"Oddity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dictate them to me here, and I will transcribe them and send them off." I replied that I could do them as quickly myself. The old man smiled. "You do not send letters in shorthand. I can take a hundred and forty words a minute, and you can do your correspondence and go away." The oddity of the proposal attracted me. I agreed to dictate. The old man took out his notebook, and in ten minutes the work was done. We came back in an hour, and by that time each letter was transcribed in ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... Pastimes, Book iii. chap. 13., speaks of Christmas Spectacles in the time of Edward III., as known by the name of Ludi; and in Warton's History of English Poetry, it is said of these representations that "by the ridiculous and exaggerated oddity of the Vizors, and by the singularity and splendour of the dresses, every thing was out of nature and propriety." In Strutt's 16th Plate, specimens will be found of the whimsical habit and attire in which the mummers were wont ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 20, March 16, 1850 • Various
... and about," as they say in Orham, and did some housework, after a fashion, but she never again set foot across the granite doorstep of the Winslow cottage. Probably the poor woman's mind was slightly affected; it is charitable to hope that it was. It seems the only reasonable excuse for the oddity of her behavior during the last twenty years of her life, for her growing querulousness and selfishness and for the exacting slavery in which she kept her ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... thirty shillings a week, though under ordinary circumstances they would be worth three or four pounds. But he will only let us have them on the understanding that we 'do for' ourselves. He is quite an oddity. He hates petticoats, especially elderly petticoats. He has one servant, an old Frenchwoman, who, I believe, was housekeeper to his mother, and he and she do the housework together, most of their time quarrelling over it. Nothing else ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... stories are full of queer people, who not only talk but act in a sort of dialect. Their one interest is their winning oddity. They are as truly native to the soil as are the people of 'Widow Guthrie.' In both books the humor is genuine, and the local coloring is bright and attractive."—New York ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... pretentious arrival. Goethe first called the attention of Schiller to the book, sending him a copy while he was at Jena, in 1795. Schiller recognized at once its power and geniality, but was disposed to regard it as a literary oddity, whose grotesque build and want of finish rather depreciated the rich cargo,—at least, did not bring it handsomely into port. The first book of "Wilhelm Meister" had appeared the year before, and that was more acceptable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... such an oddity that her companion was moved, rather flippantly perhaps, to take it up. "Don't people as good as love their friends when they ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... impatient of squinting and side-glances while all eyes should be turned together to the same. Thought is growing agreement, and that in which the race cannot meet me is some whim or notion, a personal crotchet, not a cosmic and eternal truth. Genius is freedom from all oddity, is Catholicity,—and departure from it so much departure in me from Nature and myself. We say a man is original, if he lives at first, and not at second hand,—if he requires a new tombstone,—if he takes law, not from the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... The oddity and incongruity of her attire attracted attention. Women came out of their houses and crossed to the doors of neighbours to look after her. Even the boys playing at the corners looked up as ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... from the time of its appearance, and from a certain oddity and air of "key" about it, rather than from much merit as literature, or any as a story, is the Adventures of Gaudentio di Lucca by Simon Berington.[8] It appeared in 1737, between Defoe and Swift on the earlier, and Richardson on the later side, while the English ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... yore. His manner abroad had lost its excitable watchfulness; it had become puzzled and diffident, as though he had suspected that there was somewhere about him something slightly compromising, some embarrassing oddity; and yet had remained unable to discover what on earth this something ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... stranger; who then, after a slow glare up and down the Court, in search of further widows perhaps, turned to go, saying merely:—"I'll wish you a good-morning, guv'nor. Good-morning!" Uncle Mo watched him as he lurched up the Court, noting the oddity of his walk. This man, you see, had been chained to another like himself, and his bias went to one side like a horse that has gone in harness. This gait is known in the class he belonged to as the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... crash. Calhoun had smashed a chair. It was an oddity because it was make of wood. Calhoun had owned it because it was odd. Now he smashed it to splinters and piled them up and flung blaster-bolt after blaster-bolt into the heap. The air inside the Med Ship grew ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... is the colour of this Irish society of which Bernard Shaw, with all his individual oddity, is yet an essential type? One generalisation, I think, may at least be made. Ireland has in it a quality which caused it (in the most ascetic age of Christianity) to be called the "Land of Saints"; and which still ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... unison a foot to the right, returning immediately to their original position with a jerk. Then he rose, and went toward the door, catching sight of his face in a mirror as he passed. It was very pale, and he crinkled his nose at it derisively, and then smiled at the whimsical oddity of his reflected expression. On the threshold he paused, looking toward the west, blazing with the red and saffron of the ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... Martin: With this further oddity, that above the nape of his neck was a whitish tuft which, though he took great pains to conceal it, continually obtruded through the darker hair like the cottontail on ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... short, fat figure in a coarse blue coat, with a hood of the same, lined with scarlet; a flat cloth cap, and long heavy boots, reaching above the knee. An ugly red-and-green woollen scarf tied around the waist enhanced the oddity of his appearance. The other was taller and more slenderly built. His complexion was decidedly 'sandy,' with short, curling hair and a prodigious mustache. His countenance, like his dress, was grave, the latter being an ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... is needed for the oddity of the title of this chapter, it will not be to readers of Burton's Anatomy. The way in which the phrase "Those six non-natural things" occurs and recurs there; the inextinguishable tendency—in view of the eccentricity of its application—to forget that the six include ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... a voice that made me jump; 'what is this story I hear of Collins? Now, no shuffling,' says he; 'I've traced it home to you, and I want your authority. I always looked upon Collins as a decent sort of oddity,' says he; 'and I'm determined to sift this matter thoroughly.' Frightened me out of a year's growth." Moriarty paused, and ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... thee gone to Belton, as soon as thou canst. Yet whether thou goest or not, up I must go, and see what I can do with the sweet oddity myself. The moment these prescribing varlets will let me, depend upon it, I go. Nay, Lord M. thinks she ought to permit me one interview. His opinion has great authority with me—when it squares with my own: and I have assured him, and my two cousins, that I will behave with all the decency ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... to Jack Penny, saying that he was an oddity, but not a bad fellow. I began to like him better myself, though he did nothing to try and win my liking, being very quiet and distant with us both, and watching us suspiciously, as if he thought we were always making plots to get rid of ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... a group of the bride's relatives—among the rest her brother—silent, and all apparently very much grieved; while in the space between them there stumped up and down a lame, sallow-complexioned oddity, in shabby black, who seemed to be making a set oration, to which no one replied, about the sacred claims of love, and the cruelty of interfering with the affections of young people. Neither the carpenter nor myself felt any inclination to debate with the orator, or fight with the guards, or yet ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... are some elements of oddity in this case," remarked Caspar Brooke, striking in with unexpected readiness to defend his daughter's views. "Kingston was not a giddy young girl, who would go off with any man who made love to her. Indeed, I can't quite fancy any man making love to ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Swift went up to the country gentleman, and in a very abrupt manner, without any previous salute, asked him, "Pray, Sir, do you know any good weather in the world?" After staring a little at the singularity of Swift's manner and the oddity of the question, the gentleman answered, "Yes, Sir, I thank God I remember a great deal of good weather in my time."—"That is more," replied Swift, "than I can say; I never remember any weather that was not too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry; but, however God Almighty contrives ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... minute is his narration, that he takes care to inform posterity that he was very irregular in his method of walking, and that he preferred sweet wine to hard. In short, he was a man of considerable parts, with a great simplicity and oddity ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... game, and so convinced is the ordinary person that queerness is of necessity contemptible, that when she did anything which was unusual, its reason was never examined, nor did the possibility that it might be better done in that way occur to anybody. It was merely a new evidence of her oddity. ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... seems. And so is a rhinoceros's horn. A rhinoceros used to be hairy all over in old times: but now he carries all his hair on the end of his nose, except a few bristles on his tail. And the right-whale, not to be done in oddity, carries ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... aged face, with dark, pretty eyes - and the most considerate manner. She took me up into an upper hall, where there were a couple of curious chimney-pieces and a fine old oaken roof, the latter representing the hollow of a long boat. There is a certain oddity in a native of Bourges - an inland town if there ever was one, without even a river (to call a river) to encourage nautical ambitions - hav- ing found his end as admiral of a fleet; but this boat- shaped roof, which is extremely graceful and is re- peated in another apartment, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... vice," she said, "is oddity. For instance, I do not mix up affections with politics; let us talk politics,—business, if you will,—the rest can come later. However, it is not really oddity nor a whim that forbids me to mingle ill-assorted colors and put together things that have no ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... funny, but is very tiresome. Yet it is no sooner laid aside and buried than it gets resurrected. I suppose the real reason is that it is funny, at least to our eyes. When Bill Nye spells wife with "yph" we can't help being amused. Now Bill Nye's bad spelling had absolutely no point to it except its oddity. At times it was extremely funny, but as a mode it led easily to widespread and pointless imitation. It was the kind of thing—like poetry—that anybody can do badly. It was most deservedly abandoned with execration. No American ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... satin programme of the musicale soiree in their hands, some numbers of which were about to be rendered. Under the ceilings that were dappled with painted clouds, surrounded by brilliant lights and a wealth of flowers, this crowd presented at once an aspect of luxury and oddity, with its living antitheses of old parliamentarians and tyros of ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... extraordinary influence—whether it were the oddity of William Harewood's face, or the novelty of his perfect insouciance in the household whither care had come only too early—some infection seized on the young Underwoods, and before the end of the evening meal, if the 'goings on' were not equal to those ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I would chat discreetly with you between two pages of your novel, and I would make that fantastic grating of the chain [Footnote: The chain of the tug-boat going up or coming down the Seine.] which you detest, but whose oddity does not displease me, keep still. I love everything that makes up a milieu, the rolling of the carriages and the noise of the workmen in Paris, the cries of a thousand birds in the country, the movement of the ships on the waters; I love also absolute, profound ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of battalions, carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in hand, nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient classic courage, absolute regularity; on the other, intuition, divination, military oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, an indescribable something which gazes like an eagle, and which strikes like the lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful impetuosity, all the mysteries of a profound soul, associated with destiny; the stream, the plain, the forest, the hill, summoned, and ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... vignettes, sketches, or elaborate pictures, on the ever-shifting and always entertaining pages of the London Charivari. Of one prominent form of the exhibition of this inexhaustible arsenal, namely, the illustrations, special notice is to be taken. These, notwithstanding their oddity, extravagance, and burlesqueness, by reason of their grace, finish, and good taste, frequently get into the proximity of the fine arts. This elevation of sportive drawing is mainly to be put to the credit of manly John Leech,—"the very Dickens of the pencil." He and his associates have proved that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... however; for on his way thither his attention was arrested by a very small shop which he had not noticed before, and which, in the new-looking city of Havre, appeared to be fully a century old. Entering, he was struck with the oddity of its interior. The place was small, not larger than the smallest room at Lakewood, and though its front window displayed only watches, and a notice in French and English that Monsieur Bajeau repaired jewelry at short notice, it was so crowded with rare furniture and bric-a-brac ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... of the man in the chimney-corner instinctively sought the shade, and he gazed into the fire as he resumed his pipe. The man at the table took up the hedge-carpenter's remark, and added smartly, "True; but the oddity of my trade is that, instead of setting a mark upon me, it sets a ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... gestures, they are not convincing, because they appear to be—what they have a doubtful right to be in reality—studied. Have you ever seen a speaker use such grotesque gesticulations that you were fascinated by their frenzy of oddity, but could not follow his thought? Do not smother ideas with gymnastics. Savonarola would rush down from the high pulpit among the congregation in the duomo at Florence and carry the fire of conviction to his hearers; Billy Sunday slides to base on the platform carpet in dramatizing ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... our Antipodes?' In truth, Sir Thomas finishes his most whimsical work whimsically enough. The passage is a good specimen of the quaint and humorous eloquence in which he most delights—snatching fine thought from sheer absurdities, and putting the homeliest truth into a dress of amusing oddity. It may remind us that it is time to touch upon those higher qualities, which have led one of the acutest of recent critics[6] to call him 'our most imaginative mind since Shakspeare.' Everywhere, indeed, his imaginative writing is, if we may ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... indeed has great power; but its power is owing to the force of the serious writing, and to the oddity of the contrast between that and the flashy passages with which it is interlarded. From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. You laugh and are surprised that any one should turn round and travestie himself: ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... it. Despite the fact that he knew everything that his textbooks could tell him about sex and copulation he still had the quaint notion that the reason why Judge Carter and his wife were childless was because they had not yet gotten around to Doing It. He made no attempt to correlate this oddity with its opposite in Jake Caslow's ladies of the night who seemed to go on their merry way ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... rather quaintly, but evidently unconscious of the oddity of her own answer. There was a moment's pause, ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... of the people of the Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge mountains is filled with a quaintness of expression. Many of their words and phrases that attract through their oddity were at one time in popular use and grammatically correct. These people are clinging to the dialect of their fathers who were Anglo-Saxons. The use of "hit" for "it" is not confined to the mountains, ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... long-shafted shovel was borrowed, on which to furnish him drink with safety to themselves. That inextinguishable vein of humor, which in Ireland mingles even with death and calamity, was also visible here. The ragged, half-starved creatures laughed heartily at the oddity of their own inventions, and enjoyed the