstatements as to size, shape, or color, but occasionally one meets a bizarre answer. ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... broken, but it never seemed to occur to him to mend it. Like all truly idle people, he had an artistic eye. He chose the print stuff for his wife's dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patchwork quilt, always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated eye, always with bizarre and admirable taste—the taste of an Indian. With all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in word and act. Take his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for any society but that of fools. ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the genetic instincts. Among the older naturalists, such as Pliny and Aristotle, and even in the older historians, whose scope included natural as well as civil and political history, the atypic and bizarre, and especially the aberrations of form or function of the generative organs, caught the eye most quickly. Judging from the records of early writers, when Medicine began to struggle toward self-consciousness, it ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... hysterically, with the mirth which is akin to tears, when the query was explained to him. He looked bizarre enough under ordinary conditions, but laughter converted him into a fair semblance of one of those blood-curdling demons which a Japanese artist loves to depict. Evidently, he depended on make-up to supplement ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... her extraordinary persistence, the fierce firmness of character that was concealed by her quiet and generally impersonal manner. Certainly she had the temperament of a ruler. He remembered—it seemed to him with a bizarre abruptness—the smile on Dumeny's lips in the Divorce Court when the great case had ended ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... face, several tall apartment houses thrusting up their lighted windows into the night, telegraph offices, bars, apothecaries, florists, confectioners, tobacconists, jewelry shops galore, all signed with electricity, and producing that wonderful glitter and glare that is both so bizarre and so enchanting. A street, do we call this? It is a scene, most theatrical and gorgeous, and set for the great human comedy which is even ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... influence of the man makes itself felt. I have seen Huysmans in his office—he is an employe in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a model employe; I have seen him in a cafe, in various houses; but I always see him in memory as I used to see him at the house of the bizarre Madame X. He leans back on the sofa, rolling a cigarette between his thin, expressive fingers, looking at no one and at nothing, while Madame X. moves about with solid vivacity in the midst of her extraordinary menagerie of bric-a-brac. The ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter—hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment—came from the dance floor, ...
— A Bottle of Old Wine • Richard O. Lewis
... garage, Michel, all seriousness, polished the Ford that was to carry away the bridal pair. Recently demobilized, he wore the bizarre combination of military and civilian clothes that all over France symbolized the transition from war to peace—black coat encroaching upon stained blue trousers, khaki puttees, evidence of international intimacy and—most brilliant emblem ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... as I come to the dark conclusion of a story which had seemed to me to be only childish and bizarre, I experience once again the dismay and horror with which I was filled. Would that I had some brighter ending to communicate to my readers, but these are the chronicles of fact, and I must follow to their dark crisis the strange chain of events which for some days ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as a mode of finally settling disputes and serious questions of precedence shades off into the obligatory, unprovoked private fight, as a social obligation due to one's good repute. As a leisure-class usage of this kind we have, particularly, that bizarre survival of bellicose chivalry, the German student duel. In the lower or spurious leisure class of the delinquents there is in all countries a similar, though less formal, social obligation incumbent on the rowdy to assert his manhood in unprovoked combat with his fellows. And spreading ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... the Secret House all the privacy he desired. He might do things which were unheard of, as indeed he did, and Great Bradley, standing aloof, was content to thank God that it was not cast in the same bizarre mould as this wealthy unknown, and took comfort from ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular emotion began stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, there crept unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... that the decadence obvious in the sartorial modes for society women reached its limit last year and that a saner and more decent sense of propriety would evince itself in the revulsion of public taste. But the tendency to bizarre indecency has increased so that now we are offered in our public ballrooms the spectacle of criminal impropriety—of women's bare legs with painted knees, of naked backs and lewdly veiled bosoms, of transparent skirts and suggestive nudity, of decorated flesh and vulgar exposure generally—the ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... or buck tails in their hats, with long heavy chains of nuggets, with glittering and prominently displayed pistols, revolvers, stilettos, knives, and dirks. Some even plaited their beards in three tails, or tied their long hair under their chins; but no matter how bizarre they made themselves, nobody on the streets of blase San Francisco paid the slightest attention to them. The Mission, which they, together with the crowd, frequented, was a primitive Coney Island. Bear pits, cockfights, theatrical attractions, side-shows, innumerable hotels and small ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... conjectures, for on going to the spot the next night, he found beneath the bush a little boy clad in a strange melange of Indian finery, and the bizarre attire worn by Paul Hubel when he set out on his strange adventure. That ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... the stone, whence gas escaped steadily and burned with a blue flicker, hung copper pots fairly well fashioned, though of bizarre shapes. Here the communal cuisine went steadily forward, tended by the strange, white-haired, long-cloaked women; and odors of boiling and of frying, over hot iron plates, rose and mingled with the shifting, swirling ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... recompense for his weakness and his lack of capacity for happiness. He was a master of the exquisite nuances of vision, but since he touched real life at the circumference, and not at the centre, his philosophical valuations are bizarre, and have only a ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... of Mary Shelley's methods of revision. A study of the manuscript shows that she was a careful workman, and that in polishing this bizarre story she strove consistently for greater credibility and realism, more dramatic (if sometimes melodramatic) presentation of events, better motivation, conciseness, and exclusion of purple passages. In the revision and rewriting, many additions were made, so that ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... garden-like deck the amusing, frivolous, elegant society, which was the one he mingled with, but which he towered above from the height of his great intelligence, his conscience, and his convictions. It was a mixed and bizarre society, of different nationalities; an assemblage of exotic personages, such as are met with only in Paris in certain peculiar places where aristocracy touches Bohemianism, and nobles mingle with quasi-adventurers; a kaleidoscopic society, grafting its vices upon Parisian follies, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... famous painter with, "I am rejoiced to make your acquaintance, Sir Edwin Landseer, I am so fond of beasts." An equally ardent sympathy with Frank Buckland's specialty was necessary to his friends while he was alive, and is required by those who read this delightful, bizarre, and admirable history of a man whose fellow-feeling for all creatures endowed with life was as broad and comprehensive as Dame Nature's for all her children. He had, it might seem, no antipathies. Everything excited his interest, curiosity, and tenderness. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... a cigar if you won't have anything else." Val accepted one, and in default of a match Lawrence made him light it from his own. He was entirely at his ease, though the situation struck him as bizarre, but he did not believe that Val was at ease, no, not for all his natural manner and fertility in commonplace. Lawrence was faintly sorry for the poor devil, but only faintly: after all, an awkward interview once in ten years was a low price to pay for that night which Lawrence never had forgotten ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... some bizarre idea in your head about this episode, and I can't fathom it," spoke Dick Marston. "What do you think happened anyway?" he demanded. And stopped, horrified at the ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... island, in a lake"; in the Hebrides it is "in an egg, in the belly of a duck, in the belly of a wether, under a flagstone on the threshold." It is impossible to imagine the human mind independently imagining such bizarre convolutions. They were borrowed from one nation to the other, and till we have reason shown to the contrary, the original lender was a Hindu. I should add that the mere conception of an external soul occurs in the oldest Egyptian tale of "The Two Brothers," but ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... replied, stretching himself luxuriously in the long lounge chair, "the most commonplace life hovers on the edge of the bizarre. But those of us who overstep the border become preposterous in the eyes of those who have never done so. This is not because the unusual is necessarily the untrue, but because writers of fiction have claimed the unusual as their particular province, and in ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... but a languid reception unless roused by something either horrible or sensational, but her bizarre appearance had the effect which the Manager ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... lifted the structure, a thing of glistening cones and spinning golden disks; fantastic yet disquietingly symmetrical; bizarre as an angled headdress worn by a mountainous Javanese god—yet coldly, painfully mathematical. In every direction the cones pointed, seemingly interwoven of strands of ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... a fearful din. That decided her. Coke, if he were not killed, would surely be driven out. She sprang to her feet, and literally ran down the steep ladder to the saloon deck. Through the open door of the officers' mess she witnessed another bizarre act—an act quite as extraordinary in its way as Coke's jump over the steersman's body. In the midst of this drama of death and destruction, Watts was standing there, with head thrown back and uplifted arm, gulping down a tumblerful of some ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... place over there, Miss Heron; rather bizarre and conspicuous, but striking and rather artistic. ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... of the Marchioness of Montebello; and Marcello Capecce, a young man of exceptional beauty. Diana was a woman of thirty years, hot-tempered, tawny-haired, devotedly in love with Domiziano Fornari, a squire of the Marchese di Montebello's household. Marcello had conceived one of those bizarre passions for the Duchess, in which an almost religious adoration was mingled with audacity, persistence, and aptitude for any crime. The character of his mistress gave him but little hope. Though profoundly wounded by her husband's infidelities, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Entertainment" I set myself the task of reconstructing, in the fullest possible detail and with all the colour available from surviving records, a group of more or less famous events. I would select for my purpose those which were in themselves bizarre and resulting from the interplay of human passions, and whilst relating each of these events in the form of a story, I would compel that story scrupulously to follow the actual, recorded facts without owing anything to fiction, ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... soon after. Johnny Dromore! Bizarre guardian for that child! Queer life she must have of it, in that bachelor's den, surrounded by Ruff's Guides! What would become of her? Caught up by some young spark about town; married to him, no doubt—her father would see to the thoroughness ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... handkerchief showed clearly about the man's neck. Then a slight limp in the left leg intruded itself, and a droop of the shoulders that spoke weariness. He was very near by this time, so near that the black beard which covered his face became discernible, likewise the bizarre breadth of the Mexican belt above the baggy chaperejos. The crunch of the snow-crust marked his ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... strange man before, you see'; and he no more laughed at her than he had laughed at Mother's 'nunculus.' Even Jane Anne, he knew, would settle down comfortably before long into the great big pattern where a particular nook awaited—aye, needed—her bizarre, odd brilliance. The most angular fragments would nest softly, neatly in. A little filing, a little polishing, and all would fit together. To force would only be to break. Hurry was of the devil. And later, while Daddy played an ancient tune that was written originally as a mazurka yet did duty now ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... of seizing on any bizarre incident reported in the morning papers, enfolding it in "funny language," adding a pun, and thus making it his own. He had a cunning mastery of periphrasis, and a ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... self-sufficient summer colony, and that all these subdued and inarticulate masqueraders were personages daily exploited by the press as the brightest stars in the social firmament, the incongruity of this dumb gathering seemed as glaring, as bizarre as ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the same sort as that described, though varying in size and varying also in their lines athwart the house. Those of the ground floor are all uniform in size and position. But those above are irregular both in size and place, and this irregularity gives a bizarre and not unpicturesque appearance to the building. Along the top, on every side, runs a low parapet, which nearly hides the roof, and at the corners are more figures ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... an 8vo volume in 1791, at Strasbourg and Paris, entitled 'Le veritable homme, dit au MASQUE DE FER, ouvrage dans lequel on fait connaitre, sur preuves incontestables, a qui le celebre infortune dut le jour, quand et ou il naquit'. The wording of the title will give an idea of the bizarre and barbarous jargon in which the whole book is written. It would be difficult to imagine the vanity and self-satisfaction which inspire this new reader of riddles. If he had found the philosopher's ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of the market place was of unusual interest. They saw its humor and its crowding, its bizarre effects and unwonted pageantry. Black giants and pigmies were there; kerchiefed aunties, giggling black girls, saffron beauties, and loafing white men. There were mules and horses and oxen, wagons and buggies and carts; but above all and in all, rushing through, piled and flying, bound and ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... of Paul, on the west side, was the Black Tom Cafe. Every attempt had been made to make the place bizarre. About the walls were palings that represented a back fence, along which crawled painted black cats in every conceivable state—a rather ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... much-discussed actress, whose wickedness had set the town agog, and her first impression was vaguely disappointing. Miss Demorest's beauty was by no means remarkable, although it was accentuated by the most bizarre creation of the French shops. She was animated, audacious, Gallic in accent and postures—she was vividly alive with a magnetism that meant much more than beauty; but she over-exerted her voice, and her song was nothing to excite applause. At last she was off, in a whirl of ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... a people, we seek to be entertained, but fail to make a nice distinction between entertainment and amusement. War, it is true, has caused us to think more soberly and feel more deeply; but the bizarre, the gaudy, and the superficial still make a strong appeal to us. We are quite happy to wear paste diamonds, provided only that they sparkle. So long have we been substituting the fictitious for the genuine that we have contracted the habit of loose, fictitious thinking. ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... her wine and sipped it, but her mouth again relaxed to scornful contempt as she saw him toss off the fiery liquor. She was somewhat astonished at the effect her words had had on the man, but she gathered that he was now considering her bizarre proposal with real interest. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... company. For Lydia was tired, and left alone with Miss Amabel, she settled to an hour's laziness. She knew Miss Amabel liked having her there, liked her perhaps better than Anne, who was of the beautiful old Addington type and not so piquing. Lydia had, across her good breeding, a bizarre other strain, not bohemian, not gipsy, but of a creature who is and always will be, even beyond youth, new to life. There were few conventions for Lydia. She did not instinctively follow beaten paths. If the way looked feasible and pleasant, ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different, as might have been expected from the duke's love of the bizarre. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... strange sound to me: I cannot understand the little spontaneous tongues, the quivering throats, the open beaks, the small bright eyes that gleam with unknown emotion, the nimble capricious heads that twist this way and that with such bizarre unreasonableness. ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... eight-pounder at the bow port; Captain Bunker and the second mate ranged themselves at the companionway, and the passengers for the first time became aware that they were participating at the reception of visitors of distinction, as two strange and bizarre ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... erratic and bizarre, was not justly entitled to rank among great statesmen. But the characteristics of Congress, as a body, can be brought into better relief in the narrative of his life than in that of any other person of his day. These characteristics ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... have no use for it. To me everything must have a direct human purpose, a definite human application. When the cup of human life is so overflowing with woe and pain and misery, it seems to me a narrow dilettanteism or downright charlatanism to devote one's self to petty or bizarre problems which can have no relation to human happiness, and to prate of self-satisfaction and self-expression. One can have all the self-expression one wants while doing ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... of her discovery, dazzled by the surprising brilliance of the Princess's capture, stupefied by the fear of saying or doing the wrong thing and ruining her idol's bizarre triumph, poor Miss Portman staggered as Virginia ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... the spirit's core. An idea came, at which he laughed. He bade it go, but it would not. It stayed, and his fevered fancy played around it as a moth around a candle. At first he knew it for a notion, bizarre and absurd, which presently he would dismiss. All day strange thoughts had come and gone, appearing, disappearing, like will-o'-the-wisps for which a man upon a firm road has no care. Never fear that he will follow them! He sees the marsh, that ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... distance of only six miles. The mountain crests were sharply outlined against the clear sky. Well wooded at the base, they grew more bare and showed only stunted evergreens toward the summit. There the scraggly trees, grotesquely twisted, gave to the rocky heights a bleak and bizarre appearance. Here and there the ridge rose in sharp peaks. On our right the Black Dome, nearly seven thousand feet high, reared its gigantic head, sparkling at times ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne
... treats it with a freedom and variety and a certain disregard of precedent—induced, perhaps, by his schooling in Blackletter—that often produces delightful, though sometimes, be it added, direful results. But if the extreme and bizarre forms be thrown aside the designer may obtain suggestions of great benefit and value from the more restrained examples of German work. Many eminent German draughtsmen, whose work is all too little known in this country, are [84] using letters with the same ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... nettete de son cou, par l'ornement de ses pennes et par la majeste de tout le reste de son corps, il ravit tous ceux qui le contemplent attentivement; toutefois au rencontre de sa femelle, pour l'attirer a son amour, il deploye sa pompe, fait montrer et parade de son plumage bizarre, et RIOLLE PIOLLE se presente a elle avec piafe, et luy donne la plus belle visee de sa roue. De mesme ce Dieu admirable, amoreux des hommes, pour nous ravir d'amour a soy, desploye le lustre de ses plus accomplies beautez, et comme un amant ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... imaginative works shows that this explanation is untrue. That the bizarre and apparently novel products arise from the experiences of the author, revived in imagination and combined in new ways. The horrendous incidents depicted in Dante's "Divine Comedy" never occurred within the lifetime experience of the author as such. Their separate ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... Cromwell; he had lived, had worked for the future—and now he had ceased to exist. His future—our past, had come to an end. The barge with the man still straining at the oar had gone out of sight under the arch of the bridge, as through a gate into another world. A bizarre sense of solitude stole upon me, and I turned my back upon the river as empty as my day. Hansoms, broughams, streamed with a continuous muffled roll of wheels and a beat of hoofs. A big dray put in a note of thunder ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... from a lecture, and being unusually pressed for time, I took a shorter cut homeward than was my wont, and at the corner of a narrow and ill-smelling street I came upon a little heterogeneous shop, in the windows of which were set out a variety of faded and bizarre articles of millinery. Hanging from a front shelf in a conspicuous position among the collection was a strip of the identical silver ribbon which had encircled Pepin's throat—I called the dog Pepin—on the night I rescued him from the streets. Without hesitation ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... your authority for that?" Phil turned a large, bizarre ring round on his slender left little finger and the whole room ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... curious excursions that even a Magic Land can offer is that to the Campo Santo of Genoa. A cloistered promenade encloses a square, and above are terraced colonnades, each and all revealing statues, and monuments, and groups of sculpture whose varied beauty, oddity, or bizarre effects are a curious study. Some memorials—as one of an angel with outstretched wings; another of a flight of angels bearing the soul away; another combining the figure of Christ with the cross, and angels hovering ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... assignment of the melody to just the right instrument, and the color-effect thereby produced, are integral parts of the conception. Notwithstanding the fact that some of his effects are extravagant or at times bizarre, he must be credited with revealing possibilities in orchestral shading and color which, still further developed by Wagner, Strauss and Tchaikowsky, have become conventional means of expression. ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... Esther, Prudence; Ruth, Meekness; Patience could only be Penelope. The effect of the shining stone and painted arches is of extraordinary brilliance and completeness—the completeness of an unrivalled collection. But there is somewhere something bizarre; perhaps it is the setting. Marble demands marble neighbours, and the setting of these exotic treasures is the simple beauty of English parkland. The little church fits better with the great trees and the green ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... unequalled, an eye always eloquent with admiration, a step from which grace could never be divorced, a voice that spoke in a silver key, and uttered flatteries delicate in thought and poetical in word; even a certain originality of mind, remark, and character, occasionally approaching to the bizarre, yet sometimes also to the elevated, possessed a charm for the imagination of a young and not unenthusiastic female, and contrasted favourably, rather than the reverse, with the dull insipidity of those she ordinarily saw. Nor are we ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... great poet are the prism of the universe; all its wonders are there reflected, divided, and recomposed; sounds imitate colours, and colours are blended in harmony; rhyme, sonorous or bizarre, rapid or prolonged, is inspired by this poetical divination; supreme beauty of art! triumph of genius! which discovers in nature every secret in affinity with the ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... From one to another we were hurried, passing through jungles such as we of the North never dream exist. In that humid climate vegetation is prodigal beyond belief, gorgeous with spattered greens and yellows and crimsons bizarre enough to take ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... his turn, perceived that the tall man, ungainly as he was, affected a bizarre individualism in the matter of dress. His clothing cried out, rather than suggested, that it was expensive. His feet were cased in button shoes with fancy tops; his waistcoat, cut in the extreme of style, revealed that ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... city, and the shape of its buildings, were the most bizarre features of all. Only a few of the edifices bore resemblance to any which the travelers had ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... with an air of finality which effectually closed the discussion. By this time she was not herself an especially effective monument of cleanliness. The rice pudding and the mud pies had combined to produce a somewhat bizarre effect, and the dirt she had casually gathered from the paths, the flower-beds, and the hedges enlivened but did ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... his personal success outweighed even that, and the market on his books was exhausted. We cannot follow him on this trip of mingled arduous labor and personal satisfaction. The humorous reactions of his homely vision upon the quaint, the bizarre, the pretentious, aspects of life in remote parts of the world may be read in his own record of this journey, Following the Equator. There are few things to record of this great effort to ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... gold, with fine horses, with an eery, swooping, steadiness of direction, journeyed fast. He and his traveling companion reached Rome early in February. There was a villa, there were attendants, there was the Frenchman's especial circle, set with bizarre jewels, princes of the Church, Italian nobles of his acquaintance, exiles, a charlatan of immense note, certain ladies. He only asked of his guest, Monsieur Rullock, that he help him to entertain the whole chaplet, giving to his residence in ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... transmuted by the Italian genius into something fanciful and quaint, survived as a frail work of art. The men-at-arms of the Condottieri still glittered in gilded hauberks. Their helmets waved with plumes and bizarre crests. Their surcoats blazed with heraldries; their velvet caps with medals bearing legendary emblems. The pomp and circumstance of feudal war had not yet yielded to the cannon of the Gascon or the Switzer's pike. The fatal age of foreign invasions had not begun ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... in the autumn rolling to the west,—La Verendrye and his voyageurs came to the forks of Red River and the Assiniboine, or what is now known as the city of Winnipeg. Where the two rivers met on the flats to the west were the high scaffoldings of an ancient Cree graveyard, bizarre and eerie and ghostlike between the voyageurs and the setting sun. On the high river bank of what is now known as Assiniboine Avenue gleamed the white skin of ten Cree tepees, where two war chiefs waited to ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... element. At the same time the sculptor, while discarding Gothic tradition, has not betaken himself yet to a servile imitation of the antique. He has used invention, and substituted for grinning dragons' heads something wild and bizarre of his own in ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the second century had one common link and badge; they all proposed a "way," often bizarre and strange-sounding to modern ears, by which the soul, astray, lost, encumbered, or imprisoned in matter, might attain its freedom and become spiritual. Most of the Gnostic teachers, who in their flourishing time were ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... more normal women seems very simple and probably too simple. In fact, it does not explain the hysteria, it merely gives a USE for its symptoms, and the writer is driven back to the statement that the neuropathic person is characterized by his or her bizarre and prolonged emotional reactions, which, in turn, brings us back to a defect ab origine. And the Freudians, starting out to prove that the experiences of the individual ALONE cause hysteria, by pushing back the TIME of those experiences to INFANCY (and lately to foetal life), have proved ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the car, and driving between two gigantic hotels, ran down to a beach with sands of gleaming gold, and a background of wind-blown dunes billowing away as far as the eye could reach. The very wildness of this background gave a bizarre sort of charm to the fantastic buildings which made up ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... certain that even the clever people who write them have moods and impulses far more vivid and thrilling, far more abnormal and bizarre, than they have the audacity to put into their work. A sort of perverted Puritanism restrains them. They have the diseased conscience of modern art, and they think that nothing can be true which is not draggle-tailed and nothing can be real which is not petty and unstimulating. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... the Blaneys in the city was much like the one Patty had seen at Lakewood, only a little more elaborately bizarre. The Moorish lamps were bigger and dustier: the thick brocade draperies a little more faded and tattered; the furniture a ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... gold, athwart which the afternoon sunlight lingered tenderly, picking out here the limpid blue of a bit of old Chinese "blue-and-white," there the warm gleam of polished copper, or here again the bizarre, gem-encrusted image of an Eastern god. All that was rare and beautiful had gone to the making of the room, and rarer and more beautiful than all, in the eyes of the man whose memory now recalled it, had been the woman to whom it had belonged, whose loveliness had ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... oddly. The swirling eddy became a small dense cloud of darker green light. Then abruptly, like the fade-in on a moving picture screen, from the cloud over the plate the misty outlines of an object swiftly cleared and solidified into a bizarre something at whose unfamiliar aspect both Marlowe and ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... advantageous location than the Swedish building. Situated on a narrow tongue of triangular shape, the architect has taken the fullest advantage of this original piece of ground. The building gives a very good idea of some of the very best tendencies in the modern art of Europe, without being bizarre, like some recent American attempts, in the most wrongly labeled of all art expressions ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... or bizarre stationery. A good quality of white or cream paper, in several sizes, is ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... unconsciously, while awake. Or they may be fragments of broken memories which have been picked up here and there and mingled by chance, composing an incoherent and unrecognizable whole. Before these bizarre assemblages of images which present no plausible significance, our intelligence (which is far from surrendering the reasoning faculty during sleep, as has been asserted) seeks an explanation, tries to fill the lacunae. It fills them by calling up other ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... man as "Pilgrim's Progress." Elsewhere, as in the fictional essay on the "The Cow" and in the delightful lies that Brann in rollicking mischief attributed to his fellow Texas journalists, we find the humorous tale enriched with the bizarre and scintillating figure. Nor was Brann unconscious of his fictional gift, for he was working on a novel at the time of his death. That O. Henry's ambition to write may be accredited to the influence of Brann seems more than probable. Brann's first attempt to start The Iconoclast ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... ware, and the carriages of Brewster are generally admired. Carriages are, however, such a matter of fashion that an exhibit of that kind cannot suit all nations, and what one considers graceful is to another strange and bizarre. There is no question of the fine quality, however: of course a nation with elm for hubs and ash for spokes wonders at American temerity in making wheels so light, and the casual observer thinks our roads must be better than the European ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... coast, and only where a river poured out from one of these ravines did there appear to be any gap through the long lines of reefs where the surf boomed like thunder. The coast seemed to trend from northwest to southeast, and might have been from thirty to fifty miles long, with strange bizarre arches of rock overhanging endless fields of kelp and seaweed. The land was absolutely treeless except for willow brushwood the size of one's finger. Lichens, moss, sphagnum, coated the rocks. Inland appeared nothing but billowing reaches of sedges ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... to himself: This Siddhartha is a bizarre person, he expresses bizarre thoughts, his teachings sound foolish. So differently sound the exalted one's pure teachings, clearer, purer, more comprehensible, nothing strange, foolish, or silly is contained in them. ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... Highlanders. The sensitiveness to the picturesque, the liking for local color and for whatever is striking, characteristic, and peculiarly national in foreign ways is a romantic note. The eighteenth century disliked "strangeness added to beauty"; it disapproved of anything original, exotic, tropical, bizarre for the same reason that it disapproved ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... regulation of industry and commerce, the flood of missionary zeal which poured in upon it, the heroism and courage of its priests and voyageurs, the venality of its administrative officials, the anachronism of a feudal land-tenure, the bizarre externals of its social life, the versatility of its people—all these reflected the paternity ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... there is something magical, like going to the moon; and I say the thing should be kept exceptional and felt as something breathless and bizarre. My ideal hero would own his horse, but would have the moral courage to hire his motor. Fairy tales are the only sound guidebooks to life; I like the Fairy Prince to ride on a white pony out of his father's ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... moment the only thing that surprised him was the fact that he was not more surprised. There was something about this girl that made the most bizarre happenings seem right and natural. Ever since he had met her his life had changed from an orderly succession of uninteresting days to a strange carnival of the unexpected, and use was accustoming him to it. Life had taken on the quality of a dream, in which anything might happen ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... mounted his horse and ridden away—far off, no matter where. Goldite, bizarre and tragic—a microcosm of the world that man has fashioned—was a blot of discordant life, he felt, upon an otherwise peaceful world. As a matter of fact it had only begun its ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... novel and imposing character. But how shall I convey to you an idea of what I experienced, as, turning to the left, and leaving the broader streets which flank the quay, I began to enter the penetralia of this truly antiquated town? What narrow streets, what overhanging houses, what bizarre, capricious ornaments! What a mixture of modern with ancient art! What fragments, or rather ruins, of old delicately-built Gothic churches! What signs of former and of modern devastation! What fountains, gutters, groups of never-ceasing men, women, and children, all ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... forty-six years of age, a mathematician of European fame, and the holder of an honourable post at an ancient university, which he might have exchanged for other employment quite as dignified and far more lucrative. In dealing with a character as bizarre as his, it would be as a rule unprofitable to search deeply for motives of action, but in this instance it is no difficult matter to detect upon the surface several causes which may have swayed him in this decision to remain at Pavia. However firmly he may have set himself to win fame as a physician, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... tenders flocked in a flotilla near the stern of a rusty old schooner. All the tenders were burning Coston lights, and from several boats yachtsmen were sending off rockets which striped the pall of fog with bizarre colorings. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... a matter of fact, after this day no more notes are found in Rouletabille's memorandum-book. The last one is that above, bizarre and romantic, and necessary, as Sainclair, the Paris advocate and friend of Rouletabille, indicates opposite it in the papers from which we have taken all ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... this bizarre situation which had been thrust upon me, I ushered Katie into the living room and removed her hat ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... bearing a curious resemblance to a gigantic hand, the long lean fingers of which were stretched threateningly out as if to grasp the land and drag it back into the lurid sea of blood; altogether a cruel, weird-looking scene, fantastic, unreal, and bizarre as one of Dore's marvellous conceptions. Suddenly on the red waters there appeared a black speck, rising and falling with the restless waves, and ever drawing nearer and nearer to the gloomy cliffs and sandy beach. When within a quarter of a mile of the shore, the speck resolved ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... moyen age. Il se perpetua sous les rois de France, et l'emploi d'amuseur officiel devint une veritable charge a la cour des Valois. Les bouffons etaient, en general, des nains contrefaits que l'on affublait d'une livree bizarre et que les rois ou les princes entretenaient aupres d'eux pour ...
— French Conversation and Composition • Harry Vincent Wann
... JENNINGS' plot matters. She freely accepts the absurdities which her bizarre outline demands, but doesn't shirk the pains to make her situations possible within the pleasantly impossible frame. What is all-important is that she does shake the house with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... decoration, not of psychology. One might compare it to firelight in a dark room, throwing fantastic shapes on the walls. He loved the fantastic, and he was held by the darkness. Both in speech and in character, it was the bizarre and even the freakish that attracted him. In Riders to the Sea he wrote as one who had been touched by the simple tragedy of human life. But, as he went on writing and working, he came to look on life more and more as ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... to the most picturesque incident of the "incident." Most envied of all observers of the tournament was an aviator who looked down on a show bizarre even in the annals of aviation. The German planes had been driven to cover, which gave the Briton a fair field. A knightly admiration, perhaps a sense of fellowship not to say sympathy with the old arm of scouting from the new, possessed ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... said Holmes, relapsing into his arm-chair, and putting his finger-tips together, as was his custom when in judicial moods. "I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life. You have shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle, and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many of my ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... pistol by a jump. I bluffed for a raise of five dollars, on the strength of this outfit, and got it off the bat. There's the suit paid for in two months and a pair of shoes over." He thrust out a leg, from below the sharp-pressed trouser-line of which protruded a boot trimmed in a sort of bizarre fretwork. "Like me to take you around ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Berlin wit was a large part of his endowment. His cool irony associated him more closely to the Schlegels than to Novalis, with his life-and-death consecrations. His absurd play-within-a-play, Puss in Boots (1797), is delicious in its bizarre ragout of satirical extravaganzas, where the naive and the ironic lie side by side, and where the pompous seriousness of certain complacent standards ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... her parents—urged a dissolute and anaemic aristocrat—blue blood and a gold lining. Her grandfather, a strong unsilent sheep-rancher, was against this inept decadent and converted to his view that saintly worldling, the gorgeous Cardinal Camperioni. A neo-futurist of the most bizarre type prances through the pages upon his head, causing enough "tumult" to satisfy any one. So why drag in Pan? Miss VALLINGS can tell a story, cannot keep down the volume of her puppets' talk, has a sense of movement and colour, and ought to win ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... Marsh, to long for the glow of some romance to warm the fogs that filled his landscape. In spite of his father's jeers, he was no monk, and generally had some sentimental adventure keeping his soul alive—but he was fastidious and rather bizarre in his likings, and since he had come to North Farthing, no one, either in his own class or out of it, had appealed to him, except ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... plan too madcap for Peachy to undertake. She revelled in anything venturesome or bizarre. The Camellia Buds did as she decreed, and resigned the courts that afternoon to Bertha, Mabel, Elsie, Ruth, Rosamonde, Winnie, Monica, and Callie, who fell readily into the trap prepared for them. Leaving this double set busy at tennis they fled to the opposite ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... the tiny combined in one single strange impression. For, through this conception of great movement, stirred also a roving, delicate touch that his imagination felt as bird-like. Behind the solid mass of the Desert's immobility flashed something swift and light and airy. Bizarre pictures interpreted it to him, like rapid snap-shots of a huge flying panorama: he thought of darting dragon-flies seen at Helouan, of children's little dancing feet, of twinkling butterflies—of birds. Chiefly, yes, of a flock of birds in flight, whose separate units formed a single entity. ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... feelings on either side, let it be mentioned—to join the literary staff of the Aurora Borealis, an organ of quite a different complexion, and of considerable notoriety in the empire city, as it was famed for its bizarre sensations and ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... crystalline glass drops—a cool white pavement invited the gay minuet. Beyond, a huge banquet table groaned with delicacies and wines the cost of which would have gone far to rationing the thirty thousand hungry of the nearby City. Indeed, enough was wasted to have fed many. With bizarre and often gross entertainment Marquis de Praille amused his guests who themselves presented a wanton and amorous scene that seemed itself a part ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... notice; its many peculiarities repugnant to our waking thought; the incongruence between its images and the feelings they engender; then the dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it—all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory. Before all there is the question as to the meaning of the dream, a ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... back presently, wonderfully lovely in the bizarre Oriental costume, and I wanted her to stand on tiptoe, ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... think, revered swami, that I could ever fight tigers?" This was the first, and the last, time that the bizarre ambition ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... Watson, here was a case of exceptional interest. In all the annals of criminal investigation I know of none that presented possibilities more bizarre, none that called more urgently for the subtlest qualities of the private detective. I rushed out of the building, letting doors slam behind me. Quickly I reached the railings, raised myself to the top, and glanced down ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... chapel close to each other, appeared to perform the duty of sweeping it, like menials; but as they used only one hand, the floor was not much benefited by the exercise, which they plied with such oddity of gestures and manner as befitted their bizarre and fantastic appearance. When they approached near to the knight in the course of their occupation, they ceased to use their brooms; and placing themselves side by side, directly opposite to Sir Kenneth, they again slowly shifted ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... "Exquisite! But she is not of your land. Italian, Spanish, or some bizarre mingling of strange races, but ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... hand-beaten metal, drilled stone and looped leather. The only recognizable item was a thin knife of unusual design. Loops of piping, flared bells, carved stones tied in senseless patterns of thonging gave the rest of the collection a bizarre appearance. Perhaps they had some religious significance. But the well-worn and handled look of most of them gave Brion an uneasy sensation. If they were used—what in the universe could ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... blurred and indeterminate that it had to be subdivided many times, and became only a quality. Amory's secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents—also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was quite irreconcilable to the ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... get on the front page a story must be rather unusual. A perusal of our daily rags will convince the most skeptical that the sensational, the unusual, the bizarre are what appeal most to the men who make the newspapers. The unusual thing about our deal lies in the fact that this is the first time in the history of Australia or the United States that the former country has exported wheat into the latter—the ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... of his foe has turned to ten swords in his hand. But this is not really because the man is playing with ten swords, it is because he is aiming very straight with one. Moreover, a man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope. Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity, because they are hurried into ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the girl's face at that moment so vital, so bizarre and arresting, that so long as Rupert Guest lived, it remained with him as one of the most striking pictures in his mental picture- gallery. He had but to pass a high green hedge in the June sunshine, to catch the fragrance of the honeysuckle ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Corinthian columns that lift its domes aloof on their prodigious bulk, huge as that of the grouped pillars in the York Minster. The white of the marble walls, the gold of altars, the colors of painted wooden sculpture form the tones of the place, subdued to one bizarre richness which I may as well leave first as last to the reader's fancy; though, let his fancy riot as it will, it never can picture that gorgeousness. Mass was saying at a side altar as we entered, and the music of stringed instruments and ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... it with us. He had a penchant for interesting situations, and in France today anything may happen. In a few scant months dukes have turned into pastry cooks, and barbers' boys into generals. Tomorrow it may be a republic, or a monarchy that governs, or some bizarre contrivance that is neither one nor the other. Just now it is Napoleon Bonaparte, a very determined little man. Ah, you have heard of him, my son? I sometimes wonder if he will not go further than many of ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... States-General vied with each other in generosity to the great champion of protestantism, who was combating the holy league so valiantly, and rarely has a great historical figure presented itself to the world so bizarre of aspect, and under such shifting perplexity of light and shade, as did the Bearnese in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... They were a bizarre mass of color on the sweet spring landscape, those patchwork quilts, swaying in a long line under the elms and maples. The old orchard made a blossoming background for them, and farther off on the horizon rose the beauty of fresh verdure and purple mist ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... attend the obsequies of a total stranger. At the end, without a word of explanation, still less of apology, he had been returned as an empty rejected package to the platform at Liverpool Street. Yes, I should dearly love to have met and cross-questioned that policeman, and have listened to the bizarre solution which he had to offer to it all. But most probably, in his stolid, faithful way, he never gave the subject any thought at all. To be tossed about at the whims of superiors was an experience which he would take as composedly as he would those exiguous weekly wages ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... greater than Signorelli chiefly through that larger and truer perception of aesthetic unity which seems to be the final outcome of a long series of artistic effort. The arabesques, for instance, with which Luca wreathed his portraits of the poets, are monstrous, bizarre, in doubtful taste. Michelangelo, with a finer instinct for harmony, a deeper grasp on his own dominant ideal, excluded this element of quattrocento decoration from his scheme. Raffaello, with the graceful tact essential to the style, developed ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... which has been already alluded to, Das fremde Kind, a curious mixture of reality and fairyland, and Der Zusammenhang der Dinge, which is not devoid of interest. Several of the things in this collection suggest comparison with Poe's writings for weirdness and bizarre imaginative power, though of course there are wide differences between the styles of ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... said, "but I want you to be abreast of the times. There's going to be a reaction from this reign of the bizarre. We've gone long enough to harems and odalisques for our styles and our manners and presently we are going to see the blossoming of ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... divers uniforms and decorations suggesting a dress ball in the capital of the world. But the motley costumes of the women, who dressed with the license of unrestrained individuality, were even more startling and bizarre—a kaleidoscopic fantastic masquerade. ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... that the most bizarre incident I saw during the bombardment of the outer forts was the flight of the women inmates of a madhouse at Duffel. There were three hundred women in the institution, many of them violently insane, and the nuns in charge, assisted by soldiers, had to take them across ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... discarded kilt and bagpipe on the eve of departure, marching in blouse and cap and breeks of army blue; but the 14th. Brooklyn departed in red cap and red breeches, the 1st and 2d Fire Zouaves discarded the Turkish fez only; the 5th, 9th, 10th Zouaves marched wearing fez and turban; and bizarre voltigeurs, foot chasseurs, hussars, lancers, rocket batteries in costume de fantasie poured southward,—no two regiments equipped and ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... A bizarre derivation based upon early Arabic (c. 1040 A.D.) sources is given by Kircher in his work[120] on number mysticism. He quotes from Abenragel,[121] giving the Arabic and a Latin translation[122] and stating that the ordinary Arabic forms are derived from sectors ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... Langham, thinking. 'I met him at dinner at the Vice-Chancellor's, now I remember. A bizarre and formidable person—very difficult to talk to,' ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... at, however, was this bizarre figure of a despot who held the power of life and death. It was one of his quieter interludes when he laid aside the ferocious and bombastic play-acting which made it hard to discover whether he was very cunning or half-mad. ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... not hard to realize that here we were in the country of Bras-de-Fer, of Memling, of Cuyp, and Thierry d'Alsace, for, on descending from the halting, bumping train at the small brick station, we were face to face with a bizarre, bulbous-topped tower rising above the houses surrounding a small square, and now quite crowded with large, hollow-backed, thick-legged Flemish horses, which might have been those of the followers of Thierry gathered in preparation ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... a reaction of morality and refinement. The wits and beauties of the Salon Bleu may have committed a thousand follies, but their chivalrous codes of honor and of manners, their fastidious tastes, even their prudish affectations, were open though sometimes rather bizarre tributes to the virtues that lie at the very foundation of a well-ordered society. They had exalted ideas of the dignity of womanhood, of purity, of loyalty, of devotion. The heroines of Mlle. de Scudery, ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... blending Christianity and paganism; but Bellini's sole purpose was to do this. We have children from a Bacchic vase and the crowned Virgin; two naked saints and a Venetian lady; and a centaur watching a hermit. The foreground is a mosaic terrace; the background is rocks and water. It is all bizarre and very curious and memorable and quite unique. For the rest, I should mention two charming Guardis; a rich little Canaletto; a nice scene of sheep by Jacopo Bassano; the portrait of an unknown young man by an unknown painter, No. 1157; and ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... power.[1069] He partakes of the nature of both men and gods—he is all-powerful, yet a creature of caprice and a slave of accident. To him society is supposed to owe an incalculable debt; but his mixed nature affords a wide field for bizarre myths and folk-stories, and he of necessity gives way to more ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... the steps of a griping, miserly sire, he had risen to his present station by oppression and chicanery; by crushing the weak and cajoling the strong. And he was prepared to maintain his ground by means as vile and a hand as hard. But he loved; and—strange anomaly, bizarre exception, call it what you will—somewhere in the depths of his earthly nature a spark of good survived, and fired him with so pure an ardour that at the least hint of disrespect to his mistress, at a thought of injury to her, the whole man rose in arms. It was a ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... of the title. Cornelia had passed on. A bizarre story of Mr. Barrett's father was related to Adela by Sir Twickenham. She grappled it with her sense, and so got nothing out of it. "Disinherited him because he wrote to his father, who was dying, to say that he had gained a livelihood by playing the organ! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... loss to explain it. Whether it was music or perfume, or just the emanation from an intense personality, I have never determined. I only know that when I turned, I saw standing before me, in an attitude of waiting, a woman of such marvelous attractions, and yet of an order of beauty so bizarre and out of keeping with the times and the place in which she stood, that I forgot to question everything but my own sanity and the reality of a vision so unprecedented in all my experience. I therefore simply stood like her, speechless and lost, and only came to myself when ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... fragrance of love, is inconspicuous. The hero, after ten years of devotion to a young woman, a paragon of beauty, finally marries her mother, and ends with a few pious observations concerning Heaven's mercy and his own happy lot. Such an ending seems disappointing, almost bizarre, in view of the romantic novels to which we are accustomed; but we must remember that Thackeray's purpose was to paint life as he saw it, and that in life men and things often take a different way from that described in romances. As we grow acquainted with Thackeray's ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... when the sisters entered their drawing-room there were numerous evidences of an occupant during their absence. The sofa pillows had been rearranged so that the effect of their grouping was less bizarre than that favored by the Western women; a horrid little Buddhist idol with its eyes fixed on its abdomen, had been chastely hidden behind a Dresden shepherdess, as unfit for the scrutiny of polite eyes; and on the table ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... literary history. The "Dictionnaire Historique" has compiled the article of Lenglet entirely from this work; but the Journal des Scavans was too ascetic in this opinion. Etoit-ce la peine de faire un livre pour apprendre au public qu'un homme de lettres fut espion, escroc, bizarre, fougueux, cynique, incapable d'amitie, de soumission aux loix? &c. Yet they do not pretend that the bibliography of Lenglet du Fresnoy is at all ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... diverted by the bizarre on all sides, Grant avenue, the main artery of Chinatown, stretching before you in a many-hued arabesque of shop fronts, no two quite alike in tone or in the stuff they ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... wild, bizarre picture; the fire, fanned by the fierce winds that swept down the open chimney, kept sending out puffs of smoke that went like grey wraiths about the room; the top of the table rutted by hundreds of years' fierce feeding; the shattered crockery and forlorn-looking ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... stood before that column of light, with only a few seconds of the third dimension left to them. They had answered a weird advertisement, and had but a limited idea of what they were about to do. Grimly, though, they accepted it as a job, a bizarre job, but a job. They faced it as they had faced other equally ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... It was as bizarre a company as Graham had ever sat down to dinner with. The sheep-buyer and the correspondent for the Breeders' Gazette were still guests. Three machine-loads of men, women, and girls, totaling fourteen, had arrived shortly before the first gong and had remained ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... and go away. But there's a strangeness, a sort of haunting fascination in it all. To you, who don't know the people, it may only seem a piece of rather sordid folly. But it isn't the good, the obvious, the useful that puts a spell on us in life. It's the bizarre, the dimly seen, the mysterious for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... contrast between CD-ROM and network pricing and in doing so highlighted something bizarre in information pricing. A large institution such as the University of California has vendors who will offer to sell information on CD-ROM for a price per year in four digits, but for the same data (e.g., an abstracting and indexing database) on magnetic tape, regardless of how many people ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly |
