"Incongruity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... model—that is to say, arching of length and breadth, graceful and perfectly relative as regards proportion, curves, and an unmistakeable oneness of expression, if I may so speak, of every part as a whole, nothing whatever of incongruity or want of symmetry intruding to disturb once and always the gaze of ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... the English and other Northern nations from the supreme council of Christendom. There was no apparent reason why an Englishman should not be the head of the Christian Church just as well as an Italian; but there was some incongruity in the idea of an Englishman ruling over Italian States, and no Englishman had attained the Papacy for nearly four centuries. The double failure of Wolsey made it clear that the door of the Papacy was sealed to Englishmen, whatever their claims might be. The roll ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... said than any or all of them have recorded. The angels' question is half a rebuke, wholly a revelation, of the essential nature of 'the Living One,' who was so from all eternity, but is declared to be so by His rising, of the incongruity of supposing that He could be gathered to, and remain with, the dim company of the dead, and a blessed word, which turns sorrow into hope, and diverts sad eyes from the grave to the skies, for all the ages since and to come. The angels recall Christ's prophecies of death and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was graciously pleased to permit me to be presented to her, also to criticize the curtsey which I had now to perform, my good Queen being so kind in training me that I almost lost the sense of the incongruity of such a lesson at my age and in my weeds. In fact, with my mother and my godmother commanding me, and Eustace and the Prince of Wales looking on, it was like a return to one's childhood. At last I satisfied my royal instructress, and as she agreed with my mother ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... when organized into an art and a tactical system of imbrices and bombi, (as they were at Alexandria, and afterwards at the Neapolitan and Roman theatres,) that they could not protect themselves from dying in the very moment of their birth,—laying together all these considerations, we see the incongruity of any audience, so constituted, to any purpose less evanescent than their ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... fixed belief that, because he did not get fat, he was as thin as a starved rat. Paul looked at his father's thick, brownish hands all scarred, with broken nails, rubbing the fine smoothness of his sides, and the incongruity struck him. It seemed strange they were the ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... the horror and disgust with which it impressed me, so grossly did it outrage all the best feelings of my nature, that even the angelic voice, and perfect science of Mrs. Billington, lost half their charms, or rather increased my aversion to the piece by an additional sense of incongruity. Then I learned the immense difference between reading and seeing a play;—and no wonder, indeed; for who has not passed over with his eye a hundred passages without offence, which he yet could not have even read aloud, or have heard so read ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Harenc, of Chalons, found a sympathetic, or perhaps a derisive audience (for who can tell nowadays the degree of Baudet's excellence in his art?), favour would not be wanting for the greatest ballade-maker of all time. Great as would seem the incongruity, it may have pleased Charles to own a sort of kinship with ragged singers, and whimsically regard himself as one of the confraternity of poets. And he would have other grounds of intimacy with Villon. A room looking upon Windsor gardens is a different matter ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was a counter manifestation of bourgeois National Guards, who arrived in military order with their arms. Jules Favre addressed them. Now as far as I can make out, these battalions went to the Hotel de Ville on their own initiative. No one, however, seems to see any incongruity in the friends of the Government making an armed demonstration as a protest against armed and unarmed demonstrations in general. The question of the municipal elections will lie dormant for a few days, but I see no evidence that those who were in favour of it have altered their minds. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... The incongruity of the name seemed somehow to throw into brighter relief the peculiar sincerity of its bearer's character, and by the time it was generally adopted among the students Madge ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... his mouth wide so that it made a round O. "I asked you to come to say this to you: 'Your esteemed father has applied verbally and in writing to the provincial marshal of nobility, to have you summoned and made to see the incongruity of your conduct with the title of nobleman which you have the honour to bear. His Excellency Alexander Pavlovich, justly thinking that your conduct may be subversive, and finding that persuasion may not be sufficient, without serious intervention on the part of the authorities, ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... tolerable voices, but by trained vocalists, was taking its place. The people of New York were not quite so sophisticated as they are to-day, and possibly were dowered with a larger degree of sincerity. Many of them were willing to admit the incongruity of behavior at which Addison made merry when he predicted that the time would come when the descendants of the English people of his day would be curious to know "why their forefathers used to sit together like an audience of foreigners in their own ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... model my version of this Ode, to some extent, on Milton's, "the high-water mark," as it has been termed, "which Horatian translation has attained." I have not, however, sought to imitate his language, feeling that the attempt would be presumptuous in itself, and likely to create a sense of incongruity with the ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... hypothesis of transmitted fragments of instincts in accord with the strangely anomalous fact that children are at one moment seemingly cruel and at the next affectionate and kind, vibrating, as it were, between two worlds, egotistic and altruistic, without conscious sense of incongruity?" (F.L. Burk, "Teasing and Bullying," Pedagogical ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a sense of incongruity in the appearance of a canoe when in a cart, on a train, or in a house, and you have often to meet an inexplicable but evident smile at the whole affair, which perhaps comes from pity, certainly from ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... of the whole scene was a sane order, the deliberate solution of problems, a progressive intention steadily achieving itself, and the aspect that particularly occupied me was the incongruity of this with ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... loop, and standing with the Government Building to my right and the Fisheries with its curving colonnades on my left, I gaze off upon the blue and shining waters of the lake, and realize fully for the first time the awful incongruity between all this stateliness and beauty and our mission in its midst—a ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Newhaven had that power, and enjoyed also in consequence a profound belief in her prophetic instincts; while others, Hugh not excepted, detected a premeditated tone in her conversation, and a sense of incongruity between her remarks and the ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... the metaphor that light, like a tree, grows and blossoms and puts forth fruit, is a very strong one. And its very violence and incongruity help its force. Fruit is generally used in Scripture in a good sense. It conveys the notion of something which is the natural outcome of a vital power, and so, when we talk about the light being fruitful, we are setting, in a striking image, the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... a humorous incongruity and abruptness that is sometimes forcible. For example, after the climax ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... diversity of opinion on the abstract question of slavery; or from want of sympathy among Northern men in the cause of human rights, as from the fact, that the common sense of the public has been shocked by the incongruity and folly of hoping to effect the abolition of slavery in one country, by addressing the people of another. We do not expect to abolish despotism in Russia, by getting up indignation meetings in New York. Yet for all the purposes of legislation on this subject, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... which even the "native" scout encountered can be estimated only by those familiar with the vigilance that surrounds an army. The casual meeting with an acquaintance, the slightest act inconsistent with his assumed character, or the smallest incongruity between his speech and that of the district to which he professed to belong, has sent many a good man to the gallows. One of the best of Rosecrans's scouts—a native of East Kentucky—lost his life because he would "bounce" (mount) his nag, "pack" (carry) ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... other hand, we witness the spectacle of the Christ who so lived the divine life, and whose immaculate holiness is so overwhelming, that His claim to be one with the Godhead brings no shock or sense of incongruity to any one to-day. He has so impressed men of all generations that untold millions, in all lands, have felt no hesitation in believing Him when He says, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Here do we indeed find ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... fancies. What grim and ghostly revelations might pass between this dead scion of the Dorntons lying on the trestles before them and the obscure, nameless ticket of leave man awaiting his entrance in the vault below! The incongruity of this thought, with the smug complacency of the worldly minded congregation sitting around him, and the probable smiling carelessness of the reckless rover—the cause of all—even now idly pacing the deck on the distant sea, touched him with horror. And when added to this was ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... to the dignity of that melancholy yet vigorous ruin of the Temple of Neptune, or anything that resembles it in the whole of ancient Rome. It survives having been a custom-house and being a stock-exchange without apparent ignominy, while one feels an incongruity, to say the least, in the Column of Marcus Aurelius looking down on the sign of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. Whether this is worse than for the Palazzo di Venezia to confront the American Express Company where it ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... lately married couple. The room looked as if it had been decorated the day before for a twentieth-century Madame de Pompadour. But, if the background was almost archaeological, the atmosphere was absolutely modern. In this incongruity was ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... days afterwards, when all her leisure hours were occupied with the contemplation and consideration of her own presents, Willy had been perfectly contented to let things go on in the old way, or any way, but now the incongruity of Mrs. Cliff's present mode of living, and the probable amount of her fortune, began ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... but diverted her mind from the state of Ireland to the state of the household linen, and, when left alone once more, laughed to herself at the incongruity of ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... across the clearing into another forest, lying upon the verge of which I saw a bit of white. It appeared to stand out in marked contrast and incongruity to all its surroundings, and when I stopped to examine it, I found that it was a small strip of muslin—part of the hem of a garment. At once I was all excitement, for I knew that it was a sign left by Lys that she had been carried this way; it was a tiny bit torn from ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... pleasure; if we must needs represent one naked, we must invent some such accident, some extraordinary dislocation of all usual relations and circumstances. In place of the antique harmony of character and situation, we have here a painful incongruity that no study or skill ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... in two ways, for Defoe's ears were not clipped, though he was condemned to stand in the pillory; and there can hardly be a greater incongruity conceived than there is between our idea of a dunce and the energetic, shifty, wide-awake Defoe,—though for that matter a scholar like Bentley and a wit like Colley Cibber are as much out of place in the poet's ill-natured catalogue. Defoe angrily resented the taunts of the university ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... all its fascinations. Sara was particularly offended at having to get out to tea, and more so at not being allowed to go in her bathing-drawers. But a mushroom hat trimmed with daisies appeased her, and even at that early age she saw the incongruity of that hat and those nether garments. They were packed, Hugh, Betty, Sara, and the nursery-maid, into the donkey-cart. Betty was supposed to drive, but Hugh and Sara had so large a share in the stage direction of that donkey, that I wonder we ever arrived. We did. Our approach ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... places. People who are not Christians seem to have an intuitive perception of the fitness of things. It is like dancing and theatre-going, and a dozen other questions. It is very unusual to meet people who do not sneer at Christians for upholding such amusements; they seem to realize an incongruity between them and the Christian profession. It was just as plain to me, I know, and I have sneered many a time over card-playing Christians, and here you are, dear little Flossy, among them, just for the purpose of ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... his Pelican Island, makes statements that are shocking to an intelligent thinker, and which no scientist can excuse on the ground of poetical license. "The poetry of this excellent author," says Dana, "is good, but the facts nearly all errors—if literature allows of such an incongruity." Think of coral-animals as being referred to as shapeless worms that "writhe and shrink their tortuous bodies to grotesque dimensions"! These deep-sea builders manufacture or secrete from their own bodies the coral substance out of which the great reefs are built. It is a part of their ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... fishing," he plaintively answered. He still held his long rod, and the incongruity of it added to the pathos of his despair. I reminded him of a bad river we had before crossed, and how his mule had swum it safely with him on her back. I promised to keep close to him, and help him if need were, though I was confident if he left everything to Cream ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... his face glowing with conscious pride, "y'ort ter see me in a bloomin' bowt. I ain't a-goain' ter say as I kin fling wun o' them 'ere bloomin' 'arpoones like ar bowt-steerers kin; but I kin do my bit o' grawft wiv enny on 'em—don'tchu make no bloomin' herror." The glorious incongruity of the thing tickled me immensely; but I laughed more heartily still when on going below I was hailed as "Wot cher, chummy; 'ow yer hoppin' up?" by another barbarian from the wilds of Spitalfields, who, from the secure ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... art of poetry teach us that, if we would write what may be worth reading, we ought always, before we begin to form a regular plan and design of our piece; otherwise we shall be in danger of incongruity. I am apt to think it is the same as to life. I have never fixed a regular design in life, by which means it has been a confused variety of different scenes. I am now entering upon a new life; let me, therefore, make some resolutions, and ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... commonplace building, from which it cut off needed light. The more modest but appropriate columnar faade to the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, by Bassevi, was a more successful attempt in the same direction, better proportioned and avoiding the incongruity of modern windows in several stories. These have always been the stumbling-block of the revived Greek style. The difficulties they raise are avoided, however, in buildings presenting but two stories, the order being applied to the upper story, upon a high stylobate serving as a basement. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... one explain such a case as that of the monastic opinion of Dagobert the Second, king of the Franks. We are told in the same narrative, seemingly without any great sense of incongruity, how he murdered his own relations and guests, and who not?—how he massacred 9000 Bulgars to whom he had given hospitality; how he kept a harem of three queens, and other women so numerous that Fredegarius cannot mention them; ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... The incongruity of this interruption was almost as great as a shout of laughter at a funeral, and Leigh experienced a ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... often comforts and cheers. But as often it is remorseless. Broken health and empty purses, desperation, mute suffering and madness, we saw at Monte Carlo. Where the world flocks for pleasure, agony of soul reveals itself more readily than elsewhere because of its incongruity. Nice is full of tragedy, and none takes the pains to conceal it as at Monte Carlo. The casual visitor creates his own atmosphere in Nice, and he goes away with the most pleasant memory, having found what he sought. But you cannot stroll day after ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... Garnier's thought, which is fundamentally opposed to spontaneity. But imagine the devotion to style of a milieu in which a person who would throw ink on a confessedly fine work of art is actuated by an impersonal dislike of incongruity! Dislike of the incongruous is almost a French passion, and, like all qualities, it has its defect, the defect of tolerating the conventional. It is through this tolerance, for example, that one of the freest of French critics of art, a true Voltairian, Stendhal, was led actually ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... in which Italy, too, has taken part, implicitly recognized the actual status England had acquired in Egypt. Now the war has demonstrated the judicial incongruity of a Turkish province in which and for which the English had to carry out warlike operations against Turkey. The protectorate already existed in substance, and Great Britain might now even ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... men who delighted in quoting it took as an additional evidence of the wise dispensation of the God of Nature, rather inconsistently overlooking its incongruity with the teachings of Him in whose name they assumed ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... could not be carried out. To prove that they could be carried out, and that his evidence was correct, he undertook the new works, and executed them with complete success; besides demonstrating in a spirited publication elicited by the controversy, the insufficiency and incongruity of the plans which had been submitted by the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... the city of Glaston, the Company being once more in East Tennessee, and the lion spoke the old familiar mountain dialect so easily recognizable in this locality. Even a lapsus linguae, "you uns." was unmistakable amidst the high-flown periods. Although the ventriloquism was appreciated, the incongruity of this countrified jargon, held in great contempt by the townfolks, discounted Emperor's majesty and he ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the franking system are far more serious than the pecuniary expense, although that is by no means undeserving of regard. It is not only an ensnaring prerogative to those who enjoy it, and an anomaly and incongruity in our republican institutions, but it is an oppressive burden upon the post-office, which ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... not subservient to one another; nor is there any dependance or connection throughout; but this perhaps is a fault almost inseparable from a subject in itself so diversified, as not to admit of such limitation. He has not indeed been guilty of any incongruity; the scenes described in spring, are all peculiar to that season, and the digressions, which make up a fourth part of the poem, flow naturally. He has observed the same regard to the appearances of nature in the other seasons; but then what he has described in the beginning of any ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... and splendour of colour. The heads are full of character; that of the Virgin in particular, who seems, with half-closed eyes, in act to breathe away her soul in rapture. The altar near the bed, having on it figures of Moses and Aaron, is, however, a serious fault and incongruity in ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... river at one time, and sends them over in succession, following one another rapidly through the Golden Gate of the City. The four boys with their wives and children, it is true, stay behind awhile, but there is an evident incongruity in their doing so when the allegory has brought them all to what stands for the close of their earthly pilgrimage. Bunyan's mistake was in gratifying his inventive genius and making his band of pilgrims so large. He could get them together and make them travel in company without ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... the soft horizon. She thought rather drearily of the townward journey to-morrow, of her home in the suburbs, of the endless monotony that awaited her. The flowers lay on her lap; she smelt them, dreamed over them. And then—strange incongruity—she thought of beer! ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... anomaly—her words were always of a meek and submissive character, but her voice, her look, her gestures were those of a queen. The Doctor felt this, but hardly its incongruity, as she slowly resumed her seat and signed to ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... amusing biography of Bowyer, has not devoted so large a portion of his pages to the description of Mr. West's collection, life, and character, as he has to many collectors who have been less eminently distinguished in the bibliographical world. Whether this was the result of the paucity, or incongruity, of his materials, or whether, from feelings of delicacy he might not choose to declare all he knew, are points into which I have neither right nor inclination to enquire. There seems every reason to conclude that, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... lean for support upon "enlightened absolutism." The despotism of the orthodox and the intolerance of the unenlightened masses forced the handful of Maskilim to fall back upon those who in the eyes of the Jewish populace were the source of its sorrow and tears. There was a profound tragedy in this incongruity. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... his Jewish memories. When he went almost mechanically to the piano on the last afternoon, all these slumbering forces wakened in him found vent in a rhapsody of synagogue melody to which he abandoned himself, for once forgetting his audience. When gradually he became aware of the incongruity, it did but intensify his inspiration. Let the heathen rats wallow in Hebrew music! But soon all self-consciousness passed away again, drowned ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... the summer preceding Mr. Lincoln's marriage, and which in the opinion of many had its influence in hastening that event, deserves some attention, if only from its incongruity with the rest of his history. This was the farce—which aspired at one time to be a tragedy—of his first and last duel. Among the officers of the State Government was a young Irishman named James Shields, who owed his post as Auditor, in great measure, to that alien vote to gain ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... main piers, and its rounded arches are lofty and well proportioned. Excellent portraits of former Bishops adorn its white walls, and narrow rectangular windows at frequent intervals admit a dim, mellow light through their dark panes. Before one of these windows—apparently with no thought of incongruity in the exhibition of such a gruesome object attached to a Christian church—there has been affixed an iron grating, said to have served the Holy Inquisition as a gridiron on which to roast its heretical victims. Within, an ambulatory, supported on the first tier of arches, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... she said abruptly. "You ought to be dancing instead of wasting your time on old ladies like me." Here there was a burst of mirth at the incongruity of the words with Miss Jinny's ferocious masculine aspect, but she silenced it with a wave of her hookah stem. "Let me introduce the Second Calendar, who I hope knows enough respectable young men here to see that you aren't a ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... to resist the smile which twitched at his lips. Unpleasant as was the nature of his errand, he, the most unsmiling of men, had already twice over been moved to merriment. Stephen was reflecting on the incongruity of the fact, when Pixie again ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... first there is an apparent incongruity between this high-sounding salutation and the bearing of the man to whom it was addressed. Surely such an address is far-fetched and fulsome; yet subsequent events prove that every syllable of it was deservedly true. Gideon was a mighty ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... such perversions of judgment are common among us. We all know the man who seems to be full of rich and varied thought, who holds us sometimes by the power of his conceptions or the beauty of his creations, but in whose thought we yet find some incongruity, some eminently unfit element, some grotesque application, some elevation or depression from the level of commonplace truth, some ugly strain in the aesthetic impression. The man himself does not know it, and that is the ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... as she came from the dressing tent and stopped to gaze at the nearby church steeple. The incongruity of the slang, that soon came from her delicately formed lips, was lost upon him as she turned her ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... they achieve. To be born a Jewess was a distinction for Emma Lazarus, and she in turn conferred distinction upon her race. To be born a woman also lends a grace and a subtle magnetism to her influence. Nowhere is there contradiction or incongruity. Her works bear the imprint of her character, and her character of her works; the same directness and honesty, the same limpid purity of tone, and the same atmosphere of things refined and beautiful. The vulgar, the false, and the ignoble,—she scarcely comprehended them, while on every ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... Thus, in the Australian "Legend of Eerin," the mourners implore Byamee to accept the soul of the faithful Eerin into his Paradise, Bullimah. No doubt Byamee heard, yet Eerin is now a little owl of plaintive voice, which ratters warning cries in time of peril. {65} No incongruity of this kind is felt to be a difficulty by the childlike narrators. Now I conceive that, starting with the relatively high idea of a Spirit of the Grain, early man was quite capable of envisaging it both spiritually and in zoomorphic form (accidentally ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... to be accompanied by a diversion of that merry imp of incongruity always with him—as Shakespeare's most stately heroes are attended by a comic servant. He married Miss Mary Todd, of Kentucky, at Springfield, at the age of thirty-three. It was the first wedding performed with all the ceremonial of the Episcopalian sect. This was to the awe of the Honorable ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... a queer tableau, indeed; Donna weeping on Mr. Pennycook's breast, when every instinct of her sex, even the vaguest acceptance of tradition and custom, dictated that she should have wept on Mrs. Pennycook's breast. Mrs. Pennycook realized the incongruity of the situation and was shrewd enough to attribute it to a strong aversion to her on the part of Donna Corblay. She resolved to make them both pay for her humiliation—Dan, within the hour, Donna whenever ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... set it playing rag-time. While it was playing, I stopped thinking. For I had to keep time in my brain with the beat of the tune. And so, at last, since I couldn't think, or remember, I fell asleep. The gramophone saved me"; and again Joan was smitten by the incongruity of Stella with her life. She had eaten of all that nature allots to women—love, marriage, the birth of children, the loss of them—and there she was, to this day half-child, and quite incompatible with what ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... maintain that in his case the fault was a necessary fault and went with a power which permitted him to achieve the sympathy which he did achieve. He talks of the "Celt" and the "Saxon," and ascribes what he calls "our failures in Ireland" to the "incongruity of character" between these two imaginaries. He takes it for granted that "we are something which divides us from mediaeval Christianity by an impassable gulf." When he speaks of asceticism he must quote "the hair shirt of Thomas a Becket." If he is speaking of Oxford ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... solitary state belonged to old, disappointed bachelors, old maids, faded people generally. Here she sat, a picture unseen, playing at age—and she less than twenty-two. There was a kind of delicate incongruity about it all. And watching her own grey eyes, as they faced her in the mirror, she half comprehended why she continued to live so, even after her father died and took away the reason for her old solitude. She had been under the hypnotic suggestion ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... health and vigor in its atmosphere, and really, if I could take root anywhere, I know not but it could as well be here as in another place. It would only be a kind of despair, however, that would ever make me dream of finding a home in Italy; a sense that I had lost my country through absence or incongruity, and that earth is not an abiding-place. I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Chayne had to build up the terrible scene which had taken place between Sylvia and her father in the little back room of the house in Hobart Place. He looked round the lighted room, listened to the ripple of light voices, and watched the play of lively faces and bright eyes. There was an incongruity between these surroundings and the words which he had heard ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... of uncertainty, came to Rudolph like a sea-breeze to a stoker. To escape and survive,—the bare experience seemed to him at first an act of merit, the deed of a veteran. The interim had been packed with incongruity. There had been a dinner with Kempner, solemn, full of patriotism and philosophy; a drunken dinner at Teppich's; another, and a worse, at Nesbit's; and the banquet of a native merchant, which began at four ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... has often taken place in the case of mediaeval books bound in ornamental metal, but even in these instances it must be recognised that such a change can seldom be made without serious detriment. It is chiefly indeed from some incongruity of style or technical mistake in the re-putting together that we are led to guess that the covers have been thus tampered with. Now and then such a transference occurs in the case of leather-bound books, and in such instances is usually easy for a trained binder to detect. Embroidered ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... was standing in front of a tall mirror, still only half-dressed. As she looked into the bright face of the smiling girl in the glass, a sudden change came. Pigeons! Doc Tripp had said that Trevors had got them; had remarked on the incongruity of a man like Trevors caring for little cooing birds. It was ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... of bathers, shouting and splashing; in the shallows. There, under a dazzling sky, with a strong wind blowing, and whitecaps careering about, he came face to face with the subject of his speculations. The incongruity of catechising a man of ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... Electric Light winds up the Second volume. The incongruity of its position is to be referred to the lateness of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... stolid silence. Only Watusk chatted and laughed. The women stared at Ambrose, and the men looked down their noses. All were somewhat embarrassed by the presence of a white man. Ambrose, looking around, was struck by the incongruity of the women's neat print dresses and the men's store clothes taken with their savage, walled faces. Such faces called for blankets, beads, war paint and ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... master, and the other the common law denouncing and deciding against the right of property in man. This could not have been their intention, nor can this be the construction. We cannot consider these gentlemen to have changed their opinion from one sentence to another, to have left an incongruity and a contradiction expressed upon the face ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... he simply applied to the whole state the Slavonic principle existing in the social unit—the family. And while he was Europeanizing the surface, he was completing a structure of paternalism, which was Asiatic and incompatible with its new garment—an incongruity which in time must bring disorder, and ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... was making his way to Colonel Pendleton's lodgings, and half expecting to find the St. Charles Hotel itself transformed by the eager spirit of improvement. But it was still there in all its barbaric and provincial incongruity. Public opinion had evidently recognized that nothing save the absolute razing of its warped and flimsy walls could effect a change, and waited for it to collapse suddenly like the house of cards it resembled. Paul wondered for a moment if it were not ominous ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... sacrifice[390], are simply Jatakas in another form—interesting stories full of edification for those who can understand but not to be taken as a narrative of facts. At other times he simply states the ultimate facts of a case and leaves them in their droll incongruity. Thus when King Ajatasattu was moved and illuminated by his teaching, he observed to his disciples that His Majesty had all the makings of a saint in him, if only he had not killed that excellent man ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison. It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... of the lady had the effect of throwing Durant and his hostess on each other's mercy during dinner, a circumstance that seemed greatly to entertain Mrs. Fazakerly. Probably a deep acquaintance with Coton Manor made her feel a delightful incongruity in Durant's appearance there, since, as her gaze so frankly intimated, she found him interesting. He was roused from a fit of more than usual abstraction to find her little gray eyes twinkling at him across the soup. Mrs. Fazakerly, ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... household has not its skeleton? Where shall we find perfect happiness—or anything perfect? In this instance it was soon apparent to us; and again we marvelled at the inconsistency of human nature; the incongruity of things; the way men spoil their lives and make crooked things that ought to be, and might have ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... the pious of all parties were far more nearly of the same mind than their own imperfections, and the imperfection of language allowed them to see: I mean the disposition to explain away the articles of the Church on the pretext of their inconsistency with right reason;—when in fact it was only an incongruity with a wrong understanding, the faculty which St. Paul calls [Greek: phronaema sarkos], the rules of which having been all abstracted from objects of sense, (finite in time and space,) are logically applicable to objects of the sense alone. This ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... family; it seemed only to accentuate the air of humility which enveloped Jeremiah as with a garment. Everybody knew some version of the many tales afloat which, in a kindly spirit, illustrated the incongruity between him and his splendid habitation. Some had it that he slept in the shed. Others told whimsical stories of his sitting alone in the kitchen evenings, smoking his old clay pipe, and sorrowing because ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... from Noah's Arks of various dates, partly from the stock company of the toy theatre. On the other hand, besides the touches of modernity already mentioned, and assisting them, there is a great attention to "interiors." The writer has, for her time, a more than promising sense of the incongruity between Empire dress and furniture and the style of George II.: and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte Street and Chancery Lane show that she had either been a very early and forward scholar of Dickens, or had discovered the thing on ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... how potent an imagination, of how resistless an energy, that even when his sole unassisted name is pitted against the outcome of centuries, and we say Burke and the French Revolution, we are not overwhelmed by any sense of obvious absurdity or incongruity. ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... that there was somewhat of incongruity in the companionship of Tottie and May, but the difference between the poor man's daughter who had been raised to comparative affluence, and the gentleman's daughter who had been brought down to comparative poverty, ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... of dalliance in the Temple, and not unfrequently on Sunday morning, leaving a lady love, L'Estrange would go to church—top hat, umbrella, and prayer-book—and having a sense of humour, he was amused by the incongruity. ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... Katie anew: the incongruity of choosing so well-regulated a place for the performance of so disorderly an act as the taking of one's life. Choosing army headquarters as the place in which to desert from the army of life! Such an infringement of discipline ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... old hill-village of Roquebrune. Kindly enveloping nature was so sane and wholesome in her vast wisdom and stillness that the sugar-cake Casino and all its attendant artificialities struck into the brooding peace a shrill note of challenging incongruity. The little sparkling patch of light and colour that was Monte Carlo proclaimed that it was there for some extraordinary and powerful purpose, that its bizarre beauty was dedicated to exceptional uses; and it occurred to Mary that the temple of Chance must after all diverge from every ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... him President and Simon Gradkoski, Treasurer, collecting twenty-five shillings on the spot, ten from the lad Raphael Leon. In vain Pinchas reminded the President they would need Collectors to make house to house calls; three other members were chosen to trisect the Ghetto. All felt the incongruity of hanging money bags at the saddle-bow of Pegasus. Whereupon Pinchas re-lit his cigar and muttering that they were all fool-men betook himself ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... to what violent storms man is exposed in the voyage of life, what variety there is in his natural endowments, what incongruity between education and position in life. It is easy for the favorite of fortune to keep in the right path; temptation, at any rate to crime, hardly reaches him; how hard, on the other hand, is it for the hungry, the uneducated, the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... these dancing classes was one of the duties that often devolved upon her. In the children's early years Marcia had attended a child study class twice a week and Hannah had more or less minded the two in their mother's absence. The incongruity of this had never struck her. Or if it had she had never mentioned it to Marcia. There were a good many things she never mentioned to Marcia. Marcia was undoubtedly a conscientious mother, thinking of her children, planning for her children, hourly: their food, their clothes, their training, ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... point one is reminded of Watts-Dunton's definition of the two kinds of humour in The Renascence of Wonder: "While in the case of relative humour that which amuses the humorist is the incongruity of some departure from the laws of convention, in the case of absolute humour it is the incongruity of some departure from the normal as fixed by nature herself." We have our doubts as to the general application of this definition: but it applies so well to Chesterton that it might ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... said Mr. Joseph Mangles to the concierge, in a voice of deep depression which only added to the incongruity of his ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... and sound; but without colour and sound it breathes and throbs with life. Every object is associated in my mind with tactual qualities which, combined in countless ways, give me a sense of power, of beauty, or of incongruity: for with my hands I can feel the comic as well as the beautiful in the outward appearance of things. Remember that you, dependent on your sight, do not realize how many things are tangible. All palpable things are mobile or rigid, solid or ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... "formula" in mind. In brief, if we are to have complete efficiency, the right kind of life and no other must be put into the short-story hopper. Nothing which cannot be told rapidly must be dropped in, lest it clog the smoothly spinning wheels. If it is a story of slowly developing incongruity in married life, the action must be speeded beyond probability, like a film in the moving pictures, before it is ready to be made into a short story. If it is a tale of disillusionment on a prairie farm, with the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... vaguely angry and dissatisfied, but not willing to face things. It was unlikely that the man had seen her, unlikely that she would see him again; but he was incongruous in this simple life, and he brought forcibly home the incongruity of herself and her errand. She had come for the blue daffodil, it was no good pretending she had not; she told herself angrily, as she had told herself when she had first looked at Johnny's yellow-faced watch, that she was going to get it in some way that was justifiable. ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... until, if he be running towards anything better than wildfire, he may shoot up and become a constellation in the end. Lord look after his health, Lord have a care of his soul, says he; and he has at the key of the position, and swashes through incongruity and peril towards his aim. Death is on all sides of him with pointed batteries, as he is on all sides of all of us; unfortunate surprises gird him round; mim-mouthed friends[19] and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal synod about his path: and what cares he for all this? ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... enormous cathedral, at the time of my visit in course of erection directly above the gambling rooms. The millions of francs expended on this sumptuous basilica were supplied by the proprietors of the Casino and the Prince of Monaco. Nothing can strike the stranger with a stronger sense of incongruity—a church rising from the very heart of ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... satisfactory Chamber of Deputies re-elected by the people of France after four years of irritating and exasperating misrule. Much was expected from the dazzling effect upon the popular mind of the Universal Exposition at Paris—so much, indeed, that I have had the obvious incongruity of selecting for the celebration of the French Revolution by a French Republic the centennial of a year in which no French Republic existed, accounted for to me by a French Republican on the express ground that ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... pink cradle, was already interfering with his mother's plans. Ralph, alarmed by the fresh rush of expenses, sided with his father-in-law in urging Undine to resign herself to West End Avenue; and thus after three years she was still submitting to the incessant pin-pricks inflicted by the incongruity between her social and geographical situation—the need of having to give a west side address to her tradesmen, and the deeper irritation of hearing her friends say: "Do let me give you a lift home, dear—Oh, I'd forgotten! I'm afraid I haven't the ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... with a large theme, which, since it belongs to tragedy, is universal and unhampered by time or place or people. To them it had something of the sweep, dignity, and solemnity and also something of the dramatic incongruity and lack of cohesion of a Shakespearian drama as contradistinguished from the coherence of purpose and manner of ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... John's? He knew, as he sat there, that not only he could not, but that he would not. What, then? It was almost as if Julie suggested that the alternative was madcap days, such as that little scene in the bathroom suggested. He looked at her, and thought of it again, and smiled at the incongruity of it, there. But even as he smiled the cold whisper of dread insinuated itself again, small and slight as it was. Would such days fill his life? Could they offer that which should seize on his ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... passed, Krool turned towards the house, eyes showing like flames under the khaki trooper's hat, which added fresh incongruity to the frock-coat and the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... indeed. The impression made upon him by the story of Joan and her outcast life was one not easy to be effaced. The hardest miseries in the lot of a class in whom he could not fail to be interested, were grouped about that dramatic figure. He was struck, too, by a painful sense of incongruity. ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... admire the skilful manner in which he illustrates this theory himself, by constructing out of the rude materials of a distant time a monument of genius that transports us at once into the midst of the Feudal Ages,-and this without the incongruity which usually attaches to a modernantique. In like manner, I have attempted to seize the characteristic expression of a distant age, and to exhibit it in the freshness of life. But in an essential particular, I have deviated from the plan of the French historian. I have suffered the scaffolding ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... philosophers were great and awful; and they had the charm of antiquity. Something which found a response in his own mind seemed to have been lost as well as gained in the Socratic dialectic. He felt no incongruity in the veteran Parmenides correcting the youthful Socrates. Two points in his criticism are especially deserving of notice. First of all, Parmenides tries him by the test of consistency. Socrates is willing to assume ideas or principles ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... without hesitation, the Latin, rather than the Greek, nomenclature for the Heathen Deities. I have been induced to do so from the manifest incongruity of confounding the two; and from the fact that though English readers may be familiar with the names of Zeus, or Aphrodite, or even Poseidon, those of Hera, or Ares, or Hephaestus, or Leto, would hardly convey to ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... true of him who says that all is vanity. For indefinable as the predicate 'vanity' may be in se, it is clearly something that permits anaesthesia, mere escape from suffering, to be our rule of life. There can be no greater incongruity than for a disciple of Spencer to proclaim with one breath that the substance of things is unknowable, and with the next that the thought of it should inspire us with awe, reverence, and a willingness to add our co-operative push in the direction toward which its manifestations seem to be drifting. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... impressed, though he does not always treat of it with desirable clearness and precision, namely, that certain beliefs become obsolete, not in consequence of direct arguments against them, but because of their incongruity with prevalent habits of thought. Here is his statement of the two "classes of influences" by which the mass of men, in what is called civilized society, get their beliefs ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... mute. Let us confess at once that this tale savors strongly of the marvelous, the mysterious, and the vague; elements which Flemish narrators have infused into a story retailed so often to gatherings of workers on winter evenings, that the details vary widely in poetic merit and incongruity of detail. It has been told by every generation, handed down by grandames at the fireside, narrated night and day, and the chronicle has changed its complexion somewhat in every age. Like some great building that has suffered many modifications of ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... right," said O'Leary, joining in the hearty laugh against him, "quite right, I was always a very heavy sleeper—indeed if I wasn't I wouldn't be here now, travelling about en garcon, free as air;" here he heaved a sigh, which from its incongruity with his jovial look and happy expression, threw us ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... there was very little if any difference between a performance of "Hamlet" by the great Betterton, and an exhibition of the marital infelicities of Punch and Judy. Are matters so much better now that we can afford to laugh at the incongruity? Do not theatres devoted to the "legitimate" and dime museums, the homes of triple-pated men, human corkscrews and other intellectual freaks, come under the same police supervision, and rank one and all within the same classification as "places of amusement?" Nay, to go further and ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... embodiment of the thought and feeling expressed. Form should be molded by the thought and emotion, as the rose or oak is shaped by the potency of its inner life. When, in any way, the form is out of keeping with the subject, the effect upon a cultivated taste is a disagreeable incongruity. ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... thundered a salute across the ordinarily quiet bay. Amidst their universal demonstration the Sumter alone remained unmoved. The nation whose flag she bore had not yet been recognised by the Brazilian government, and it would therefore have been the height of incongruity to sport the slightest bunting on such an occasion. The more so as the good folks of Maranham, though to all appearance personally well disposed towards the Confederates, were in such dread of officially committing themselves, ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... a Jacobean parlour for political consultation and learned disputes, and even—since we are almost in the eighteenth century—a Chinese cabinet full of curios. It was a habitable philosophy, and not too inharmonious. There was no greater incongruity in its parts than in the gentle variations of English weather or in the qualified moods and insights of a civilised mind. Impoverished as we are, morally and humanly, we can no longer live in such a rambling mansion. It has become a national monument. On the ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... Law that Moses flung down from the mountain-top in his wrath. In the dense ignorance of the mountaineer, and his secluded life, he knew of no foreign countries, no land holier than the land of his home. There was no incongruity to his mind that it should have been in the solemn silence and austere solitude of the "bald," in the magnificent ascendency of the Great Smoky, that the law-giver had met the Lord and spoken with Him. Often as he lay at length on the strange barren place, veiled with the ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... and arrows, one of them, who appeared to be the chief, having a lynx's skin for a quiver. A few had fishing tackle, but the bystanders said that they lived almost entirely upon grasshoppers. They were a most impressive incongruity in the midst of the tokens of an ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... particular formula has probably not been used for the last quarter of a century. The warriors are also made to shield themselves with the white war whoop, which should undoubtedly be the red war whoop, consistent with the red war club, white being the color emblematic of peace, which is evidently an incongruity. The war whoop is believed to have a positive magic power for the protection of the warrior, as well ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... The incongruity of all this with any adequate conception of deity is patent, if once the critical attitude be adopted; and it was adopted by some of the clearest and most religious minds of Greece. Nay, even orthodoxy itself did not refrain from a genial and sympathetic criticism. Aristophanes, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... went quietly from the room, and through the long and stately passages, where the worldly pomp visible had stirred in Dalaber on entering a sense of incongruity and almost of contempt. ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... one glorious Gothic projection which almost touches the balcony of the theatre. Within the Carolinum are spacious halls devoted to all manner of academic functions. In one of these halls I witnessed a scene which struck me with a sense of incongruity that I have not been able to explain to myself. The Indian poet and philosopher, Rabindranath Thagore, was received here by the University of Prague. Learned professors read lengthy addresses of welcome in Czech, ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... Scriptures or elsewhere we should find a banquet denominated a marriage feast, while from the circumstances it appeared that no marriage had taken place, we should experience no difficulty in explaining the apparent incongruity. But in this case there is no reason for adopting the exceptional, and the strongest reason for retaining what is confessedly the ordinary and natural signification of the term. The conception of the Redeemer as the bridegroom, and his redeemed people as the bride, lies too ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot |
