"Incongruity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in sitting, likened Member for West Belfast to; charming simile, with just that mixture of graphicness and incongruity that only Irish wit could flash upon. Not meant to be uncomplimentary, for SAUNDERSON, like the rest, acknowledges capacity of SEXTON in debate; his clear insight, his capacity for grasping a subject, his aptness of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 27, 1892 • Various
... have thought since—how he conveyed to us in few words the essential emotional note of his life. It was no violin tone, beautifully complex with harmonics, but the clear simple voice of the flute. It spoke of his wife and his baby girl and his home. The very incongruity of detail—he told us how he grew onions in his back yard—added somehow to the homely glamour of the vision which he gave us. The number of his house, the fact that he had a new cottage organ, and that the baby ran away and lost herself in Seventeenth Street—were all, ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... controversies, but which is well worthy of being borne in mind, as teaching us to beware of hastily assuming that objections to Revelation, whether suggested by the progress of science, or from the supposed incongruity of its own contents, are unanswerable. We are not, he says, rashly to suppose that we have arrived at the true meaning of the whole of that book. 'It is not at all incredible that a book which has been so long in the possession of ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... yourself than to trust Him for those whom we love," said Jane; "but I try hard for that amount of faith. Elsie is so weary of her life sometimes, it is difficult to give her courage. This is grave conversation for a dancing party; but you do not see the incongruity. If we cannot carry our religion into our amusements, and into our business, it will not be of much ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... the crowd noticed any one except 'those ordinary looking persons,' as Mrs. Fox-Moore complainingly called them, up there on the plinth—'quite like what one sees on the tops of omnibuses!' Certainly it was an exercise in incongruity to compare these quiet, rather depressed looking people with the vision conjured up by Lord John's 'raving lunatics,' 'worthy of the straight jacket,' or Paul ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... all public functions clad in such weeds as she may find available. It is not even needful, indeed, that her supreme effort should attain any definite standard. Anybody can collect a few black things, and there is often an added pathos in the very incongruity of some of the mourning toilettes that pass up the aisles ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... is found in verses that refer to objects in terms the opposite of true, thereby suggesting ludicrous incongruity, and there is also the nonsense verse that uses word effects which have been confiscated by the poets and ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... willing to work together amicably, each recognizing the rights of the other, and both willing to give in upon occasion in order to make the service as a whole work out more smoothly. Many humorous stories are told, the point of which is based upon the absolute incongruity of the various parts of the church service. The writer remembers most vividly an incident that occurred during the first year of the Great War, in the church in which he was at that time the choirmaster. ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... incongruity of his appearance and his behavior. He looked like a half-civilized warrior of centuries ago, and yet his manner was the conventional one of today. However, it would not be wise to expect him to remain conventional under unusual conditions. Barbara could ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook
... Lincoln's failure. He was keen enough to grasp the difference, to perceive the clue to his failure. In a thousand ways, large and small, the difference came home to him. It may all be symbolized by a closing detail of his stay. An odd bit of incongruity was the inclusion of his name in the list of managers of the Inaugural Ball of 1849. Nothing of the sort had hitherto entered into his experience. As Mrs. Lincoln was not with him he joined "a small party of mutual friends" who ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... 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 ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... her hand was cold and trembling. Her hair, still in its elaborate arrangement, hung loose, untidy, untouched; her collar and sleeves were soiled and tumbled; her dress, with its inconvenient machinery of inflation, looked wretched from its incongruity, and the stains on the huge hanging sleeves. Not a moment could have been given to the care of her own person, since the sole burthen of nursing had so grievously ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... would do one's utmost to keep it from their knowledge, as a red flag of adventure and disintegrating influence in life. The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national life. They will read of the Charge of Balaclava in much the same spirit as they assist at a performance of ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on the Luz struck the trooper as amusing. There was the incongruity of his seven-hundred-dollar cabin, the secession of his stomach from the tranquillity of the federal body organic, and finally, this running away from somebody. But he quickly perceived that the last was serious enough. The skipper lowered his glasses, and shook his perky head a number of times. ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... small boy of the family nonchalantly carrying a very large slice of watermelon! He found a spot on the floor at the foot of the coffin, and proceeded to eat the juicy treat. The Rector continued with the service, and the mourners gave him absorbed attention until the last prayer. No incongruity could possibly change the beauty and dignity of that service ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... which pressed upon him so that many must have come into bodily contact with him, he knew that some one had touched him with special intent. No perplexity arises from the difference between the accounts, for there is only difference, not incongruity: the two tell more than the one; it is from the nature of the added circumstances that it springs, for those circumstances necessarily involve inquiries of the most difficult nature. Nor can I in the least pretend to have satisfied myself concerning them. In the ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... my room-mate, a grim and swarthy miner, who probably had not heard the prayer since he repeated it after his mother at her knee, and from the still potent though long dormant force of habit, now joined in its utterance, the incongruity of my surroundings overcame me, and I electrified the worthy priest by bursting into a guffaw. Looking back on the scene, I can see far more pathos than humor in it; but at the time, the scene was to me irresistibly ludicrous. And oh! the paltry excuse that I raked up. 'Nervousness,' I ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... reason is that?" asked Hester, half smiling at the absurd incongruity of the child's observation; but on second thoughts ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... goal, which was not to be wondered at, as with every two steps he prostrated himself full length on the ground before the little altar he carried with him. With this primitive mountain world his act was in weird harmony, but there was an incongruity almost stunning in the sight of a Hindu carrying out a similar vow in one of the crowded business streets of Europeanized Calcutta. I nearly stepped on him as I came out one day from the Hong Kong and ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... 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 ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... 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 ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... effect of ostentation to the Maddens as a 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 second ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... the comma after Elias, which some copies of the Bible contain, and others do not. Whether he supposed the verb appeared to be singular or plural, I cannot tell; and he did not extend his quotation to the pronoun they, which immediately follows, and in which alone the incongruity lies. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... infatuated with her; they are excessively jealous and would rather shoot me than have me win. They are more than double her age, and yet they can see no incongruity in hoping to win her. They will hope on until the awakening comes. Then they will be my deadliest enemies. I shouldn't be surprised if I receive a call and warning from them, but neither they nor the whole world shall turn me from the prize which ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... this stout defender of all that is English acknowledges the coupling together of the versicle, "Give peace in our time, O Lord," and the response, "Because there is none other that fighteth for us, but only thou, O God," to be "a very infelicitous non-sequitur." For correcting this palpable incongruity, the authors of The Book Annexed have been sharply criticised here at home. What were they that they should have presumed to disturb ancient Anglican precedent in such a point? If we could not understand why the God ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... experience, my grandfather should have learned so little of the attitude and even the dialect of the spiritually-minded; that after forty-four years in a most religious circle, he could drop without sense of incongruity from a period of accepted phrases to "trust his wife was getting up her spirits," or think to reassure her as to the character of Captain Wemyss by mentioning that he had read prayers on the deck of his frigate ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the incongruity of his position, for he was equally ignoring the needs of two others, Peyton and Mina Raff. It was evident to him now, since he had seen her in a picture, that she was well worth the greatest consideration. She lay outside the stream ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... strike one. Perhaps it is because armor and flowing robes, colonnades and branching trees, never seem out of keeping with events of a certain dignity. I am not sure that the traveler ever becomes quite unconscious of the incongruity of the old Flemish dress and decorations, in most cases strongly enhanced by the prim composure which is the elementary expression of the earlier Netherlandish faces: this is still discernible through all transitory emotions of fear, hate, love or anguish, and does ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... the Policy, and lawes Civill, are a part of Religion; and therefore the distinction of Temporall, and Spirituall Domination, hath there no place. It is true, that God is King of all the Earth: Yet may he be King of a peculiar, and chosen Nation. For there is no more incongruity therein, than that he that hath the generall command of the whole Army, should have withall a peculiar Regiment, or Company of his own. God is King of all the Earth by his Power: but of his chosen people, ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... play for variety." He saw D'Avenant's version of it no less than eight times, with ever-increasing enjoyment. He generously praised the clever combination of "a deep tragedy with a divertissement." He detected no incongruity in the amalgamation. "Though I have seen it often," he wrote later, "yet is it one of the best plays for a stage, and for variety of dancing and music, ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... hazard of some injustice, to revert to the summary process of barbarism? Can it be right, that a magistrate shall be empowered to incarcerate a man for months, while he is debarred from pronouncing definitively on his guilt or innocence? There is an incongruity in all this, of which savages might be ashamed. We trust that the time is approaching when a better system will be established. Consolatory is it to consider, that in various countries of Europe, as well as in America, the subject of prison discipline, and of criminal jurisprudence, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... the schoolmaster, came to the spring while she was there, and they spoke together, because they were great friends, these two. He was unchanged, the same strong gray man, with the ruddy face. He was not unhappy here despite the seeming incongruity of his presence. The wilderness appealed to him too in a way, he was the intellectual leader of the colony and almost everything that his nature called for ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the impulsive, cheery, warning exclamation of a wild young Irish spirit to his friend Dyck Calhoun, but it had behind it the humour and incongruity of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... first point I wish to make is that a woman-child, once baptised Margaret, is thereby insured of a suitable name. Be she grave or gay in after-life, wanton or pious or sullen, comely or otherwise, there will be no possible chance of incongruity; whether she develop a taste for winter-gardens or the higher mathematics, whether she take to golf or clinging organdies, the event is provided for. One has only to consider for a moment, and if among a choice of Madge, Marjorie, Meta, Maggie, Margherita, Peggy, and Gretchen, and countless ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... is designed to illustrate the bad effects produced on the female mind by the reading of French novels. We have nothing to say in their defence. But the incongruity lies here—that Lilian, who was seduced by means of these noxious publications, was evidently a lady of the frailest virtue from the very first; and her lover might have seen this with half an eye. Her materials were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... supreme Deity. There, on the 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 the supreme contrast between the manual of Hindu faith and the Gospels of Christianity; ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... its primitive form; however, finally, the Attic dialect may not have assumed all its more marked and distinguishing characteristics—still it is difficult to suppose that the language, particularly in the joinings and transitions, and connecting parts, should not more clearly betray the incongruity between the more ancient and modern forms of expression. It is not quite in character with such a period to imitate an antique style, in order to piece out an imperfect poem in the character of the original, as Sir Walter ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... one fourteen and one ten years of age, found Cheon by far the most entertaining incongruity at the dinner, and when dinner was over—after we had settled down on the various chairs and stumps that had been carried out to the verandah again—they ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... hesitated. The delay of the Canadian, who had so repeatedly urged the necessity for expedition while in the fort, had, to say the least of it, an appearance of incongruity. Still it was evident, if disposed to harm them, he had full opportunity to do so without much risk of effectual opposition from themselves. Under all circumstances, therefore, it was advisable rather to appear to confide implicitly in his truth, than, by manifesting ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... business and legal detail which took place between Mr. Palford and his client the following morning, Tembarom's knowledge of his situation extended itself largely, and at the same time added in a proportionate degree to his sense of his own incongruity as connected with it. He sat at a table in Palford's private sitting-room at the respectable, old- fashioned hotel the solicitor had chosen - sat and listened, and answered questions and asked them, until his head began to feel as though ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... natural and proper, in another appears ludicrous and absurd. We smile to see laugh spelled larf, just as we should to see scarf spelled scaugh, or scalf, as in half; and we forget that this perception of apparent incongruity is entirely the result of long habit in us, and has no natural foundation, and that children can not be sensible of it, or have any idea of it whatever. They learn, in learning to talk, what sound serves as the name by which the drops of water that they find upon the grass in the morning ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... jealousy, sensual passion. It would be strange indeed if their worshippers were not like unto them. The conduct of the Homeric heroes was, however, better than their creed. And there is this strange incongruity and inconsistency in the conduct of the Homeric gods,—they punish mortals for crimes of which they themselves are guilty, and reward virtues in men which they do not themselves always practise. "They ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... 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 shelter of his cats'-meat ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... 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
... telegraphic instrument with its dial, face, and needles, and the little bell of which he had spoken. On my trusting that he would excuse the remark that he had been well educated, and (I hoped I might say without offence) perhaps educated above that station, he observed that instances of slight incongruity in such wise would rarely be found wanting among large bodies of men; that he had heard it was so in workhouses, in the police force, even in that last desperate resource, the army; and that he knew ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... you have red-emblazoned newspapers which are yellow; you call your politicians public servants who are your masters, and you call your women the masters, but will not let them vote. Why, then, should you be so surprised at any seeming incongruity ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... The little incongruity made us both laugh, but it was only for the instant. The tender mood of the evening, and all that we had said, sustained the quiet and almost grave undertone of our conference. My own quite unconscious act of rising from the grave and standing before ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... speaks of Congressmen or Members of Parliament one thinks, to be plain about it, of intellectual riff-raff. When one hears of a pre-eminent man in the English-speaking community, even though that pre-eminence may be in political or social science, one is struck by a sense of incongruity if he happens to be also in the Legislature. When Lord Haldane disengages the Gifford lectures or Lord Morley writes a "Life of Gladstone" or ex-President Roosevelt is delivered of a magazine article, there is the same ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... so plainly recognize his own influence, and the incongruity of it against the gentle, colourless background of the tale was in truth amusing. A more ludicrous effect could hardly have been obtained, if Miss Bibby herself, clad in the limp lavender muslin, had been encountered lashing about with a stockwhip or hurling blue ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... it?" I said. "You are not the first person who, being present at a marriage, has, with perverse incongruity, meditated on ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... I returned home resolved to do some building at Riversdale—a gate lodge," and he talked to her of the gate lodge he had in mind, until he became aware of the incongruity. "But I didn't come here to talk to you of gate lodges. Tell me, Evelyn, how do you ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... instituted for a barbarous State are certainly a great draw-back in a modern State. If appropriate in an epoch when property and sovereignty were fused together, when the Government was local, when life was militant, they form an incongruity at a time when sovereignty and property are separated, when the Government is centralized, when the regime is a pacific one. The bondage which, in the tenth century, was necessary to re-established security and agriculture, is, in the eighteenth century, purposeless ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... gave in general that turn to her descriptions, partly as if to amuse him by free and humorous colour, partly—and that charm was the greatest—as if to work off, for her own relief, her constant perception of the incongruity of things. She had seen the general show too early and too sharply, and she was so intelligent that she knew it and allowed for that misfortune; therefore when, in talk with him, she was violent and almost unfeminine, it was almost as if they had settled, for intercourse, on the short cut of the ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... practical application of the new doctrine, the people of the free states could not but perceive the incongruity of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... physical colour 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 liquid, big or small, warm or cold, and these qualities ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... that "the corn-bins of Russia were bulging with grain." To-night Mr. MCCURDY told the House that, according to his information, the resumption of trade With Russia was not likely to open up any large store of wheat or grain in the near future. Possibly there is no real incongruity. The grain may be there, but the Russians, greedy creatures, may be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... hilarious and immortal youth. And such a figure did The Museion in its latter days present. But the proprietors were going to change all that. The Museion was about to be withdrawn from circulation and reissued in a new form under the new title of Metropolis. As if aware of the shocking incongruity it was going to fling off its cap and gown. Whatever its staying power might be, its spirit and its outward appearance should henceforth in no way differ from those of other competitors in the race ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... presage of a train, had just sounded through Oxford station; and the undergraduates who were waiting there, gay figures in tweed or flannel, moved to the margin of the platform and gazed idly up the line. Young and careless, in the glow of the afternoon sunshine, they struck a sharp note of incongruity with the worn boards they stood on, with the fading signals and grey eternal walls of that antique station, which, familiar to them and insignificant, does yet whisper to the tourist the last enchantments of the ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... incongruity that is frequent in a highly wrought mind, his memory slipped back through the years to the time when first he heard of this half-mythical thing, which was called the Death Trail. He had run away from his nurse in Victoria Square, in Montreal, and, after his recapture, the girl had threatened ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... weaknesses valor and beauty had not only sacrificed themselves, but made things equally unpleasant to a great many minor virtues. Nevertheless, the consul, with an amused sense of its ridiculous incongruity to the grim Scottish Sabbath procession in the street, and the fog-bound volumes of admiralty law in the ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... for the apparent incongruity of connecting the "Toilet" with the "Kitchen;" but the receipts and suggestions comprised in the Second Part of the work before us, will not, we trust, be considered misplaced in a volume ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore
... an exception to this. In his criticism of Paradise Lost (Works, vii. 136), he says:—'The confusion of spirit and matter which pervades the whole narration of the war of Heaven fills it with incongruity; and the book in which it is related is, I believe, the favourite of children, and gradually neglected ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... in vocations which have been the life-work of the latter. O, the wearisome nonsense of this kind which is remorselessly thrust upon a docile public! And what an opportunity for some novelist, in his rabid pursuit of originality, to merely reverse the incongruity—picturing a semi-barbarian, lassoed full-grown, and launched into polished society, there to excel the fastidious idlers of drawing-room and tennis-court in their own line! This miracle would be more reasonable than its antithesis. Without ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... and then, as if struck himself by the incongruity between this phrase and the look and manner of his companion, he added, in slow tones—'even if you do ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... would possibly have a justice of the supreme court, or mayhap an eminent divine! He looked suddenly around him, as though startled. It always startled him, that comparison. There was something too stupendous to be simply ironical in the incongruity of it. If—if he were ever run ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... time he attains an effect of ironical contrast by the juxtaposition of incongruous poems, as when a deification of his beloved is followed by a cynical utterance of a different kind of love. But often the incongruity is within the poem itself, and the poet, destroying the illusion of his created image, gets a melancholy satisfaction from derision of his own grief. This procedure perfectly symbolizes a distracted mind; it undoubtedly suggests a superior point of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the incongruity of the lovers, is not the whole play filled with convulsive energies and unhealthy bursts of passion? For my part—but in this, my dear Smith, I will willingly yield to your better judgment—I think Iago was intended for the hero of the play. He is the mainspring ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... The incongruity of this interruption was almost as great as a shout of laughter at a funeral, and Leigh experienced ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... of heart which was not ashamed to own its love, but rather gloried in the public exhibition of a faith in the worthiness of its object, and a constancy, which never wavered to the hour of his death.[14] The pitifulness of it is to see the incongruity between such faith, such devotion, and the distasteful ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... none left alive to fight. The head of Ali was struck off by a Spanish soldier, the banner of the Moslems was replaced by the flag of the Cross, the head of Ali on a pike being exhibited in derision above it. The conquerors seem to have seen no incongruity in this performance. The lowering of the sacred standard of the Capitan-Basha had a disheartening effect upon the Turks; they knew by this that their Commander-in-Chief was dead and his ship captured, the result being that the resistance of the Ottomans began to weaken. ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... had there prevailed in the South economic and social forces similar to those in the North, the emancipation of the Negro would have taken place naturally and normally in both sections. That Locke and his contemporaries felt no incongruity between their ideas of liberty and the existence of slavery must be attributed to the fact that the full social implications of their doctrines had not yet been brought home to them by industrial development. They accepted the status ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Gracchus or Zenobia. It was here we found Aurelian and Livia, and his niece Aurelia. The Emperor, habited in silken robes richly wrought with gold, the inseparable sword at his side, from which, at the expense of whatever incongruity, he never parts—advanced to the door to receive ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... just the sort to see no incongruity in the majesty of Heaven stooping to plead and sentimentalize over such, and see in ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the verdict that had blackened his repute, the sentence that had hurled him from his native sphere; or that, as her reason had insensibly matured, she herself, reflecting on all the mystery that surrounded him—his incognitos, his hidings, the incongruity between his social grade and his education or bearing, and his repeated acknowledgments that there were charges against him which compelled him to concealment, and from which he could not be cleared on earth; that she, reflecting on all these evidences to his disfavour, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to be proud of; and yet, such is the incongruity of things, the sobriquet stuck to me from that day to this, following me about from ship to ship while I have been ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... soldierlike body. What with the bands, the pigs, the dogs, the horses, the children, the people, it was altogether one of the most delightful confusions conceivable, not the least interesting feature being the happy unconsciousness of the people of the incongruity of the reception. However, we formed a column, the Constabulary at the head, with its band, and were played into Bayombong, with the other bands, children, dogs, etc., as a mighty ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... corps is not to be got through by the aid of the academy of compliments. The master himself, suiting the action to the word, occasionally started up, and making some pas, as an illustrative example, with his heels flying in the air, was certainly in a state of signal incongruity with his aspect, which, when seated, was that of a steady-looking ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... pedestal by some gigantic disturbance. He appeared to buckle in his mid-air leap like a bended thing of metal, then dropped to the earth, stiff-legged as an iron image, to bound up again with mad and furious gyrations that seemed to the girl to twist both horse and rider into one live mass of incongruity, ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... far had been conducted as it had started, with Leslie down on the main deck and Turnbull on the poop. The incongruity of the arrangement now seemed to strike ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... this evening with the incongruity of Leslie's presence in the Professor's dry, silent, scholastic home, and with her monotonous, shaded existence, and her want of natural associations and fitting companionship. He pondered upon her future; he was well acquainted with her prospects; he knew much better than ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... eyes, what was that but the threat of disaster to come? Had not her aunt told her that this extraordinary luck that she must ever bring was part of the curse shadowing her life? Then the coincidence of her nickname. It was truly hideous. The very incongruity of it made it seem the most terrible disaster of all. Surely, more than anything else, it pointed the hand of Fate. It was her father's nickname for her, and he—he had been the worst sufferer at ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... lived for an immense period of time. It is true that there are several theoretical advantages in cooked vegetable foods; but unfortunately there is a want of conformity with our digestive organs. If a flesh diet is taken, the incongruity is greater. Concentrated food causes constipation. An active man, leading an out-of-door life, can take unsuitable food with little or no apparent inconvenience, the movements of his body favouring ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... is false 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 ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... 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, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... of any antagonism arising between his love to Christ and his love to Jenny Lavender. Stay—had he not? What was that faint something, without a name—a sort of vague uneasiness, which had seemed to creep over him whenever he had seen her during those months—a sense of incongruity between her light prattle and his own inmost thoughts and holiest feelings? It was so slight that as yet he had never faced it. He recognised now it was because his heart had refused to face it. And conscience told him, speaking loudly ...
— The Gold that Glitters - The Mistakes of Jenny Lavender • Emily Sarah Holt
... I came suddenly upon the face again. The very incongruity of its alliance with laughter overwhelmed me, and wonderingly I read what he had written, not once, but every day, always with the handicap of that half-tone. If Cobb were an older man, I would go on the witness stand and swear that the ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... house of Stuart. To these queries Edward could not at any time have given more than general answers, and it may be supposed that, in the present state of his feelings, his responses were indistinct even to confusion. The Chevalier smiled once or twice at the incongruity of his replies, but continued the same style of conversation, although he found himself obliged to occupy the principal share of it, until he perceived that Waverley had recovered his presence of mind. It is probable that this long audience was partly meant to further ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... public-house, for his meal, recounting the feasts of the great as if h had been present at them; and in tattered trousers and dingy shirt-sleeves, cheerfully describing and arranging the most brilliant fetes of the world of fashion. The incongruity of Finucane's avocation, and his manners and appearance amused his new friend Pen. Since he left his own native village, where his rank probably was not very, lofty Jack had seldom seen any society but such ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... You got the incongruity of it the instant your eye fell upon Chet Ball. Chet's shoulders alone would have loomed large in contrast with any wooden toy ever devised, including the Trojan horse. Everything about him, from the big, blunt-fingered hands that held the ridiculous chick ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... the air of solitude and languor is still more conspicuous. In the great square, or by the side of the promenade—if the town is fortunate enough to have one—cows or horses may be seen grazing tranquilly, without being at all conscious of the incongruity of their position. And, indeed, it would be strange if they had any such consciousness, for it does not exist in the minds either of the police or of the inhabitants. At night the streets may be lighted ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... a louder sound, not more emphatic, imperative or clear than the others; it was formless, feeble and ineffably pathetic. It was its utter incongruity which reached Dewforth through the robotic clamor, and which touched him ... a mewing, as of a kitten trapped ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... the trains of ideas are passing in our imaginations in dreams, we cannot compare them with our previous knowledge of things, as we do in our waking hours; for this is a voluntary exertion; and thus we cannot perceive their incongruity. Thus we are deprived in sleep of the only two means by which we can distinguish the trains of ideas passing in our imaginations, from those excited by our sensations; and are led by their vivacity to believe them to ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... 