ingenuity with which they made shift to meet the exigencies of the occasion, without in the slightest degree having their sympathy and concern ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... "The Intelligence Office" and "A Virtuoso's Collection," also remnants of old-fashioned ingenuity. In such fantasy Hawthorne found a better channel for that play of his mind which had earlier sought expression in the grotesque; oddity of thought he had in plenty, and the sense of oddity was often as far as his humorous faculty reached, for it was ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... bell telling? It is old, very old, as we have already observed; it was there long before grandmother's grandmother was born; and yet it is but a child in comparison with the Au-mann, who is an old quiet personage, an oddity, with his hose of eel-skin, and his scaly jacket with the yellow lilies for buttons, and a wreath of reed in his hair and seaweed in his beard; but he looks very pretty for ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... slim young man did not stare again, he at least had time to make out that the oddity of his host's light eyes lay not so much in the fact of their failing to be distinctly brown, gray, or green, as that they had a translucent look. Then he responded briefly, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and exchanged glances of amusement with Wilhelm. She had described him to Wilhelm beforehand as a Parisian oddity, and invited him to be present during the visit. While Anne enveloped her mistress in the white dressing-mantle, Monsieur Martin laid out the battery of combs, brushes, and tortoise-shell hair-pins provided by the maid, added, out of his own box, two hand-glasses, and a ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... know that would never do." But it did do. We left Duchie that very night, and though she paid us frequent visits, she was Cousin Susan's for life. I fear indulgence dulled her moral sense. She was an immense happiness to her mistress, whose silent and lonely days she made glad with her oddity and mirth. And yet the small creature, old, toothless, and blind, domineered over her gentle friend—threatening her sometimes if she presumed to remove the small Fury from the inside of her own bed, into which it pleased her to creep. ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Of the oddity of inventing as a remedy for the inconveniences resulting from this situation a supernumerary conceptual object called an absolute, into which you pack the self-same contradictions unreduced, I will say something in the next lecture. The absolute is said to perform its feats by taking ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... That was the only way he had ever hit upon by which he might honestly earn his food and shelter, such as it was. But from choice the dwarf had always avoided his fellow-creatures. Surrounded by the strong, the self-satisfied, the handsome, the gay, the consciousness of his own oddity and deformity was borne in upon his sensitive spirit in the keenest manner; but in the woods and fields, by the roadside and the hedgerows, he felt another person entirely. There Bambo forgot that he was so unlike his fellows; and among the birds, the beasts, ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... familiar expression, wanted "an ear." Throughout life he, however, was highly susceptible of the delights of music, though his own execution was confined to a single song, with which he attempted to enliven the social board, but, it is stated, with such unmusical oddity as to content his hearers with a single specimen of his vocal talent. His early rambles around the "hills and holms of the border," is said to have kindled in Scott the love of painting landscapes, not strictly in accordance with the rules of art, though certainly from nature herself. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... my kind hosts had finished their narrations, and I was not sorry, after all the exercise I had taken, to return to my cell, where everything invited to repose. I was charmed with the neatness and oddity of my little apartment; its cabin-like bed, oratory, and ebony crucifix; in short, everything it contained; not forgetting the aromatic odour of the pine, with which it was roofed, floored, and wainscoted. The night was luckily dark. Had the moon appeared, I could not have prevailed ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... and enjoyed extremely the duration of delay—these things, it is to be conceived, were early signs in him that his relation to his actual errand might prove none of the simplest. He was burdened, poor Strether—it had better be confessed at the outset—with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... side of his countenance, whenever any droll idea passed through his mind. It was with a twitch of this kind, and a certain indescribable twinkle of his somewhat melancholy eye, as he seemed intuitively to form a hasty conception of the oddity of his appearance to a stranger unused to the bush, that he welcomed me to his clearing. He instantly threw down his handspike, and leaving his "niggers" to finish their work at their leisure, insisted on our going to his house to get ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... several books which had aroused attention through the oddity of their themes, and their gratifying success had made it possible for him to establish himself in a comfortably furnished bachelor apartment on the corner of the rue de Vaugirard ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... humorous before—it was more than that now, with this stern business gravity injected into it. The bankers discussed the monument with me. We met several times. They proposed an indestructible memorial, to cost twenty-five thousand dollars. The insane oddity of a monument set up in a village to preserve a name that would outlast the hills and the rocks without any such help, would advertise Elmira to the ends of the earth —and draw custom. It would be the only monument on the planet ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... jangle as of cracked china, the high-pitched tirade of jarring abuse and scolding at the presence of an enemy, the meek cheeps, the tremulous, coaxing whistles when the young first venture from the nest—each and every sound, unique and totally unlike that of any other bird, indicates the oddity of this sportful member ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... but nothing could be more unromantic than many of the inventions and the characters; than the temper, the morality, and the conduct of the poem. The Arthurian poets, Malory himself, would have jumped out their skin with amazement, even with indignation, had they read it. And a great deal of this oddity, this unfitness of the matter to the manner, arose from the romantic story being expressed in poetry written in accordance with classic traditions. Of course, there were other sources for these inharmonies in the poem, but that was one, and ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... of Gondoles, and other Amusements, too tedious to enumerate, also take place. But among the several Shows which attract the eyes of the Populace, I cannot forbear describing one which is remarkable for its oddity, and perhaps peculiar to the Venetians. A number of Men, by the help of Poles laid across each other's Shoulders, build themselves up almost as children do Cards—four or five Rows of 'em standing one above the other, and lessening as they advance in height, till ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... chair, sat down and was left alone. For ten minutes, that seemed longer, he surveyed the plainly furnished sitting-room, with open fireplace, a many colored rag-carpet on the floor, old-fashioned chairs, and dozens of pictures on the walls. They caught his eye at once, mainly because of the oddity of the frames, which were evidently home-made, for it was too dark to see more, and then a door was opened, and Uncle Terry invited him into a lighted room where a table was set. The elderly lady was standing at one ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... it had not worn before. She tried to remember, at his urgence, something about her childhood in California; and she told him a great deal more about South Bradfield. She described its characters and customs, and, from no vantage-ground or stand-point but her native feeling of their oddity, and what seemed her sympathy with him, made him see them as one might whose life had not been passed among them. Then they began to compare their own traits, and amused themselves to find how many they had in common. Staniford related a singular experience ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... quite accidentally, with a young man who had come from a little embryo "college," of the sort so common in rising American towns, at a place called Hiram in Ohio. American schools are almost as remarkable as American towns for the oddity and ugliness of their names; and this "college" was known by the queer and meaningless title of the "Eclectic Institute." It was conducted by an obscure sect who dub themselves "The Disciples' Church," to which young Garfield's father and mother had both belonged. His casual acquaintance urged ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... Bitzer, smiling at the oddity of the question, 'couldn't be carried on without one. No man, sir, acquainted with the facts established by Harvey relating to the circulation of the blood, can doubt that I have ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... employed the method of humours for an important personage. It was not Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade the humour: into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour Out of Breath," Fletcher later, ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... does and wishes in politics. There is no getting her to hear a word of reason. She is another Maxwell in petticoats. And it always seems to me so unfair. Maxwell without beauty and without petticoats is quite enough to fight! Look at that little fellow with his flowers!—such an oddity of a child!" ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the insolently lounging figure did nothing to sooth his irritation. This escape was not the way he wanted to deal with a threat. There was an oddity in the man's waiting. The range was poor, and he probably was not firing, although he would look as if he were not in any case, but if he were not going to take this chance for his murder attempt, why did he openly exhibit himself, arousing ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... a little the next moment, recognizing the oddity of her speech, and her little laugh was very ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was once a "moisture"; then one of the four moistures or liquids that entered into the human constitution and by the proportions of their admixture determined human temperament; next a man's outstanding temperamental quality (the thing itself rather than the cause of it); then oddity which people may laugh at; then the spirit of laughter and good nature in general. Normally we do not connect the idea of moisture with the word. We may even speak of "a dry humor." But we should not say "now and ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... and the introduction to his sister brought a new interest. Perhaps the very novelty was what first attracted him, the oddity of feeling that he was on terms of friendship, for it amounted to that with surprising quickness, with a famous woman, whose face smiled out at him from his morning paper or, huge and shockingly colored, from the sheets on the ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... horse. He at once recognized the rider as an odd character, a carpenter, whom he at one time had occasion to employ in doing some work on a small property he owned in Ipswich. Reining up his horse, Master Putnam stopped to have a chat with the man—whose oddity mainly consisted in his taciturnity, which was broken only by brief ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... fellow scientists faced one of the figures, which I recognized as that of William II, and I, a little tardily, saluted with them. And now we turned sharply on our heels and saluted the second figure of these twin German heroes. For German it was unmistakably in every feature, save for the one oddity that the Teutonic face wore a flowing beard not unlike that of Michael Angelo's Moses. As we moved forward my eye swept in the lettering on the pedestal, "Unser Alte Deutche Gott," and I was aware that I had acknowledged my allegience to the supreme war lord—I had saluted ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... pantomime, his vivid, eager way of telling the story of the triumph of his shrewdness over the dealer's ignorance, would have made a subject for a Dutch painter; but it was all thrown away upon the audience. Mother and daughter exchanged cold, contemptuous glances.—"What an oddity!" ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... and preserved—not for publication, but to pass from hand to hand among the members of the staff as simply quaint and mirth-provoking specimens of the verdancy of both the venerable author and the Muse inspiring him. Letters as quaint as were the poems invariably accompanied them, and the oddity of these, in fact, had first called attention to the verses. I well remember the general merriment of the office when the first of the old man's letters was read aloud, and I recall, too, some of his comments on his own verse, verbatim. In one place he said: ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... the controls. He slipped headphones over his ears. He listened. Very, very carefully, he monitored all the wave lengths and wave forms he could discover in use on Weald. There was no mention of the oddity of behavior of shiploads of surplus grain aloft. There was no mention of the ships at all. There was plenty of mention of Dara, and blueskins, and of the vicious political fight now going on to see which political party could promise the most ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... found Lincoln just emerging from the depot. He had on a thin suit of summer clothes, his coat being a linen duster, much soiled. His whole appearance was decidedly shabby. He carried in his hand an old-fashioned carpet-sack, which added to the oddity of his appearance. Major Wilcox says if it had been anybody else he would have been rather shy of being seen in his company, because of the awkward and unseemly appearance he presented. Lincoln immediately began to talk about ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... have greeted this last declaration with the sympathy it deserved, might have commended the noble aspirations of his kinswoman. But what struck him, rather, was the oddity of so sudden a sharpness of pitch in an intercourse which, an hour or two before, had begun in perfect amity, and he burst once more into an irrepressible laugh. This made his companion feel, with intensity, how little she was joking. "I don't know why I should care what ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... whom the boy had become a great favourite. Indeed the regard was mutual, though there was this difference about it, that Susan, being two years older than Gillie, and tall as well as womanly for her age, looked upon the boy as a precocious little oddity, whereas Gillie, esteeming himself a man—"all but"—regarded Susan with the powerful feelings of a ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the Porte-Saint-Martin, was brought to give in the same twelve-month to the rejected of the Renaissance a firm promise that anything he liked to do for that theatre should be acted is an impenetrable mystery. But then Harel himself was an oddity, and he may have felt bowels of compassion for a confrere so original. The story goes that once he tried to borrow thirty thousand francs from King Louis-Philippe. "Ah! Monsieur Harel," replied the monarch, smiling, "I was ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... home rather late that evening, and when she left me I turned into the library, where a light showed that the doctor was still sitting. As I entered he was turning over the leaves of a very old and yellow-looking volume, the title of which, by its oddity, ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... is a man evidently pertaining to the class of human eccentrics who excite the interest of their fellow-men "to see what they will do next," but without any idea of the final value of that which may come by what seems to them to be mere unbalanced oddity. Such people are invariably misunderstood until they succeed. When he invented the automatic repeating telegraph he was discharged, and walked from Decatur to Nashville, 150 miles, with only a dollar or two as his entire possessions. With a pass thence to Louisville, he and a friend arrived ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... The oddity of the grouping stupefied Coleman. It was anarchy, naked and unashamed. He could not imagine how such changes could have been consummated in the short time he had been away from them, but he laid it all to some startling necromancy on the part of Nora Black, ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... all the world knows, but his oddity is far more amusing than repulsive, far more playful than bearish. Yates's picture of him last year was not bad; neither was it good—it wanted the raciness of the original. Let the reader imagine a smug, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... their uncouth barbarism, a sort of dancing, which they execute to the sound of an instrument, somewhat resembling a Mandoline, but considerably larger, and which is highly diverting, from the extreme vivacity of the steps, and the oddity of the contortions and grimaces, with which they exhibit it. For a grotesque dance there can hardly be imagined ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... on board—picking up the English language with facility, and readily conforming himself to our customs and the discipline of the ship. He was very cleanly in his personal habits, and paid much attention to his dress, which was always kept neat and tidy. I was often much amused and surprised by the oddity and justness of his remarks upon the many strange sights which a voyage of this kind brought before him.' The Nemesis steamer underweigh puzzled him at first; he then thought it was 'all same big cart, only got him shingles (wooden roofing-tiles, so called) on wheels!' Neinmal ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... time I had become seized with the idea that here was what is called 'a character.' I had, as it were, caught on to the whimsical oddity of the man, and liked it. Indeed, he would have been a singularly dull dog who failed to recognise this man's quaint good-humour as something jolly and kindly and well-meaning. The gentleman spoke by the aid, not alone of his ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... quaintness of childhood, its originality, its tenderness and its teasing, its infinite unconscious drollery, the serious earnestness of its fun, the fun of its seriousness, the natural religion of its plays and the delicious oddity of its prayers—all these waited for dear Little Prudy ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... devote the greater part of your life to pulling your way up, pushing your way up, fighting your way up, the ladder of status to be satisfied to associate with your social superiors on the basis of being a nine-day-wonder, an oddity to be met at cocktail parties and spoken to for a few ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... been made since the 17th century. Whatman, who became sole owner of the mill in 1740, specialized in fine white paper of the highest quality. But while the book attracted considerable attention it did not immediately divert the demand for laid paper, since it was looked on more as an oddity than as a serious achievement. Baskerville was strictly an artist: he took unlimited time and pains, he had no regard for the prevailing market, and he produced sporadically; also, he was harshly criticized and even ...
— Why Bewick Succeeded - A Note in the History of Wood Engraving • Jacob Kainen
... Apollonius which he had continued to combat in vain, it would be a useless torture to his brother to refresh in his mind all that he must be glad to have forgotten. He would easily find an excuse for refusing to obey a command which only oddity had suggested. The conclusion of the letter contained a teasing insinuation of a relation between our hero and his cousin's youngest daughter, of which his home town was talking. His brother sent his regards to her as his ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... would be impossible to break this decree, and therefore contented myself with cold beef and cole-slaw. I went to bed, and thought over the oddity of my being helped by William Allen, and of how easily I might ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... Oddity of the Classical Romance. Its importance. The Troy story. The Alexandreid. Callisthenes. Latin versions. Their story. Its developments. Alberic of Besancon. The decasyllabic poem. The great Roman d'Alixandre. Form, &c. Continuations. King Alexander. Characteristics. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... father, shifting nervously and looking at his daughter as though for an explanation of this oddity. 'This is peculiar. It has an ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... various kinds of printing-telegraphs and dial telegraphs, some of which could transmit sixty words a minute. These accurate instruments, it believed, could never be displaced by such a scientific oddity as the telephone. And it continued to believe this until one of its subsidiary companies—the Gold and Stock—reported that several of its machines ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... for a philosophic bachelor to maintain in his establishment a young and detached female of prepossessing appearance. For the oddity I care not two pins. Io son' io. But the question that exercises me occasionally is: In what category are my relations with Carlotta to be classified? I do not regard her as a daughter; still less as a sister: not even as a ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... at home; but, on asking the servants if that was the house of Mr. Tonson, they assured me, with great simplicity, that no such gentleman lived there. I named the Kit-Cat Club, as accustomed to assemble here; but the oddity of the name excited their ridicule; and I was told that no such Club was held there; but, perhaps, said one to the other, the gentleman means the Club that assembles at the public-house on the Common. Knowing, however, that I was at the right place, I could not ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... curiosity is allied to the comic, and is not an ennobling emotion, either for him who feels it or for him who is its object. A second, however, and more thoughtful consideration of such an act may redeem it from this vulgarizing taint of oddity. Reflection may satisfy us, as in the present case it did satisfy those persons who were best acquainted with Lord Carlisle's public character, that this eccentric step had been adopted, not in ostentation, with any view to its eccentricity, but in spite of its eccentricity, and ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... the middle of the lane. Into this strode Stephen, in his excitement walking so fast that Mercy could hardly keep up with him. They were too much absorbed in their own sensations and in each other to realize the oddity of their appearance, floundering in the deep snow, looking eagerly in each other's faces, and talking in ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... woman whose virtue is not always on the qui vive, will be easier to overcome than a prude; even experience does not undeceive them. How often are they exposed to a severity all the keener that it was unexpected? Their custom then, is to accuse women of caprice and oddity; all of you use the same language, and say: Why such equivocal conduct? When a woman has decided to remain intractable, why surprise the credulity of a lover? Why not possess an exterior conformable to her sentiments? In a word, why permit a ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... in the prose; though only a few years before the end it contains wonderful verse such as the song, "The swallow leaves her nest," which is a link between Blake and Canon Dixon. But earlier, as in the following, there is nothing beyond oddity. Of this there may seem to be a good share, but a few notes will make it intelligible. It clearly heralds, though the thing is first definitely indicated in a later letter, Beddoes' marvellous tragedy ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... tongue—did not make her less different, for she was like no English person that Althea had ever seen. She engaged at once the whole of her attention, but at first Althea could not have said whether this attention were admiring; her main impression was of oddity, of something curiously arresting ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... kind. She had been one of the very few persons who had always been able to appreciate the Prince Consort's jokes; and, when those were cracked no more, she could still roar with laughter, in the privacy of her household, over some small piece of fun—some oddity of an ambassador, or some ignorant Minister's faux pas. When the jest grew subtle she was less pleased; but, if it approached the confines of the indecorous, the danger was serious. To take a liberty called ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... asleep, almost lost to the world, and some scene comes before you so vividly as to seem real till its oddity wakens you to the reality of your bedroom. Or you are fully asleep, and then the images that come are dreams and seem entirely real, since contact with the objective situation ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... trouble, I saw his lips tremble and his body quiver with emotion. I could scarce endure the sight of this, and to show my feelings threw my arm across his shoulder, at which movement a murmur went through the crowd, no doubt at the oddity of the situation, that I should be so strongly marked on the one side and Nancy as strongly ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... residing at Berlin, was a curious personage, interesting alike for the variety of his productions and the oddity of his mental make-up. He possessed a surprising capacity for assimilation. It was this that enabled him to excel, whether he imitated the style of the Bible or the style of mediaeval authors. Hebrew and Aramaic he handled with the same ingenious skill. All his works he attributed to some ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... the Tiber in his barge, hoisted English colours on the capitol, and acted for the time as governor of Rome. The prophecy of the Irish poet was thus accomplished, and the friar reaped the fruits; for Nelson, who was struck with the oddity of the circumstance, and not a little pleased with it, obtained preferment for him from the King of Sicily, and ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... nondescript vehicle, in which a woman was partly sitting, partly reclining. Without knowing why, Mr. Oakhurst instantly conceived that the carriage was the invention and workmanship of the man, partly from its oddity, partly from the strong, mechanical hand that grasped it, and partly from a certain pride and visible consciousness in the manner in which the man handled it. Then Mr. Oakhurst saw something more: the man's ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... is carried on in a very simple and seeming ignorant style. One could not refrain from laughing at their oddity in agricultural pursuits. They are a great many years behind the North in this respect, as well ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear
... a nondescript place in the inside, splashed with gaudy lights from the windows, and picked out with medallions of the Dolorous Way. But there was one oddity, in the way of an ex voto, which pleased me hugely: a faithful model of a canal boat, swung from the vault, with a written aspiration that God should conduct the Saint Nicolas of Creil to a good haven. The thing was neatly executed, and would have made the delight of a party of boys on the ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... can feel the deep significance underlying the myths we present—the poetry and imperishable beauty of the Greek, the strange and powerful conceptions of the Scandinavian mind, the oddity and fantasy of the Japanese, Slavs, and East Indians, and finally the queer imaginings of our own American Indians. Who, for instance, could ever forget poor Proserpina and the six pomegranate seeds, the death of beautiful Baldur, the luminous Princess Labam, the stupid jellyfish and shrewd ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... singing it over and over again in childish sort, with so little appreciation of the meaning of the words that the oddity of the ditty was the first thing to attract ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... speedily prepared, steaming hot, with a slice of lemon at the bottom, a dark-red stratum of port wine upon the surface and a sprinkling of nutmeg strewn over all. As we touched our glasses together, my legendary friend made himself known to me as Mr. Bela Tiffany, and I rejoiced at the oddity of the name, because it gave his image and character a sort of individuality in my conception. The old gentleman's draught acted as a solvent upon his memory, so that it overflowed with tales, traditions, ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the central mystery of Manderson's having arisen long before his usual hour to go out and meet his death, there were two minor points of oddity about this affair which, I suppose, must have occurred to thousands of those who have read the accounts in the newspapers; points apparent from the very beginning. The first of these was that, whereas the body was found ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... lighter mood and he told the happy thought—project—which had come to him while they talked with the jeweller. He could himself "do the job," he said, "roughly but well enough." Anna smiled at the fanciful scheme. Yet—yes, its oddity was in its favor. So many such devices were succeeding, some of them to the vast advantage of ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... passive one. A group of men standing before the new mill—the same men who had so solicitously challenged her attention with their bows a couple of hours ago—turned as she approached and suddenly dispersed. It was not until this was repeated by another group that its oddity forced itself upon her still angry consciousness. Then the street seemed to be full of those excited preoccupied groups who melted away as she advanced. Only one man met her curious eyes,—the engineer,—yet she missed the usual critical smile with which he was wont ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte |
