"Conventional" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is the conventional counter system behind which the clerk stands to serve the customer on the other side. There are many advocates of the counter that is built into the shelving, believing that the closer the customers are brought to the coffee, the more they will be inclined to buy. This system also makes for cleanliness, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the common superficial consciousness of mankind bears witness. I agree with this statement about the basis of Mysticism, but I prefer to use the word symbol of that which has a real, and not merely a conventional affinity to the thing symbolised.[320] The line is by no means easy to draw. An aureole is not, properly speaking, a symbol of saintliness,[321] nor a crown of royal authority, because in these instances the connexion of sign with significance is conventional. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... in his interesting notes on Lockhart in his later life, recalls his remark: "If I had to write my Life of Scott over again, now, I should say more about his religious opinions. Some people may think passages in his novels conventional and commonplace, but he hated cant, and every word he said came from his heart." Of Lockhart's own religious opinions, Mr. Gleig writes: "A clergyman, with whom he had lived in constant intimacy from his Oxford days [probably the writer himself], was in the frequent habit, between 1851 and 1853, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... in their atmosphere, I was mirthful when they were mirthful, and grave when they were grave. The mere fact that I had no young companions, no storybooks, no outdoor amusements, none of the thousand and one employments provided for other children in more conventional surroundings, did not make me discontented or fretful, because I did not know of the existence of such entertainments. In exchange, I became keenly attentive to the limited circle of interests open to me. Oddly enough, I have no recollection of any curiosity about other children, nor ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... grew worse, when the outriders would have opened a passage for the carriage through the crowded streets. As soon as the people recognized the liveries, all the conventional homage with which they were accustomed to greet such ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... a sort of reckless earnestness that moved his hearer more than that individual cared to show. Redmond felt it was useless to offer mere conventional sympathy in a case like this. He did the next best thing possible—he remained silently attentive and let ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... lines. Hence we see that any effort to define or describe coal, lignite, or anthracite accurately must be a failure, because neither has a fixed composition, neither is a distinct substance, but simply a conventional group of substances which form part of an ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... consideration is put on one side when the business of the shop has to be attended to. They are all tradesmen who have strayed into unlawful courses. They have nothing about them of the heroism of sin; their crimes are not the result of ungovernable passion, or even of antipathy to conventional restraints; circumstances and not any law-defying bias of disposition have made them criminals. How is it that the novelist contrives to make them so interesting? Is it because we are a nation of shopkeepers, and enjoy following lines of business which are a ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... from me hurriedly, but not without strong manifestation of feeling. I folded her to my heart; that being no moment for affectations or conventional distance; and I know I was, while I trusted Anneke might be, none the less happy for remembering we had exchanged ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... fatigue. The martyrdom of discomfort, however, was obviously much easier to bear than that to which, even to the eyes of the casual visitor, Count Tolstoy daily subjected himself, for his study in the basement of the conventional dwelling, with its short shelf of battered books and its scythe and spade leaning against the wall, had many times lent itself to that ridicule which is the most ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... cupboard door. Back is a window looking on the street. A door, left, leads to other rooms. There is a table near shop door and a horse-hair sofa back, an armchair at fire, and two leather-covered chairs about. Conventional pictures on walls, and two certificates framed, showing that some one in the house has passed some ...
— Three Plays • Padraic Colum
... for the audience to know the thoughts of stage characters, the aside and the soliloquy in all species of dramatic composition have always been recognized as the only feasible conventional mode of conveying them. According to the strictest canons of dramatic art, the ideally constructed play should be entirely free from this weakness. Mr. Gillette is credited with having written in "Secret Service" the first aside-less ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... Siva, Vishnu and Brahma, with innumerable minor deities, some 30,000,000 altogether, which have been created during emergencies from time to time by worshipers of vivid imaginations. When we speak of Hinduism or Brahminism as a religion, however, it is only a conventional use of a term, because it is not a religion in the sense that we are accustomed to apply that word. In all other creeds there is an element of ethics; morality, purity, justice and faith in men, but none of these qualities is taught by the Brahmins. With them the fear ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... the same effect,[2] with which it is unnecessary to trouble the reader. Now, all this was quite new to me. If I had ever given a second thought to the so-called "supernatural" beings of tradition, it was only to dismiss them, in the conventional manner as creatures of the imagination. But these ideas of Mr. Campbell's were decidedly interesting, and deserving of consideration. It was obvious that tradition, especially where there had been an intermixture of races, could not preserve one clear, ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie
... approach the perfect face—so the poets and the philosophers, with their diverse conceptions of ideal manhood, divide the kingdom of character. "The true man cannot be a fragmentary man," said Plato. Is he not one-sided who masters the conventional refinement and the stock proprieties, yet indulges in drunkenness and gluttony? "Pleasure must not be his sole aim," said the accomplished Chesterfield. "I have enjoyed all the pleasures of the world, and consequently know their futility, and do not regret their loss. Those who have no experience ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the exception of Giotto himself—to whose premature excellence none of his contemporaries and disciples ever attained—give us, by means of pictorial representation, just about the same as could be given to us by the conventional symbolism of writing. In describing a Giottesque fresco, or panel, we are not stopped by the difficulty of rendering visible effects in words, because the visible effects that meet us are in reality so many words; so that, to describe the picture, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... country, she herself was born in Massachusetts, where for a time she had been a school-teacher. This, then, with the exception of two months at the village school, was the limit of young Edison's education—to use the conventional term. The world was now to take him in hand, and show what it could do with ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... conventional reply, Mr. Ducaine," she remarked, with faint sarcasm. "I gave you credit for a larger ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... know the distinctive styles and figures of different countries, and not confuse an entrechat with a pirouette, should be aware of the meaning of the terms arabesque and rond de jambe, and understand to some extent the conventional language and history of grand ballet. No one will deny that his study of history must be substantial and, to put the matter compendiously, he must have a good general education, which, however, will not carry him very far, since he must own a ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... from sentimentality; and even a carping critic will find little to cavil at in her productions. If fault should be found with any of them it would probably be with such a narrative as "Wolverine." It "bites," like all her Indian pieces, and conveys a definite meaning. But, written in the conventional slang of the frontier, it jars with her other work, and seems out of form, if not out ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... rummages through Violet's wardrobe in a state of hapless bewilderment, calling finally upon Gertrude to make a proper selection. Denise attires her young mistress, who looks really pale after this enforced seclusion. Mr. Grandon carries her down-stairs; and if it is not a conventional parlor, the room still has some picturesque aspects of its own, and the two luxurious wolf-robes on the floor are grudged afterward, as Laura steps on them. There is a great jar full of autumn branches and berries in one corner that ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... juvenility, but made no comment. "News sways people more than editorials," he continued. "That's why there's so much tinkering with it. I'd like to give you a definition of news, but there isn't any. News is conventional. It's anything that interests the community. It isn't the same in any two places. In Arizona a shower is news. In New Orleans the boll-weevil is news. In Worthington anything about your father is news: in Denver ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... eager for novelty as the veterans were impatient of it, had come upon the stage, that the requisite impulse was given. Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Merimee, Alfred de Vigny, and other young men of genius, were just opening the assault on the citadel of classicisme. Conventional rules were set at defiance; the authorities that had so long held sway were summoned to abdicate; nature, truth, above all passion, were invoked as the sources of inspiration, the law-givers of the imagination, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... said that there is enough on the face of this communication to show that the Duke of Wellington took a narrow, and, so to speak, technical, view of the relative positions of himself and Mr. Canning; that the latter expected a more conventional and generous construction of his position and proposal from one with whom he was on terms ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... few days the crew discussed our destination. Discipline, while maintained strictly, was not conventional. During the dog watches, often, every man aboard would be below, for at that period Captain Selover loved to take the wheel in person, a thick cigar between his lips, the dingy checked shirt wide open to expose his hairy chest to the ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to welcome the strangers, much better behaved than those found at San Diego, who stripped the clothing from those too ill to defend themselves. Perhaps a reason for this superiority may be found in the fact that these tribes were entirely naked, and had no desire for any conventional covering. They serenaded their new friends so loudly that sleep or rest was impossible, and offered their most delicious food and free use of canoes. They ate seeds, fruit, fish, locusts; hunted rabbit, hare, and deer; ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... tell, but as it contained from 2000 to 3000 armed and mounted gentlemen it must have counted at least double that tale of cavalry, and perhaps five-, perhaps ten-fold the number of foot soldiers. A force of 15,000 to 30,000 men in an England of some 5,000,000 (I more than double the conventional figures) was prepared to enforce feudal independence against the central government, even at the expense of ceding vast territories to Scotland or of submitting to the nominal rule of a foreign king. Against this army the King had a number of mercenaries, mainly drawn from ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... permissible for women in some circumstances to propose marriage. Even in England it is so, where society is like a huge Clapham Junction, with human creatures moving like trucks and carriages on cast-iron, conventional rails, which they can only leave at the risk of a destructive collision. And a proposal of the kind was never more justifiable than in this case. Shut away from the sight of men in her dreary seclusion, ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... minute. This is what I want to say: I have no belief whatever in conventional moral codes, and no respect for them. To me the relations between men and women are simply questions of personal ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... book has been enlarged and greatly improved as to its order and grammar, the first edition contains all the essential elements of her philosophy, if such it may be called. Mr. Wiggin did good work in translating the book into comparatively conventional English, and gave a kind of unity to paragraphs and sentences, and later revisers have greatly improved upon his work; but the first edition gave a fairly complete and, on the whole, a comprehensible statement of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... them as to who should entertain me first, and who should be the next. Invitations to breakfast and dinner literally poured in; and those convenient "sick headaches," "colds," and "previous engagements," so opportune in more conventional parts, were of no avail here. No card—no friendly note bade one to come and be merry. They generally arrived en masse to fetch me. Pulling and pushing played a not unimportant part in their urging, and to decline was ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... "entirely reached the special Puritan class he meant to reach." "Whether," he said, "I have rendered St. Paul's ideas with perfect correctness or not, there is no doubt that the confidence with which these people regarded their conventional rendering of them was quite baseless, made them narrow and intolerant, and prevented all progress. I shall have a last paper at Christmas, called Puritanism and the Church of England, to show how the Church, though holding certain doctrines like justification ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... problem which she had been perpetually trying to solve lately so very simple, after all, and only a perplexity to her own weak powers of reason? Lady Laura must be the best judge, of course, and she was surely too warm-hearted a woman to take a conventional view of things, or to rejoice in a mere marriage of convenience. No, it must be true. They really did love each other, these two, and that utter absence of all those small signs and tokens of attachment which Clarissa had expected to see was only a characteristic of good taste. ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... she answered. "Lord Arranmore is not exactly the man to be a slave to, or even to respect, the conventional, and your being—what you are, naturally makes you a pleasant companion to him—and his guests. No, I don't think that ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of conventional approaches, he plunged boldly into the matter with which their thoughts were at once occupied. "So this was why Dr. Melton insisted I should take this car. Well, I'm grateful to him! It gives me a chance to relieve my mind of a weight of ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... an answer to her prayer, or a denial of it. Anyhow, there he was; better, perhaps, than nobody, until she learned from his own lips—tactless though ardent lips—that he had come from Cairo to Assuan, from Assuan to Philae, to see her. Then she took alarm, and remarked in the old, conventional way of women, that they'd "better go look for the others." But Sir Marcus hadn't spent his money, time, and gray matter in hurrying to Philae from Shellal, for nothing. Finding himself too late to catch us at Assuan, he had paid for a special train in order to ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... riding breeches and leggins. Otherwise he was dressed as a Texas cowboy of the past generation. His sombrero was almost Mexican in its size and ornateness. But his rifle was of the latest American pattern, and in place of the conventional Colt's he carried an automatic pistol. As his horse patiently clambered with him up towards the top of the escarpment the man gazed indolently about between half-closed eyelids and inhaled the smoke from an unbroken ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... murderess recalled that type. She presented the delicate light hair, the quiet eyes, the finely-shaped lower features and the correctly oval form of face, repeated in hundreds on hundreds of the conventional works of Art to which I have ventured to allude. To those who doubt me, I can only declare that what I have here written is undisguised and absolute truth. Let me add that daily observation of all classes of criminals, extending over many ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... man, Umgona, merely started, then began to pour out sentences of conventional thanks and praise to the king for his goodness and condescension. Cetywayo listened to his talk in silence, and when he had done answered by reminding him tersely that if Nanea did not appear at ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard
... and I fell down and broke a bone; the L—— house, where also we boarded, and there were many young girls. There I dreamed of an angel,—a person about eight feet long, flying along past the second-story side-windows, in the conventional horizontal attitude, so suggestive of a "crick in the neck," with great, wide wings, tooting through a trumpet as long as himself; and out of each temple, as I distinctly remember, grew a thing like a knitting-needle, with a cherry on the end. There ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... how those awful days, and more awful nights, passed over. The remembrance is repulsive. I hate to think of them. I was soon draped in the conventional black, with its heavy folds of crape. Lady Knollys came, and was very kind. She undertook the direction of all those details which were to me so inexpressibly dreadful. She wrote letters for me beside, and was really most kind and useful, and her ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... importance, but I stood up to him at first in words, and finally for a few seconds on my feet. Then I went down like an ox, and Raffles came out of his tent. Their fight lasted twenty minutes, and Raffles was marked, but the net result was dreadfully conventional, for the bully was ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... that the Indian is weaned from his idea of the happy hunting-ground, and the sacrilegious thought of ever meeting his horse again is eradicated from his mind. I thought with satisfaction that the missionary really knows no more about the future than the Indian, who seems ill adapted to the conventional idea of heaven. For my part, I prefer to think of him, in the unknown future, as retaining something of his earthly wildness and freedom, rather than as a white-robed saint, singing psalms, and playing on ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... embarrassing in the encounter seemed dissolved by the utterly conventional tone of her greeting. Sir Leslie Borrowdean came up and joined them, and Lord and Lady Redford. Then the little party, escorted by the landlord, disappeared into the hotel. Mannering resumed his seat and continued his dinner. He leaned over and addressed his wife. ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... formal beauty, moreover, was nothing to him. Over and over again he emphasizes soul, feeling, direct and immediate life, as the first necessity of an art work. It is therefore not strange that under certain circumstances he ignored conventional forms in sonata and symphony. An irrepressible impulse toward freedom is the most prominent peculiarity of the man and artist Beethoven; nearly all of his observations, no matter what their subject, radiate the word "Liberty." In his remarks about composing there is a complete ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... not speak of the past. She did not appear to wish to recall it and I had no desire to refer to it. We resumed our old relations of neighbors; yet there was something of constraint between us, a sort of conventional familiarity. It was as though we had said: "It was thus before, let it still be thus." She granted me her confidence, a concession that was not without its charms for me; but our conversation was colder, ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... wished to ask was something like this: Suppose I had had the chance to present to you my letters of introduction, and suppose that we had known each other for some time, and suppose that everything had been very conventional, instead of somewhat unconventional; supposing all this, would you have deemed a recent action of mine so unpardonable as you ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... thoughtless differentiation between the "bad" and the "good" feeble-minded, we find new evidence of the conventional middle-class bias that also finds expression among some of the eugenists. We do not object to feeble-mindedness simply because it leads to immorality and criminality; nor can we approve of it when it expresses itself in docility, submissiveness and obedience. We object because ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... embrace the class of gestures which form the subject of this paper, and which often have an immediate pantomimic origin, the earliest gestures were doubtless instinctive and generally emotional, preceding pictorial, metaphoric, and, still subsequent, conventional gestures even, as, according to DARWIN's cogent ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... conventional inquiry, "How are you? How is it with you?" which politenesses, in a number of variations unknown to Western speech, would have been continued, in ordinary circumstances, until the passers-by were beyond the range of hearing; but the appearance of the Englishmen induced ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... Conventional religion had passed Daylight by. He had lived a sort of religion in his square dealing and right playing with other men, and he had not indulged in vain metaphysics about future life. Death ended all. He had always believed that, and been unafraid. And at this moment, the boat fifteen feet above ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... speechlessly. She felt cold from head to foot. She had known that he was coming. She had been steeling herself for weeks to meet him in an armour of conventional reserve. But all her efforts had come to this. Swift, swift as the wind over wheat, his coming swept across her new-born confidence. It wavered and bent ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... paused there a half-score of years before, Stephen O'Mara paused now, with Caleb and Miss Sarah again gazing up at him. It was the first time Sarah Hunter had seen the grown-up Steve in conventional black and white; her emotions were much the same as they had been on that remoter day. But Steve did not even see her glowing face below him in that instant, nor Caleb's, nor that of Allison either, who ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... Hemstead better, she found that he was different from what she had expected. The conventional idea of a theological student had dwelt in her mind; and she had expected to find a rather narrow and spiritually conceited man, full of the clerical mannerisms which she had often heard laughed at. But she saw that Hemstead's awkwardness ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... Win began in the conventional way that he had laughed at in the morning. Then, afraid of being teased again, she said that she must ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... had been running in conventional channels and that my hopes had always been drab stuff. I had envisaged a command as a result of a slow course of promotion in the employ of some highly respectable firm. The reward of faithful service. Well, faithful service was all right. One would ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... pleasure," should lead you to expect that species of happy ending in which Jack shall have Jill and naught shall go ill, I think a word of warning may not be wasted. In only three of the tales is the finish a matter of conventional happiness. Elsewhere you have a deserted husband, who has tracked his betrayer to a nigger saloon in Atlantic City, wrested from his purpose of murder by a revivalist hymn; a young lad, having avenged the destruction of his home, returning to his widowed mother to await, one supposes, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... out and the men were wet and muddy. I stood by the bridge watching them pass and, thinking it was the right and conventional thing to do, wished them all a Merry Christmas. My intentions were of the best, but I was afterwards told that it sounded to the men like the voice of one mocking them in their misery. However, as it turned out, the wish was fulfilled on the ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... the bosom friend of the King, and mild reprover of his vices; and then, without the smallest transition, hey presto! he is the intransigent priest, bitterly combating the Constitutions of Clarendon. It is true that in the Prologue the poet places one or two finger-posts—small, conventional foreshadowings of coming trouble. For instance, the game of chess between King and Chancellor ends with a victory for ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... conventional long form: Republic of Yemen conventional short form: Yemen local long form: Al Jumhuriyah al Yamaniyah local short form: ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... myself. That such a picture should be in the hands of these scoundrels might in any case have caused a mild surprise; but no more. It was no mild surprise that I felt. The likeness was an extremely good one, worked up with all the accessories of the conventional photographic studio. I was leaning my head on my hand and was relieved against a painted landscape of woodland. It was obvious that it was no snapshot; it was clear that I had sat for this photograph. And the truth was that I had never sat for such a photograph. It ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... least that our poor Priscilla could do, to give her heart for a great many of them. There was the more danger of this, inasmuch as the footing on which we all associated at Blithedale was widely different from that of conventional society. While inclining us to the soft affections of the golden age, it seemed to authorize any individual, of either sex, to fall in love with any other, regardless of what would elsewhere be judged suitable and prudent. Accordingly the tender passion was very ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a second, as if making up his mind upon some point. Evidently, his lonely mode of living caused him to act differently from the conventional society man. ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... celebrated Order of the Templars, that became for all the secret associations, of the Rose-Croix, of the Illuminati, and of the Hermetic Freemasons, the reason of their strange rites, of their signs more or less conventional, and, above all, of their mutual devotedness and of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... sportsman, and dearly loved a day with his gun. As a boy, on his own Highland hills, he had been addicted to sporting a good deal without the formality of a licence, and the absolute freedom from conventional trammels in the wild North was a source of much gratulation to him. Perhaps he enjoyed his outings all the more that he was a stern disciplinarian—so deeply impressed with a sense of duty that he would neither allow himself nor his men to indulge in sport ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... that returns around the urn. The cupboards on each side of the mantel have, at the top, circular glass doors, surmounted by an arch and keystone. The bottom doors are wood paneled. The remainder of the woodwork is conventional, plain chair ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... father thinner and older than when he had last seen him, and asked how he was in a more earnest and meaning manner than is customary in the conventional "How do you do?" ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... surmounted the tomb. He was lying extended full length, six feet and five inches, his head on a low pillow, his right hand grasping the handle of his drawn sword. The more I looked at it, both during and after the service, the more convinced I became that this was no mere conventional figure made by some lapidary long after the subject's death, but was the work of an inspired artist, an exact portrait of the man, even to his stature, and that he had succeeded in giving to the countenance the very expression of the ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... feelings were as exquisite as her means of expressing them? The iron bands of distrust were loosened from his spirit, and he blushed for his cheap scepticism of the morning. In a woman so evidently nurtured in dependence, whose views had been formed, and her actions directed, by the most conventional influences, the mere fact of coming alone to Westmore, in open defiance of her advisers, bespoke a persistence of purpose that ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... addition to the military discipline, fencing, wrestling, weight-lifting and pole-twisting of which I have spoken, exercises itself in handwriting—which many Japanese practise as an art during their whole lifetime—and in composing the conventional short poem. I was gravely informed that "the custom of spending money on sweet-stuff is decreasing." What this really means is that the young men were not frequenting the sweet-stuff shops, which are staffed by girls who are in many cases a greater temptation than the sweets. The ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... me about some of the other men you are meeting in politics?" she asked when they had sat down before another open fire. "It seems as if all the people I know are just alike—I suppose it's because we are all so conventional—and I am very much interested in hearing about ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... nothing, ascended another flight of stairs and went straight into the dressing room. A bronze dragon nailed by the tail to a bracket writhed away from the wall in calm convolutions, and held, between the conventional fury of its jaws, a crude gas flame that resembled a butterfly. The room was empty, of course; but, as he stepped in, it became filled all at once with a stir of many people; because the strips of glass on the doors of wardrobes and his wife's large pier-glass reflected him from head to foot, ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... saddled, very often, with a girl-wife in the background—the last by no means a matter of course in these enlightened days. In Dyan Singh's case the safeguard was lacking. His mother being dead, he had held his own against a rigidly conventional grandmother, and insisted on delaying the inevitable till his education was complete. Waxing bolder still, he had demanded the same respite for Aruna; a far more serious affair. For months they had waged a battle of tongues and temper and ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... dear niece, that you are a good and pure-minded girl, and that you mean to live a life above reproach, and I fully understand your rebellion against many of the conventional forms which are incompatible with the career of a "girl bachelor," as you like to call yourself. But let us look at the subject from all sides, while you are on the threshold of life, in the morning of your career, and before ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... napkin over his arm did most of the serving, and being a man the conventional differences did not seem to him so great as ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... degenerated from century to century. The growing Christian religion, which forbade the picturing of any living beauty, gave the death-blow to such excellence as remained. A style of painting followed which received the name of Greek Byzantine. In it was no study of life; all was most strikingly conventional, and it grew steadily worse and worse. A comparison of the paintings and mosaics of the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries shows the rapid decline of all art qualities. Finally every figure produced was a most arrant libel on nature. It was always painted against a flat gold background; ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... it might possibly help to set right-side-up the perverted conscience and re-invigorate the starved self-respect of our considerable class of loose-lived playgoers whose point of honor is to deride all official and conventional sermons. As it is, it only gives me an opportunity of telling the story of the Select Committee of both Houses of Parliament which sat last year to enquire into the working of the censorship, against which it was alleged by myself and others that as its imbecility ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... greetings. But with what fervour girls of tender years re-unite some day after a separation of months need not, of course, be explained. Presently, she entered the apartments, paid her respects and inquired how they all were. But after this conventional interchange of salutations, old lady Chia pressed her to take off her outer garments as the weather was so close. Shih Hsiang-yuen lost no time in rising to her feet and loosening her clothes. "I don't see why," Madame Wang thereupon ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... I make no pretence. I do not promise to work miracles. I do not, like your conventional candidates, talk in platitudes. I do not undertake to achieve a regeneration of politics out of unregenerate human nature. As long as we have cherries we shall have blackbirds; as long as we have politics we shall have politicians. I acknowledge the ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... other by conventional lines. Their absences were periods in which to store vital topics and questions—their meetings were ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... induction coil related to a carbon transmitter, a battery, and a receiver. Fig. 12 shows exactly the same arrangement, using conventional signs. The winding of the induction coil which is in series with the transmitter and the battery is called the primary winding; the other is called the secondary winding. In the arrangement of Figs. 11 and 12 the battery has no metallic ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... making any noise, and without appearing to work much, he accomplished a good deal. She had an impulse once to thank him, but she restrained it, and she gave him a good-bye that was neither cool nor warm, just sufficiently conventional to leave no inference whatever. But when the train was gone and Mr. Grayson and he were riding back in the cab to the hotel, the candidate spoke ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Epicurean has even ultimately to surrender and be converted. No one of these three systems became in any proper sense popular. The plain intelligible character of Euhemerism exerted doubtless a certain power of attraction over the Romans, and in particular produced only too deep an effect on the conventional history of Rome with its at once childish and senile conversion of fable into history; but it remained without material influence on the Roman religion, because the latter from the first dealt only in allegory and not in fable, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... capricious. The realms of fancy were all untravelled, and its fairest flowers had not been gathered, nor its beauties despoiled by the rude touch of those who affected to cultivate them. The wing of genius was not bound to the earth by the cold and conventional rules of criticism, but was permitted to take its flight far and wide over the broad expanse of creation. But with science it was otherwise. No genius could suffice for the creation of facts, - hardly for their detection. ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... to the other two plays here presented. It belongs to the school of Scribe and the "soliloquy," and the author avails himself of the recognised dramatic conventions of the day. At the same time, though the characters may be conventional in type, they are, thanks to Bjornson's sense of humour, alive; and the theme of the estrangement and reconciliation of the "newly-married couple" is treated with delicacy and charm. It is true that it is almost unbelievable that the hero could be so stupid as to ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... must have betrayed more than conventional impassivity, for Evarin smiled. "Now you know, Rakhal, why I am called Toymaker. Is it not strange—the masterpriest of Nebran, a maker of Toys, and the shrine of the Toad God a workshop ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... offered them. It was not that the affair differed much from affairs of its sort, but the fact that it did not materially differ might have been what made it seem so tiresome. Possibly the effect of a summer of out-door, home merrymaking, under the least conventional of conditions, had been to make formal entertaining under a roof seem more than ordinarily fatiguing and pointless. The handsome rooms were hot, in spite of open windows; the guests quite evidently were making heroic efforts to seem gay. Somehow even ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... make so painful an avowal. Nonsense! Let us put aside all such trash: the question is, not—how we shall mutually make what the circumstances require us to say to each other agreeable to the self-love of either of us, and to silly rules of conventional gallantry, but there is a real question of fairness between us; and it is this: how much should each of us expect that the other will contribute towards the difficult task of liberating both of us from engagements we neither of us wish to undertake. You see, Signor ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the scenery: "It is ... the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth itself. Daring poets who wished to escape from the conventional gardens and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this. He insists on celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. That sense of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... presented with my card at Miss Loraine's door at exactly five o'clock. A Japanese page dressed in uniform ushered me into a conventional but well-furnished reception-room. There sat a young woman in a handsome silk negligee, who invited me to be seated, remarking that Miss Loraine was out, but would soon return, and that she was to entertain me in the interval. In a few minutes there came up the steps and then entered the room three ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... Kunst. It stood for a remoteness from reality which formed a strong contrast to the naturalistic creed and for a formal craftsmanship which set out to counteract the grooving tendency to break away from the fetters of conventional forms. The work of the group bordered often upon archaic preciosity, yet its influence was wholesome in holding up the ideal of a formalism which is after all one of the basic conditions of art. Though not a native ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... and shoulder pressure. He called my attention to his tone. Tone! He made every individual wire jangle, and I trembled for my smooth, well-kept action. Then he began the B-minor Ballade of Liszt. Now, this particular piece always exasperates me. If there is much that is mechanical and conventional in the Thalberg fantasies, at least they are frankly sensational and admittedly for display. But the Liszt Ballade is so empty, so pretentious, so affected! One expects that something is about to occur, but it never comes. There are the usual chromatic ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... conscientious objector. They had been under the impression that his public career had been one long orgie of conscientious objection to everything that did not emanate from his own capacious brain. Even his hat and his waistcoat proclaim his defiance of conventional opinion. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... valiant friend St. Saens' Dalila, where he has made a glorious love duet which is quite in place; for Dalila and Samson are bound to give themselves to the devil for love's sake, whilst in Massenet's Magdalen and Herodfade the whole thing is merely conventional...theatrical. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... some of the Japanese games differ slightly from ours, or else are altogether peculiar to that country. The facility with which a Japanese child slips its shoes on and off, and the absence on the part of the parents of conventional or health scruples regarding bare feet, lead to a sort of game of ball in which the shoes take the part of the ball, and to hiding pranks with the sandal, something like our hunt the slipper and hide-and-seek. On the other hand, kago play is entirely Japanese. In ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... priests awaited him. It was a direct reversal of the ordinary effect in the ordinary theatre: where the play loses in realism because a current of necessarily recognized, but purposely ignored, antagonistic fact underruns the conventional illusion and compels us to perceive that the palace is but painted canvas, and (even on the largest stage) is only four or five times as high as the Prince. The palace at Orange—towering up as though it would touch the very ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... Government commissioned this artist to execute the figure of a saint. One may well prophesy that there will be nothing conventional in this work. She has already produced a striking "Saint Barbara." Her portrait busts include those of Professor Wegr, Professor Hellmer, Mark Twain, Countess Kinsky, Countess Palffs, Baron ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... generosity defrayed all charges. The vessel was manned from the navy, and Engineer Melville, destined to bear a name great among Arctic men, together with two navy lieutenants, were assigned to her. The voyage planned was then unique among American Arctic expeditions, for instead of following the conventional route north through Baffin's Bay and Smith Sound, the "Jeannette" sailed from San Francisco and pushed northward through Bering Sea. In July, 1879, she weighed anchor. Two years after, no word having been heard of her meanwhile, the inevitable relief ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... one belongs to the ancient, though scarcely Honorable Primrose Hunt, and rides forever to the hounds down the path of dalliance, one's wife of four years is rather stale sport. One does not pry up her eyelashes; they have been pried; nor does one hold dialogues with her under the words of conventional speech. The rules of the Hunt require one to look up at one's wife—chiefly to find out what she is after and to wonder how long she will inflict herself. And when one is hearing afar the cry of the pack, no true sportsman is diverted ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... very kind," answered Rorie, with exceeding coldness. "I suppose all such engagements are subjects for congratulation, from a conventional point of view. My future wife is both amiable and accomplished, as you know. I have reason to be very proud that she has done me so great an honour as to prefer me to many worthier suitors; but I am bound to tell you—as we once ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... in an evening paper, over the top of which he looked at every newcomer, was almost farcical. At five-and-twenty to nine Pamela arrived. He advanced down the lounge to meet her. Her face was inscrutable, her smile conventional. Yet she had come! He looked over his shoulder towards ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... daily attrition and conventional intimacies of the table, the drawing-room, or the promenade, the cloak covering his resentful antipathy, his moral perversities, his thinly veiled impatience, was worn to such thin shreds that eyes keen as Jack's must see and ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... dickens don't you write something that they will accept? Why not make up something quite conventional?" ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... be conventional,' I went on, 'It wouldn't fit in with these wonderful days a bit. Perhaps I've no right to talk to you like this—but Ombos is dead and you seem to have no friend in the world. We have got caught up, you and I, in one of the marvellous tangles of this great conflict, and God knows how it's ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... visits to Lord Stanhope's seat in Kent in order to consult his magnificent library, were the only visits which Macaulay made in the course of the year. He always had a dislike of visiting in private houses, much preferring hotels, where he could be free from conventional life. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... human character of any sort. It runs eternally in certain grooves of local and historical type: the medieval knight, the eighteenth-century duellist, and the modern cowboy, recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures in an Oriental pattern. I can quite as easily imagine a human being kindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by such dehumanized ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... was facing Sally as he bent over the table and fumbled with the lock of the jewel-case, and she made good use of this chance to memorise a countenance of mildly sardonic cast, not unhandsome—the face of a conventional modern voluptuary, self-conscious, self-satisfied, selfish—rather attractive withal in the eyes of an excited ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... is not the highest. We feel that something is wanting, and yet we can hardly extol him too highly. He brought comedy into close relation with every-day life; he is the father of the modern French stage, which has gradually cast off the old conventional personages. The French dramatists of to-day are not men of genius like Moliere, but, in their airy, sparkling plays, they represent the freaks, follies, and fancies of society so exquisitely that nothing remains to be desired. They furnish the model and the materials for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... rashly assumed spencer, you would scarcely have thought, after a glance at the contours of the man's bony frame, that this was an artist—that conventional type which is privileged, in something of the same way as a Paris gamin, to represent riotous living to the bourgeois and philistine mind, the most mirific joviality, in short (to use the old Rabelaisian word newly taken into use). Yet this elderly person had once taken the medal ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... child born of plural marriage before January, 1896. The solemn benignity of the concession touched me, as it must have touched many, to the very heart of gratitude. By it, ten thousand children were taken from the outer darkness of this world's conventional exclusion and placed within the honored relations of mankind. It was a tribute to the purity and sincerity of the Mormon women who had borne the cross of plural marriage, believing that God had commanded their suffering. It recognized the holy nature and honorable intent of the marriages of these ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... more boldly conventional, not merely in the treatment of landscape, but in the general conception and machinery. An initial effort of the imagination is required to feel with the poet; it is not wonderful that no such wing bore up the solid Johnson. ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... their changes made from day to day. On the wall next to this map and at right angles to it, is a large-scale map of the entire region over which the squadron operates. On this map are numerous conventional markings which would have no meaning to the ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... half-brother," said the lawyer, softly; and then he added, with the conventional ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... statesmanship, the President probably saw that he would make just the kind of a minister to suit his purposes. Armstrong had not done this. Although a man of some ability and military information, Armstrong lacked conventional morals, and was the possessor of objectionable peculiarities. He never won either the confidence or the respect of Madison. He not only did harsh things in a harsh way, but he had a caustic tongue, and a tone of irreverence whenever he estimated the capacity of a Virginia ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander |
