"Freakish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... etc., are well enough as mere nomenclature; and the world falls for the most part, into any names which parties choose to give themselves. Silly people found inferences on this concession; and, as usually happens, they can cite some of their betters. St. Augustine,[47] a freakish arguer, or, to put it in the way of an old writer, lectorem ne multiloquii taedio fastidiat, Punicis quibusdam argutiis recreare solet,[48] asks, with triumph, to what chapel a stranger would be directed, if he inquired the way to the Catholic assembly. But the best exhibition ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... whose sizes are proportionate to the amount of pork per head eaten by the different nationalities. To these queer minds that live on facts (I myself could as easily thrive on a diet of egg-shells) this sort of pictorial information is peculiarly fascinating. But Judith, who like most women has a freakish mental as well as physical digestion, delights in knowing how many hogs a cabinet minister will eat during a lifetime, and how much of the earth's surface could be scoured by the world's yearly output of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... hard labour, and see if that wouldn't dummer a little sense into 'n." There was no suggestion, however, of "a woman in the case," to explain this man's ill-treatment of his wife; it appears to have been simply a piece of freakish brutality. ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... confusion, though, and the spacephone proved it. There were disputes between freakish ships when craft with the astrogational qualities of washtubs tried to keep assigned positions, and failed, and there were squabbles when ships had to pass close together. One had to shut off its drive-field to keep from ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... speech, but none came. It was one of those tense moments on which sometimes hangs the happiness or the misery of a lifetime—a stray thread from the web of Chance, which may be woven into a smooth pattern or knotted into a cruel tangle,—a freakish circumstance in which the human beings most concerned are helplessly involved without any conscious premonition of impending fate. Suddenly, yielding to a passionate impulse, he caught her close in ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... at a gnat and swallow a camel; blow hot and cold; play fast and loose, play fantastic tricks; tourner casaque [Fr.]. Adj. capricious; erratic, eccentric, fitful, hysterical; full of whims &c n.; maggoty; inconsistent, fanciful, fantastic, whimsical, crotchety, kinky [U.S.], particular, humorsome^, freakish, skittish, wanton, wayward; contrary; captious; arbitrary; unconformable &c 83; penny wise and pound foolish; fickle &c (irresolute) 605; frivolous, sleeveless, giddy, volatile. Adv. by fits and starts, without rhyme or reason. Phr. nil fuit ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... our acquaintance with Liosha, she counted in our lives for little more than a freakish interest. Even in the crises of her naughtiness anxiety as to her welfare did not rob us of our night's sleep. She existed for us rather as a toy personality whose quaint vagaries afforded us constant ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... who do not come under any of the usual categories, who display some small or great abnormality which sets them off from the general run of men. That some of these are accounted eccentric is to be explained in the light of man's tendency, as a gregarious animal, to think "queer" and "freakish" anything off the beaten track. Some are clearly and unmistakably abnormal in some physiological or psychological respect. From these are recruited the inmates of our penitentiaries and insane asylums and the candidates for them. But there ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... ease and so the business man sits and loses out on the exercise his body and mind must have, and therefore the great crowd pays tribute to doctors, sanitariums, rest cures, fake tonics, worthless medicines, freakish diet fads, and crazy cults, isms, and discoveries, that claim to bring health by the easy, ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... large tract through which it was thought the railroad, then contemplated, would be likely to run. The railroad changed its mind, as all railroads do, and Mr. Jones's speculation was not so profitable as he had anticipated. It happened that among his friends was a wild, freakish fellow, Charley Davis, who undertook to be on the best of terms with everybody, and had succeeded admirably, with the exception of Justice Witherpee, who, he swore, had swindled him outrageously in a business transaction they had together in getting out lumber. What made it all ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Once this freakish, elvish cast came into the child's eyes while Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and suddenly for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Mr. Woods, as he sat up at the conclusion of the singing vigorously to applaud, would have shared his last possession, his ultimate crust, with that unknown benefactor of mankind. Indeed, though, the heart of Mr. Woods just now was full of loving kindness and capable of any freakish magnanimity. ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... telegraphers familiar with the wireless alphabet were busy trying to reconcile some of the names received with those of persons who went down on the Titanic. That the body of William T. Stead, the English journalist and author, had been recovered by the Mackay-Bennett, but through a freakish error in wireless transmission the name of another was reported instead, was one of the theories advanced by persons ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... to dinner with a pleasant party, Coleridge, Reynolds the dramatist, and Sam Bloxam: to-morrow (that is, today), Liston, and Wyat of the Wells, dine with us. May this find you as jolly and freakish as ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... a boy grows up with open eyes, but more often it turns out as it has in this case. Bob's an alcoholic, a common drunkard, and he'll end in an institution, sure. He'd be there now if it wasn't for Hannibal's money. He's run the gamut of extravagance; he's done everything freakish that there is to do. But that isn't what I want to say to you. Help me feed these ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... untouchable? If there was no Jack Glover we could afford to wait months. And I'm less troubled about him than I am about the man Jaggs. Father, you will be glad to learn that I am almost afraid of that freakish old man." ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... off on a celebration to-night: an unpremeditated, freakish, impish, essentially harmless celebration, with a faint flavour of mischief in it because he had Nan in the back of his head all the time. He played up to Mrs. Morrell with exuberance, with honestly no thought except that he was ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... our furniture than by covering them with the scroll work of the wig-age. This is only an apparent contradiction. It is not the Pigtail but the Rococo that we are reviving so industriously, not the academic constraint of rules, but the subjective arbitrariness, the spirit of the original, freakish types. This untrammeled caprice of the Rococo age seems to us as fresh as nature compared with the well planned symmetry of our modern conditions, which no longer permit one to be a real fool, and therefore do not allow ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... orbs are purged from film, and lo! "Instead of Anster's turnip-bearing vales "I see old fairy land's miraculous show! "Her trees of tinsel kissed by freakish gales, "Her Ouphs that, cloaked in leaf-gold, skim the ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... custom has its good and its bad sides. On the one hand, it supplies the element of discipline; without which any society is bound soon to fall to pieces. We are apt to think of the savage as a freakish creature, all moods—at one moment a friend, at the next moment a fiend. So he might be, if it were not for the social drill imposed by his customs. So he is, if you destroy his customs, and expect him nevertheless to behave as an educated ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... once or twice during the preceding days. It was due to her after his long neglect of her, he told himself, and had found improvement in her. But to-night she seemed to take a freakish pleasure in letting him see that there was much of the old Ann still left in her: the frank conceit of her; the amazing self-opinionatedness of her; the waywardness, the wilfulness, the unreasonableness of her; the general uppishness and dictatorialness of her; the contradictoriness and flat ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... where shapes, though inanimate, are watchful and protean. From that silent world legions of grotesques move out of the shadows at a touch of sunlight, and then, when you turn on them in surprise, become thin and vague, either phantoms or smoke, and dissolve. The freakish light shows in little what happens in the long run to man's handiwork, for it accelerates the speed of change till change is fast enough for you to watch a town grow and die. You see that Dockland is unstable, is in flux, alters in colours and form. I doubt ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... when those hours wane, Indoors they ponder, scared by the harsh storm Whose pelting saracens on the window swarm, And listen for the mail to clatter past And church clock's deep bay withering on the blast; They feed the fire that flings a freakish light On pictured kings and queens grotesquely bright, Platters and pitchers, faded calendars And graceful ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... yet another and very different side to Stevenson which struck others more than it struck myself, namely, that of the freakish or elvish, irresponsible madcap or jester which sometimes appeared in him. It is true that his demoniac quickness of wit and intelligence suggested occasionally a "spirit of air and fire" rather than one of earth; that he was abundantly given to all kinds of quirk and laughter; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... she was exalted, by so much was she dashed. But she had a conscience too, a lively one with a forefinger mainly in evidence. It would be tedious to recount how often that wagged her into acquiescence with a James suddenly revealed freakish, and how often she relapsed into the despair of one sharply rebuffed when she found him sedately himself. However, or by means of her qualities, the time-cure worked its way; her inflammation wore itself out, and her life resumed its routine of dinner-parties, calls and callers, Francis ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... in the river, off Vicksburg, bombarding the town, that river was the Mississippi, but though it looks the same to-day as it did then, it is not the Mississippi now, but the Yazoo River. This comes about through one of those freakish changes of course for which the great ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... that she gave him a rosary—(his first captors coveted that and took care of it). But also they ate together of fruit, and as both ladies and gallants do strange things at strange times, the lady divided the seeds, and counted them seeking a lucky number or some such freakish quest. And by the rosary, and by his mother, she made him swear that when he had found fortune and a plantation in the new world, he would plant with his own hands the seeds there, and send for the lady to come by ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... fail to have been impressed by his intellectual agility in matching odd rhymes. In dash and originality his rhymes out-rank even those in Butler's Hudibras and Lowell's Fable for Critics. We find in Pacchiarotto, for instance, many rhymes of the gayest, most freakish, most grotesque character—"monkey, one key," "prelude, hell-hued," "stubborn, cub-born," "was hard, hazard," all occur in a single stanza. An example of exceptional facility in rhyming is found in "Through the Metidja," where, without ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... fitfully, and we were driven solely by the current. It was dark long before we had neared Fort Douglas and the waters swished past with an inky, glassy sheen that vividly recalled the murky pool about the beaver-dam. And yet I had no fear, but drifted along utterly indifferent to the termination of the freakish escapade in which I had become involved. Nature mercifully sets a limit to human capacity for suffering; and I felt I had reached that limit. Nothing worse could happen than had happened, at least, so I told myself, and I awaited with cynical ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... walked up Fifth Avenue and with little gurgles of enthusiasm Joan halted at every other shop to look at hats that appealed to Martin as absurdly, willfully freakish, and evening dresses which seemed deliberately to have been handed over to a cat to be torn to ribbons, it came back to him that one just such soft spring evening, the year before, he had walked home from the Grand ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... tides, there is a species of goby, which is amphibious. This fish lies in myriads on the mud-banks left uncovered by the ebb of the tide, and moves with great agility on the approach of birds. Nature seems to have made the goby in one of her most freakish moods. It is equally at home in the earth, the air, and the water; and at different times in the day may be observed swimming in the stream, basking upon the surface of the tidal banks, and burrowing deep ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... using black and white, and black and color, with amazing effect. We have black papers patterned in color, and black velvet carpets, and white coated papers sprinkled with huge black polka dots, and all manner of unusual things. It goes without saying that much of this fad is freakish, but there is also much that is good enough and refreshing enough to last. One can imagine nothing fresher than a black and white scheme in a bedroom, with a saving neutrality of gray or some dull tone for rugs, and a brilliant bit of color in porcelain. There is no hint of the mournful in the decorator's ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... know that!" she interrupted. "Only I wish that we had a little longer time. You think that my interest in the people is an amateurish affair, half sentimental and half freakish, don't you? You were probably surprised to hear that I had ever read a volume of political economy in my life. But I have. I have studied things. I have read dozens and dozens of books on Sociology, and Socialism, and Syndicalism, and ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Greek or Roman page At stated hours, his freakish thoughts engage, Even in his pastimes he requires a friend To warn and teach him safely to unbend, O'er all his pleasures gently to preside, Watch his emotions, and ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... of the bridge, where the carriage had come to a stand, the traveler looks along a line of cliffs stretching as far as Tours. Nature in some freakish mood must have raised these barriers of rock, undermined incessantly by the rippling Loire at their feet, for a perpetual wonder for spectators. The village of Vouvray nestles, as it were, among the clefts and crannies of the crags, which begin to describe a bend at the junction ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... into imagination: he has also kept up the habit of dramatising everything, of playing, half consciously, many parts, of making the world "an unsubstantial fairy place." This turn of mind it is that causes his work occasionally to seem somewhat freakish. Thus, in the fogs and horrors of London, he plays at being an Arabian tale-teller, and his "New Arabian Nights" are a new kind of romanticism—Oriental, freakish, like the work of a changeling. Indeed, this curious ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... and Nora stole a look at the small pale face under the sailor hat. It seemed to her that her cousin had somehow grown beautiful in these months of absence. On her arrival in May, Connie's good looks had been a freakish and variable thing, which could be often and easily disputed. She could always make a certain brilliant or bizarre effect, by virtue of her mere slenderness and delicacy, combined with the startling beauty of her eyes and hair. But the touch of sarcasm, of a half-hostile ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... by the tongue of his stepmother, too active- minded not to indulge in freakish sports and experiments in life very astounding to commonplace minds, sometimes when in dire distress even helping himself to his unpaid allowance from his father's mails, and always with buoyant high spirits and unfailing drollery that scandalized the grave ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sport—a hop on the washing-green, under her mulberry-tree. It commenced at four o'clock in the afternoon, and ended with dusk and the bats, and a gipsy fire, and roasting groats and potatoes in the hot ashes, in imitation of the freakish oyster supper which Clary had attended ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... to life again—he whom the Machine had stamped with astute simplicity by the time he was twenty-two, and for ever after left untouched in thought and feeling—Johnny Dromore, who would never pass beyond the philosophy that all was queer and freakish which had not to do with horses, women, wine, cigars, jokes, good-heartedness, and that perpetual bet; Johnny Dromore, who, somewhere in him, had a pocket of depth, a streak of hunger, that was not ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... received with great affability, and served abundantly with all their tired bodies craved. On these kind hosts Elijah, on leaving, bestowed the wish that God might give them but a single head. Now the Rabbi could not hold himself in check any longer, and he demanded an explanation of Elijah's freakish actions. Elijah consented to clear up his conduct for Joshua before they separated from each other. He spoke as follows: "The poor man's cow was killed, because I knew that on the same day the death of his wife had been ordained in heaven, and I prayed to God to accept ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... whom he had lost his heart. Each day, almost each hour, discovered to him some new trait, some unsuspected grace of mind or heart, till, in this glowing girl, so bright, so blithe, so piquant, he had difficulty in recognizing any likeness, save of face and form, to the moody, freakish, melancholy, hysterical, ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... out my watch, and as I did so there flashed on me—in that sudden freakish way which the best ideas affect—a new and brilliant idea for the plot of My Tenant. The whole of the third and concluding act spread itself instantaneously before me. I knew then and there why the play ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the company through half a dozen movements of the manual of arms, next marching the company away in column of fours. The regulars, of course, responded like clockwork. They made a fine appearance as they started off under their freakish second lieutenant. Ere they had gone far Ferrers swung them into column of ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... thereof. A worldful of great life lies before him and his Princess. What limit can we set to their achievement? Of course he was the Fortunate Youth. Of that there is no gainsaying. He had his beauty, his charm, his temperament, his quick southern intelligence—all his Sicilian heritage—and a freakish chance had favoured him from the day that, vagabond urchin, he attended his first and only Sunday-school treat. But personal gifts and favouring chance are not ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... ready, crouched close to the window of her room, when the signal came, but first she was not sure, because the sound was as faint as a memory. Moreover, it might have been a freakish whistling in the wind, which rose stronger and stronger. It had piled the thunder-clouds high and higher, and now and again a heavy drop of rain tapped at her window like ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... a great encyclopaedia he was making. He didn't like romance, loved the truth, and wanted to get to the bottom of every thing. He was always trying to make little Fancy more sober, well-behaved, and learned; for she was a freakish, dreamy, yet very lovable and charming child. Aunt Fiction petted her to her heart's content, and might have done her harm, if Uncle Fact had not had a hand in her education; for the lessons of both were necessary to her, as to ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... part it was a peculiar wooing, a series of morbid misgivings as to the force of his affection, of alternate ardor and coldness, advances and withdrawals, and every variety of strange language and freakish behavior. In the course of it, oddly enough, his omnipresent competitor, Douglas, crossed his path, his rival in love as well as in politics, and ultimately outstripped by him in each alike. After many months of this queer, uncertain zigzag progress, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... fantastic in substance, more wild and whimsical in rhythm, than elsewhere in his music; and indeed, as Pachmann played them, they were strange and lovely gambols of unchristened elves. But in the Scherzo he mastered this great, violent, heroic thing as he had mastered the little freakish things and the trickling and whispering things. He gave meaning to every part of its decoration, yet lost none of the splendour and wave-like motion of the whole tossing ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... not sunshine: the character of the sovereign in a despotism demands perpetual study; and Paul was freakish and headstrong beyond all human calculation. No man was more misunderstood at a distance, nor less capable of being understood near. He had some striking qualities. He was generous, bold, and high-principled; but the simplest accident would turn all those qualities into their reverse. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... like me to live a week. But this is not all. For spring or June brides of the "swell London sassiety set," fine white silk stockings cost $22.50 a pair must go with a wedding gown and trousseau equally as extravagant, the climax of fashion's freakish ways being the rose-made garter worn over said stockings. Parisian society which smells to heaven in fashionable odors has now originated garters made of primroses, harebells, narcissus, violets and lillies, the same being worn by ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... well knew, was always a freakish thing, and apt to rise or fall at any time, according to the amount of rainfall along ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... intention of keeping her freshman in the background. All through the reception that preceded the dancing she took her from group to group, introducing her to sophomores whom she would dance with later and to prominent members of her own class. Eleanor Watson might be considered odd and freakish by the Hill girls, and very snobbish by the rest of the college; but nobody of either persuasion cared to ignore her, when she chose to make advances. And there was, besides, a good deal of curiosity about the short, dark little freshman, with the merry brown eyes, the big, ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... our old friend Laurie, but comely and genial as ever; for time had ripened the freakish boy into a noble man. Care and sorrow, as well as ease and happiness, had done much for him; and the responsibility of carrying out his grandfather's wishes had been a duty most faithfully performed. Prosperity suits some ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... strapping lads, built on their vigorous father's model, were considered the best- looking young men in the county, and by their fond mother were judged as the best-hearted; but, as it often happens, Nature was freakish in their regard, and turned them all out wild colts of a baser breed than might have been expected from their unsullied parentage. The eldest took to hard drinking and was killed at steeple-chasing; the second was drowned while bathing; one of the twins, named Frederick, the younger ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... the places to which he came, probably because we thought ourselves too good to stand at a distance, and could make no pretension to obtain a closer intimacy with him. This momentary absurdity, which, however, is nothing rare in presuming and freakish youth, proved, indeed, its own punishment in the sequel; for I have never set eyes on that eminent man, who was most highly esteemed ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... catastrophes was curiously mixed. Perhaps the comedy in it tended to obscure the utter degradation of the ruin she described. But the freakish incongruity of the speech did not strike Hyacinth. He found in it only two notes—pity that such a fate awaited him, and contempt for the man who ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... of parental opposition, I loved Jimmie, is not hard to guess. He had an odd and freakish humor, and talked more of Indian-fighting, filibustering in gold-bearing regions, and of moving accidents by flood and field, than of crops, live-stock, or bowery dances. He liked me just as did the older men who sent me to the National Convention,—in ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... surface to breathe. And when one had once walked down the steps and found one's way into the tank, it was an extremely pleasant one, and quite artistic. It seemed original, too. There was something almost freakish in being answered by the parlourmaid (who was suitably like a fish in manner and profile), "Miss Luscombe is at home, and will you please step downstairs?" when one had rung the bell on the ground floor. And Miss Luscombe's ringing laugh with its three soprano notes and upward cadence ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... father. He asked about you, and when I told him you were not so well as usual, he said he would call you up. He wants to tell you about some doctor he discovered in Iowa, who cures everything with massage and hot water. It sounds freakish, but Mr. Lane is a very ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... Why, to confess the truth, my dear Mac, those old sinners, Lord Freakish, General Jolly, Sir Antony Soaker, and two or three more of that set, laid hold of me last night at the opera,—and, as the General says, 'from the intelligence of my head this morning,' I believe we drank pretty deep ere ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... do I smile when I should sigh? And wherefore do I feed when I would fast? And wherefore do I dance when I should pray? And wherefore do I live when I should die? Canst answer that, good Sir? O there are women The world deem mad, or worse, whose life but seems One vile caprice, a freakish thing of whims And restless nothingness; yet if we pierce The soul, may be we'll touch some cause profound For what seems causeless. Early love despised, Or baffled, which is worse; a faith betrayed, For vanity or lucre; chill regards, ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... who had passed all their days in the desolation of Aigues-Mortes, the little fortified, derelict city in the salt marshes of Provence. Although they regarded him with the same unimaginative wonder as a pair of alligators might regard an Argus butterfly, their undoubted but freakish progeny, and although Aristide soared high above their heads in all phases of thought and emotion, the mutual ties remained strong and perdurable. Scarcely a year passed without Aristide struggling somehow south to visit ses vieux, as he affectionately called them, and whenever Fortune ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... liable to be driven, at the bidding of some dark primeval impulse, to divest herself of her raiment—a singularity which perturbed even the hardiest of social night-birds who had the misfortune to encounter her. Taxed with this freakish behaviour, she would refer to the example of St. Francis of Assisi who did the same, and brazenly ask whether he wasn't good enough for them? Whether she couldn't give her last shirt to a beggar, as well as anybody else? In short, there was nothing ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... spoiled child, Zarah, and dost but abuse the indulgence I entertain for your freakish humour," replied Christian; "thy wits have been disturbed since ever you landed in England, and all for the sake of one who cares for thee no more than for the most worthless object who walks the streets, amongst whom he left you to engage in ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... of races or to some other cause, there is a singular variety of flesh-tints among the bathers here. I wish my old friend Dr. Bowles could have seen it; we used to be deeply immersed, both of us, in the question of the chromatophores, I observing their freakish behaviour in the epidermis of certain frogs, while he studied their action on the human skin and wrote an excellent little paper on sunburn—a darker problem than it ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... principally for himself. Then, he wrote waywardly and unequally as well as selfishly; he published pretty much at random; the bulk of his work is large; and the majority has passed him by for writers more accessible and work less freakish and more comprehensible. It is probable too that even among those who, inspired by natural temerity or the intemperate curiosity of the general reader, have essayed his conquest and set out upon what has been described as 'the Adventure of the Seven Volumes which are Seven Valleys ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... and laid out with the regularity of a garden; after admiring the cultivation, beauty, and skill exhibited on every hand, until almost wearied with viewing the creations of art; the eye at once falls upon a scene in which is crowded all the wildness and abruptness of nature in one of her most freakish moods—a scene which seems to defy the hand of cultivation and the graces of art. We ascended a hill on the border of this section, which afforded us a complete view. To describe it in one sentence, it is an immense basin, from two to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... enough to dispel the suspicion. At least the petted and rather fastidious Miss Brewster's fancy would be captured only by a gentleman, not by any such homunculus as the mountain dweller. Her interest, perhaps; the man possessed the bizarre attraction of the freakish. But anything else was absurd. And the knight was inclined to attaint his lady for a certain cruelty in the matter; she was being something less than fair to ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... be a book, on the perusal of which I was bent; so for once I proved as decided and quicker than himself; recaptured the spoil, and—having saved this volume—never hazarded a second. With all this, I had never yet been able to arrest in his visits the freakish, friendly, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... from attic to basement, and though it was Christmas Eve, the air was like spring, for nature sometimes turns freakish, and smiles on us when we are expecting the cold shoulder. Here and there, a window was open, for the Derings always did love plenty of air; and so a merry sound of laughter and gay voices was wafted out into the night air, and the old trees rustled joyfully, as though the sound were a familiar ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... freakish in her choice of instruments for noble purposes. Sometimes the delicate spirit of creative genius is housed in a veritable tenement of clay, so that what is within seems ever at war with what is without. At times the antagonism is more ...
— A Day with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy • George Sampson
... for Tusitala? It is a happy circumstance, we say, for a youth, before the multiplying responsibilities of maturity press upon him, to pour out his enthusiasm in an obsession such as that; and when this passion can be shared and doubled and knitted in partnership with an equally freakish, insane, and innocent idiot (such as our generously mad friend Mifflin) admirable adventures are sure to follow. The quest begun on Darby Creek took us later on an all-summer progress among places in England and Scotland hallowed to us by association with R. ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... People who are naturally queer or freakish are always hiding things. And I know it's silly of me, but I'm going to try to find ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... that," he said. "It was not like Jack o' Judgment to do freakish things. He has an object ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... was not a good one at all, for no lump of ice cream ever remained long intact where Pee-wee was. Whether it melted or not, it disappeared. And why this freakish little island did not ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... and of his marvellous genius and skill in adapting and transmuting for his own purposes the labours of other workers in the field that for the moment engaged his attention. Most of Shakespeare's sonnets were produced in 1594 under the incitement of that freakish rage for sonnetteering which, taking its rise in Italy and sweeping over France on its way to England, absorbed for some half-dozen years in this country a greater volume of literary energy than has been applied to sonnetteering within the same space of time here or elsewhere before or since. The ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... say, she they call Fortune is a drunken, freakish dame, and withal so blind that she does not see what she is about; neither whom she raises, nor ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... poems over yonder in the small cabinet. Would that he had given us more! Most of them are the merest playful sallies of a freakish mind. But one should, indeed, be a classic, for it is in my judgment by all odds the best narrative ballad of the last century—that is if I am right in supposing that "The Ancient Mariner" appeared at the very end of the eighteenth. ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thou didst show some vanity and petulance under such distinction, it were injustice not to say that thou hast profited both in thy exercises and in thy breeding, and hast shown many sparkles of a gentle and manly spirit. Moreover, it were ungenerous, having bred thee up freakish and fiery, to dismiss thee to want or wandering, for showing that very peevishness and impatience of discipline which arose from thy too delicate nurture. Therefore, and for the credit of my own household, I am determined to retain thee ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... Engleton, in speaking of him afterwards to Hadria, "it is strange that his cleverness does not come to the rescue; but so far from that, I think it leads him a wild dance over boggy ground, like some will-o'-the-wisp, but for whose freakish allurements the good man might have trodden a quiet and ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... still and evermore Broadway rejected him with curt glances and sardonic smiles. He was the oldest of the "gags" that the city must endure. He was so flagrantly impossible, so ultra rustic, so exaggerated beyond the most freakish products of the barnyard, the hayfield and the vaudeville stage, that he excited only weariness and suspicion. And the wisp of hay in his hair was so genuine, so fresh and redolent of the meadows, so clamorously rural that even a shell-game ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... his sorrow a freakish whim came into the head of Odysseus, characteristic of his subtle and tortuous nature. Approaching his father, who was still stooping over his work, he said to him in a disguised voice: "Old man, I perceive that thou ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... began to happen again. Breakfast was eaten first, and then Jack, who had been assisting George examine his motor, discovered the cause of the unfortunate stop, so that the freakish engine was now apparently ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... of water-cut pillars and heaps of sandstone so bewildering that Bud afterward swore that in spite of the fact that he was leading Sunfish, he frequently found himself at that patient animal's tail, where they were doubled around some freakish pillar. Frequently Eddie stopped and peered past his horse to make sure that Bud had not lost the trail. And finally, because he was no doubt worried over that possibility, he knotted his rope to his saddle horn, brought back a length that reached a full pace ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... twenty cents. I consider that I had pretty fair luck for bass fishing. You know how freakish they are about biting. I had made up my mind I'd give them a whirl to-morrow, but now I find it will be impossible. My other engagements ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... Charles's approval, he left religion, he might be a prince, perhaps a king. He had thus every imaginable motive for behaving with decorum—in religion or out of it. Yet, if he is the Naples pretender, he suddenly left the Jesuits without Charles's knowledge and approval, but by a freakish escapade, like 'The Start' of Charles himself as a lad, when he ran away from Argyll and the Covenanters. And he did this before he ever saw Teresa Corona. He reminds one of the Huguenot pastor in London, whom an acquaintance met on the Turf. 'I not preacher now, I gay dog,' explained the ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... mother rose, and ever kept her eyes Upon her little child. "You freakish maid," Said she, "now mark me, if I call you one, You shall not scold nor ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... his chums and answered back. Then the car lost the slow-moving buggy on the road. Frank did not dare drive very fast. He was not familiar with the machine; and besides, possibly it was acting freakish—at least the man declared that it had jumped aside straight at that tree without his doing anything. On his part Frank accepted this version with a grain of allowance; for he had long since scented liquor around, and could guess the real ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... his qualities, and nature drove them inward, concentrating, fortifying, intensifying them; to a not wholly normal or healthy brain, freakish and without consecution, adding a stammering tongue which could not speak evenly, and had to do its share, as the brain did, 'by fits.' 'You,' we find Lamb writing ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... heel and went; he felt that at last Evadna was looking at him, though he would not turn to make sure. And his instinct told him withal that he must ignore her mood if he would win her from it. With a freakish impulse, he headed straight for the campfire and Miss Georgie, but when he came up to her the look she gave him of understanding, with sympathy to soften it, sent him away again ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... thoughts the impulse was like a mad, freakish intruder, and it frightened him, so that he drew ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... on the occasion to have rendered himself, by his assumption of independent power, liable to a capital penalty. Posterity will be inclined to transfer the actual condemnation to the commander-in-chief, whose freakish pique stopped only short of an outrage. But Essex had the fortune or misfortune to have all his errors popularly accounted virtues. In relating this occurrence, for instance, Vere, though he admits the matter was 'grievously aggravated by the most,' speaks of Ralegh's ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... turned into the garden. The shadows of the ilex-avenue chequered her straw bonnet, her prim black cape, her white skirt. There had been no meddling of freakish hands with her dark hair this morning. It was tightly plaited at the back of her head. Her plain sun-shade, her black kid gloves were ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... blunted the keen edge of his emotions; even the care for Quain became a mere dull ache in the back of his perceptions; of physical suffering he was unconscious. He fell a prey to freakish fancies—could stand aside and watch himself, an atom whirling in the mad dance of the tempest, as the snow-flakes whirled, as little potent. He saw himself pitting his puny strength of mind and body against the infinite ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... But I should smother myself in mud of my own making. I mean to come to Boston soon, not for a week but for a single day, and then I can talk about my sanitary prospects more freely than I choose to write. I am not low-spirited, nor fanciful, nor freakish, but look what seem to be realities in the face, and am ready to take whatever may come. If I could but go to England now, I think that the sea voyage and the 'Old Home' might ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... master only when he deals with pure literature, but he has a large vein of satiric humor that found its best expression in the grotesque irony of "Murder as One of the Fine Arts." In this essay he descants on the greatest crime as though it were an accomplishment, and his freakish wit makes this paper as enjoyable as Charles Lamb's essay on the origin of ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... the while the instincts of the masses were sounder in this respect than the precepts of their guides. While polygamy remained a freakish and exceptional practice, the passions of the age were absorbed to a high degree by monogamous marriage. Matrimony having been just restored to its proper dignity as the best estate for man, its praises were {508} sounded highly. The church, indeed, remained true to ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... still his fervours left them calm— Emotion they considered freakish;— He felt with many an inward qualm That he was thoroughly un-beakish; His mood perplexed them; he was half Provocative, half deferential, Too anxious to provoke a laugh, Too ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various
... expected to take care of Crookhorn,—Kjersti and she both thought she ought to do that; but it had proved to be impossible. Crookhorn had become so freakish that sometimes they almost thought her out of her wits. In the building shared by the sheep and goats she ranged back and forth from wall to wall, knocking against the sheep and the other goats so hard as she went that their ribs rattled. At last she had to be tied to ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud
... might be death, death in its most awful form. Suddenly, a little goat jumped in three bounds to the bench, and smelt at Stephanie, who waked at the sound. She sprang to her feet, but so lightly that the movement did not frighten the freakish animal; then she caught sight of Philippe, and darted away, followed by her four-footed friend, to a hedge of elders; there she uttered the same little cry like a frightened bird, which the two men had heard near the other gate. Then she climbed an acacia, ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... of something funny. You know, my memory is still freakish, and things come back in splotches. Just now I was recalling a primitive Brazilian tribe in whose language the word 'we' means also 'good. 'Others,' which they express by saying 'not we,' means also 'evil.' Isn't that a funny trait of early man—we—good; not we—bad! I suppose ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... on, to silent shades, To glist'ning streams, and sunlit glades, Where all that woodland life can give, Renders it bliss indeed, to live. Come, ye who love the shadowy wood, Whate'er your days, whate'er your mood. And join us, freakish knights that be Of grey-goose wing, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... exclamation of surprise: this time, freakish chance had willed that the block of marble should move under his fingers! Safety, flight became possible. In that case, why submit to Holmlock ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... definite date. I suppose they want to take us unawares, to see that I don't 'frame-up' any game on them. Well, I'll be ready any time they come. Now, Koku, bring along those shells, and don't drop any of them, for that new powder is freakish stuff." ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... no use in that," said he, quite slowly. "If this thing is what it appears to be, if it isn't merely some freakish bit of stone weathered off somewhere, why, it means—my God, what doesn't ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... the husband of one of the ladies had shown fight until he had been felled by a blow from the butt end of a revolver. The coachman had discreetly made no resistance. Then, after securing the jewels the women wore, the Pirate had displayed a freakish humour quite new to his character. He had insisted upon the two women dancing for his amusement in the road, threatening to shoot the husband if they did not comply with his request. They assured me that he had sat ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... in the language of music—I now have a story to tell you of a certain freakish character; and then we are regaled with the musical portrayal of a series of Till's pranks. As an Epilogue, Strauss improvises on this opening theme as much as to say—you have listened to my musical story, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... prominent cheek-bones, laughing lips and rather broad nose, that gave it a wild-wood, voluptuous expression, reminded the painter of the faun of the Borghese, a cast of which he had seen and been struck with admiration for its freakish charm. A faint down of moustache accentuated the curve of the full lips. A bosom that seemed big with love was confined by a crossed kerchief in the fashion of the year. Her supple waist, her active limbs, her whole vigorous body expressed in every movement a wild, delicious ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... Once, this freakish, elvish cast came into the child's eyes, while Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and, suddenly,—for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions,—she ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and ragged; shorn of its emerald beauty. A high fog filtered the late afternoon light to show Mr Barelli's task accomplished and the curious watchers gone. It was no smoothly clipped carpet, yet it was no longer a freakish, exotic thing. Rather forlorn it looked, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... relationship; the other is to be discovered, like the infant Moses, at the very outset of one's career. Mervyn Quentock had chosen the latter and happier manner. In an age when many aspiring young men strive to advertise their wares by imparting to them a freakish imbecility, Quentock turned out work that was characterised by a pleasing delicate restraint, but he contrived to herald his output with a certain fanfare of personal eccentricity, thereby compelling an attention which might ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... shimmering white surface of a dry lake caught his angry eye. As he looked, it began to rock gently from side to side. Presently, in a freakish spirit of its own, it curled up at the edges. Later, it seemed to turn into a dimpling sheet of water, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... Histoire d'Israel may almost be called skittish. The French are more tolerant of those excesses than the English. It is a digression, but he who would fail can reach his end by not taking himself seriously. If he gives himself no important airs, whether out of a freakish humour, or real humility, depend upon it the public and the critics will take him at something under his own estimate. On the other hand, by copying the gravity of demeanour admired by Mr. Shandy in ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... school, but she wouldn't stay. She likes her home and she hates rules. She loves animals, and if she were a boy she would practice medicine. Being a woman and having no outlet for her energies, she is freakish. You saw the way she was ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... do the math? There may be a counter to this device. Perhaps Talents, Incorporated, was sent to us to get us to adopt this freakish trick." ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... just the gloom of those dark woods, the play of some freakish and deceptive shadow conjuring itself into a human presence, that he had seen.... Who would be out in that lonely wood on such ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... man smiled and frowned and sighed and laughed in the space of thirty seconds—something of a feat in the way of emotional gymnastics. The freakish feminine nature perplexed him as it had perplexed Adam, and he could not understand this rapid change from poetry to prose. How could it be otherwise, when he was but five-and-twenty, and engaged for the first time? Threescore years and ten is all too short ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... Vanini's "Amphitheatrum," or the English translation of Bruno's "Spaccia della Bestia Trionfante," are more or less rare, and more or less curious. Wild books, like William Postel's "Three Marvellous Triumphs of Women," are "curious." Freakish books, like macaronic poetry, written in a medley of languages, are curious. Books from private presses are singular. The old English poets and satirists turned out many a book curious to the last degree, and priced at a fantastic value. Such are "Jordan's Jewels of ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... is high-toned and esthetic. Perhaps that is the main reason why he is so often reluctant to give it up and be cured. He may display morbid fears and fancies that border on lunacy, and he may do some freakish and atrocious things, but for all that he is usually a man of good points and perhaps superior attainments. Our cult is respectable and made up of gentlemen who seldom defile their mouths or stomachs with tobacco, cigarettes, impure words or ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... shafts of shapely stone, By foliaged tracery combined; Thou would'st have thought some fairy's hand, Twixt poplars straight, the osier wand, In many a freakish knot, had twined; Then framed a spell, when the work was done, And ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... forget my first glimpse of him. He strolled into the city room from his little domicile across the hall. A shabby, disreputable, out-at-elbows office coat was worn over his ultra-smart street clothes, and he was puffing at a freakish little pipe in the shape of a miniature automobile. He eyed me a moment from the doorway, a fantastic, elfin little figure. I thought that I had never seen so strange and so ugly a face as that of this ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... of reminiscent detachment the wearer of the Peacock feather describes himself as "one whom Fate in one of her freakish moods had wedded to the roads, the highways and hedges, the fields and woods. Once Cupid had touched him with his wing—the merest flick of a feather. The man—poor fool!—fancied himself wounded. Later when he looked for the scar, he found there ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... or loveliness of the place, but by its absolute uniqueness, its total unlikeness to any other on the face of the globe, its kinship with the few incomparable marvels Nature has given us; creations of her mysterious, freakish, daemonic humour. Strange that a neighbourhood so weird should have exercised only a wholesome influence on the character of the people! As far as we can judge, no franker, cheerier, more straightforward folks are to be found in France, to say nothing of that little ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... way, or a church steeple when he is flying low; but his greatest dangers are in the clear air itself, where they cannot be detected. He may suddenly drop into a 'hole,' which is really a downward current of air, or he may get a terrific bump when he strikes a rising current. A freakish whim of the winds may unexpectedly take away the air support from under one of the wings, and he will lurch and dip ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... righteous attraction. As he reminded himself, if you put your will to work on a difficult action you were fain to commit, after a while the will worked automatically and your mind functioned without aid from you, and the action bloomed of itself. This kinetic process was a constant device of the freakish impulse that he called his devil. He deliberately ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... dumb, white look of pain and bewilderment had frozen on her face. Had not that something, akin to anger, which her nature had felt to be emanating from him remained so potently to oppress her, she could almost have thought the thing a joke—some freakish mood of playfulness after all the other moods he had shown. But no such thought was possible. The glitter in his eyes had been unmistakable. Then, what ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... because thirteen men had sat down to that table, or because the Fates were unusually freakish that day, it was destined that, beyond the initial glass of whisky, not a man present should partake of Captain Benson's dinner. On deck things had been happening, and just as the host had filled the last plate for himself, a wet, bedraggled, dirty little ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... the strange light broke from the wizard's tomb! Who, like Sir Walter, could draw a mullioned window, with its 'foliaged tracery,' its 'freakish knots,' its pointed and moulded arch, and its dyed and pictured panes? We passed, of late, an hour amid the ruins of Crichton, and scarce knew whether most to admire the fine old castle itself, so worthy of its poet, or the exquisite picture of it ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... were not for the disablement of Russia, the battle against autocracy would have been won by now. As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... Mac Tavish. He wondered what sudden, devil-may-care whimsy was this that was galloping him away from business and politics and every other sane subject! He was conscious that there was in him a freakish and juvenile ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... of life appears to have been compounded of an almost brutal licentiousness, a strong love of power, and a strange, freakish longing for something new. Her political ambitions were checked by the rising discontent of her people, who began to look down upon her and to feel ashamed of her shame. Knowing herself as she did, she ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... Germany, Sweden, Scotland, Wales, or our own peculiar mining districts in England be the locale of such, still may be discovered, under different names indeed, and circumstances, the demons of the mines, the guardians of hidden treasures, the freakish dwarfs and fays, who delight in unexpectedly enriching the poor and virtuous, whilst they delude most miserably all idle and worthless treasure-seekers, &c. Nay, what, we may inquire, are the oriental genii of kings, and lamps, &c., ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... neither he nor the man who came out of the doorway to meet him saw the slight figure that crouched against the wall close by the door they had to enter. And if they had seen it, what would they have thought? That the idiot boy was only more freakish than usual, or was waiting about for the dime which was the usual pay for his services. Neither the clouds, nor the trees, nor the surrounding darkness would have whispered that an eager woman's heart beat under that boy's jacket, and that they had better trust the wind in its ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... tame and train a fine but unbroken colt, of which he was very fond. The knight agreed to try, and got on slowly but surely, for the colt was a gallant fellow, and soon learned to love his new master, though he was freakish and wild. Every day, when he gave his lessons to this pet of the king's, the knight rode him through the city, and as he rode, he looked everywhere for a certain beautiful face, which he had seen many times in his dreams, but never found. ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... home. He looks down upon the green square with the slim, quaint, black, young figures that cross it on the way to chapel on yellow Sunday mornings, or upwards to the dome, the spire; can watch them closely in freakish moonlight, or flickering softly by an occasional bonfire in the quadrangle behind him. Yet how hard, how forbidding sometimes, under [228] a late stormy sky, the scheme of black, white, and grey, to which the group of ancient ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... deposits were freakish and unaccountable. Sometimes the best diggings were a mother lode at the head of a creek. Sometimes they were found fifty feet under clay at the foot of a creek where the dashing waters swerved round some rocky point into a river. Old miners ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... into the stomach and intestines—caused intestinal obstruction and finally the end came; and we registered one more victim to the fallacies of fear and the superstitious belief in "cravings" and "markings." Occasionally some cravings are unusual and freakish, for instance, egg shells, leather, candles, chalk, and other abnormal tastes are developed. Of these we have only to say, "Rise above them, become mistress of the situation and change your longings." If such abnormal ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... description of the then existing conditions, in so far as this is still possible. Lippert, Hagedorn, Oeser, Dietrich, Heinecken and Oesterreich loved, practised and promoted art, each in his own way. Their purposes were restricted, their maxims were one-sided, yea, very often, freakish. They circulated stories and anecdotes, the varied application of which was intended not only to entertain but also to instruct society. From such elements arose the earliest treatises of Winckelmann, which he himself very soon found unsatisfactory, as indeed he did not conceal ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... frisky gobblers they have shared in, to be sure! They prance and amble over the pavements as if they had absorbed the very soul of Chanticleer, and fancied themselves once more princes of the barnyard. The most singular and freakish of the turkey's manifestations this, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... history, none is more remarkable than the arrival at Hampton Roads on the night of March 8, 1862, of the strange and freakish-looking craft known as the Monitor. Proposed to the Navy Department in the preceding fall by John Ericsson, in spite of sneers and doubts, a contract was given him in October to construct a vessel after his design. The form of the Monitor is too well known to need description—"a cheese-box ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... silk, and Nell said it was cut in a style so disgracefully freakish that she would not let Sally wear it. It was bought at one of those ultra-shops on Fifth Avenue where they have styles for children that ape the ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose
... that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. I mean that a volleyer must always cover the straight passing shot since it is the shortest shot with which to pass him, and he must volley straight to his opening and not waste time trying freakish curving volleys that give the base- liner time to recover. It is Johnston's great straight volley that makes him such a dangerous net man. He is always "punching" his volley straight and hard to the opening in his ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... with a sense of humour of all the men of genius who have ever lived. The poet Wordsworth had more. But like so many poetic natures, whose vivid imagination lends itself to every sort of human reaction, even to those not really indigenous, Victor Hugo cannot resist in indulging in freakish sallies of jocularity which sometimes become extraordinarily strained and forced, and even remind one now and then of the horrible mechanical smile on the countenance of the mutilated man in ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Fitting the freakish antics of the red light, a carnival spirit, hard to rouse in northern hearts, awakened within this crowd of Devon men and women, old men and children. There was in their exhilaration some inspiration from the joyous circumstance they celebrated; and something, too, from the barrel. Dancing began ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... "Line up here and I'll introduce you to the bunch. The skinny fellow over there by the boiler is Chief Rain-in-the-Face. The one next to him is Slivers. The freakish looking gentleman standing at my right is Krao, the Missing Link. On ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... whist, and stimulate their intelligence by playing at stakes which would make their seniors look pale; here matches are made; and odds are settled, and the cares or enterprises of life are soothed or stimulated by fragrant cheroots or beakers of Badminton. Here, in the society of the listless and freakish St. Aldegonde, and Hugo Bohun, and Bertram, and other congenial spirits, Lothair consigned to oblivion the rival churches of Christendom, the Aryan race, and the genius ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... black and tan dog, with the long body, wavy hair, drooping silken ears, and richly feathered tail of a Gordon setter, most grotesquely supported, at a height of not more than eight inches from the ground, by the little bow-legs of a dachshund. This freakish and sinister-looking animal gazed at the visitor with eyes of sagacious welcome, tongue hanging amiably half out, and tail gently waving. He approved of this particular Boy, though boys in general he regarded as nuisances to be tolerated rather than ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... on the bank of the canal this evening before bedtime and we'll have a lark," reflected Walker Farr as he toiled in the hot trench. And he stopped quizzing himself as to the whys of this sudden devotion to a freakish notion. He seemed ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... included, as was only natural, the most personally distinguished group. First of them should be named the Provost of Trinity, Dr. Mahaffy, under whose aegis we assembled—a great scholar and a great Irishman. He brought with him an element of independent unregimented political thought—often freakish in expression, but based on a vast knowledge of men and countries. In a more practical sense, Lord MacDonnell and Lord Dunraven were our chief political theorists, devisers by temperament of constitutional machinery. Lord MacDonnell's repute as an administrator, Lord Dunraven's as a leading ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... whose storehouses now the English held. They hung their borrowed banqueting-hall with garlands of flowers, upon the long table put great candles of virgin wax, with gold and silver drinking-vessels, and brought to the revel of the night a somewhat towering, wild, and freakish humor. Victory unassuaged was theirs, and for them Fortune had cogged her dice. They had taken the San Jose and sunk the caravels, they had sacked the pearl-towns and Nueva Cordoba, they had gathered laurels for themselves and England. For the ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... superficially. Rousseau's idea permitted the teacher to treat the child as an individuality, studying the traits and peculiarities of the pupil, building up where weakness appeared, and directing freakish notions and ideas into conventional channels. The modern city school with one teacher and forty pupils places before the teacher a constant temptation, which at times reaches the proportions of an overmastering necessity, to ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... life. I asked the governor of the house whether he met with any difficulty in keeping peace and order among his inmates; and he informed me that his troubles among the women were incomparably greater than with the men. They were freakish, and apt to be quarrelsome, inclined to plague and pester one another in ways that it was impossible to lay hold of, and to thwart his own authority by the like intangible methods. He said this with the utmost good-nature, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sentimental; unprincipled, but romantic; the child of whim, and the slave of an imagination so freakish and deceptive, that it was always impossible to foretell his course. He was alike capable of sacrificing all his feelings to worldly considerations or of forfeiting the world for a visionary caprice. At present his favourite scheme, and one to which he seemed really attached, was to educate ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... went with them wherever they walked in France or Flanders, more sensitive than country men to the things they saw. Some of them had to fight against their nerves on the way to Loos. But their spirit was exalted by a nervous stimulus before that battle, so that they did freakish ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... single, uneven; singular, peculiar, unusual, unique, strange, quaint, extraordinary, queer, eccentric, whimsical, freakish, baroque, fantastic, nondescript, abnormal, bizarre, erratic, unconventional, curious, capricious; extra, remaining, additional, redundant, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... and there was not one hair, eyelash or eyebrow on the whole head. The closed eyes lay in deep caverns surrounded by a thousand fine wrinkles, which crisscrossed all over his face in every direction. The face and head were freakish—monstrous; and yet, somehow, over it rested an expression of infinite wisdom and calm. He lay bound and still and unconscious, at the mercy of men far below him intellectually, this man from another planet. Clee could not help but compare him to a stoical man staked out ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... of the notion had been a main contributory factor to its success; that, plus the fact that nine healthy adults out of ten dearly love to put on freakish garbings and go somewhere. To be exactly truthful, the basic idea itself could hardly be called new, since long before some gifted mind thought out the scheme of giving children's parties for grown-ups, but with her customary brilliancy Mrs. Carroway ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb |
