"Freakish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the window of her room, when the signal came, but first she was not sure, because the sound was as faint as a memory. Moreover, it might have been a freakish whistling in the wind, which rose stronger and stronger. It had piled the thunder-clouds high and higher, and now and again a heavy drop of rain tapped at her window like a ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... * From there on his plan entered the realm of pure hypothesis; except for the broad detail the rest depended on luck and whatever freakish conditions might arise in his favor during the operation. These, too, would be beyond his control and any move to take advantage of them would have to be instinctive, providing he was in ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... purpose of carrying on such odd researches was to satisfy a fondness for freakish ingenuity, much less interest was found in the thousands of amusing epitaphs that are penned by writers for comic papers or by wags in general. Fictitious inscriptions lack the charm of authenticity, which in the case of epitaphs is ...
— Quaint Epitaphs • Various
... expected to take care of Crookhorn,—Kjersti and she both thought she ought to do that; but it had proved to be impossible. Crookhorn had become so freakish that sometimes they almost thought her out of her wits. In the building shared by the sheep and goats she ranged back and forth from wall to wall, knocking against the sheep and the other goats so hard as she went that their ribs rattled. At last she ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud
... single, uneven; singular, peculiar, unusual, unique, strange, quaint, extraordinary, queer, eccentric, whimsical, freakish, baroque, fantastic, nondescript, abnormal, bizarre, erratic, unconventional, curious, capricious; extra, remaining, additional, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... she drove by. Most of her neighbors was a lot younger, folks who barely remembered that there had been such a party as Clara Belle Kinney, and who couldn't have told whether she'd been a singer or a bareback rider. They only knew her as a dumpy freakish dressed old girl whose drugged ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... are purged from film, and lo! "Instead of Anster's turnip-bearing vales "I see old fairy land's miraculous show! "Her trees of tinsel kissed by freakish gales, "Her Ouphs that, cloaked in leaf-gold, skim the breeze, "And ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... Henry Lee permitted him entrance at all times to the Royal Lodge, he used to spend whole days in wandering about the antique apartments, examining, measuring, studying, and finding out excellent reasons for architectural peculiarities, which probably only owed their existence to the freakish fancy of a Gothic artist. But the old antiquary had been expelled from his living by the intolerance and troubles of the times, and his successor, Nehemiah Holdenough, would have considered an elaborate investigation of the profane sculpture and ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... because it contains things to eat. I do not mean that a kitchen garden is ugly; a kitchen garden is often very beautiful. The mixture of green and purple on some monstrous cabbage is much subtler and grander than the mere freakish and theatrical splashing of yellow and violet on a pansy. Few of the flowers merely meant for ornament are so ethereal as a potato. A kitchen garden is as beautiful as an orchard; but why is it that the word "orchard" sounds as beautiful as the word "flower-garden," ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... variety of flesh-tints among the bathers here. I wish my old friend Dr. Bowles could have seen it; we used to be deeply immersed, both of us, in the question of the chromatophores, I observing their freakish behaviour in the epidermis of certain frogs, while he studied their action on the human skin and wrote an excellent little paper on sunburn—a darker problem than it seems to ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... office is high-toned and esthetic. Perhaps that is the main reason why he is so often reluctant to give it up and be cured. He may display morbid fears and fancies that border on lunacy, and he may do some freakish and atrocious things, but for all that he is usually a man of good points and perhaps superior attainments. Our cult is respectable and made up of gentlemen who seldom defile their mouths or stomachs with tobacco, cigarettes, impure ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... and nature drove them inward, concentrating, fortifying, intensifying them; to a not wholly normal or healthy brain, freakish and without consecution, adding a stammering tongue which could not speak evenly, and had to do its share, as the brain did, 'by fits.' 'You,' we find Lamb ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... what it will be like," he replied, after a pause. His tone and look implied a freakish, a whimsical curiosity, yet full of charm. Then, motioning to her to come nearer, and speaking ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... say, for a youth, before the multiplying responsibilities of maturity press upon him, to pour out his enthusiasm in an obsession such as that; and when this passion can be shared and doubled and knitted in partnership with an equally freakish, insane, and innocent idiot (such as our generously mad friend Mifflin) admirable adventures are sure to follow. The quest begun on Darby Creek took us later on an all-summer progress among places in England and Scotland hallowed to us by association with R. L. S. Never, ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... visions of the soul! Ye wild and freakish gambolings of the spirit, freed from the incubus of matter, and unfettered by the control of reason, of what fantastic caprices are ye the originators 137—what caricatures of the various features of our waking life do ye not exhibit to us, ludicrous and distorted indeed, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... on her snow-white gown—if the writers are to be believed in regard to its hue!—when she sat down in the only chair, and dust in her eyes when she flirted her fan. Fortunate was it for Straws that the Muse is a wayward, freakish gipsy; a straggler in attics; a vagrant of the streets; fortunately for him she is not at all the fine lady she has been depicted! Doubtless she has her own reasons for her vagaries; perhaps because it is so easy to soar from the hovel to fairy-land, but ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... Engleton, in speaking of him afterwards to Hadria, "it is strange that his cleverness does not come to the rescue; but so far from that, I think it leads him a wild dance over boggy ground, like some will-o'-the-wisp, but for whose freakish allurements the good man might have trodden a ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... so far as this is still possible. Lippert, Hagedorn, Oeser, Dietrich, Heinecken and Oesterreich loved, practised and promoted art, each in his own way. Their purposes were restricted, their maxims were one-sided, yea, very often, freakish. They circulated stories and anecdotes, the varied application of which was intended not only to entertain but also to instruct society. From such elements arose the earliest treatises of Winckelmann, which he himself very soon found unsatisfactory, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... dawn, she was liable to be driven, at the bidding of some dark primeval impulse, to divest herself of her raiment—a singularity which perturbed even the hardiest of social night-birds who had the misfortune to encounter her. Taxed with this freakish behaviour, she would refer to the example of St. Francis of Assisi who did the same, and brazenly ask whether he wasn't good enough for them? Whether she couldn't give her last shirt to a beggar, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... her face, but by the tone of her voice he knew it had brightened. "Yes. I did a freakish thing the night we arrived at the Killigrews'. I forced him into a corner, but it did not pan out as I hoped. So far as it touched me, it wasn't necessary, as I have told you a thousand times. Your ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... spoiled child, Zarah, and dost but abuse the indulgence I entertain for your freakish humour," replied Christian; "thy wits have been disturbed since ever you landed in England, and all for the sake of one who cares for thee no more than for the most worthless object who walks the streets, amongst ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... taken to the pen herself, and artistic expression would—possibly— have absorbed and safe-guarded her during the remainder of her genetic years; but such a thing never occurred to her. She was too modest in the face of master work, and only queer freakish women wrote, anyhow, not ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... who would call "Johnny Appleseed" "queer;" others, "freakish;" again, "eccentric," etc. This peculiar, odd personage may be described by all these terms. But the ruling passion of his life was to plant apple-seeds, because he loved to see trees grow and because he loved his fellow-men. The ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... arms were loosed from my neck, by a sudden surging of his lust, he would have throttled me. All that was as clear in his looks as are the marks on this paper; but I could read my gentleman by now and was in no mood for his freakish humours. "Take warning," I said, "that if you move one step nearer to me I shoot you like a rabbit." I crooked my arm and levelled at him as I spoke. I suppose he saw truth in the mouth of the barrel, for he stopped, and looked at me, ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... I guess it seems awful foolish to you." He moved his cracked patent-leather pump in a sort of pattern on the floor. Again he looked up, this time with a freakish, an almost elfin flicker of his extravagant eyelashes. "There's something I could be real well," he said. "Only, I guess Poppa's got there ahead of me. I could be a dandy guardian ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... draft dodger who had challenged that tangled profusion of tree and brush to escape going to war and had never been able to find his way down again—a quite just punishment for his cowardice. But time and again this freakish glint of light had been proven to be the reflection of that very camp-fire upon a huge rock lodged up there and held by ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... holiday of license and drinking and reckless play with gambling devices. But now it was different—something within him had called—or was calling—a halt. He told himself that it was because he had a curiosity to follow this strange, freakish plan of Betty's ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... months reg'lar hard labour, and see if that wouldn't dummer a little sense into 'n." There was no suggestion, however, of "a woman in the case," to explain this man's ill-treatment of his wife; it appears to have been simply a piece of freakish brutality. ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... newspaper is of importance. The funny sheet appeals not so much through humor as through glaring color and grotesque pictures which violate every canon of color combination and of art. Exaggerated types of mischievous children and freakish adults, and equally freakish and unthinkable mechanical devices, are favorite subjects. Disobedience of children, premature and unnatural childish love-affairs, domestic infelicity, the privileges and advantages of bachelorhood are paraded Sunday ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... could engage him: I have need of some such spirits near me now, For this inheritance is worth a struggle. 260 And though I am not the man to yield without one, Neither are they who now rise up between me And my desire. The boy, they say, 's a bold one; But he hath played the truant in some hour Of freakish folly, leaving fortune to Champion his claims. That's well. The father, whom For years I've tracked, as does the blood-hound, never In sight, but constantly in scent, had put me To fault; but here I have him, and that's better. It must be he! All circumstance ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... to confess the truth, my dear Mac, those old sinners, Lord Freakish, General Jolly, Sir Antony Soaker, and two or three more of that set, laid hold of me last night at the opera,—and, as the General says, 'from the intelligence of my head this morning,' I believe we drank pretty deep ere ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... of music—I now have a story to tell you of a certain freakish character; and then we are regaled with the musical portrayal of a series of Till's pranks. As an Epilogue, Strauss improvises on this opening theme as much as to say—you have listened to my musical story, now let us indulge in some reflections ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... heel and went; he felt that at last Evadna was looking at him, though he would not turn to make sure. And his instinct told him withal that he must ignore her mood if he would win her from it. With a freakish impulse, he headed straight for the campfire and Miss Georgie, but when he came up to her the look she gave him of understanding, with sympathy to soften it, sent him away ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... the clear air itself, where they cannot be detected. He may suddenly drop into a 'hole,' which is really a downward current of air, or he may get a terrific bump when he strikes a rising current. A freakish whim of the winds may unexpectedly take away the air support from under one of the wings, and he will lurch and ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... the mighty works that we see done in the world. In truth, therefore, as one diamond is worth numberless bits of glass; so one solid reason is worth innumerable fancies: one grain of true science and sound wisdom in real worth and use doth outweigh loads (if any loads can be) of freakish wit. To rate things otherwise doth argue great weakness of judgment, and fondness of mind. So to conceit of this way signifieth a weak mind; and much to delight therein rendereth it so—nothing more debaseth the spirit of a man, or more ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... door. One of these was a large black and tan dog, with the long body, wavy hair, drooping silken ears, and richly feathered tail of a Gordon setter, most grotesquely supported, at a height of not more than eight inches from the ground, by the little bow-legs of a dachshund. This freakish and sinister-looking animal gazed at the visitor with eyes of sagacious welcome, tongue hanging amiably half out, and tail gently waving. He approved of this particular Boy, though boys in general he ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... to life again—he whom the Machine had stamped with astute simplicity by the time he was twenty-two, and for ever after left untouched in thought and feeling—Johnny Dromore, who would never pass beyond the philosophy that all was queer and freakish which had not to do with horses, women, wine, cigars, jokes, good-heartedness, and that perpetual bet; Johnny Dromore, who, somewhere in him, had a pocket of depth, a streak of hunger, that was not just ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of reminiscent detachment the wearer of the Peacock feather describes himself as "one whom Fate in one of her freakish moods had wedded to the roads, the highways and hedges, the fields and woods. Once Cupid had touched him with his wing—the merest flick of a feather. The man—poor fool!—fancied himself wounded. Later when he looked for the scar, he ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... to school, but she wouldn't stay. She likes her home and she hates rules. She loves animals, and if she were a boy she would practice medicine. Being a woman and having no outlet for her energies, she is freakish. You saw the way she was dressed ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... vigorously to applaud, would have shared his last possession, his ultimate crust, with that unknown benefactor of mankind. Indeed, though, the heart of Mr. Woods just now was full of loving kindness and capable of any freakish magnanimity. ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... were in Christophe's nature all sorts of disordered elements which eluded Olivier and made him uneasy. He used to have sudden fits of a freakish and terrible humor. For days together he would not speak: or he would break out in diabolically malicious moods and try deliberately to hurt. Sometimes he would disappear altogether and be seen no more for the rest of ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... of surprise: this time, freakish chance had willed that the block of marble should move under his fingers! Safety, flight became possible. In that case, why submit to Holmlock ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... at Judge Saxon's door, he could see no evidence that any one had left the Donovan boy a fortune over night, but did note a change in him. There was something appealingly grave and sedate about his face, as if a part of its youth, the freakish, unconquerable laughter of it, that had defied and antagonized Mr. Burr, were gone forever, burned away, somehow, in a night. It was a look Mr. Burr was to grow well used to in the next few months. Perhaps the unaccountable affection he was to feel for the boy ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... below the decencies of life. I asked the governor of the house whether he met with any difficulty in keeping peace and order among his inmates; and he informed me that his troubles among the women were incomparably greater than with the men. They were freakish, and apt to be quarrelsome, inclined to plague and pester one another in ways that it was impossible to lay hold of, and to thwart his own authority by the like intangible methods. He said this with the utmost good-nature, and quite won my regard ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... life of the shoal sea-floor small fishes of curious form shot hither and thither, live, darting gleams of gold and azure and amethyst. Now and again a long, black shadow would sail slowly over the scene of freakish life—the shadow of a passing albacore or barracouta. Instantly the shining fish would hide themselves among the shining shells, and every movement, save that of the unconsciously waving weeds, would ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... running-heads, should be avoided by the young compositor; there are places where it may be unobjectionable but it will require good judgment and some experience to prevent such lines making the page look freakish or amateurish. ...
— Capitals - A Primer of Information about Capitalization with some - Practical Typographic Hints as to the Use of Capitals • Frederick W. Hamilton
... garlands had bound. * * * * * The moon on the east oriel shone, Through slender shafts of shapely stone, By foliated tracery combined; Thou would'st have thought some fairy's hand 'Twixt poplars straight the osier wand In many a freakish knot had twined; Then framed a spell, when the work was done, And changed the willow-wreaths ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various
... there is a species of goby, which is amphibious. This fish lies in myriads on the mud-banks left uncovered by the ebb of the tide, and moves with great agility on the approach of birds. Nature seems to have made the goby in one of her most freakish moods. It is equally at home in the earth, the air, and the water; and at different times in the day may be observed swimming in the stream, basking upon the surface of the tidal banks, and ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... freakish in her choice of instruments for noble purposes. Sometimes the delicate spirit of creative genius is housed in a veritable tenement of clay, so that what is within seems ever at war with what is without. At times the antagonism is more dreadful still, and the artist-soul ...
— A Day with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy • George Sampson
... the mild night, Margaret was in the high spirits which accompany the expectation of bliss, without the sobering effect of its responsibility. Love itself is very serious, but the overture is full of freakish gayety. And it was all gayety that night. We all constituted ourselves a guard of honor to Miss Forsythe and Margaret when they went to their cottage, and there was a merry leave-taking in the moonlight. To be sure, Margaret walked with Henderson, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and black! Sting, little light, the shadows back! Dance, little flame, with freakish glee! Twinkle with brilliant mockery! Glitter on ice-robed roof and floor! Jewel the bear-skin of the door! Gleam in my beard, illume my breath, Blanch the clock face that times my death! But do not pierce that murk so deep, Where in their sleeping-bags ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... art of hand shaking and develop your social affections. A person that loves his kind reflects love, but a person that hates reflects hate. The person with a bad nature, a hateful disposition, evil thoughts and feeling is erratic, freakish and fitful. When you allow yourself to become irritable, watch how you breathe and you will learn a valuable lesson. Watch how you breathe when you are happy. Watch your breathing when you harbor hate. Watch ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... freakish, elvish cast came into the child's eyes, while Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and, suddenly,—for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions,—she ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Thus one couple were adorned, the wife with a set of tin curls, the man with a tin hat. A tin purse enclosing a check for "tin" was once presented to a tin bride on the occasion of her tin wedding. The freakish fancy of one's friends is generally much in evidence at a tin wedding. As at the wooden wedding, the bride cuts a wedding cake decorated with a monogram formed of the initials of her own and her husband's name, and the year of the wedding and of its ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... fantasy ripened into imagination: he has also kept up the habit of dramatising everything, of playing, half consciously, many parts, of making the world "an unsubstantial fairy place." This turn of mind it is that causes his work occasionally to seem somewhat freakish. Thus, in the fogs and horrors of London, he plays at being an Arabian tale-teller, and his "New Arabian Nights" are a new kind of romanticism—Oriental, freakish, like the work of a changeling. Indeed, this ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... she they call Fortune is a drunken, freakish dame, and withal so blind that she does not see what she is about; neither whom she raises, nor whom she ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of the enormous area which her mainsail would present when fully set. It was not, however, until we got close to her, and Carline caused his boatmen to pull slowly round her, that I detected what the Admiral and the master-attendant meant when they had spoken of the freakish peculiarities of her model; then, indeed, it became apparent that her designer had, as Sir Peter had said, literally turned her lines end for end, as it were. For she had absolutely no "straight of breadth" at all; her sides were ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... Chinese quarter, blew along Paradise Street, dusting the gesticulating man, and went on up the river, pretending to make the brown water change its muddy mind and run backwards instead of forwards. It paid a little freakish attention to Mrs. Wilder's dark hair, and it cooled the back of Hartley's neck, as they rode along together, by the way ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... very different side to Stevenson which struck others more than it struck myself, namely, that of the freakish or elvish, irresponsible madcap or jester which sometimes appeared in him. It is true that his demoniac quickness of wit and intelligence suggested occasionally a "spirit of air and fire" rather than one of earth; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bridge, where the carriage had come to a stand, the traveler looks along a line of cliffs stretching as far as Tours. Nature in some freakish mood must have raised these barriers of rock, undermined incessantly by the rippling Loire at their feet, for a perpetual wonder for spectators. The village of Vouvray nestles, as it were, among the clefts and crannies of the crags, which begin to describe ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... over and looked. Upon the page of folio, close to an illuminated capital, the black drop had flattened itself. Around the original sphere had been shed splashes of all conceivable shapes-rays, rockets, dotted lines, arrowheads, all the freakish impromptu of chaos. Next, the slope lending its aid, the channels had drained into one, and by this time a black rivulet was crawling downward to the margin. One or two readers near had risen, and now eyed me like examining magistrates. I waited for an outbreak, motionless, dazed, muttering ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... gave him a rosary—(his first captors coveted that and took care of it). But also they ate together of fruit, and as both ladies and gallants do strange things at strange times, the lady divided the seeds, and counted them seeking a lucky number or some such freakish quest. And by the rosary, and by his mother, she made him swear that when he had found fortune and a plantation in the new world, he would plant with his own hands the seeds there, and send for the lady to come by ship as ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... father. He asked about you, and when I told him you were not so well as usual, he said he would call you up. He wants to tell you about some doctor he discovered in Iowa, who cures everything with massage and hot water. It sounds freakish, but Mr. Lane is a very clever ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... Narcissa. He had not anticipated a return of the courtesy. He had no welcome for this stranger, and somehow he felt that he did not altogether understand Narcissa at times; that she had flights of fancy which were beyond him, and took a mischievous pleasure in tantalizing him, and was freakish and ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... himself Dr. Owen was favorably impressed both by the man and his surroundings. There was nothing garish or freakish or Oriental about the place, which was furnished with the business-like simplicity of an ordinary doctor's office. And Leroy certainly had a fine head—a clean-shaven face with heavy black brows under ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... argument was not a good one at all, for no lump of ice cream ever remained long intact where Pee-wee was. Whether it melted or not, it disappeared. And why this freakish little island did not rapidly ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... for the demands of public taste, and of his marvellous genius and skill in adapting and transmuting for his own purposes the labours of other workers in the field that for the moment engaged his attention. Most of Shakespeare's sonnets were produced in 1594 under the incitement of that freakish rage for sonnetteering which, taking its rise in Italy and sweeping over France on its way to England, absorbed for some half-dozen years in this country a greater volume of literary energy than has been applied to sonnetteering within ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... class of being distinct in habit and disposition from the freakish and mischievous elves. He was meagre, shaggy, and wild in his appearance. Thus Cleland, in his satire against the ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... Browning's poems can fail to have been impressed by his intellectual agility in matching odd rhymes. In dash and originality his rhymes out-rank even those in Butler's Hudibras and Lowell's Fable for Critics. We find in Pacchiarotto, for instance, many rhymes of the gayest, most freakish, most grotesque character—"monkey, one key," "prelude, hell-hued," "stubborn, cub-born," "was hard, hazard," all occur in a single stanza. An example of exceptional facility in rhyming is found in "Through the Metidja," where, without repetition of words and without forcing ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... dear and admirable, Bettine only interesting. Gunderode is of religious grace, Bettine the fulness of instinctive impulse; Gunderode is the ideal, Bettine nature; Gunderode throws herself into the river because the world is all too narrow, Bettine lives and follows out every freakish fancy, till the enchanting child degenerates into an eccentric and undignified old woman. There is a medium somewhere. Philip Sidney found it; others had it found for them ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... in ancient days, When learning, virtue, piety, and truth Were precious, and inculcated with care, There dwelt a sage called Discipline. His head, Not yet by time completely silvered o'er, Bespoke him past the bounds of freakish youth, But strong for service still, and unimpaired. His eye was meek and gentle, and a smile Played on his lips, and in his speech was heard Paternal sweetness, dignity, and love. The occupation dearest to his heart Was to encourage goodness. He would stroke ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... cultivation, beauty, and skill exhibited on every hand, until almost wearied with viewing the creations of art; the eye at once falls upon a scene in which is crowded all the wildness and abruptness of nature in one of her most freakish moods—a scene which seems to defy the hand of cultivation and the graces of art. We ascended a hill on the border of this section, which afforded us a complete view. To describe it in one sentence, it is an immense basin, from two to three miles in diameter at the top, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... these things that decided him eventually to resign his commission, but of them his letters home make little or no mention. They are full, on the other hand, of descriptions of the beauties of the Island which, curious, odd, freakish and unexpected, held him as did those of no other place. The curious inconsistencies of the Creole nature also interested him, and he spent much of his spare time sketching and studying the people. Two friendships he made there were ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... shimmering white surface of a dry lake caught his angry eye. As he looked, it began to rock gently from side to side. Presently, in a freakish spirit of its own, it curled up at the edges. Later, it seemed to turn into a dimpling sheet of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... many odd or extraordinary people there are in England. We hear continual complaints of the stodgy dullness of the English. It would be quite as just to complain of their freakish, unusual characters. Only en masse the metal ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... literature, but he has a large vein of satiric humor that found its best expression in the grotesque irony of "Murder as One of the Fine Arts." In this essay he descants on the greatest crime as though it were an accomplishment, and his freakish wit makes this paper as enjoyable as Charles Lamb's essay on ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... at a jerk, And of Redemption made damn'd work. Then took his Muse at once, and dipt her Full in the middle of the Scripture. What wonders there the man, grown old, did? Sternhold himself he out Sternholded. Made David seem so mad and freakish, All thought him just what thought King Achish. No mortal read his Solomon But judg'd Re'boam his own son. Moses he serv'd as Moses Pharaoh, And Deborah as she Siserah, Made Jeremy full sore to cry, And Job himself curse God and die. What ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... called him out of town. He would go to Precious. Glory was getting freakish, queer. Precious never had visions. She was not notionate. She just loved him and was content. So he went to her. She dimpled at him adoringly, and led him out to her bower of roses, and sat on his ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... stretched out their skeleton arms towards him, moaning and wailing that even in their graves they could not get over the torture caused by his essences and electuaries. Accordingly the Pyramid Doctor, although he could not contradict Signor Pasquale that it was only a wild freakish trick played upon him by a parcel of godless boys, grew melancholy; and, albeit not ordinarily superstitiously inclined, he yet now saw spectres everywhere, and was tormented by forebodings and ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... rapidly swept off his feet. Since their meeting at Threlfall, which had been interrupted by Melrose's freakish return, there had been other meetings, as delightful as before, yet no more conclusive or encouraging. He and Lydia had indeed grown intimate. He had revealed to her thoughts and feelings which he had unveiled for no one else—not even for ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the hog were never part of the curriculum in any American boy's school, I suppose; they seem too freakish to be credited to any but the demoniac ingenuity of my home ogre. But they stood for a comprehension of the office of school and teacher which was not patented by any day or land. It is not so long since the notion yet prevailed that the schools were principally to lock children up in for the ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... her as she turned into the garden. The shadows of the ilex-avenue chequered her straw bonnet, her prim black cape, her white skirt. There had been no meddling of freakish hands with her dark hair this morning. It was tightly plaited at the back of her head. Her plain sun-shade, her black kid gloves ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and frowned and sighed and laughed in the space of thirty seconds—something of a feat in the way of emotional gymnastics. The freakish feminine nature perplexed him as it had perplexed Adam, and he could not understand this rapid change from poetry to prose. How could it be otherwise, when he was but five-and-twenty, and engaged for the first time? Threescore ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... treatment than the rooms which are to be constantly occupied. No part of the house that is in use for hours at a time should be at all over-elaborated, particularly in its unchangeable features. Care must be taken even in the hall to avoid any freakish combination that will either stand out conspicuously or demand a like ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... was Arthur Coga, who had studied at Cambridge, and was said to be a bachelor of divinity. He was indigent, and "looked upon as a very freakish and extravagant man." Dr. King, in a letter to the Hon. Robert Boyle, remarks "that Mr. Coga was about thirty-two years of age; that he spoke Latin well, when he was in company, which he liked, but that his brain was sometimes ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Zululand the wife may not mention her husband's name, just as in the Welsh fairy tale the husband may not even know the name of his fairy bride, on pain of losing her for ever. These ideas about names, and freakish ways of avoiding the use of names, mark the childhood of languages, according to Mr. Max Muller, {74b} and, therefore, the childhood of Society. The Kaffirs call this etiquette 'Hlonipa.' It applies to women as well as men. A Kaffir bride is not called by her own ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... he moved to the window, if he had the sense to move to the window and tear aside those drawn curtains, the grey twilight would show the shadowy moving figures. Mitchelbourne's chance would be gone. And then something totally unexpected and unhoped for occurred. The god of the machine was in a freakish mood that evening. He had a mind for pranks and absurdities. Mitchelbourne was strung to so high a pitch that the ridiculous aspect of the occurrence came home to him before all else, and he could barely keep himself from ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... sometimes reduced her to much this sort of frantic exasperation by his impregnable assumption that she was the white-souled little angel she looked. Sitting here in this very room he had goaded her into committing freakish misdemeanors. ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... besmeared with mud and one or two in such a freakish way as to give a curious turn to their meaning. On one card a mischievous little rivulet of mud or wetted ink had ingeniously changed a T into a crude R and the travelers ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... General Armstrong, or was it Max? had said there was something freakish about this Hungarian. His reflexes were unbelievably fast. Now, ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... furniture than by covering them with the scroll work of the wig-age. This is only an apparent contradiction. It is not the Pigtail but the Rococo that we are reviving so industriously, not the academic constraint of rules, but the subjective arbitrariness, the spirit of the original, freakish types. This untrammeled caprice of the Rococo age seems to us as fresh as nature compared with the well planned symmetry of our modern conditions, which no longer permit one to be a real fool, and therefore do not allow any ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... once or twice during the preceding days. It was due to her after his long neglect of her, he told himself, and had found improvement in her. But to-night she seemed to take a freakish pleasure in letting him see that there was much of the old Ann still left in her: the frank conceit of her; the amazing self-opinionatedness of her; the waywardness, the wilfulness, the unreasonableness of ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... united their thanks over a grand regimental banquet. What frisky gobblers they have shared in, to be sure! They prance and amble over the pavements as if they had absorbed the very soul of Chanticleer, and fancied themselves once more princes of the barnyard. The most singular and freakish of the turkey's manifestations ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... the character of the sovereign in a despotism demands perpetual study; and Paul was freakish and headstrong beyond all human calculation. No man was more misunderstood at a distance, nor less capable of being understood near. He had some striking qualities. He was generous, bold, and high-principled; but the simplest accident ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... a double-seater of fairly safe construction—that is, it was not freakish nor speedy, and was what was usually ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... What limit can we set to their achievement? Of course he was the Fortunate Youth. Of that there is no gainsaying. He had his beauty, his charm, his temperament, his quick southern intelligence—all his Sicilian heritage—and a freakish chance had favoured him from the day that, vagabond urchin, he attended his first and only Sunday-school treat. But personal gifts and favouring chance are ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... travelers were constantly losing their direction, for beyond the thistle fields they again found themselves upon the turning-lands, which swung them around in such a freakish manner that first they were headed one way and then another. But by keeping the City of Thi constantly behind them the adventurers finally passed the treacherous turning-lands and came upon a stony country where no grass grew at all. There were plenty ...
— The Lost Princess of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... went to reside there too, to look after her darling. One might have supposed that this would have involved Ruskin in ridicule, but he was petted and indulged by his fellow-undergraduates, who found his charm, his swift wit, his childlike waywardness, his freakish humour irresistible. Then he had a serious illness, and his first taste of misery; he was afraid of death, he hated the constraints of invalid life and the grim interruption to his boundless energies and plans. Then came his first great book, and he strode ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of Aigues-Mortes, the little fortified, derelict city in the salt marshes of Provence. Although they regarded him with the same unimaginative wonder as a pair of alligators might regard an Argus butterfly, their undoubted but freakish progeny, and although Aristide soared high above their heads in all phases of thought and emotion, the mutual ties remained strong and perdurable. Scarcely a year passed without Aristide struggling somehow south ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... glade upon Ganymede, the hexans resembled those aborigines only as civilized men might resemble gigantic primordial savages of our own Earth. Brandon's gaze went from short, powerful legs up a round, red body to the enormous, freakish double pair of shoulders, with its peculiar universal jointing. From the double shoulders sprang four limbs, the front pair of which were undoubtedly arms, terminating in large, but fairly normal, hands. The intermediate limbs ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... ever lived. The poet Wordsworth had more. But like so many poetic natures, whose vivid imagination lends itself to every sort of human reaction, even to those not really indigenous, Victor Hugo cannot resist in indulging in freakish sallies of jocularity which sometimes become extraordinarily strained and forced, and even remind one now and then of the horrible mechanical smile on the countenance of the mutilated ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... bachelor maid of some—well, I won't tell how many summers, but she's 'past the freakish bounds of youth,' and a real artist. She's studied abroad, and she's done things worth while. That group of fishermen on the Normandy coast is hers," nodding towards the opposite wall, "and that ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... In freakish flights strange oily lights came fluttering round its head, Like butterflies of a monster size—then I knew it for the Dead. Its face was rubbed and slicked and scrubbed as smooth as a shaven pate; In the silver snakes that the water makes ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... Wings on her Shoulders and Feet, and was able to transport herself to the most distant Regions in the smallest Space of Time. She was continually varying her Dress, sometimes into the most natural and becoming Habits in the World, and at others into the most wild and freakish Garb that can be imagined. There stood by her a Man full-aged, and of great Gravity, who corrected her Inconsistences, by shewing them in his Mirror, and still flung her affected and unbecoming Ornaments down ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... was curiously mixed. Perhaps the comedy in it tended to obscure the utter degradation of the ruin she described. But the freakish incongruity of the speech did not strike Hyacinth. He found in it only two notes—pity that such a fate awaited him, and contempt for the man who ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... celebration to-night: an unpremeditated, freakish, impish, essentially harmless celebration, with a faint flavour of mischief in it because he had Nan in the back of his head all the time. He played up to Mrs. Morrell with exuberance, with honestly no thought except that he was having a whacking good time, and that old ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... object on which to cultivate heavenly patience, and patience, says the Eastern proverb, is the key to content. The spirit of Xantippe seems to have taken possession of Mrs. Shurtleff immediately after her marriage. The freakish disrespect with which she used her meek consort was a heavy cross to bear at a period in New England when clerical dignity was at its highest sensitive point. Her devices for torturing the poor gentleman were inexhaustible. Now she lets his Sabbath ruffs go unstarched; now she scandalizes him ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... natural, the most personally distinguished group. First of them should be named the Provost of Trinity, Dr. Mahaffy, under whose aegis we assembled—a great scholar and a great Irishman. He brought with him an element of independent unregimented political thought—often freakish in expression, but based on a vast knowledge of men and countries. In a more practical sense, Lord MacDonnell and Lord Dunraven were our chief political theorists, devisers by temperament of constitutional machinery. Lord MacDonnell's repute as an administrator, Lord Dunraven's as a leading ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... was lighted from attic to basement, and though it was Christmas Eve, the air was like spring, for nature sometimes turns freakish, and smiles on us when we are expecting the cold shoulder. Here and there, a window was open, for the Derings always did love plenty of air; and so a merry sound of laughter and gay voices was wafted out into the night air, and the old trees rustled joyfully, as though the ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... at the memorial service in the morning before the Bishop quitted them, where many parishioners gathered who had been spellbound in Angela's freakish days of early girlhood, and who were greatly touched when the committal to the deep was inserted from the Forms of Prayer to be used ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... when perhaps three or four have combined to form it. The habits of thought and methods of study followed by philologists render them especially open to this charge. They wish to establish every form as symmetrical and mathematical, where nature has been freakish and bizarre. Some years ago when I published certain poems in the broken English spoken by Germans, an American philologist, named Haldemann, demonstrated to his own satisfaction that the language which I had put into Hans Breitmann's mouth was inaccurate, because I had not reduced it to an uniform ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... owned them. No Mansard roof here, no pseudo "Queen Anne" hybrid, with lowering, top-heavy projections like scowling eyebrows over squinting eyes; neither mongrel Renaissance, nor feeble, sickly, imitation Elizabethan facades, and Tudor towers; none of the queer, composite, freakish impertinences of architectural style, which now-a-day do duty as the adventurous vanguard, the aesthetic vedettes "making straight the way," for ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... was bent; so for once I proved as decided and quicker than himself; recaptured the spoil, and—having saved this volume—never hazarded a second. With all this, I had never yet been able to arrest in his visits the freakish, friendly, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... incredible account, Ralegh was gravely declared on the occasion to have rendered himself, by his assumption of independent power, liable to a capital penalty. Posterity will be inclined to transfer the actual condemnation to the commander-in-chief, whose freakish pique stopped only short of an outrage. But Essex had the fortune or misfortune to have all his errors popularly accounted virtues. In relating this occurrence, for instance, Vere, though he admits the matter was 'grievously aggravated ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... sketch"—I had turned over the leaves and ascertained that there was nothing more in the book—"a single sketch by a wandering American artist who may have done it under hashish, or in the delirium of fever, or simply in order to gratify a freakish imagination. You can't, as a man of science, defend ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of new players of note the league enjoyed an average season, and a considerable amount of new blood was injected into the game in the persons of players who made good without attracting freakish attention. The rise of the Washington team from seventh to second place brought its youngsters into the limelight prominently, and of these Foster and Moeller were commended highly. Gandil, who had his second tryout in fast company, plugged the hole at first base which had worried ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... the skin, and there was not one hair, eyelash or eyebrow on the whole head. The closed eyes lay in deep caverns surrounded by a thousand fine wrinkles, which crisscrossed all over his face in every direction. The face and head were freakish—monstrous; and yet, somehow, over it rested an expression of infinite wisdom and calm. He lay bound and still and unconscious, at the mercy of men far below him intellectually, this man from another planet. Clee could not help but compare ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... is more serious than it appears superficially. Rousseau's idea permitted the teacher to treat the child as an individuality, studying the traits and peculiarities of the pupil, building up where weakness appeared, and directing freakish notions and ideas into conventional channels. The modern city school with one teacher and forty pupils places before the teacher a constant temptation, which at times reaches the proportions of an overmastering necessity, to treat the group of children as if each child were ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... amazing effect. We have black papers patterned in color, and black velvet carpets, and white coated papers sprinkled with huge black polka dots, and all manner of unusual things. It goes without saying that much of this fad is freakish, but there is also much that is good enough and refreshing enough to last. One can imagine nothing fresher than a black and white scheme in a bedroom, with a saving neutrality of gray or some dull tone for rugs, and a brilliant ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... in a few realities, and some beautiful brainless creature would generally be found the nucleus of a crowd, while Clio in spectacles languished in a corner. Winifred Glamorys, however, was reputed to have a tongue that matched her eye; paralleling with whimsies and epigrams its freakish fires and witcheries, and, assuredly, flitting in her white gown through the dark balmy garden, she seemed the very spirit of moonlight, the subtle incarnation ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... years of incarceration in a sleeping-room the chest and lungs were delicate; hence the congestion and cause of death. Well, well—let me see—I remember your brother twenty-three years ago when I first came to St. Ignace. A strange, bookish, freakish character, but a gentleman, that goes without saying, Ma'amselle Pauline. And you, just a little black-haired girl, reciting French tragedy in the untidy garden! Ah—ah! I see it clearly—no father, no mother, save old Victoria ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... irresistibly as to watch her maternal visage during her eulogiums, while the big-wigs are nodding approbation; or the contortions of her physiognomy, when any cross incident happens to impede the torrent of her fondness. With all due respect to her motherly functions, she is a very freakish and laughable ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... fast and loose, play fantastic tricks; tourner casaque [Fr.]. Adj. capricious; erratic, eccentric, fitful, hysterical; full of whims &c n.; maggoty; inconsistent, fanciful, fantastic, whimsical, crotchety, kinky [U.S.], particular, humorsome^, freakish, skittish, wanton, wayward; contrary; captious; arbitrary; unconformable &c 83; penny wise and pound foolish; fickle &c (irresolute) 605; frivolous, sleeveless, giddy, volatile. Adv. by fits and starts, without rhyme ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... I smile when I should sigh? And wherefore do I feed when I would fast? And wherefore do I dance when I should pray? And wherefore do I live when I should die? Canst answer that, good Sir? O there are women The world deem mad, or worse, whose life but seems One vile caprice, a freakish thing of whims And restless nothingness; yet if we pierce The soul, may be we'll touch some cause profound For what seems causeless. Early love despised, Or baffled, which is worse; a faith betrayed, For vanity or lucre; chill regards, Where to gain constant glances we have paid ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... he was eccentric. People who are naturally queer or freakish are always hiding things. And I know it's silly of me, but I'm going to try to find ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... engaged in the benevolent work of driving dull care away would be impossible within the space at our command. But we cannot end without recognition of the exhilarating extravaganzas of "George A. Birmingham" (Canon Hannay), the freakish and elfin muse of James Stephens, and the coruscating wit of F.P. Dunne, the famous Irish-American humorist, whose "Mr. Dooley" is a household word on both sides ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... though consciously laid in with its vivid yellow-green as an intentional note of a tone scheme. The somberest shadows, the most neutral twilights, the most austere recesses are lighted by it as though so many freakish sunbeams had severed relations with the parent luminary to rest quietly in the ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White |
