"Ridiculously" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as Sallust avers, by his merit, in spite of his birth and social position, when the mortal peril of the Catilinarian conspiracy was gathering round the state, and necessity called for the man, and not the game-preserver. His conduct in that hour of supreme peril is ridiculously overpraised by himself. Not only so, but he begs a friend in plain terms to write a history of it and to exaggerate. Now, it is denounced as brutal tyranny and judicial murder. But those who hold this language have new lights on the subject of Catiline. I ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... accustomed and beastly manner carousing with them, his servants being as drunke as he, threw the king, in sport, into a great vessell full of drinke, that was set in the middist of the hall for their quaffing, where he ridiculously ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 348, December 27, 1828 • Various
... about new and neat residences for city people are springing up, with fine names,—Eldon Terrace, Rose Cottage, Belvoir Villa, etc., etc., with little patches of ornamented garden or lawn in front, and heaps of curious rock-work, with which the English are ridiculously fond of adorning their front yards. I rather think the middling classes—meaning shopkeepers, and other respectabilities of that level—are better lodged here than in America; and, what I did not expect, the houses are a great deal newer than in our new country! ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... her neck with a smile. "You are joking, Mrs. Baker. I know it is ridiculously small, but it is a child's necklace, and I wear it because it was a gift from ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... municipium if it had not meant something. At the very best she could not have been a real municipium with Roman citizenship longer than seven years, 89 to 82 B.C., and that at a very unsettled time, nor would an enforced taking of the status of a municipium, not to mention the ridiculously short period which it would have lasted, have been anything to look back to with such pride that the inhabitants would ask the emperor Tiberius for it again. What they did ask for was the name municipium as they used and understood it, for it ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin
... she turned from the sunny window with a sigh, and went down the dark, echoing staircase to the breakfast parlour, where her own little silver chocolate-pot looked ridiculously small beside Sir John's quart tankard, and where the crisp, golden rolls, baked in the French fashion by the maid from Chilton, who had been taught by Lord Fareham's chef, contrasted with the chine of beef and huge farmhouse loaf that ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... was looking somewhat frouzy, for the Maxwells breakfasted late, and the house-maid had not had time to put it in order. Louise saw it through her father's and mother's eyes with the glance they gave it, and found the rooms ridiculously little, and furnished with cheap Fourteenth Street things; but she bragged all the more noisily of it on that account, and made her mother look out of the window for the pretty view they had from their corner room. Mrs. Hilary pulled her head back from the prospect of the railroad-ridden ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... inquire who the stranger was, when I ascertained that it was only Tommy Came-last who was imitating a Scotch female who, as I then learnt, was at Portland Bay and had been very kind to Tommy. The imitation was ridiculously true through all the modulations of that peculiar accent although, strange to say, without the pronunciation of a single intelligible word. The talent of the aborigines for imitation seems a peculiar trait in their character. I was informed ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... [Bowing ridiculously low.] Lady Rodolpha, down till the ground, my congratulations and duty attend you, and I should rejoice to kiss ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... amazing frame of things the tribute of an unutterable awe. If that be religion, I profess myself as religious as Mr. Wells. I am even willing to join him in some outward, ceremonial expression of that sentiment, if he can suggest one that shall not be ridiculously inadequate. What about kneeling through the C Minor Symphony? That seems to me about as near as we can get. Or I will go with him to Primrose Hill some fine morning (like the Persian Ambassador fabled by Charles ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... to, then, is a certain result of the eternally pagan influence of the sun. For, say what you will, the sun is pagan. It says "Yea" to life. In its glorious rays it is ridiculously easy to forget the alleged beauties of another world. Under its scorching heat the snaky sinuousness of a basking cat seems more seductive than the image of a winged angel, and amid the gold it lavishes, nothing looks more loathsome, more repulsive, than the pale cheek of pious ill-health. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... to any one ridiculously self-evident, he may take it for granted he is one of the geniuses, for whose service they are not promulgated. For their ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... broke out. "They're going to get on—Ruth and mother—beautifully. 'She's a dear!' That's what mother says of Ruth half a dozen times a day. 'She's a dear!' And somehow the triteness of the phrase from mother is ridiculously pleasing to me. May I ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... rigid, his arms held stiff at his sides, his hands clenched; the red mark showed plain against an ashy countenance. "Pardon me for a moment." Once or twice he opened and shut his eyes like an automaton. "And stop behaving so ridiculously. I cannot fight you. I have other matters to attend to. We are wise, Harry,—you and I. We know that love sometimes does not endure; sometimes it flares up at a girl's glance, quite suddenly, and afterward smoulders out into indifference ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... you excited," Flossie had once confessed to her in the old student days. "You look so ridiculously young and you are so pleased with yourself, ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... this fact. That "Mr. Tomkins lived in familiar intercourse with the Royal Academicians of his day, and was a frequent guest at their private tables," and moreover was a most worthy man, I believe—but is it less true that he was ridiculously mortified by being never invited to the Academic dinner, on account of his caligraphy? He had some reason to consider that his art was of the exalted class to which he aspired to raise it, when this friend concludes his eulogy of this writing-master thus—"Mr. Tomkins, as ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the most ridiculously provoking affair! Herbert Carrington asking me to give him my daughter! I don't wonder at your astonished look, Rose; a couple of silly children. I should have given either of them credit for ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... there is often no knowing which may turn out important. We don't go around being interested on purpose, hoping to profit by it, but a profit may come. And anyway it is generous of us not to be too self-absorbed. Other creatures go to the other extreme to an amazing extent. They are ridiculously oblivious to what is going on. The smallest ant in the garden will ignore the largest woman who visits it. She is a huge and most dangerous super-mammoth in relation to him, and her tread shakes the earth; ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... wants some charcoal." The very small voice at his feet must have pleased him, for his black brows relaxed into a smile, and he poked the little one's chin with a hard, dirty finger, as he emptied the ridiculously small bucket of charcoal into the child's bucket, and gave a ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... new-born foal, woolly, dun of hue, swaying on uncertain legs. The little creature, with the mane and tail of a toy horse, looking supremely pathetic in its helplessness, wavered ridiculously in the wind. It was all knees and hocks, and fluffy tail that wriggled, and jelly-like eyes. Its tall, thin legs were stuck out before and behind like those of a wooden horse. It stood like one dazed, staring blankly before it, absorbed in the new and surprising action of drawing ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... bear the name of Hegel. And the thought is this: The earth is enough for us, away with heaven; man suffices for himself, away with God; reality suffices for us, away with chimeras! Wisdom consists in contenting ourselves with the world as it is. It is attempted ridiculously enough to place this wisdom under the patronage of the luminaries of our age. We are bidden, forsooth, to see in the negation of the real and living God, a conflict of progress with routine, of science with a blind tradition, of the modern mind with superannuated ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... we find it in her best dramatic work, Seven Short Plays; but she set about transforming it into a tongue into which all literature and emotion might apparently be translated. Thus, she gave us Moliere in Kiltartan—a ridiculously successful piece of work—and she gave us Finn and Cuchullain in modified Kiltartan, and this, too, was successful, sometimes very beautifully so. Here, however, she had masterpieces to begin with. In Irish Folk-History Plays, on the other hand, ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... ear just now, Mr. Dishart," McQueen said after the loch had been left behind. "Aye, and I'm thinking my pipe would soothe you. But don't take it so much to heart, man. I'll lick him easily. He's a decent man, the minister, but vain of his play, ridiculously vain. However, I think the sight of you, in the place that should have been his, has broken his nerve for this day, and our side ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... "Ridiculously easy! I'm going across," I said to my man. "When I'm over I'll throw a cord across for you to tie my tripod on to; then I'll pull it across. It will save you ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... hurried past, he caught dimly a glimpse of an old nurse whom he remembered trying to break into bits with a hop-pole he could barely lift; and, most singular thing, on the Sidcup platform, a group of noisy schoolboys, with smudged faces and ridiculously small caps stuck on the back of their heads, had scrambled viciously to get into his compartment. They carried brown canvas satchels full of crumpled books and papers, and though the names had mostly escaped him, he remembered every single face. There was Barlow—big, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... could have saved him and other persons much trouble, and the Court some hours of its valuable time, by the utterance of a single word, or, indeed, without the necessity for any words at all. Really, this affair, about which so much noise had been made, was so ridiculously simple and empty that he almost felt inclined to apologize to the Court and to the gentlemen of the jury for showing them how empty and simple it was. But, indeed, he feared that the apology, if there was to be one, was not due from ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... turned, and thus took the same course that the girls had taken. The current was at right angles with its advance, though the houses on the north somewhat broke that force. The roofless building, ridiculously shortened in its height, had more the look of a fortress than when it was used as one. The walls had been washed out above both great entrances, making spacious jagged arches through which larger ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... want you to go first. The rise is easy for a half-mile or so. I can better watch out for you and catch you—if you make a misstep. The stones are loose and mischievous; the path is ridiculously near the edge of things. If one should—now do not get nervous, but if you should go over, just clutch the bushes, the sturdy little clumps, ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... a thousand conventional cases in which 'yes' means 'no,' and 'no' means 'yes;' and they are so ridiculously common that every one is supposed, in politeness, not to mean what he says, or, rather, is not doubted to mean the contrary of what he says. In fact, quite apart from positive lying—that is, any intention to deceive—the honest words are so often interchanged, that ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... grunted in deep displeasure, and reached over to pick up his hat preparatory to leaving. He could not countenance anything so ridiculously absurd. If the pastor's eccentricities continued to develop as they had in the last year, he would be compelled to seek another and more congenial church home, where ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... or two ridiculously low offers the boys received for their horse and cart, and the discovery that they could not find room on the boat down the Ohio except at a fancy price, resulted in their decision to join Tom Fish. They talked all day of the subject, but when they went to bed that night, they ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... a poet, and succeeds because the majority of men are poets. It is true, if that matter is at all important, that the German Emperor is not a good poet. The majority of men are poets, only they happen to be bad poets. The German Emperor fails ridiculously, if that is all that is in question, in almost every one of the artistic occupations to which he addresses himself: he is neither a first-rate critic, nor a first-rate musician, nor a first-rate painter, nor a first-rate poet. He is a twelfth-rate poet, but because ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... assertions of newspaper correspondents, women are at one and the same time preposterously masculine, contemptibly feminine, ridiculously intellectual, repulsively athletic, and revoltingly frivolous. In appearance they are either lank, gaunt, flat-footed lamp-posts, or else over-dressed, unnaturally-shaped, painted dolls. Their extravagance ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... stuck wide apart in a queer stiff position that Mr. Irving often adopts preparatory to one of his long, wolflike strides across the stage. The figure is life-size, and, though apparently one- armed, is so ridiculously like the original that one cannot help almost laughing when one sees it. And we may imagine that any one who had the misfortune to be shut up at night in the Grosvenor Gallery would hear this Arrangement in Black No. 3 murmuring in ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... Winstanley has a little ridiculously shewn his vanity, by informing the world, that he could afford to drink a glass of Rhenish; and has added nothing to his reputation by the verses, which have neither poetry ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... parliament voted 45,000 seamen, including 1,000 marines. The difficulty was to get them. A seaman's service was not continuous; when his ship was paid off he could go whither he would. The peace establishment of the navy was ridiculously small, and when a war broke out it was always difficult to get men in a hurry. Many of the best seamen would have taken service on board merchant ships and would, perhaps, be at sea; and life on the king's ships in time of war was often so rough that it is ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... winkie,—with a triple accent on the first syllable of the last word. Most of the songs of this family are rather slight, but the extremest case known to me is that of the black-poll (Dendroeca striata), whose zee, zee, zee is almost ridiculously faint. You may hear it continually in the higher spruce forests of the White Mountains; but you will look a good many times before you discover its author, and not improbably will begin by taking it for the call of ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... locomotive anything but a cheap substitute for horseflesh, or found anything incongruous in letting the dimensions of a horse determine the dimensions of an engine. It mattered nothing that from the first the passenger was ridiculously cramped, hampered, and crowded in the carriage. He had always been cramped in a coach, and it would have seemed "Utopian"—a very dreadful thing indeed to our grandparents—to propose travel without cramping. By ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... attaching, almost elfish, in Bubbles Dunster's charm. For one thing, she was so good-natured, so kindly, so always eager to do someone a good turn—and last, not least, she had inherited her aunt's cleverness about clothes! She dressed in a way which Blanche Farrow thought ridiculously outre and queer, but still, somehow, she always looked well-dressed. And though she had never been taught dressmaking, she could make her own clothes when put to it, and was always willing to help other people ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... and animals. For the night, the common charge was 700 cash, twenty-three cents. Travellers are expected to provide their own food and bedding and to pay a small extra sum for the rice and fodder used by their servants and mules, but even then the cost appears ridiculously small to a foreigner. Still, the most thoroughly seasoned traveller can hardly consider a Chinese inn a comfortable residence. It is simply a rough, one-story building enclosing an open courtyard. The rooms are destitute of furniture except occasionally a rude table. The floor is the beaten ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... an air of absurd perplexity to the poor man's visage, Waverley, reflecting on the communication he was about to make to him, of a nature so ridiculously contrasted with the appearance of the individual, could not help bursting out a-laughing, as he checked the propensity to ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... penabsk.] and near Oonahgemessuk weegeet, the Home of the Water Fairies. [Footnote: Also called from a legend, Oonahgemessuk k'tubbee, the Water Fairies' Spring. This appropriate and beautiful name has been rejected in favor of the ridiculously rococo term "Diana's Bath." As there is a "Diana's Bath" at almost every summer watering place in America, North Conway must of course have one. The absolute antipathy which the majority of Americans manifest for the aboriginal names, even in a translation, is really remarkable.] Now the old ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... not at all, and the main body of the Choctaws and Chickasaws, into whose minds some unscrupulous merchants had instilled mercenary motives and the elements of discord generally, were lingering far in the background. Pike's white force was, moreover, ridiculously small, some Texas cavalry, dignified by him as collectively a squadron, Captain O.G. Welch in command. There had as yet not been even a pretense of giving him the three regiments of white men earlier asked for. Toward the close of the afternoon of March 6, Pike "came up with the rear of McCulloch's ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... supped at Lord Pomfret's: at twelve, Lady Granville, his mother, and all his family went to bed, but the porter: then my lord went home, and waited for her in the lodge: she came alone in a hackney-chair, met him in the hall, and was led up the back stairs to bed. What is ridiculously lucky is, that Lord Lincoln goes into waiting, to-day, and will be to present her! On Tuesday she stands godmother with the King to Lady Dysart's(920) child, her new grand-daughter. I am impatient to see the whole m'enage; it will be admirable. There is a wild young Venetian ambassadress(921) ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... one might sail around and about, day after day, not to go anywhere, but just to enjoy the motion and the views; and there were cod and haddock swimming over the outer ledges in deep water, waiting to be fed with clams at any time, and on fortunate days ridiculously accommodating in letting themselves be pulled up at the end of a long, thick string with a pound of lead and two hooks tied to it. There were plenty of places considered proper for picnics, like Jordan's Pond, and Great Cranberry Island, and the Russian Tea-house, and ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... we agree in thinking ridiculously underrated by recent fashions, my boat is on the shore and my bark is on the sea; but before I go, Tom Moore (if I may so by a flight of fancy describe you), I feel impelled to send you this hurried ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... I have narrated of the business-like manner in which Canadians treat death, is more ridiculously striking than the following:— ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... to be counted among those wicked men. He did not believe that Beatrice had any more reality than other ladies through whom ancient poets who sang of love represented some scholastic idea, ridiculously subtle. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... floors, its shrouded furniture, its screened book cases, its blank pictures swaddled in linen bags, its long, gaunt shadows, and its deadened air, suggested itself horribly and ridiculously as a fitting scene for a crime. He might kill Claude with a blow, and if he turned out the lights and shut the door and stole back to his hotel no one would ever suspect him as the murderer. The idea would have been no more ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... recalling more than one incident in Lavengro that transpired there. In 1897 the then mayor made the one attempt of his city of a whole half century to honour Borrow by calling this court Borrow's Court—thereby conferring a ridiculously small distinction upon Borrow,[13] and removing a landmark connected with one of its own worthy citizens. For Thomas King, the carpenter, was in direct descent in the maternal line from the family of Parker, which gave to Norwich one of its most distinguished sons in the ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... so criticised and maligned for defending Mr. Dorsey in the Star Route cases, and so frequently charged with having received an enormous fee, that I think it but simple justice to his memory to say that he received no such fee, and that the ridiculously small sums he did receive were much more than offset by the amount he had to pay as indorser of Mr. Dorsey's paper. —C. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... bride in mole-coloured taffeta and sable furs into the waiting car, the horn blew, the engines whirled, a big hand and a little one flourished handkerchiefs out of the window, a white satin shoe danced ridiculously after the wheels, and Aunt Emmeline ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... gratefully at his ready acceptance. And then a curious change came. She felt her heart begin to beat faster, the strange intrusion of a new element into her life and thoughts and being. It was shining out of her eyes, something which made her a little afraid yet ridiculously light-hearted. Suddenly she felt the colour burning in her cheeks. She withdrew her hands, lost her presence of mind, and found it again at the sound of the ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... obscurer sounds than ought ever to be given them in solemn discourse. "In public speaking," says Rippingham, "every word should be uttered, as though it were spoken singly. The solemnity of an oration justifies and demands such scrupulous distinctness. That careful pronunciation which would be ridiculously pedantic in colloquial intercourse, is an essential requisite of good elocution."—Art ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... I was trying to be agreeable. This conception acted on the honest and amiable soul like magic. I gradually became comprehensible, and finally he gave himself up to the theory that, though eccentric, I was harmless and amusing, so we got on famously,—so famously that Willie Beresford grew ridiculously gloomy, and I decided that it could ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... stood, candle in hand, before us. He held up the light and peered before him into the darkness to ascertain who we could be. When his eye fell on our uniforms and the red-coats of the soldiers his countenance assumed a most ridiculously scared appearance, and with a groan of terror he let the candlestick fall from his hands. The expiring flame, as the candle reached the ground, showed me a female arm stretched out. It hauled him through a ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... were ridiculously inadequate in every sense of the word. Only one attempt was ever made to establish a magazine. This was about eleven years ago. It was called the Revista Puertorriquena and was intended "to carry the highest expression of our intellectual culture to all the people of ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... Fenwick, coming upstairs three steps at a time, filled the whole house with "Hullo, Sarah! what's the latest intelligence?" this young lady had only just time to pull herself together into something like dignified self-possession, in order to reply ridiculously—how could she have been our usual Sally, else?—"We-ell! I don't see that it's anything so very remarkable, after all. I've been encouraging my medical adviser's attentions, if you ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... bigness of your two fists, that carries within his small skin enough courage, audacity, and dignity to befit the size of an elephant. He is also known as "Posey's bear dog"—a sobriquet bestowed upon him partly in humor, because of his ridiculously small size, and partly in honor, because ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... feeling her cheeks burning when the direct rays found them. The fine, loose soil was sifting into her low slippers before she had gone a score of paces. When she came back she would unpack her trunk and get out a sensible pair of boots. No doubt she was dressed ridiculously, but then the heat had tempted her. ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... thousands of students, forming the cap-stone of a great educational system which was to rest on the little log schoolhouses which were so rapidly rising in the wilderness about them. Their immediate resources, however, proved almost ridiculously inadequate, while their best efforts were often nullified by the selfishness and lack of foresight of many of their contemporaries. Land set aside for the University by the Government was sold for a song to satisfy speculators. An ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... heard elephant stories before, but it was most ridiculously absurd to see that great mountain of flesh crying like a whipped child, go down on his knees and quietly receive his burden without any attempt to hurt or ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... we are for her, and "Mees Ommalee" she has made me for her millionaire. For fun, I don't correct him. Let him find out for himself who we really are! I say that my brother hasn't fixed a price; but would six hundred francs seem very high? The man considers it ridiculously low. He refuses to pay less than twice that sum. Even so, he argues he will be cheating us, and getting me into hot water when my brother comes. We almost quarrel, and at last the hero has his way. He strikes me as one who is ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... himself, with the help of the conditions about him, regard it as serious. It was born, for that matter, partly of the conditions, those conditions that Kate had so almost insolently braved, had been willing, without a pang, to see him ridiculously—ridiculously so far as just complacently—exposed to. How little it could be complacently he was to feel with the last thoroughness before he had moved from his point of vantage. His question, as we have called it, was the interesting question of whether ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... where the ways were rough the Tinker's light cart creaked and lurched until the tins wherewith it was festooned rattled and clinked and I, perched precariously on the tailboard, legs a-swing, was fain to hold on lest I be precipitated into the ditch, yet felt myself ridiculously happy notwithstanding. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... the particulars of a ridiculously-spiteful conversation that passed between my brother and me, in the time that he (with Betty) was in office to keep me in the parlour while my closet was searching!—But I think I will not. It can ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... thoroughly confirmed. The baby had taken a start, as Sarah called it, left off unreasonable crying, sat up, laughed and stared about with a sharp look of inquiry in his dark eyes and tiny thin face, so ridiculously like his grandfather, Mr. Moss, that his mother could not help being diverted with the resemblance, except when she tormented herself with the fear that the likeness was unpleasing to Arthur, if perchance he remarked it; but he looked so little at the child, that she often feared he did not ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The Hankow was ridiculously small, and monstrously strong. Chiefly it consisted of engines and boilers. Despite their security, despite the shipwrecks and deaths that have been poured into their present design, Yangtze river-boats sink, a goodly ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... of the officers and of the Governor, the crowd began to melt away. Splitting up in twos and threes, it sauntered off, as if it had made up its mind to submit quietly to the inevitable. Soon only women and children were left, and the Governor began to feel that the array of force was almost ridiculously out of proportion to the need. The whole thing was, as Captain Heseltine regretfully observed, "fizzling out," and he proposed to ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... being ridiculously small and shabby in point of efficiency in rigging, sails, and general outfit, it will always be a mystery how it was that so few were lost by stress of weather or even ordinary navigable risks. They were veritable boxes in design, and ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... the six sheep that were bought for the ridiculously low price of eighty-nine cents apiece, the lambs being thrown in as makeweight, were grazing on the mixed-measles lawn over on the east shore of the island, with a fairy in evening dress eying them ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... from Doan, Rockwell & Haight, big stock-buyers of Sacramento, submitting an unsolicited order for a surprisingly large shipment of cattle and horses. The price offered was ridiculously low, even for this season of low figures due to the fact that many overstocked ranches were throwing their beef-cattle and range horses on the market. So low, in fact, that Judith's first surmise when Hampton brought it to her was that the typist taking the company's dictation ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... time in her seventeenth year. She had a lively perception of the foibles of others, and no reverence for her seniors, whom she thought dull, cautious, and ridiculously amenable by commonplaces. But she was subject to the illusion which disables youth in spite of its superiority to age. She thought herself an exception. Crediting Mr. Jansenius and the general mob of mankind with nothing but ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... must lecture you on your lack of woodcraft. It is exceedingly unwise to build a fire in the wilderness and go to sleep beside it, unless there is someone with you to watch. I'm ashamed of you, Monsieur Garay, to have neglected such an elementary lesson. It made your capture easy, so ridiculously easy that it lacked piquancy and interest. Tayoga and I were not able to give our faculties and strength the healthy exercise they need. Come now, ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... excursions, went to see a Dutch tragedy acted, an entertainment which, of all others, had the strangest effect upon the organs of our hero; the dress of their chief personages was so antic, their manner so awkwardly absurd, and their language so ridiculously unfit for conveying the sentiment of love and honour, that Peregrine's nerves were diuretically affected with the complicated absurdity, and he was compelled to withdraw twenty times before ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... minute she simply held the envelope in her hand. She felt so relieved, and yes, so ridiculously happy, that after the first moment of heartfelt joy there came a pang of compunction. It was wrong, it was unnatural, that the safety of one human being should so affect her. She was glad that ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... sufficient for a pivot which is one-third larger. Of course it is understood that side shakes do not increase in proportion according as the pivot increases in size, for if they did a six-inch shaft would require at this rate a side shake of 1/2 inch, or 1/4 inch on each side, which would be ridiculously out of all proportion, as the 1/64 of an inch would be ample under any circumstances. Neither can we arrive at the proper end shake for a pivot by reducing in proportion from the end shake allowed on a six-inch shaft, because if we followed ...
— A Treatise on Staff Making and Pivoting • Eugene E. Hall
... to have for supper, but not General Desaix, who arrived with his troops in time to snatch victory from our grasp, and to inflict a most terrible defeat upon our triumphant army. All of our generals are short-sighted fools, from that ridiculously-over-rated Archduke Charles down to General Schwarzenberg, and whatever the names of these gentlemen may be—these gentlemen with the golden epaulets, and decorated breasts, and empty heads—I have no confidence in a single one of them. At the ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... out as their personal enemy. The general rule is to have a real reserve with almost every one, and a seeming reserve with almost no one; for it is very disgusting to seem reserved, and very dangerous not to be so. Few observe the true medium. Many are ridiculously misterious upon trifles and many indiscreetly communicative of all ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... James much better. James was a quick, slender, dark-haired fellow, a gentleman, who was always trying to catch her out with his quickness. She liked his fine, slim limbs, and his exaggerated generosity. He would ask her out to ridiculously expensive suppers, and send her sweets and flowers, fabulously recherche. He was always ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... Francis came a little further into the room. His hostess, who had subsided into an easy-chair and was holding a screen between her face and the fire, motioned him to, seat himself opposite. He did so without words. He felt curiously and ridiculously tongue-tied. He fell to studying the woman instead of attempting the banality of pointless speech. From the smooth gloss of her burnished hair, to the daintiness of her low, black brocaded shoes, she represented, so far as her physical and outward ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... good roads and the apparently great distances, the mere matter of travelling was far more important in social activities than is the case in our day of break-neck speed. A ridiculously small number of miles could be covered in a day; there were frequent stops for rest and refreshment; and the occupants of the heavy, rumbling coaches had ample opportunity for observing the scenery and the peculiarities ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... no one—least of all, the young man that had asked her before she left Pittsburg to marry him and was now writing her every other day—Allen Harrison. Indeed, what could be more ridiculously embarrassing than to be assailed so unexpectedly? She had no mind to make herself anyone's laughing-stock by speaking of it. One thing, however, she had vaguely determined—since Glover had frightened her she would retaliate at least a little before she returned ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... "I'm ridiculously excited, Anne," Laura said, as she looked down at her woods-brown robe with its fringes and embroideries. "I don't feel a bit as if I were prosaic Laura Haven. I'm really one of the nut-brown Indian maids that roamed these ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... any rate no hesitation in doing so. Very small in stature, he had a large head, ornamented with a moderately sized and sparkling light blue eye, and with a nose peculiarly short, and in comparison with his other features, altogether ridiculously small. His nose was in wonderful contrast with a massive fore-head and well-shaped mouth, which even when his tongue stood still, rare as that occurrence was, ever moved. He was peculiarly thin-skinned. The blue veins of his fair face made ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... wakened a warlike fire, peaceful though I be. Close to their rear marches a battalion of schoolboys ranged in crooked and irregular platoons, shouldering sticks, thumping a harsh and unripe clatter from an instrument of tin and ridiculously aping the intricate manoeuvres of the foremost band. Nevertheless, as slight differences are scarcely perceptible from a church-spire, one might be tempted to ask, "Which are the boys?" or, rather, "Which the men?" But, leaving these, let us turn to the third procession, which, though sadder ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... B. Ffolliot was very tidy indeed. Behind her followed a youth ridiculously like her in feature, but he was half a head taller. He walked with quick, short steps, and had a very flat back and square shoulders. His appearance, even allowing for the high seriousness of an outfitter's point of view, was eminently satisfactory. ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... away to the lady the very first thing," said Hugh, lightly. He shoved the papers into the drawers and swung it shut. His heart was beating quite ridiculously. He would know at last—What wouldn't he know? "Uncle Hugh's girl, Uncle Hugh's girl," he told himself, and his temperamental responsiveness to the interest and the mystery of life expanded like a sea-anemone ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... that we have defeated their countrymen somewhere on land, or else that one of our ships has sunk or captured the Huascar; nothing less would, I imagine, have roused them to such a pitch of excitement. We Chilians are maintaining a ridiculously small army of occupation here; far too small for the purpose, in my opinion; and if the Bolivians were to turn restive, as they seem very much inclined to do, we should have rather a bad time of it, I am afraid. ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... are told the Plot should not be so ridiculously contrived, as to crowd several Countries into one Stage. Secondly, to cramp the accidents of many years or days, into the Representation of two hours and a half. And, lastly, a conclusion drawn that the only remaining dispute, is concerning Time; whether it should be contained in twelve ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... professional interest. For once his tried and tested powers of turning other people's minds inside out failed utterly. His innocent-sounding queries, his adroit leads, were smilingly turned aside. The defense, so far as Mr. Jelnik was concerned, was ridiculously simple: he didn't want to talk about himself ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... her, and then, as soon as his back is turned, she lies down and rolls. Hunt is in despair. He used to be really fond of her. But now I believe he'd kill her if he could, sometimes. All his labour entirely and ridiculously in vain. I'm convinced that she does it on purpose, because she always chooses just the moment when he has achieved a beautiful polish on her, and either has to go off to breakfast or else to get the saddle or something. It's as good as ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... Miscellaneous Poems, still extant at Gall & Inglis's—a long one of eighteen stanzas, much liked by Gladstone amongst others. I didn't intend it certainly, but, as the poem ends with the word "bliss," it was ridiculously thought that I had ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Miss Patty. "I like to hear secrets." Now, how very absurd it was in Mr. Verdant Green wasting time in beating about the bush in this ridiculously timid way! Why could he not at once boldly secure his bird by a straightforward shot? She did not fly out of his range - did she? And yet, here he was making himself unnecessarily hot and uncomfortable, when he might, by taking it ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... on her, but rather a proof of her wisdom and tenderness. Impostors are easily detected; as Simnel was. All Henry's art and power could never verify the cheat of Perkin; and if the latter was astonishingly adroit, the king was ridiculously clumsy. 6. Perkin himself confessed his imposture more than once, and read his confession to the people, and renewed his confession at the foot of the gibbet on which he was executed.—Answer. I have shown that this confession was such ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... called counts, chevaliers, knights of the order of the golden fleece, or of the thimble, or of Malta. But the realities are the same. Fashionable life is a show, truly fashionable people are the proprietors, who are never prominently or ridiculously seen therein; and these several orders of over dressed, under-fed, empty-pocketed mountebanks, are the people put on the platform outside, to astonish the eyes and ears ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... stop such talk, both of you. I'm ridiculously unlike the heroines in uncle's library. Lieutenant, please don't say 'Ha! the hour has come and we must part, perhaps forever.' I won't have any forever. Uncle Lusthah has insured you gray hairs, and if you don't come and see us before they're gray, Aun' Jinkey and I will believe all uncle ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... arm, his face changing from red to white as he watched Tessibel. She had clambered to her feet, ridiculously tangled in the rags of her dress. The dead Frederick was forgotten, falling with a great thud upon the floor. Her face was so mobile, so glassily white that if the hand of death had smitten her, she could not ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... all the mothers in the place were reviling her for encouraging their sons in dissipation, must have left the bed out of the reckoning, considering that she could not honestly charge me for a night's rest which I did not get. At any rate, the bill was ridiculously small. ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... a group of wounded soldiers were just entering. With them was a woman in a man's uniform. Her hair was curly and short, and her chin pointed. Her feet looked ridiculously small in the heavy, high, soldier's boots, and in spite of a strut her knees knocked together in an unmistakably feminine manner. But the men treated her quite as one of themselves. One soldier, who had had his leg cut off up to the thigh, supported himself ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... long, and the mane seems to be plaited. Thus far the representation, though somewhat heavy and clumsy, is not ill-drawn; but the remaining figure—that of the Parthian subject—is wholly without merit. The back of the man is turned, but the legs are in profile; one arm is ridiculously short, and the head is placed too near the left shoulder. It would seem that the artist, while he took pains with the representation of the monarch, did not care how ill he rendered the subordinate figure, which he left in the unsatisfactory condition that may be seen ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... and Manchester, each with upwards of 100,000 people, and Leeds and Sheffield, each with 50,000, had no representation whatever. On the other hand, boroughs were entitled to representation which contained ridiculously scant populations, or even no population at all. Gatto, in Surrey, was a park; Old Sarum, in Wiltshire, was a deserted hill; the remains of what once was Dunwich were under the waves of the North Sea. Bosseney, in Cornwall, ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... features of these Muteites would not only seem absurd, but would be distorting. Can you imagine a beautiful person without ears and void of vocal sound, having a head totally out of shape compared with ours, and with a bodily framework ridiculously new to us? Such would be a brief word sketch of these far-away ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... we return to them, altogether too small. Our childhood home, the old flower garden, the height of house and trees, and even that of our hero uncle, all seem to the returning traveller of adult life ridiculously small. That we expect them to be larger may result from the fact that the memory images have undergone change ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... properly qualified," said the Bishop. "If there be any superiority among them your son has it. He is not without natural talent, Mr. Finnerty; his translations are strong and fluent, but ridiculously pedantic. That, however, is perhaps less his fault than the fault ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... the public: "My dear sir, here is an open market. Nowhere else can you get such large and quick returns on so small an investment. For these opportunities I charge you the ridiculously small percentage of one-eighth of one per cent., and loan you, besides, ninety per cent. of your investment. Could any man with a proper regard for his wife and children do better by you? You own whatever security you buy, and get its dividend. Your margin is your equity in ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... white as alabaster, her hair was a gorgeous brown kissed into fine gold glimmering as though with a touch of some hidden fire. She moved with the delightful freedom of absolute naturalness. He murmured something which sounded ridiculously commonplace, and ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... its appearances. Although she exhibits the diamond tassels sparkling in St. James's sun or the musk and amber that perfume the Mall, she never penetrates beyond externalities. The sentiments of her characters are as inflated as those of a Grandison and her picture of refined society as ridiculously stilted as Richardson's own. The scene whether in London, Bath, Oxford, or Paris, is described with more attention to specific detail than appeared in her early romances, but compared with the setting of "Humphrey Clinker" her ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... pitch their conceit will have arrived by the time they are nothing at all. They are proud that they love but a little, believe less, and hope for nothing. Every fool prides himself on not being such a fool as believe what would make a man of him. For dread of being taken in, he takes himself in ridiculously. The man who keeps on trying to do his duty, finds a brighter and brighter gleam issue, as he walks, from the ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... Woman, the woman brought up throughout her girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her; trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her real work; going then into marriage with none of the discipline of habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to share his struggle but his prosperity—that ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... ridiculously silly little softie, that nobody could put a grain of sense into your head," Elsie replied, angrily. "Supposing it had been mother. A nice row you'd have got us into. Why couldn't you keep quiet, and she'd have thought we were both in ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... Highland Laddie, written long since by Allan Ramsay, and now sung at Ranelagh and all the other gardens; often fondly encored, and sometimes ridiculously hissed.' Gent. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... it would be absurd to suppose that any real feeling could have been engendered by so ridiculously brief an acquaintance. I had only met the girl three times, and even now, excepting for business relations, was hardly entitled to more than a bow of recognition. But yet, when I considered the matter impartially and examined my own consciousness, ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... remained closeted in the stern cabin of the "Mongoose", listening, poring over chart upon chart and taking notes, and for an hour the marine at the door heard nothing but things like these: "Now you'll have to put in here if there's any sea on. That current is ridiculously under-estimated, and it sets west at this season of the year, remember. Their boats never come south of this, see? So it's no good looking out for them." And so on and so forth, while Judson lay at length on the locker ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... you at once that it's ridiculously short compared with the huge country behind it. From Borkum to the Elbe, as the crow flies, is only seventy miles. Add to that the west coast of Schleswig, say 120 miles. Total, say, two hundred. Compare that with the seaboard of France and England. Doesn't it stand to reason that every inch ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... would do with the family among mankind what nature has done with the compound animal, and confine it to the lower and less progressive races. Certainly there is no inherent love for the family system on the part of nature herself. Poll the forms of life and you will find it in a ridiculously small minority. The fishes know it not, and they get along quite nicely. The ants and the bees, who far outnumber man, sting their fathers to death as a matter of course, and are given to the atrocious mutilation ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... the rules of courtly etiquette, and, without expressing her belief in her complete social equality with the Queen or anyone else present, was so entirely convinced of this equality that she would have deemed a statement of it ridiculously superfluous. ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... yells which followed us, it was clear that we had left the fellow beside himself with rage. Looking back through the little window, I could see him dancing. Suddenly he stopped, peered after us, and then swung about and ran ridiculously up the street. ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates |
