"Misfit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were covered with layers of misfit clothing out of the store, while many of them wore several hats, and others had extra pairs of shoes ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... than the once hale, lusty manager. All his corpulency had fled. His face was thin and pale, his hands white, his body flabby. Clothes and all, he weighed but one hundred and thirty-five pounds. Some old garments had been given him—a cheap brown coat and misfit pair of trousers. Also some change and advice. He was told to apply ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... marster name Sam Brice. His wife, my mistress, tho' fair as de lily of de valley and cheeks as pink as de rose of Sharon, is called 'Darkie.' Dat always seem a misfit to me. Lily or Rose or Daisy would have suited her much more better, wid her laces, frills, flounces, and ribbons. Her mighty good to de slaves. Take deir part 'ginst de marster sometime, when him want to whup them. Sometime I sit on de door-steps and speculate in ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... her like she knew the proprietor wa'n't responsible for overcoats. The Boss tried to tell her how there wa'n't any grand larceny intended, but it was no go. She had her suspicions of the crowd, so they just had to let her sit there draped in black. And at that she wa'n't any misfit. ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... "if I wanted him I think I'd find some way of hurrying him up. Ludovic SPEED! Was there ever such a misfit of a name? Such a name for such a man is a delusion ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... level of the Tepl, the hill- fed torrent that brawls through the little city under pretty bridges within walls of solid masonry, they found themselves in almost the only vehicle on a brilliant promenade thronged with a cosmopolitan world. Germans in every manner of misfit; Polish Jews in long black gabardines, with tight corkscrew curls on their temples under their black velvet derbys; Austrian officers in tight corsets; Greek priests in flowing robes and brimless high hats; Russians in caftans and Cossacks ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... listening, seeing a shabbily clothed misfit of a boy with a bundle of papers under his arm turning a corner. "What's that? ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... coffee!" following it with peals of laughter. Or, turning up a saucy face, she would ask, "Shall I tumble out more coffee?" and again the laughter which came as readily at her own misfit attempts ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... his Indian companion as they made their way downstream. At each dip of their paddles a deeper sickness seemed to enter into his heart. Life, after all, he tried to reason, was like a tailored garment. One might have an ideal, and if that ideal became a realization it would be found a misfit for one reason or another. So he told himself, in spite of fill the dreams which had urged him on in the fight for better things. There flooded upon him now the forceful truth of what Ransom had said. His ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... is to cast mortals into the holes that most misfit them) sometimes, when she has got them there, takes pity, and contemptuously lifts them. Pet was in a hole of hardship, such as his dear mamma never could have dreamed of, and such as his nurture and constitution made trebly disastrous for ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... licence, Doc,' he demands, when Peets tells him how it's spelled, 'to jam in that misfit "c"? Me havin' drove stage for twenty years, I've seen as much scenery as any gent present, an' should shore know how it's spelled. Scenery is what you sees. "S-e-e" spells see; an' tharfore I contends that "S-e-e-n-r-y" spells scenery. That "c" you springs on us, Doc, is a solecism, an' as ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... habit requires readjustment. From such negative control a habit should never be allowed to escape. This great world of ours does not stand still. Every moment its conditions are altering. Whatever action fits it now will be pretty sure to be a slight misfit next year. No one can be thoroughly good who is not a flexible person, capable of drawing back his trains, reexamining them, and bringing them into better ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... space for reason for going, the applicant had written simply: Adventure. He handed the application back to Tom. "I think I see what you mean, Tom. It does look too good. Better not take a chance. Seven years is a long time to get stuck with a misfit, or worse, a—" He didn't finish, but Tom knew he meant a man not to ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... is a misfit in her present environment. Born at Longwood Plantation on Waccamaw in 1837, all she knows is the easy, quiet life of the country. And the busy, bustling 'RACE PATH' near which her Grandson lives with whom she makes her home doesn't make a fitting frame for the old lady. All day she ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... unproductive period of boyhood was cut very short. Franklin's father speedily resolved to devote him, "as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the church," and so sent him to the grammar school. A droller misfit than Franklin in an orthodox New England pulpit of that era can hardly be imagined; but since he was only seven years old when his father endeavored to arrange his life's career, a misappreciation of his fitnesses was not ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... to know that even the best name you could pick wouldn't turn out to be a misfit? About the only Percy I ever knew in real life was a great two-fisted husk who was foreman of a stereotypin' room; and here in the Corrugated Buildin', if you'll come in some night after five, I can show you a wide built scrub lady, with ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... Donkin rose and watched Belfast's back lurch through the doorway. On all sides invisible men slept, breathing calmly. He seemed to draw courage and fury from the peace around him. Venomous and thin-faced, he glared from the ample misfit of borrowed clothes as if looking for something he could smash. His heart leaped wildly in his narrow chest. They slept! He wanted to wring necks, gouge eyes, spit on faces. He shook a dirty pair of meagre ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... eyes, saw a claw of a hand thrust above the log. The bones of the wrist were visible; the rest resembled a misfit glove, the fingers hanging in shreds. The hand connected with the body of a man lying close against the opposite side of the log. The legs from the knees down were gone; the remainder of the man was a mass of burned flesh and rags. Near ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... had a ring of harshness. "Believe me, I am not accustomed to being ranked with the saints," he said. "How shall I get away from your halo? I warn you, it's a most awful misfit. You'll find it out presently, and make me ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... in the proceedings the moving man and his assistant paused in their labors and the former fished out of his misfit clothing a greasy piece of paper which he handed me. I glanced at it under the jet and saw ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... conscious of a misfit somewhere in our experience, the actual study done to right it varies indefinitely with the individual. The savage follows a hit-and-miss method of investigation, and really makes his advances by happy guesses rather than by close application. ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... an uneasy change in Mr. Micawber, which sat tightly on him, as if his new duties were a misfit, I felt I had no right to be offended. My telling him so, appeared to relieve him; and he shook hands ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... didn't join me in that. But when she left school and went up to Oxford, she began to develop and expand mentally, and took her own line, and by the time she was twenty she was, as I never was, a red-hot nationalist. We were neither of us ever inclined to Judaism in religion; we shook off the misfit of Anglicanism at an early age (we both refused at fifteen to be confirmed), but didn't take to our national faith, which we both disliked extremely. Nor did we like most of our fellow Jews; I think as a race we are narrow, cowardly, avaricious, and mean-spirited, ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... my case,' said the stranger sadly. 'However much they may misfit me, they do not misfit ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Buffalo next morning, catching the first glimpse of that important " seaport of the lakes," where, fifteen miles across the bay, the wagon-road is almost licked by the swashing waves; and entering the city over a " misfit" plank-road, off which I am almost upset by the most audaciously indifferent woman in the world. A market woman homeward bound with her empty truck-wagon, recognizes my road-rights to the extent of barely room to squeeze past between her wagon and the ditch; and holds her long, stiff ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... "Well, I'm no misfit," he rejoined briefly. To "feel at home" at home—that, I presume, was the advantage ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... and still overcome with his native superstition, Rusty was nevertheless forced to don the armor—a sad misfit he was, ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... disagreeable, motor cooerdinations that will need laborious decomposition later. The avoidable factor in their causation is, with some modification, not unlike that of the simpler feral movements and faulty attitudes, carriage, and postures in children; viz., some form of overpressure or misfit between environment and nature. As during the years from four to eight there is great danger that overemphasis of the activities of the accessory muscles will sow the seeds of chorea, or aggravate predispositions ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... know what she wants well enough, but somehow I just can't do it. I might at one time, but I couldn't now to save my neck from the loop. The old man is plumb right. When a feller's love gets cold on the inside he can't warm it up by external applications. He's a matrimonial misfit, and the sooner he realizes it and is ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... the American nation has taken to itself is as acquiescent as it seems. No doubt they are largely taking over the traditional forms of American thought and expression quietly and without protest, and wearing them; but they will wear them as a man wears a misfit, shaping and adapting it every day more and more to his natural form, here straining a seam and there taking in a looseness. A force of modification must be at work. It must be at work in spite of the fact that, with the exception ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure. The tailor adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to his patron's wants. The tailor's object, in this volume, is to fit young men, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... or tenderfoot, or greener or chechako, or counter-jumper, owin' to what part of the country you misfit into. We thought you wouldn't have no ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... of careful investigation and the examination of many thousands of individuals, we have seen so much of the tragedy of the misfit that it seems at times almost universal. The records of one thousand persons taken at random from our files show that 763, or 76.3 per cent, felt that they were in the wrong vocations. Of these 414 were thirty-five years old or older. Most ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... wished to talk, eat, or laugh. It was Sally who made him buy them, and he wore them more for her sake than for any other reason, and he was always uncomfortable with them, for they were a plain, unmistakable misfit, and felt, as he said, "like I got my mouth full o' tenpenny nails." When out of Sally's sight he avoided this feeling by carrying them in his hand, hidden in his red bandana handkerchief. About town he used to show them with ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... the one drop of poison in the honey of my cup: that I was wearing an abominable misfit of a drab-coloured suit of homespun more adapted to some village tradesman than to a young cavalier of fashion, for on account of the hue and cry against me I had pocketed my pride and was travelling under an incognito. ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... my belief that the benevolent fiend sat up all night to baulk me. She was at my bedside with a candle long ere day, roused me, laid out for me a damnable misfit of clothes, and bade me pack my own (which were wholly unsuited to the journey) in a bundle. Sore grudging, I arrayed myself in a suit of some country fabric, as delicate as sackcloth and about as becoming as a shroud; and, on coming forth, found the dragon had prepared for me a hearty breakfast. ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be shaped and strengthened; but it will not be transformed if it is dross in the first place. That is something which every combat leader has learned in his tour under fire; the man of whom nobody speaks good, who is regarded as a social misfit, unliked and unliking, of his comrades, will usually desert them under pressure. There are others who have the right look but will be just as quick to quit, and look to themselves, in a crisis; underneath, ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... most any of these places that have grown out of this process of finest subdivision of work. The hardship comes only when the mind cannot get interested in the work. In many cases this is undoubtedly due to a misfit, but in most cases it seems to be due to a false notion that there is nothing there ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... spare brass proved to be of the wrong pattern; a Pullman, instead of a P. S-W. standard. Olson was a trained mechanic and a man of resources, and he chipped and filed and scraped at the misfit brass until he made it serve. But when he climbed again to the cab of his engine, and Ford swung up to the steps of the car, the white headlight eye of an east-bound freight, left at a siding a full hour's run to the rear, came in sight from the observation platform ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... no inheritance but a predisposition to baldness and a bitter hatred of rum; with no personal property but a misfit suspender and a stone-bruise, began a life history which has never ceased to be a warning to people who have ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye |