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 ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... the conclusion that circumstances had straitened themselves around her. Experience had given him a keen eye, and he had noted several things about her dress. For one thing, while he had observed that her under-clothing was peculiarly dainty, he had once or twice caught a glimpse of such an incongruity as he was compelled to set down to poverty. Besides, what reason in which poverty bore no part, could a lady have for being alone in a poor country lodging, without even a maid? Indeed, might it not be the consciousness of the peculiarity of her position, and no dislike ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... themselves, over the threshold of earthly ruin, in the spaces where there is no need of a temple any more; they forgot their worn and far-spent lives,—each other's old and year-marked faces; they were as two spirits, met without hindrance or incongruity, looking ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... 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 great Christian thought that, if you want to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... answered, in a qualified tone. 'Even this old house in which we speak,' pursued her son, 'is an instance of what I say. In my father's earlier time, and in his uncle's time before him, it was a place of business—really a place of business, and business resort. Now, it is a mere anomaly and incongruity here, out of date and out of purpose. All our consignments have long been made to Rovinghams' the commission-merchants; and although, as a check upon them, and in the stewardship of my father's resources, your judgment and watchfulness have been actively exerted, still those qualities ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... a kind of half-mourning which became her fair hair and tall figure very well, arrived in James' barouche drawn by James' pair. Soames had not seen it in the City since his father retired from business five years ago, and its incongruity gave him a shock. 'Times are changing,' he thought; 'one doesn't know what'll go next!' Top hats even were scarcer. He enquired after Val. Val, said Winifred, wrote that he was going to play polo next term. She thought he was in a very good set. She added ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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 compel ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... trait is the habitual combination of alleged human ancestry and adventures, with the possession of personalities otherwise figuring in the heavens and on the earth, with totally non-human attributes. This enormous incongruity, not the exception but the rule, the current theory fails to explain. Suppose it to be granted that the great terrestrial and celestial objects and agents naturally become personalized; it does not follow that each of them shall have a specific human biography. To say of some star ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... 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. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... A miniature Santa Claus, a pasteboard monkey, and several other articles of bric-a-brac of the kind the tenement affords, complete the outfit. The background is a picture of St. Donato, their village saint, with the Madonna "whom they worship most." But the incongruity harbors no suggestion of disrespect. The children view the strange show with genuine reverence, bowing and crossing themselves before it. There are five, the oldest a girl of seventeen, who works for a sweater, making three dollars a week. It is all the money that comes in, for ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... not see the incongruity of his position, of being a passenger, though secretly and surreptitiously, of the car containing those embarked on a mission so closely concerning himself. Instead of fleeing from them he was actually courting their company, pursuing himself, as it were! At ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... there was not a dish served that day that was not covered over with skewers, on which truffles, crayfish, mushrooms, and forced-meat were impaled. When old Gashleigh went down with her barbarian bunches of holly and greens to stick about the meats, even the cook saw their incongruity, and, at Truncheon's orders, flung the whole shrubbery into the dust-house, where, while poking about the premises, you may be ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... country. All occupations and recreations are well represented. Thus no country in the world approaches England in the wide scope and play of hotel nomenclature. Some of the combinations are exceedingly unique and most interesting in their incongruity. Dickens has not exaggerated this characteristic; not even done it justice in his hotel scenes. Things are put together on a hundred tavern signs that were never joined before in the natural or moral world, and put together frequently in most grotesque association. For instance, there ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... and with her. He reproached himself with having been brusque and reserved. He ought to have shown himself more expansive and less restrained. But it was her fault, for she had abashed him! The incongruity between the woman who cried with voluptuous suffering in her letters and the woman he had seen, so thoroughly mistress of herself in her coquetries, was ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans |
