"Humourous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... antithesis; and they heard some six streets below a newsboy calling, and a bell bidding to chapel. They could also hear talk out of the garden below; and realized that the irrepressible Smith must have followed Gould downstairs, for his eager and pleading accents could be heard, followed by the half-humourous protests of Miss Duke and the full and very youthful laughter of Rosamund Hunt. The air had that cold kindness that comes after a storm. Michael Moon drank it in with as serious a relish as he had drunk the little bottle of cheap claret, which he had emptied almost ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... buccaneer. He was closely followed by one who in every particular, save that of age, was his physical opposite, corpulent in a brawny, vigorous way, with a full, round, weather-beaten face whose mouth was humourous and whose eyes were blue and twinkling. He was well dressed without fripperies, and bore with him an air ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... from the choir and nave. There is a good number of Confessionals within them; and at one of these I saw, for the first time, two women, kneeling, in the act of confession to the same priest. "C'est un peu fort," observed our guide in an under-voice, and with a humourous expression of countenance! Meanwhile Mr. Lewis, who was in an opposite direction in the cathedral, was exercising his pencil in the following ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... then this humour vain, And this more humourous strain, Where self-conceit, and choler of the blood, Eclipse what else is good: Then, if you please those raptures high to touch, Whereof you boast so much: And but forbear your crown Till the world puts it ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of our own day—pathetic, humourous, entertaining, powerful—in which the element of romantic love is altogether subordinate, or even imperceptible. THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM does not owe its deep interest to the engagement of the very charming young ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... The Post-humourous Notes of the Pickwickian Club. Edited by "Bos." Illustrated with 120 engravings. ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... traces of beauty and joy in the most monotonous of lives, is, in the true and best sense of the term, Christ-like, with a message and gospel of hope. Thackeray must have had Charles Dickens in his mind when he wrote: "The humourous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness—your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture—your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy." Charles Dickens, of all writers of our age, assuredly did this ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... sit down?' said Dr. Maryland, 'Dane and I have walked up from Mr. Falkirk's. Unless Dane likes to stand to accommodate the cat!' said the doctor with a humourous glance at the shoulder where pussy sat with shut eyes, purring contentedly. 'It's a fair question, Hazel; and an easy mistake. But my dear, so far as I know, Prim and Arthur and I have not kept anything. For myself,' said Dr. Maryland, lifting up a bright face, 'all that I have is my Master's. ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... newly risen sun was shining upon the ripples of the Lirrapaug River and upon the four people who stood on the bank shaking hands and exchanging polite remarks. His glowing face was bright with that cheerful air of humourous and sympathetic benevolence with which he seems to look upon all our human ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade "the humour" into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour Out of Breath," Fletcher later, "The Humourous Lieutenant," and Jonson, besides "Every Man Out of His Humour," returned to the title in closing the cycle of his comedies in "The Magnetic Lady ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... exquisite nature only needed the sunshine of his unspoken assurance to respond with delighted tenderness to his refined, his cultured advances. He was already beginning to write imaginary letters to his friends, on the theme of his engagement: semi-humourous academic effusions as to how he, who had so long remained immune, had succumbed at last to feminine charm; how he, the determined celibate—Wentworth always called himself a celibate—had been taken captive after all. To judge by the letters which Wentworth conned over in his after-dinner ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... the most humourous of these is the paper on Hoops, which, the Spectator tells us, particularly ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... assurance of it; then the certainty that suspicion would focus on Larry the Bat as being connected with the millionaire's death, since Larry the Bat had been caught in Jimmie Dale's home—and he would be accused of his own murder! It was quite humourous, of course, quite grotesquely bizarre—but it was equally an exceedingly grim possibility! There were drawbacks ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... said the old doctor, giving her a look made up of humourous vexation and real sadness,—"I wish I knew the right tuning-key to take hold ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... men as himself, gains the habit, and the privilege of talking about himself as familiarly as about other men. Fond of the curious, and a hunter of oddities and strangenesses, while he conceived himself, with quaint and humourous gravity a useful inquirer into physical truth and fundamental science,—he loved to contemplate and discuss his own thoughts and feelings, because he found by comparison with other men's, that they too were curiosities, and so with a perfectly graceful ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... regard as an original creator in art—beginning at the point where the dramatist's pen stops—approaches a subject from such a radically different direction that we writers cannot study his impressions too carefully in revising our work." Sometimes, conventions seized the humourous side of Howard. From England, around 1883, he wrote, "Methinks there is danger in the feeling expressed about 'local colouring.' English managers would put the Garden of Eden in Devonshire, if you adapted Paradise Lost for them—and insist on giving Adam an eye-glass ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... Premier, Houghton, gigantic in its proportions, had its purposes. He there assembled his supporters; there, for a short time, he entertained his constituents and coadjutors with a magnificent, jovial hospitality, of which he, with his gay spirits, his humourous, indelicate jokes, and his unbounded good-nature, was the very soul. Free conversation, hard-drinking, were the features of every day's feast. Pope thus ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... his book on his knees and his head propped on his hand. We are allowed to follow his reflections, those of a philosopher,—but not one standing apart and watching a little scornfully the vagaries of men; a very human being, taking part in them, without losing a humourous sense of their character. "Illusion! Illusion! Everywhere illusion! Whichever way I bend my inquiry, searching the chronicles of the city and those of the world, to discover the reason why people, in vain and frantic rage, torment and oppress themselves and one another to ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... first time saw Burns. The Englishman heard, it is said, with wonder, the sarcastic sallies and eloquent bursts of the inspired Scot, who, in his turn, surveyed with wonder the remarkable corpulence, and listened with pleasure to the independent sentiments and humourous turns of conversation in the joyous Englishman. This Poem was the fruit of the interview, and it is said that Grose regarded ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... history: "Bubbles of Canada;" "The Old Judge, or Life in a Colony;" "Historical and Statistical account of Nova Scotia;" "Rule and Misrule of the English in America;" "Letters to Lord Durham." His more strictly humourous writings include "Nature and Human Nature;" "Wise Saws;" "The Letter ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... of the incongruous. More satisfying, however, is the following, which has been ascribed to Dean Inge: It is a sense of incongruous emotions. As soon as we think of the emotions being stirred we see that the strange difference between humourous and unhumourous people is not an intellectual matter, but follows the general law of emotional susceptibility, viz., that it is independent of the reason and varies within wide limits with each individual, and obviously with each nationality. Moreover, ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... general, as the ways of men are amazing to women, and will be so, no doubt, as long as the world goes on. The strange mixture of the wise and the foolish, the altogether heroic, and the involuntarily fictitious, struck his keen perception with a humourous understanding, and amusement, and sympathy. That Mrs. Dennistoun should pose a little as a sufferer while she was unmitigatedly happy in the possession of Elinor and the child, and be abashed when she was forced to confess how ecstatic was the fearful joy which she snatched ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... sort of humourous character," said Guy Morris; "strong-minded, you know, and eccentric, but not half bad. I quite like the old lady, though I ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... incorporated in The Bible in Spain. The two letters plainly indicate that all the time Borrow was in Spain his mind was more filled with the subject of the gypsies than with any other question. He did his work well for the Bible Society no doubt . . . but there is a humourous note in the fact that Borrow should have utilised his position as a missionary—for so we must count him—to make himself thoroughly acquainted with gypsy folklore, and gypsy songs and dances."—[Shorter, George Borrow and his Circle, ...
— A Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... have it in Sophocles, though exquisitely clear and simple in form, and austerely beautiful withal, is comparatively limited in its scope, with few characters, little change of scene, no blending or interchanging of the humourous and the grave, the tragic and the comic, and hardly exceeding in length a single Act of the Shakespearian Drama. The interest all, or nearly all, centres in the catastrophe, there being only so much of detail and range as is needful to the evolving of this. Thus the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... humourous or pathetic," remarked Alice. "Some of them remind me of a person trying to laugh with a heart full of sorrow, and their love songs are ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... up before the house at Marigold Lake on the afternoon of the day before Christmas, a triumphal procession. The moose was driven, a peaceful captive with a wreath of cedar leaves around its neck—the humourous conception of Gregory Thorne. Malbrouck had announced their coming by a blast from his horn, and Margaret was standing in the doorway wrapped in furs, which may have come originally from Hudson's Bay, but which had been deftly ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... so humourous since his daughter was forsaken: hark, hark, there, there, so, so, codes, codes. What now? ...
— The Maids Tragedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... unfeigned. He was clad in white of no remembered fashion, with the green gem burning on his breast, but his manner was that of one perfectly tailored and about the most cosmopolitan offices of modernity. One might have told him one's most subtly humourous story and ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... his head and looked at the cashier with humourous pity. The man was trembling from excitement ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... strenuous, and Broadway, New York, doesn't begin to be the only place where she lives it. Look abroad, look abroad!" She was altogether fascinating as she pointed out to Steering little typical features that he would have missed without her humourous, ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... "Hobson's choice," that is, "this or none." Despite his ever growing wealth and advanced years, Hobson continued his regular journeys to London until the outbreak of the plague caused the authorities to suspend the carrier service for a time. This is the fact upon which Milton seized with such humourous effect in his ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... Roy trapped in the Tolbooth, and confronted with Bailie Nicol Jarvie, draws no sword, leaps from no window, affects none of the dazzling external acts upon which contemporary romance depends, yet that plain and humourous dialogue is full of the essential philosophy of romance which is an almost equal betting upon man and destiny. Perhaps the most profoundly thrilling of all Scott's situations is that in which the family of Colonel Mannering are waiting for the carriage which may or may not ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... ribbons tied in large knots and bows, and their hats are smartened in the same way. They are usually accompanied by an old woman, or a boy dressed up to represent one; she is gaily bedizened, and called the Bessy. Sometimes the sport is assisted by a humourous countryman to represent a fool. He is covered with ribbons, and attired in skins, with a depending tail, and carries a box to collect money from the spectators. They are attended by music and Morris Dancers, when they can be got; but it ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... said Annan, smiling at her with his humourous, bantering air. And to his surprise and discomfiture he saw the least trace of annoyance in her ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... words in a low tone to young Mr Dixon, retired with a profound bow to the company. The presence even for a moment among a party of debauchees of a woman endued with every quality of modesty and not less severe than beautiful refrained the humourous sallies even of the most licentious but her departure was the signal for an outbreak of ribaldry. Strike me silly, said Costello, a low fellow who was fuddled. A monstrous fine bit of cowflesh! I'll be sworn she has rendezvoused you. What, you dog? Have you a way with them? Gad's bud, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... dwelt on to satiety; and the tone of eloquence was more swelling and stately than he had hitherto adopted. The papers allotted to criticism are marked by his usual acumen; but the justice of his opinions is often questionable. In the humourous pieces, when our laughter is excited, I doubt the author himself, who is always discoverable under the masque of whatever character he assumes, is as much the object as the cause of our merriment; and, however moral ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... manuscript was read to Ben Webster, the manager of the Haymarket Theatre, London, and to Charles Reade, the collaborator, with Boucicault, in so many plays. Then the company heard it, after which Jefferson proceeded to study it, literally living and breathing the part. Many are the humourous records of the play as preserved in the Jefferson "Autobiography" and in the three books on Jefferson by Winter ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... flamboyant, talkative, who spoke with a faint brogue, and who tagged every observation, argument, or remark with the phrase, "Do you understand me, gen'lemen?" Freye, a German-American, was a quiet fellow, very handsome, with black side whiskers and a humourous, twinkling eye. The three were members of the Board of Trade, and were always associated with the Bear forces. Indeed, they could be said to be its leaders. Between them, as Cressler afterwards was accustomed to say, "They could have ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... envelope a man using the note-paper of a Boston journal begged to know if the accompanying article would be acceptable; if not it was to be kindly returned in the enclosed stamped envelope. It was a humourous essay on trolley cars. Adventuring through the odd scraps that were come to the great mill, Baker paused occasionally ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... his study after all those people had gone who had been boarding and lodging with him for twenty months. They had plagued him and bored him at all sorts of uncomfortable hours, and yet now he would be almost glad if one of them would walk in and chat with him as of yore—"an odd, pleasant, humourous, melancholy feeling." In how much more solemn a mood Dickens finishes "Our Mutual Friend," congratulating himself on having been saved—with Mr. and Mrs. Boffin and the Lammles, with Bella Wilfer and Rogue Riderhood—from a destructive railway ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... ungrateful not to mention, since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvelous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humourous colouring which nature taught him how to throw over his descriptions, the result, I honestly believe, would have been something new in literature. Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... nativities, a general-read scholar, a thorough-paced philologist, and one that understood the surveying of lands well. As he was by many accounted a severe student, a devourer of authors, a melancholy and humourous person, so by others who knew him well, a person of great honesty, plain dealing and charity. I have heard some of the ancients of Christchurch often say that his company was very merry, facete and juvenile; and no man in his time did surpass him for ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... lounged upon the green bank, I lazily watched these parodies of humanity as they were tossed hither and thither with humourous indignity by the breeze, remarking to myself on the quaint shamelessness with which we thus expose to the public view garments which at other times we are at such bashful pains to conceal. And thus ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... a man of his own age, but shorter and darker, with a hawk-like face softened by black eyes with a faintly humourous twinkle lurking in the corner of each. He seemed distinctly good-natured, but competition stirred Prescott and he offered sixty dollars. The other man hesitated, and the auctioneer, who seemed to know him, asked ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... genuine humour an acknowledgement of the hollowness and farce of the world, and its disproportion to the godlike within us. And it follows immediately from this, that whenever particular acts have reference to particular selfish motives, the humourous bursts into the indignant and abhorring; whilst all follies not selfish are pardoned or palliated. The danger of this habit, in respect of pure morality, is strongly exemplified ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... humourous eyes turned inquiringly from Jack to Lorraine and from Lorraine to Jack. He was puzzled, perhaps, but did not ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers |
