"Poetic justice" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... jump. She is a sweet girl, and a good girl, and a beautiful girl; but really this wouldn't do at all. Fancy Cousin John's son going round with a drum, keeping company with a tambourine. Shades of Dr. Charming forbid! Now why couldn't it have been Mr. Flint? That would have been poetic justice. Conversion of an atheist—marriage on the platform in presence of the Army. She is too good for him; but still I would have given my blessing—but here everything is snarled up and getting worse all ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... Next to this in poetic justice would have been to summon those plenipotentiaries before him at Senlis where their troops had committed such insensate horrors in September, 1914. But for reasons of his own (which we may be sure ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... had reckoned without the French, who in these matters were far and away the most influential. Was it not in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, they asked, that Teuton militarism had received its most powerful impulse? And did not poetic justice, which was never so needed as in these evil days, ordain that the chartered destroyer who had first seen the light of day in that hall should also be destroyed there? Was this not in accordance with the eternal ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Blount would receive; and then he would be left, a spectacle for gods and men—a banker who had been beaten by a boy. It was the chicanery of Blount which had ruined his father and driven Colonel Huff to his death, and what could be better, as poetic justice, than to see him hoist on his own petard. And if the Colonel was not dead—as would appear from Charley's maunderings—if he could be discovered and brought back to town, then surely Virginia would forget the old feud and consent to be his wife. All this lay before him, a fairyland of ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... a man expects to take his whack first—I mean to hit some man on the head, or stab some woman in the breast, first. Then he professes himself quite ready for the consequences, and poetic justice is satisfied." ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... Then the whole sum of them will swarm to some higher planet, Fourier himself, perhaps, being the old gray gander that will head the flock, pilot king of their flight. Each man is to enjoy about four hundred births on earth, poetic justice leading him successively through all the grades and phases of fortune, from cripplehood and beggary to paragonship and the throne. The invisible residence of spirits and the visible are both on this globe, the former in the Great Soul, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... had centered about the great waterway. There was much of poetic justice in his end; for the Thames had claimed him, who so long had used the stream as a highway for the passage to and fro for his secret forces. Gone now were the yellow men who had been the instruments of his evil will; gone was the giant intellect which had controlled the complex murder machine. ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... heroine meet with no special disaster at the end, and why do we feel so little sympathy for the misfortunes of any one in the play? If it is a comedy, why is its sarcastic mirth made more bitter than tears, and why does it end with the death of its noblest minor character and with the violation of all poetic justice? From beginning to end it is the story of disillusion, for it sorts all humanity into two great classes, fools who are cheated and knaves who cheat. Some people think that Shakespeare wrote it in a gloomy, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... it lacked the fulness of poetic justice, since the chief offender escaped him. While Gourgues was sailing towards Florida, Menendez was in Spain, high in favor at court, where he told to approving ears how he had butchered the heretics. Borgia, the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... His neck broken, as it should have been broken by the rope for the murders he's done! It was my carelessness did it, yes. But I don't care now, so long as it's Hodges who's got caught. Hodges set those traps, and—there he is!... I read about something like that once in a story. They called it 'poetic justice.'" ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... move against La Tour d'Azyr, but which would move briskly enough against himself in like case. And then, suddenly, as if by inspiration, he saw the way—a way which if adopted would probably bring La Tour d'Azyr to a poetic justice, bring him, insolent, confident, to thrust himself upon Andre-Louis' sword, with all the odium of provocation ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... I stood here was nigh three years ago, when I spoke to you in relation to John Brown, then in a Virginia jail. How great the result of that idea which he pressed upon the country! Do you know with what poetic justice Providence treats that very town where he lay in jail when I spoke to you before? The very man who went down from Philadelphia to bring his body back to his sad relatives—insulted every mile of the road, his life threatened, the bullets ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Mr. Goulburn was concerned, the above was poetic justice. He was the minister who, in old time, told a deputation from the Astronomical Society that the Government "did not care twopence for all the science in the country." There may be some still alive who remember this: I heard it from more than one of those who were present, and are now gone. Matters ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... between religious opinions and hungry jaws, but for purposes far better adapted to widen and develop the mental energies of the people. This vast amphitheater, with its encircling galleries, its mysterious vaults, and its unseen passages, was an agent of poetic justice, in which crime was punished, or virtue rewarded, by the decrees of ...
— The Lady, or the Tiger? • Frank R. Stockton
... for woman suffrage. She soon learned that the opposition to be overcome was far greater than she had imagined, and after nearly thirty years' effort, not even in her own State have women been able to secure their enfranchisement. It seems, however, a bit of poetic justice that this convention, which was to lift the movement for woman suffrage to a higher plane than it ever before had occupied, should have been the first to invite to its platform Victoria C. Woodhull, whose advent precipitated a storm of criticism compared to which all ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... act of placing the plucked and eviscerated Nemesis upon her cooking range. The Frau betrayed considerable confusion; and although the accusing Blisselwartle could not but recognize in her act a certain poetic justice, he could not conceal from himself that there was something grossly selfish and sordid in it. He thought it was a good deal like bottling an annoying ghost and selling him for clarified moonlight; or like haltering a nightmare and ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... by her withdrawal, immediately married May Lawrence, who had been patiently in love with him for five years, and who was only waiting for some such turn as this to deliver him into her hands. A poetic justice visits him with misery, for he still cares for Alice. May, however, is not conscious ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... the insulting terms in which Byron wrote of Polidori, and, although h deeply admired the genius of Byron, did not fail to note where any weakness of form could be found in his work—such is human nature, and so is poetic justice meted out. This might appear to be a slight digression from our subject, if it were not for the fact that when Mary wrote Frankenstein at Secheron, as one of the tales of horror that were projected by the assembled party, it was only John Polidori's ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... exclaimed in great excitement. "The same as the one on Ellen's Isle. But the size of it! There's a fortune in it for you, Judge. Think of the gallons of water that are flowing by some underground passage into the lake without ever coming to the surface! That's the prettiest case of poetic justice I've ever come across, finding this spring on your land. Now you can go ahead and organize a new mineral water company that will have a real ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... West!" he began. "It rejoices me to observe this spirit animating your bosoms. Trampling down the finer feelings that you all possess to such an unlimited degree, putting aside all thought of merely material prosperity, you are now prepared, at whatever cost, to ally yourselves with that higher poetic justice which is above barter, above mere expediency, above even the ordinary this-for-that fairness which often passes as justice among the effete and unenlightened savages of the East. Gentlemen of the great and glorious ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... But there are other vagabonds whom I love, and whom I do well to love. With what affection do I follow little Ishmael and his broken-hearted mother out into the great and terrible wilderness, and see them faint beneath the ardours of the sunlight! And we feel it to be strict poetic justice and compensation that the lad so driven forth from human tents should become the father of wild Arabian men, to whom the air of cities is poison, who work without any tool, and on whose limbs no conqueror has ever yet been able to rivet shackle ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... You deny the whole art of elocution, the value of the voice in acting! You want to substitute for both the art of toneless squeaking! Further you deny the importance of action in the drama and assert it to be a worthless accident, a sop for the groundlings! You deny the validity of poetic justice, of guilt and its necessary expiation. You call all that a vulgar invention—an assertion by means of which the whole moral order of the world is abrogated by the learned and crooked understanding of your single magnificent self! Of the heights of humanity you know nothing! ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... late, especially her parting with us overnight, it seemed not so impossible neither. For here, seeing the folly of our coming hither, desponding of any happiness in the future, was the speediest way of ending a life that was burdensome to herself and a constant sorrow to us. Nay, with her notions of poetic justice drawn from plays, she may have regarded this as the only atonement she could make her husband; the only means of giving him back freedom to make a happier choice in marriage. With these conclusions taking shape, I shuffled on my clothes, and then, with shaking fear, we two, hanging ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... has made (without a pun) some noise in history. One of its ancient lords, Enguerrand de Marigny, was the inventor of the famous gibbet of Montfaucon, and in the poetic justice which should ever govern such cases he came to be hung on his own gallows. He was convicted of manifold extortions, and launched by the common executioner into that eternity whither he could carry none of his ill-gotten gains with him. Here, at least, we succeed in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... commercial and conquering tongue. This startling reappearance of Swedenborg, after a hundred years, in his pupil, is not the least remarkable fact in his history. Aided, it is said, by the munificence of Mr. Clissold, and also by his literary skill, this piece of poetic justice is done. The admirable preliminary discourses with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these volumes, throw all the contemporary philosophy of England into shade, and leave me nothing to say on their ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that centred in these singers. They were on a noble mission. They sang to build up education in the blighted land in which they themselves and millions more had so long drearily plodded in ignorance; and it was a most striking and yet pleasing exhibition of poetic justice, when many of those who really, in a certain sense, had been parties to their enslavement, were forced to pay tribute to the signs of genius found in this native music, and to contribute money for the cause ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... for precisely this purpose when he was young and naive and not yet interacting with the real computing community. Many people invent such words; this one seems simply to have been lucky enough to have spread a little. In an eloquent display of poetic justice, it has returned to the originator in the form of a nickname. 2. /interj./ See {foo}; however, denotes very little disgust, and is uttered mostly for the sake of the sound of it. 3. Guy Steele in his persona as 'The Great Quux', which ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... trifling, since the next train did not leave for above three hours; too late to push on beyond Takasaki that night, a thing I had most firmly purposed to do. Here I was, the miserable victim of a punctuality my own people had foisted on a land only too happy without it! There was poetic justice in the situation, after all. Besides, the course of one's true love should not run too smooth. Judicious difficulty ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... the nature of poetic justice that the lad whose family was cast thus ruthlessly on the roadside in the summer of 1880, should, after the passage of the Land Act of 1903, have, in the providence of things, the opportunity and the power for negotiating, in fair and friendly and conciliatory fashion, for the expropriation ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... Now I have found you.... If you say another word I'll serve you as you served the Haddock. I'll hang on to your arm right along the Leas. I'll hang round your neck and scream if you try to run away. This is poetic justice, darling. Now you know how our Haddock felt. No—I won't leave go of your sleeve. Where shall we go, dearest darling Dammy. Dare you drive up and down the Front with me in Amelia Harringport's sister's young man's ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren |
