"Whimsicality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... (the corner farthest from the marsh and Pip's little brothers and the expected convict), had spread a wide napkin thereupon after the fashion of a domestic dinner-table, and was rapidly transferring the contents of the hampers to that point. The horrible whimsicality of trying to eat and make merry under these deplorable circumstances, the tragic-comic character of the scene, appeared to take him by surprise. He at once threw himself into it (as he says in "Copperfield" he was wont ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... charm in conversation was due to an adventurous whimsicality, perfectly natural, which was absent from Lady Roden's. She saw everything through a medium of unexpected analogies. She was one day asked in my hearing whether she had enjoyed herself at a Marlborough House garden party. "My dear," she ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... it in a lighter and more fantastic vein; in James Stephens, whose wild ingenuities are redolent of the soil. And it finds its corresponding opposite in the limpid and unperturbed loveliness of Ralph Hodgson; in the ghostly magic and the nursery-rhyme whimsicality of Walter de la Mare; in the quiet and delicate lyrics of W. H. Davies. Among the others, the brilliant G. K. Chesterton, the facile Alfred Noyes, the romantic Rupert Brooke (who owes less to Masefield and ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... me of all this splendor and grace of water life, as I bent over the surface of the lagoon or walked with lunette among the beds of coral, was, after the oft-repeated periods of bewilderment at the gorgeousness and whimsicality of the universe, a deep rejoicing for its prodigality of design and purpose, and a merry sorrow for those who would inflict dogma and orthodoxy on a practical and heterodox world. I leaned on the side of the canoe or on my spears and laughed at the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... caught a glimpse of some cells, where more obscene practices were going on than modesty will suffer me to mention, which caused my companion to snatch me away in wrath, from this palace of whimsicality and wantonness, to the treasury of the princess, (because we went where we pleased, in spite of doors and locks.) There we beheld a multitude of beautiful damsels, all sorts of drink, fruit, and dainties; all kinds of instruments and books of music, harps, ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... quite an intelligent man, Bruce," he said, with a sudden whimsicality, "but I don't think you would ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... bits of land, he talks of them continually, sees to them, visits them. They are quite little bits of land. He calls one Clement, and the other Marot! Here is a whimsicality you would not find, ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... kind for her having driven off from Grosvenor Place without him. But it was not new to the girl that he really spared his wife more than she spared him; not so much perhaps because he wouldn't do the 'nastiest' thing as because he couldn't. Selina could always be nastier. There was ever a whimsicality in her actions: if two or three hours before it had been her fancy to keep a third person out of the carriage she had now her reasons for bringing such a person in. Laura knew that she would not only pretend, but would really believe, that her vindication ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... and I can scarce sufficiently express how little it could have conduced to the formation of prigs. Our father's prime horror was of them—he only cared for virtue that was more or less ashamed of itself; and nothing could have been of a happier whimsicality than the mixture in him, and in all his walk and conversation, of the strongest instinct for the human and the liveliest reaction from the literal. The literal played in our education as small a part as it perhaps ever played in any, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James |
