"Exotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the most native and democratic of our birds; He is one of the family, and seems much nearer to us than those rare, exotic visitants, as the orchard starling or rose-breasted grosbeak, with their distant, high-bred ways. Hardy, noisy, frolicsome, neighborly, and domestic in his habits, strong of wing and bold in spirit, he is the pioneer of the thrush family, and well worthy of the finer artists ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... anything—now. Originally I intended it to mean 'The Conquest of Art by the Spirit of Business,' or something like that. I started it when I was fresh from Paris, and wore a red tie and a pointed beard. I keep it as a record of the folly into which exotic instruction will lead a man. If I were to go at it now I'd turn the whole thing around—I'd make it 'Art ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... Pliocene strata of the same region we observe a larger proportion of species and genera which, although they may agree with well-known Asiatic or other foreign types, are at present wanting in Italy. If we then examine the Miocene formations of the same country, exotic forms become more abundant, especially the palms, whether they belong to the European or American fan-palms, Chamaerops and Sabal, or to the more tropical family of the date-palms or Phoenicites, which last are conspicuous ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... and to have frequent recourse to its pitcher. The mechanism of the "rose of Jericho" (Anastatica hierochuntina] shows the susceptibility of plants to moisture in a very remarkable manner; and I have submitted some experiments made with this extraordinary exotic, the inhabitant of an arid sandy soil, to the Horticultural Society of London. That succulents should be found clothing in patches the surface of the burning desert is a phenomenon not the least wonderful in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... fact, that the theories—admitted by the study of geography—could not be brought into consideration. How should space and time be in existence when a few steps sufficed to convey us from the land of perpetual snow to the zone of exotic plants and ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... humour, such as was indigenous in the country, it was only represented by a few Saturnian snatches, some Fescennine banterings at weddings and harvest-homes, and rude pantomimic performances also originating in Etruria. Intellectual pleasantry was unknown, except as an exotic, and flourished almost exclusively among those who were imbued with ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... begin to acquire something of the brown and ruddy complexion of his schoolfellows. The English system did not commend itself to Scotland in these days. There was no little Eton at Fettes; nor do I think, if there had been, that a genteel exotic of that class would have tempted either my wife or me. The lad was doubly precious to us, being the only one left us of many; and he was fragile in body, we believed, and deeply sensitive in mind. To keep him at home, and yet to send him to school,—to combine the ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... what to say to her. There was a species of abandon in her gaiety. Her exotic language embarrassed one who had been used to mariners' laconic directness of speech. She looked at him, teasing him with her eyes. He was a bit relieved when the pale-faced secretary came dragging himself up the ladder and broke in on ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... This is one of the very few instances on which the terrible and vicious punishment of 'breaking on a wheel' was employed in Scotland. Jean Livingstone's accomplice was, according to Birrell's Diary, broken on a cartwheel, with the coulter of a plough in the hand of the hangman. The exotic method of execution suggests experiment ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... profoundly felt that she was in Paris. The mere shape of the doorknob by the side of a brass plate lettered "Madame Dubois" told her that she was in an exotic land. ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... a government; "Some countries have a very exotic government." Patriotic; "He was exotic in the cause of Independence." Absolute; "The government of Turkey is exotic." Standing out; "The ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... was the poetry of life, after all, which counted. Fred Starratt knew that now. A year ago he had thought of poetry as strings of high-sounding words which produced a pleasant mental reaction, something abstract and exotic. He had never fancied that poetry was a thing to be seen and understood and lived, and that such common things as bread and wine and love and hatred were shot through with the pure gold of mystery. Once, if he had been moved to magnanimity ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... peculiar dress occasioned were especially annoying. To avoid being conspicuous, she had already laid aside the white cap; but her beauty, enhanced by the coils of glossy hair which crowned her queenly little head, was so remarkable, so foreign-looking and striking, that she seemed like some rare exotic which, in all the luxuriance of its loveliness, had been transplanted from the land of palms to our colder soil. There was in her manner an odd mixture of pride and humility, dignity and modesty, which gave her all the reserve of a woman and the winsomeness ...
— Sister Carmen • M. Corvus
... first it was used largely for medicinal purposes; and high prices were charged for it. Vesling says of its use in Europe as a medicine, "the first step it made from the cabinets of the curious, as an exotic seed, being into the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... century is approximately the period in which the collection and classification of exotic plants and animals became one of the chief objects of exploratory voyages. This was also one of the aims of the expedition under the command of Marion and Commerson, a botanist who had accompanied De Bougainville, was to have accompanied Marion also. But he ...
— Essays on early ornithology and kindred subjects • James R. McClymont
... put out the light she saw her image in the glass and paused, eyeing it. So far her appearance had had no value for her save as a stage asset. Now she looked at herself with a new, critical interest. Behind the footlights she was another person, blossomed into an exotic brilliance, took on fire and beauty with the music and excitement. Might not a man seeing her there be disappointed when he met her as she really was? She studied her face intently, viewing it at different angles, judging ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... communities where this is absolutely impossible. What has religion to offer to a girl denied an education which will fit her for the life she must live, compelled to enter into a fierce struggle for daily bread while still a child, surrounded by every sort of cheap, exotic amusement behind which temptation lurks? Has it anything to offer in compensation, if it permits conditions to go ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... elude him; he is eternally on the surface, chasing bits of driftwood. The literature he knows is the fossil literature taught in colleges—worse, in high schools. It must be dead before he is aware of it. And in particular he appears ignorant of what is going forward in other lands. An exotic idea, to penetrate his consciousness, must first become stale, and even then he is apt to purge it of all its remaining validity and significance before ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... white lilies which painters throw at the feet of Franciscan monks, and dedicate also to the Virgin,—Annunciation lilies, so called. They are common too, and rather specially emblems of purity. What I am thinking of, and what Pitt was thinking of, is, on the contrary, one of those unique exotic lilies, which are as much wonders of colour as marvels of grace; apart, reserved, pure, also lofty, and delicate to the last degree; queening it over all the rest of the flowers around, not so much by official pre-eminence of beauty as by the superiority of the ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... at some of Harrington's other notions:—"The way propounded [Milton's] is plain, easy, and open before us: without intricacies, without the introducement of new or obsolete forms or terms, or exotic models,—ideas that would effect nothing, but with a number of new injunctions to manacle the native liberty of mankind; turning all virtue into prescription, servitude, and necessity, to the great impairing and frustrating of ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... clove has been spread over Asia, Africa, and the West Indies, the nutmeg refuses to flourish out of the Malayan Archipelago, except as an exotic, all attempts to introduce it largely into other tropical countries having decidedly failed. The island of Ternate, which is in about the same latitude as Singapore, is said to have been the spot where it was truly indigenous, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... is your rule, that old Laws and Deeds are to come in bar of new, we," cry a multitude of persons,—French Dukes of Nevers, and all manner of remote, exotic figures among them,—"we are the real heirs! Ravensburg, Mark, Berg, Ravenstein, this patch and the other of that large Duchy of yours, were they not from primeval time expressly limited to heirs-male? Heirs-male; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... never have of mushrooms," was one of the descriptions. It was, of course, guessed at once—"Enough;" and could there be a truer compliment to this strange exotic delicacy, which costs nothing but a walk in an early autumnal morning and is more choice than the rarest flavours ever designed by the most inspired of chefs? For certainly there has never been enough of them. I, at any rate, have never had enough. The thought of mushrooms missed must add ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various
... growing up, had developed into a mature beauty that rivaled the exotic loveliness of the wild orchids of Io. And in debarking at the rocket port on a business trip to earth, because hurricanes had forced him to land far south of New York, ...
— The Indulgence of Negu Mah • Robert Andrew Arthur
... fact that the Germans were at that time blind to the transcendent merits of Chopin's genius. The professional critics, after their usual manner, found fault with the very things which we to-day admire most in him—the exotic originality of the style, and the delightful Polish local color in which all his fabrics are "dyed in the wool," as it were. How numerous these adverse criticisms were, may best be inferred from the frequency with which Schumann ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... not find exotic animals, nor even the beasts of heraldry, at all frequently. Leppard, leopard, is in some cases for the Ger. Liebhart; and Griffin, when not Welsh, should no doubt be included among ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... exotic brought unto a foreign strand, She lost her bloom and pined to see once more her native land, And only when from earthly scenes death summoned her to part A blissful smile played round her lips, and ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... our private taste, there is always something a little exotic, almost artificial, in songs which, under an English aspect and dress, are yet so manifestly the product of other skies. They affect us like translations; the very fauna and flora are alien, remote; the dog's-tooth violet ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... her flowers the night of the New York opening, with the name of his club on his card, and she wrote there in acknowledgment. Then, later, twice he sent her books, one a biography, which was a compromise with his conscience, and later a volume of exotic love verse, which was not. As he replied to her notes of thanks a desultory correspondence had sprung up, letters which the world might have read, and yet which had to him the savor and interest ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... possession, that it invests the whole process with a sense of unequaled security. Resembling the work of nature in the simplicity of its growth, it will probably also resemble the work of nature in the permanence of its existence. It is not an exotic, fixed in an unsuitable soil by capricions planting; but a seed self-sown, nurtured by the common air and dews, assimilated to the climate, and strikig its roots deep in the ground which it has thus, by its own instincts, chosen. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... at least, with only the maternal help. For like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower; and so, being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies all over the world; every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as the ardor of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends her solemn pauses; in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated Turk; then a love ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... orchards in the heart of England Roman Catholicism presented itself to Mark's imagination as an exotic. The two words "Roman Catholicism" uttered aloud in the quiet June sunlight gave him the sensation of an allamanda or of a gardenia blossoming in an apple-tree. People who talked about bringing the English Church into line with the trend of Western Christianity lacked a sense of ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... I first taught them to crowd their advertisements with panegyrical superlatives, each epithet rising above the other, like the bidders in their own auction rooms! From me they learned to inlay their phraseology with variegated chips of exotic metaphor: by me too their inventive faculties were called forth:—yes, sir, by me they were instructed to clothe ideal walls with gratuitous fruits—to insinuate obsequious rivulets into visionary groves—to teach courteous shrubs to nod their approbation of the ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... posts. The parking space on Cypress Street, opposite the main entrance of the station—a space usually crowded with commercial cars—was deserted. No private cars were there, either. Spike seemed alone in the drear December night, his car an exotic of ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... of this house, strayed as a child, found by eccentric travellers, taken to England, reared with love and care to strange exotic beauty, marrying a great landowner so lost in passionate devotion that he gave her all he had, and, dying, left her ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... way a marvelous product. It is very beautiful, with the delicate beauty of excessive culture and effete luxury. It has the subtle charm of the exotic, of the tall and graceful arum, whose spotless whiteness cannot bear a single breath of the keen ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... sense is Bohemianism at its best; Bohemianism, not as it is imagined by the dilettante—a thing of picturesque penury and exotic vice—but a spontaneous intermingling of personalities, an understanding, a fraternity as purely a gift of the gods as ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... result of the union. The admission of wealthy capitalists could not be considered a very marked social detraction to the dignity of the order. The question of pedigree might be sunk in an amiable community of taste. In point of lavish expenditure and exotic refinement, in the taste that displayed itself in the patronage of literature, the collection of objects of art, the adornment of country villas, there was little to choose between the capitalist and the noble. And ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... whole corruption is found in these dregs of Achaea? Long since has the Syrian Orontes flowed into the Tiber and brought along with it the Syrian tongue and manners and cross-stringed harp and harper and exotic timbrels and girls bidden stand for hire at the circus." Still, from the facts which have come down to us, we cannot arrive at any definite date at which houses of ill fame and women of the town came into vogue at Rome. That they had long been under police regulation, and compelled to register ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... love of beauty, and received from them British romanticism and sense of responsibility!.... But they only seem to increase the anarchy, these 'foreigners,' and to learn the American twang and method of spitting. And there is the peril of politics. Upon these scattered exotic communities, ignorant of the problems of their adopted land, ignorant even of its language, swoop the agents of political parties, with their one effectual argument—bad whisky. This baptism is the immigrants' only organised ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... to which they were destined. For instance, what could have been a more graceful compliment to the Mniszechs than to lodge them during their visits to Paris, which would of course be frequent, in a set of rooms painted with brilliant exotic butterflies, poised lightly on lovely flowers? Apparently foreseeing, as Balzac remarks, that a "Lepidopterian Georges" would at some time inhabit the mansion, Beaujon had actually provided a beautiful bedroom and a little drawing-room decorated ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... entertainment for the imagination: everything is to be done with which it is natural for the mind to be pleased, whether it proceeds from simplicity or variety, uniformity or irregularity: whether the scenes are familiar or exotic; rude and wild, or enriched and cultivated; for it is natural for the mind to be pleased with all these in their turn. In short, whatever pleases has in it what is analogous to the mind, and is therefore, in the highest and best ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... Huysmans, the Huysmans of A Rebours, and it is just such surroundings that seem to bring out his peculiar quality. With this contempt for humanity, this hatred of mediocrity, this passion for a somewhat exotic kind of modernity, an artist who is so exclusively an artist was sure, one day or another, to produce a work which, being produced to please himself, and being entirely typical of himself, would be, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... companion so courageous, so richly blooded, and highly vitalized as the boy seemed to be. There was a fervid, tropical richness in his air that gave one a sense of warmth in looking at him, and made his Oriental name seem in good-keeping. He seemed an exotic that might have waked up under fervid Egyptian suns, and been found cradled among the lotus blossoms of old Nile; and the fair golden-haired girl seemed to be gladdened by his companionship, as if ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... use of rhetoric, and spoke of suffering, toiling, sorrowing, onward-looking humanity, its impassioned relations, its great wistful heart. Hugh again, could not understand him; he thought that his friend had formed some exotic and fanciful conception, arrived at by subtracting from humanity all that was not pathetic and solemn and dignified, and then fusing the residue into a sort of corporeal entity. He did not see any truth or reality about the conception. It seemed to him as unreal as though one had personified ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... easier digested;" and a kind of herring, and the sparus known upon the Brazilian coast as the "tainha," the West African "vela," and the French "mulet," at times superabound. All the tropical fruits flourish, especially the orange; the exotic vegetables are large and sightly, but tasteless and insipid, especially peas and radishes: the indigenous, as tomatoes, are excellent, but the list is small. Gardens are rare where the soil is so thin, and ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... not dwell 'neath a palace dome, With rare exotic flowers, Whose perfumed splendour gaily gleams In ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... the proprietor at a desk, adding up figures in a large book. He was very fat, and his chins went all the way round his neck in grooves, as if his thick throat might pull out like an accordion. There was something curiously exotic about him, as there is in persons of mixed races; an olive pallor of skin, an oiliness of black hair, and a jetty brightness ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... army, but in 1574 he went to study medicine at Padua. After taking his doctor's degree in 1578, he settled as a physician in Campo San Pietro, a small town in the Paduan territory. But his tastes were botanical, and to extend his knowledge of exotic plants he travelled to Egypt in 1580 as physician to George Emo or Hemi, the Venetian consul in Cairo. In Egypt he spent three years, and from a practice in the management of date-trees, which he observed in that country, he seems to have deduced the doctrine of the sexual ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to."—Bailey cor. "Yet the glorious serenity of its parting rays, still lingers with us."—Gould cor. "Enough of its form and force is retained to render them uneasy."—Maturin cor. "The works of nature, in this respect, are extremely regular."—Pratt cor. "No small addition of exotic and foreign words and phrases, has been made by commerce."—Bicknell cor. "The dialect of some nouns is noticed in the notes."—Milnes cor. "It has been said, that a discovery of the full resources of the arts, affords the means of debasement, or of perversion."—Rush ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... His destination: a small corner delicatessen four blocks south of Wilshire, on Western. Tonight he intended bypassing the larger stores like Safeway or Thriftimart, with their available supplies of exotic foods; a smaller grocery was far more likely to have what he needed. He was finding it more and more difficult to locate basic food stuffs. In the big supermarkets only the more exotic and highly spiced canned and bottled goods remained—and he ...
— Small World • William F. Nolan
... culture and refinement, he accumulated many valuable paintings and rare books, and his gardens, greenhouse and grounds were his particular pride and joy. To a large collection of native American plants and shrubs he added many exotic trees and plants. To him is credited the introduction of the Ginkgo tree and the ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... word of news shocked and held him breathless. Bobby, the little orphan, a frail exotic, had succumbed to the Northern winter. A cold caught in New York had developed into pneumonia, and he died on the passage. Miss Avondale, although she had received marked attention from Sir William, returned to America ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... condescension, of criticism in your bearing to those about you. The critical attitude to society and individuals is a bad one for a successful practitioner of medicine to fall into. It is more than that—it is illiberal; it comes from a continued residence in a highly exotic society, in a narrow intellectual circle. Breadth ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... means sins beyond his fellows. In regard to Latinisms his case is not so good. He constantly uses such words as "clarity" for "clearness," "ferity" for "fierceness" or "wildness," when nothing is gained by the exotic form. Dr. Greenhill's useful glossary to the Religio and the Morals exhibits in tabular form not merely such terms as "abbreviatures," "aequilibriously," "bivious," "convincible," "exantlation," and hundreds of others with which there is no need to fill the page, but also a number only ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... identification cleared up many obscurities in chromospheric chemistry. Several bright lines, persistently seen at the edge of the sun, and early suspected by Young[596] to emanate from the same source as D3, were now derived from helium in the laboratory; and all the complex emissions of that exotic substance ranged themselves into six sets or series, the members of which are mutually connected by numerical relations of a definite and simple kind. Helium is of rather more than twice the density of hydrogen, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... no sectarian name, nor could they have told to what "party" they belonged. They troubled themselves with no theories of education, but mingled gentle nurture with "wholesome neglect." There was nothing exotic or constrained in the growth of Eric's character. He was not one of the angelically good children at all, and knew none of the phrases of which infant prodigies are supposed to be so fond. But to be truthful, ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... on the under side, in the form of radiating plates, or strong folds. The genus Phlebia in the Hydnaceae has the hymenium on smooth, somewhat radiating veins which are interrupted and irregular. One exotic genus has the hymenium on numerous irregular obtuse lobes (Rhacophyllus). ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... Clare," without feeling the tear of sensibility tremble on his eyelids, or the glow of virtuous indignation mantle his cheek, at the low brutality and pitiable jocularity of THE DUTCH FLAT INTELLIGENCER, which the next week had suggested the exotic character of the cypress, and its entire absence from Fiddletown, as a reasonable answer to ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... talked to Lady Anne, who had just come back from Mexico. It was her way to dart about the world, leaving her husband in his arm-chair at the Marlborough. She brought gossip with her from across the seas, gossip about exotic Presidents and their mistresses, about revolutionary generals and explorers, about opera singers in Havana, and great dancers in the Argentine. In her set she was called "the peripatetic pug," but she had none of the pug's snoring laziness. Presently someone took her away to play bridge, ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... Chinese for rice, flourcake, tea, egg, chopsticks, opium, bed, by-and-by, how many, charcoal, cabbage, and customs. My laoban could say in English, or pidgin English, chow, number one, no good, go ashore, sit down, by-and-by, to-morrow, match, lamp, alright, one piecee, and goddam. This last named exotic he had been led to consider as synonymous with "very good." It was not the first time I had known the words to be misapplied. I remember reading in the Sydney Bulletin, that a Chinese cook in Sydney when applying for a situation detailed to the mistress his undeniable qualifications, concluding ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... to Birmingham in 1856, and died suddenly on the evening of Oct. 22, 1883, after delivering a lecture in the Midland Institutes on "Exotic Art." An architect of most brilliant talent, it is almost impossible to record the buildings with which (in conjunction with his partner, Mr. Wm. Martin) he has adorned our town. Among them are the new Free Libraries, the extension of the Midland Institute, ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... the most symmetrical tunnels in solid wood reaches its perfection in the large Virginian Carpenter bee (Xylocopa Virginica, Fig. 19). This bee is as large as, and some allied exotic species are often considerably larger than, the Humble bee, but not clothed with such dense hairs. We have received from Mr. James Angus, of West Farms, N. Y., a piece of trellis from a grape vine, made of ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... receptive sympathy for the rare flood of experiences that his naval life brought on him, experiences which had not fallen to the lot of Bernardin de St. Pierre or Chateaubriand, both of whom he resembles. But neither of those writers possessed Loti's delicate sensitiveness to exotic nature as it is reflected in the foreign mind and heart. Strange but real worlds he has conjured up for us in most of his works and with means that are, as with all great artists, extremely simple. He may be compared to Kipling and to Stevenson: to Kipling, because ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... antagonistic to those claimed for the new art; I was deceived, as was all my generation, by a certain externality, an outer skin, a nearness, un approchement; in a word, by a substitution of Paris for the distant and exotic backgrounds so beloved of the romantic school. I did not know then, as I do now, that art is eternal, that it is only the artist that changes, and that the two great divisions—the only possible divisions—-are: those who have talent, and ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... should have created a form of torture unknown to Louis XI. or to the Spanish Inquisitors, is indeed inexplicable! Outside of this happy land the institution is unknown. The pension when it exists abroad, is only an exotic growth for an American market. Among European nations it is undreamed of; the poorest when they travel take furnished rooms, where they are served in private, or go to restaurants or table d'hotes for their meals. In a strictly continental ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... and have another, for once he starts yarning he is not easily stopped. Wonderful anecdotes he has to relate, too; not perhaps brilliant stories, or even stories with a point of any kind, but stories brimful of atmosphere, stories salt of the sea or scented with exotic bloom. They begin, perhaps, "Once, off Rangoon," or "I remember, a big night in Honolulu," or Mauritius, or Malabar, or Trinidad. Before the warning voice cries, "Time, gentermen!" you have circled the globe a dozen times under the spell of ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... Portsmouth's with a billet; and so tiresomely pressing for an answer, that I was obliged to write without my diamond pen. I have daubed my fingers, I dare say," she added, looking at a very pretty hand, and presently after dipping her fingers in a little silver vase of rose-water. "But that little exotic monster of yours, Empson, I hope she really understands no English?—On my life she coloured.—Is she such a rare dancer?—I must see her dance, and hear him play ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... and trousers that he had found upon a skeleton in the basement of the Urban and District Bank. The women, even Jessica, came in jackets and immense hats extravagantly trimmed with artificial flowers and exotic birds' feather's—of which there were abundant supplies in the shops to the north—and the children (there were not many children, because a large proportion of the babies born in Bun Hill died in a few days' time of inexplicable maladies) had similar clothes cut down to accommodate them; ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... with regard to the city of Paris, it is to be remarked, that in that metropolis flourish a greater number of native and exotic swindlers than are to be found in any other European nursery. What young Englishman that visits it, but has not determined, in his heart, to have a little share of the gayeties that go on—just for once, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the application of labor and science to a limited spot, for convenience, for profit, or for ornament,—though implying a higher state of cultivation, than is common in agriculture. It includes the cultivation of culinary vegetables and of fruits, and forcing or exotic gardening, as far as respects ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... effect, in display, in the art of the show-shop; all of them talented far beyond their genius, out and out VIRTUOSI, with mysterious accesses to all that seduces, allures, constrains, and upsets; born enemies of logic and of the straight line, hankering after the strange, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, and the self-contradictory; as men, Tantaluses of the will, plebeian parvenus, who knew themselves to be incapable of a noble TEMPO or of a LENTO in life and action—think of Balzac, for instance,—unrestrained workers, almost destroying ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... haunts and stuck to the attic studio above the rooms where, in the dawning days of prosperity, he had installed Peter Quick Banta in the effete and scandalous luxury of two rooms, a bath, and a gas stove. Yet the picture advanced slowly which is the more surprising in that the exotic Bobbie seemed to find plenty of time for sittings now. Between visits she took to going to the Metropolitan Museum and conscientiously studying pictures and catalogues with a view to helping her protege form sound artistic ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... views, the exquisite framings of the summer sea and sky made by tree, rock, and rising ground, and the walks so well laid out on the little headland, now on smooth turf, now bordering slopes wild with fern and mountain ash, now amid luxuriant exotic shrubs that attested the ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... movements that they seemed as if dancing through the air. I was not less delighted by the sight of two wild peacocks. It afforded me peculiar pleasure to see these animals in a state of freedom, which we Europeans are accustomed to keep as rarities, like exotic plants. ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... excitement by the contact of the ointment, whence there results to it a full commission or power to cure its cousin-german the blood in the patient's body. This it does by sucking out the dolorous and exotic impression from the wounded part. But to do this it has to implore the aid of the bull's fat, and other portions of the unguent. The reason why bull's fat is so powerful is that the bull at the time of slaughter ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the literature of the new dialect with translations from Shakespeare. To do this successfully would, obviously, be a great gain. The Maalstraevere would thereby prove the capacity of their tongue for the highest, most exotic forms of literature. They would give to it, moreover, the discipline which the translation of foreign classics could not fail to afford. It was thus a renewal of the missionary spirit of Ivar Aasen. And behind ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... it must be brought to the spot and sown; it must be cherished and protected as a stranger. The two occupants of the ground, consequently, are not on equal terms; it is not a fair fight. The thorns are at home; the wheat is an exotic. The thorns are robust and can hold their own; the wheat is delicate and needs a protector. The weeds accordingly grow with luxuriance, while the wheat stalks in the neighbourhood, cheated of their sustenance under ground, become tall, ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Renaissance architect could not well be imagined. The former shaped his material with his own hands; the foster mother of his art was tradition and its cradle the craftsman's bench; whereas the latter, with no builder's training, worked out his flawless and precise plans in the exotic atmosphere of the office and the study. The practice of making working drawings for every detail of the building was the cause of the decline of ornamental sculpture, with the result that all life and growth in the building ceased. Some authorities are very severe on the Renaissance ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... humanity does not always issue without serious blotches, he yet is free from pessimism. He has no nervous disorder, no "brain fag," he is no pagan, not even a nonbeliever, and has happily preserved his wholesomeness of thought; he is averse to exotic ideas, extravagant depiction, and inflammatory language. His novels and tales contain the essential qualities which attract and retain the reader. Some of his works in chronological order, omitting two or three novels, ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... naturalist, born in London; bred a silversmith; took to entomology; published "Illustrations of Natural History"; his principal work "Illustrations of Exotic Entomology" (1725-1803). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... poet, and of no other Oriental who has ever lived can the same be said. When the history of the literature of our country comes to be written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile exotic blossom ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... and expression, that might be adapted to express the American character? And if more pleasing, why cling to the effete and cumbrous tyrannies of a soulless classicism? Why crush out all symptoms of natural growth to make room for the unsightly exotic? ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... comforts. It was perhaps the first time in his prosperous life that he had ever been really crossed. Joe had never attempted to do it, nor any of the first family. They had married, as they had done everything else, according to his dictation; and now here was his useless son, his exotic plant, his Dresden china, not only asserting a will of his own, but meaning to have it; and showing a resolution, a determination equal to his own. His mother had never shown anything of this. She had yielded, as every one else had yielded (Mr. ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... exotic to him as a Japanese doll. Her face was painted in picturesque blotches that reminded him of a toy-shop. Her eyes were made up with a delicate green that gave them an ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... the kind reader of our sober clime This way of writing will appear exotic; Pulci[233] was sire of the half-serious rhyme,[dj] Who sang when Chivalry was more quixotic, And revelled in the fancies of the time, True Knights, chaste Dames, huge Giants, Kings despotic; But all these, save the last, being obsolete, I chose ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... that the bush on which the flowers grew seemed to be the only rose-bush in the region. We looked about us in vain to find another. How had that single rose-bush come to be, an uncompanioned exotic, in the rough society of pines and oaks and hickories, on a rocky hill-top swept by the North wind, and how had those frail, scented petals found strength and courage thus to bloom alone in the doorway of Winter? And, why, out of all the roses of the world, had these two been chosen, ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... need of something to distract her attention by a stroke of exotic brilliancy and by the creation of some new object of hatred. Enmity for ever directed against France, was beginning somewhat to pall. This continually living on the strength of one's old triumphs, made Germany to appear like some much-dyed old dandy, seeking ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... Garden... there was not another like it in Europe. Not one indigenous tree grew there, not one French flower; nothing but exotic plants, gum trees, calabashes, cotton trees, coconut palms, mangos, bananas, cactuses, figs and a baobab. One might have thought oneself in the middle of Africa, thousands of miles from Tarascon. Of course none of these trees was fully grown, the coconut palm ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... not in the mood just now for a whole evening of exotic melodrama might look in at the Globe Theatre about 9.15, and derive a few moments' distraction from a Zulu wedding dance. I found it a better show than anything I have ever seen in the native compounds at Earl's Court. The company, of course, was mixed, but the white contingent had ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... can see how, through the help of all the cheapest and most perishable household wares, the poorest Japanese is able to enjoy that special peculiarity and synthesis of line and colour and perspective which strikes even initiated Westerns as so exotic, far-fetched and almost ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... ticket and pointed the way up the empty crimson-carpeted stairs. His duplicate, on the upper landing, held out a catalogue with an air of recognizing the futility of the offer; and a moment later she found herself in the long noiseless impressive room full of velvet-covered ottomans and exotic plants. It was clear that the public ardor on which Mrs. Davant had expatiated had spent itself earlier in the week; for Claudia had this luxurious apartment to herself. Something about its air of rich privacy, its diffusion of that sympathetic quality in other countries so conspicuously ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... his eyes than the country's cricket averages. As for either social reform interests in England, or the affairs of the Empire outside England, he simply could not be induced to give them even conversational breathing space. They were as exotic to my sister's husband as the ethics of esoteric Buddhism. But he was a thick and thin Conservative. To be sure, he would have said, nothing would cause him to waver ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... system of morality. The penal law (ritsu), although its Chinese original has not survived for purposes of comparison, was undoubtedly copied from the work of the Tang legislators, the only modification being in degrees of punishment; but the code, though it, too, was partially exotic in character, evidently underwent sweeping alterations so as to bring it into conformity with Japanese customs and traditions. Each of the revisions recorded above must be assumed to have ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... and statuary by well-tilled fields: a good example to his wealthy subjects. Unfortunately his bailiff is not what we should call a practical farmer; and many acres of valuable ground are given up to a botanic garden, where exotic plants are grown at great expense, and rather for curiosity than use: a common ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... christening party to which she was invited in the suburb; and, accordingly, after the morning lessons, the pupils were to be dismissed to a holiday. As Fanny now came last, with the hopeless spelling-book, she stopped suddenly short, and her eyes rested with avidity upon a large bouquet of exotic flowers, with which the good lady had enlivened the centre of the parted kerchief, whose yellow gauze modestly veiled that tender section of female beauty which poets have likened to hills of snow—a chilling simile! It was then autumn; ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the primrose is an exotic in American poetry, to say nothing of the snowdrop and the daisy. Its prominence in English poetry can be understood when we remember that the plant is so abundant in England as to be almost a weed, and that it comes early and is very pretty. Cowslip and oxlip are familiar ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... sparkling of water. The course of the river could be traced clear back to the mountains by the winding line of woods that followed its bed. The trees themselves were not like any Kieran had seen before. There seemed to be several varieties, all grotesque in shape and exotic in color. There were even some green ones, with long sharp leaves that ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... May, and London was bright with all the exotic gaiety of the season. The park was crowded with riders at one, and was almost impassable at six. Dress was outvying dress, and equipage equipage. Men and women, but principally women, seemed to be intent ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... the papacy. The Catholics had chosen the alternative, either to crush the free thought which was bursting from the soil, or else to be crushed by it; and the future of the world could not be sacrificed to preserve the exotic graces of mediaeval saints. They fell, gloriously and not unprofitably. They were not allowed to stay the course of the Reformation; but their sufferings, nobly borne, sufficed to recover the sympathy of after-ages for the faith which they professed. ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... unusual for Manville Fenn to set a novel in a boys' boarding school, since I had become used to exotic settings in Malaysia, or South America, for his tension-filled novels. Here he certainly does not disappoint if it's tension and suspense you are expecting of him. The last few chapters, in particular, ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... of rare exotic flowers were erected at intervals along the avenue leading from the castle courtyard down to the bridge that spanned Loch Lone from the island, to the mountain hamlet on the main land. The bridge itself was canopied with evergreens, and starred with roses. Every house in the little ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... indebted to Dr. Hooker for having sent me many plants from Kew; and to Mr. Veitch, of the Royal Exotic Nursery, for having generously given me a collection of fine specimens of climbing plants. Professor Asa Gray, Prof. Oliver, and Dr. Hooker have afforded me, as on many previous occasions, much ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... anything could reconcile the British Radical to his House of Lords, it would be the rankness of taste, the irresponsible freaks of individual caprice, that rule in a country where there is no carefully polished noblesse to set the pattern. George William Curtis puts the case well: "Fine society is no exotic, does not avoid, but all that does not belong to it drops away like water from a smooth statue. We are still peasants and parvenues, although we call each other princes and build palaces. Before we are three centuries old we are endeavouring to surpass, by imitating, the results ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... would be thrown out of employ if the Debt were done away with. What would become of the porcelain manufacture without it?' He would then show the company a flower, the production of his own garden, calling it a unique and curious exotic, and hold forth on his carnations, his country-house, and his old English hospitality, though he never invited a friend to come down to a Sunday's dinner. Mean and ostentatious, insolent and servile, he did not know whether to treat those he conversed with as if they were his porters or his customers. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... recondite—a wealth of metaphor, imagery, allusion, colour and perfume—a palette, a pounce-box, an optical instrument, a sounding-board, a musical box, anything rather than a living tongue. To a later race of stylists, who have gone as far as Samoa and beyond in the quest of exotic perfumery, Borrow would have said simply, in the words of old Montaigne, "To smell, though well, is to stink,"—"Malo, quam bene olere, nil olere." Borrow, in fact, by a right instinct went back to the straightforward manner ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... the stage. No one plays a love scene better, but it is a picture of love that she gives, a strange orchidaceous picture rather than a suggestion of the ordinary human passion as felt by ordinary human people. She is exotic—well, what else should she be? One does not, at any rate one should not, quarrel with an exquisite tropical flower and call it unnatural because it is not a ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... opinions are few in number, they have but little root in the country, and but little power. They are like a religion which has still some temples left standing, though men have ceased to believe in it. But amidst these half-obliterated notions of exotic honor, some new opinions have sprung up, which constitute what may be termed in our days American honor. I have shown how the Americans are constantly driven to engage in commerce and industry. Their origin, their social condition, their political institutions, and even the spot they inhabit, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... now I felt—as I had seen from above—the languorous, sensuous quality of it all. Music, mingled with the ripple of girlish laughter and cheers, came from the houses as we passed. Soft, fragrant flower-petals deluged us. The very air was laden heavy with exotic perfumes from the flowers which ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... American authors. From the inextensive volumes of an eminent and fastidious critic I have culled a dear phrase about an oasis of style in "a desert of literary limpness." But it were hardly courteous, and might be dangerous, to publish these exotic blossoms ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... contend with the five heroic poets, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius. His patron is the accomplished courtier Balthazar Castiglione. His admirers are numerous and passionate. Yet the rigid critics reproach the exotic weeds, or flowers, which spring too luxuriantly in ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... traditions shattered, were, for once, right. They gauged correctly from which direction the wind was blowing. They probably heard, faintly piping in the distance, the pentatonic scales of Moussorgsky and Debussy, the scales of Scriabine and Strawinsky and Ornstein, the barbarous, exotic and African scales of the future, the one hundred and thirteen scales of which Busoni speaks. And to-day there are no longer musical rules, forbidden harmonies, dissonances. Siegfried has broken them along with Wotan's spear. East and West are near to merging once ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... with her sharply outlined, arched, black eyebrows and the extraordinarily soft, bright color of her long, beautiful, expressionless face. Amid the scattered property and the crowd on the open space, she, in her rich satin cloak with a bright lilac shawl on her head, suggested a delicate exotic plant thrown out onto the snow. She was sitting on some bundles a little behind the old woman, and looked from under her long lashes with motionless, large, almond-shaped eyes at the ground before her. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... at him with arch inquiry, and even as she did so, either as the result of something which she read in the watching eyes, or by the action of some mysterious mental power, the pink flamed in her cheek, and lo! she was a rose herself; a wonderful, exotic rose, flaming from red to gold! Guest looked at her for a moment, and then hastily dropped his eyes. He was not by nature an impetuous man, but he had a conviction that if he looked at Cornelia any longer at this moment, he might say something ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... full weight to the two last-named ingredients, they are not more than a counterpoise to Competitive Examination, which is also a recent exotic belonging ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... With very little ceremony, the cadets, Sinclair, George, and his wife sat down to eat. The food was simple fare, but the sure touch of Mrs. Hill's cooking and the free use of delicate Venusian jungle spices added exotic flavor, new but immensely satisfying to the three hungry boys, a satisfaction they demonstrated by cleaning their plates quickly and coming back for second helpings. Astro, of course, was not happy until he had polished off his fourth round. Mrs. Hill ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... The writer who has the most abused this fabulous generosity, is our ingenious Sir William Temple, (his Works, vol. iii. p. 349, 350, octavo edition,) that lover of exotic virtue. After the conquest of Russia, &c., and the passage of the Danube, his Tartar hero relieves, visits, admires, and refuses the city of Constantine. His flattering pencil deviates in every line from the truth of history; yet his pleasing fictions are more excusable than the gross errors ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... regarding this maiden, he would have found that she was from the Chinese settlement in Macassar, and on her way to Canton, to pay a visit to a grandmother she had never seen. But it was Peter's nature to spin little dreams of his own whenever he contemplated exotic young women, to place them in ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... allowed for strange manners, for exotic ideas, and ways not our own. More perhaps is due to what, as Englishmen think, is the lack of HUMOUR in the most brilliant and witty of races. We have friends many in Moliere, in Dumas, in Rabelais; but it is far more difficult to be familiar, at ease, and happy in the circles to ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... Saint Matthew, he had enjoyed a clear vision of Christ's entry into Jerusalem. Making his picture from materials supplied by an article in the People's Encyclopedia, he seemed to be able to see the ancient city and its exotic life as the Redeemer and the disciples must have seen it on that memorable day. Here were the narrow streets and the crowded market-places; the towers and domes; the strangely garbed traders, laden camels, gorgeous Roman soldiers, brown-faced priests, black-bodied slaves; sunlit hills high above ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... in unexampled profusion. After reading Aristotle's ethics, I feel, when I turn to the New Testament, as Linnaeus is said to have felt when he first saw growing wild the masses of blooming gorse, which he had never seen in his cold North, except as a sheltered exotic. Whether it was likely that contemporaries of the Pharisees, who were sunk in formalism, and who had glossed away every moral and spiritual the Law, could reach and maintain such elevation of tone, I leave you to judge." But though ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... partly to the nature of the literary avocations with which the writer is by preference occupied, and partly, no doubt more fundamentally, to the special character of his predominantly esthetic temperament and attraction to the exotic. An attraction for exotic experiences will not, however, suffice to account for the rather late development of homosexual tendencies, a late development which may be held to place this case in the retarded group of inverts. H.C. has himself pointed out to me that ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... problems. Mr. Palford found his charge baffling because, according to ordinary rules, a young man so rudimentary should have presented no problems not perfectly easy to explain. It was herein that he was exotic. Mr. Palford, who was not given to subtle analysis of differences in character and temperament, argued privately that an English youth who had been brought up in the streets would have been one of two or three things. He would have been secretly terrified and resentful, roughly awkward and resentful, ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of refined beauty of feature, but to compare them in a word, Marie Antoinette looks to me like a superb exotic that has come to its brilliant perfection of bloom in a hothouse it would lose its beauty in the strong free air it would change and droop if it lacked careful waiting upon and constant artificial excitement; the other," said Mr. Carleton, musingly, "is a flower of ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell |
