"Exotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... right, a shallow fall of terraces led to the Italian garden, Mrs. Dinsmore's chief pride, now a glory of matched and patterned color and a dazzle of spray from marble basins. Beyond all the careful, exotic beauty of the place, the wide valley dipped away, alternate meadow and grove, until it met the silvery shiver of willows marking the course of the river. Beyond that again, the hills, solemn in unbroken green, rose ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... English poet, and of no other Oriental who has ever lived can the same be said. When the history of the literature of our country comes to be written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile exotic blossom of song. ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... that perhaps it was he who was exotic in the schooner. It might be for this reason that he was too ready to mistake normal things as evidences of a menace which did not exist. He wondered if this fact might not well account for the formless fears he ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... were as much alike as a sturdy sun-browned man of forty can resemble a thin, pale youth of sixteen or so. In other words, they possessed the same features, but the elder suggested an outdoor plant, sturdy and well-grown, the younger a sickly exotic, raised in the hot steaming air of the building which gardeners call a stove, a place in which air is only admitted to pass over hot-water pipes, for fear the plants within should shiver and ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... thus so densely clothed. The few villages there are, bordering on the coast, are poor and meagre-looking, but their inhabitants were very hospitable, especially where there were any Banyans. Nothing could exceed the mingled pride and yearning pleasure these exotic Indians seemed to derive from having us as their guests. Being Indian officers, they looked upon us as their guardians, and did everything they could to show they felt it so. Our conversing in their own language, and talking freely of their ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... Madame Christophor rose deliberately to her feet. For one swift moment she measured the things between them. She herself was conscious of a greater intellectual maturity, a more subtle quality in her looks, a beauty less describable, more exotic, perhaps, but also more provocative. The arts of her sex were at her finger-tips, the small arts disdained by this well-looking and perfectly healthy young woman. She turned her head quickly towards Sir Julien. It was the idle impulse of the man or woman ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... says "A Wilson Avenue girl," the mind—that is, the Chicago mind—pictures immediately a slim, daring, scented, exotic creature dressed in next week's fashions; wise-eyed; doll-faced; rapacious. When chiffon stockings are worn Wilson Avenue's hosiery is but a film over the flesh. Aigrettes and mink coats are its winter uniform. A feverish district this, all plate ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... I thought, "must not be an exotic, a parasite, an alien growth, not a flower of beauty transplanted from a conservatory and shown under glass; it must have its roots deep in the neighborhood life, and there my roots must be also. No teacher, be she ever so gifted, ever ...
— The Girl and the Kingdom - Learning to Teach • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... notoriety. The duties of this gentleman being irksome and his reward being ridicule, it is perhaps amazing that we stand in no nearer danger of lacking a leader for want of aspirants than does the nation of begging for a President. Once guided by a master mind the most exotic may come frankly forth to meet and struggle with the daily weariness of dinner giving and dinner eating: may look towards a triumphant overthrow of those problems on what forks to use, what jewels to adopt, what mannerisms ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... for land, and that transitive verbs in that language require an accusative case, recorded each tenant as having taken of the lord "unam landam, vocatam Tregollup," &c. Indeed so easily does a clipt exotic take root and become acclimated among the peasantry of the Moor, whose powers of appropriation are so much disparaged by the sceptical doubts of K., that since the establishment of local courts the terms fifa and casa have become familiar to them as household words and the name ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 79, May 3, 1851 • Various
... current issues: extirpation of native bird population by the rapid proliferation of the brown tree snake, an exotic, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Space Service does fight, in its own way. It fights the airlessness of space and the unfriendly atmospheres of exotic planets, using machines, intelligence, knowledge, and human courage as its weapons. Some battles have been lost; others have been won. And the war is still going on. It is an unending war, one which has no victory ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... has greater interest for the botanist since Darwin interpreted their marvelous mechanism, and Gray, his instant disciple, revealed the hidden purposes of our native American species, no less wonderfully constructed than the most costly exotic in a millionaire's hothouse. ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... least amusing—to consider what are the most appropriate places in which different authors should be read. Pope is doubtless at his best in the midst of a formal garden, Herrick in an orchard, and Shelley in a boat at sea. Sir Thomas Browne demands, perhaps, a more exotic atmosphere. One could read him floating down the Euphrates, or past the shores of Arabia; and it would be pleasant to open the Vulgar Errors in Constantinople, or to get by heart a chapter of the Christian Morals between the paws of a Sphinx. In England, the most ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... of glass it crashed, neatly decapitated a rare, choice exotic, the pride of Mr. Alastair Kenneth MacIlwraith, head gardener, released from its hold a hanging basket, struck a large pot (perched high in a state of unstable equilibrium), and passed out on the other side with something accomplished, ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... leisurely the doctorated product of the universities—doctors of law, doctors of medicine, embryo doctors still in the making—each swinging a light cane. Their black hats and cutaway coats, in the fashion of a temperate clime, would have looked exotic were it not for the serene dignity with which they were worn. With them, merchants lazed along, making a deal as they walked. Clerks, under their masters' eyes, hurried ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... ever run wild, and when the experiment is purposely tried it invariably fails. Thus A. de Candolle informs us that several botanists of Paris, Geneva, and especially of Montpellier, have sown the seeds of many hundreds of species of exotic hardy plants, in what appeared to be the most favourable situations, but that in hardly a single case has any one of them become naturalised.[170] Still more, then, in plants than in animals the absence of a species does not prove that it has never reached the locality, but merely that it has ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... that makes them hard to recognize as old friends. Among them rise the banana, the palm, the aloe, the rubber tree, and the pampas-grass with its tall feathery plumes. Here and there one sees the guava, the Japanese persimmon, Japanese plum, or some similar exotic—but grapes and oranges are the principal product. Yet there are groves of English walnuts almost rivaling in size the great orange orchards, and orchards of prunes, nectarines, apricots, plums, pears, peaches, and apples that are little behind in ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... with regard to the city of Paris, it is to be remarked, that in that metropolis flourish a greater number of native and exotic swindlers than are to be found in any other European nursery. What young Englishman that visits it, but has not determined, in his heart, to have a little share of the gayeties that go on—just for once, just to see ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... poisonous years of the past. Beside all wishes for books and pictures and means for music and the thousands of small things which make for divine discontent, stands a spectre—not grim and abhorrent and forbidding, but unlovely and stern, indicating that the least excess of exotic pleasures would so strain our resources that independence would be threatened. If we were to buy anything beyond necessities, we might not be certain of gratifying wants, frugal as they are, without once more being compelled ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... ugly to look at, the plant is, all spines and thick, graceless, fleshy pads; as ugly as Ashley life looks to you. And this crabbed, ungainly plant-creature is faithfully, religiously tended all the year around by the wife of a farmer, because once a year, just once, it puts forth a wonderful exotic flower of extreme beauty. When the bud begins to show its color she sends out word to all her neighbors to be ready. And we are all ready. For days, in the back of our minds as we go about our dull, routine life, there is the thought that the cereus is near to bloom. Nelly and her ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... nothing disagreeable met the eye. The gleam and flashing of the steel swords under the yellow light, the gay colours of the caps, the quick movements of combatants and seconds were all pleasant to see against the background of stately exotic plants which made the hall look like ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... past'ral maiden fair Waters a lovely foreign plant with care, That scarcely can its tender bud display Borne from its native genial airs away, 5 So, on my tongue these accents new and rare Are flow'rs exotic, which Love waters there, While thus, o sweetly scornful! I essay Thy praise in verse to British ears unknown, And Thames exchange for Arno's fair domain; 10 So Love has will'd, and oftimes Love has shown That what He wills he never wills in vain. ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... Jewish poetry brings forth exotic romances, satires, verbose hymns, and humorous narrative poems. Such productions certainly do not justify the application of the epithet "theological" to Jewish literature. Solomon ben Sakbel composes a satiric ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... the possibilities were there and his aims and ambitions were fast nearing a practical triumph the end of which of course was to be, as in the case of nearly all American multi-millionaires of the newer and quicker order, bohemian or exotic and fleshly rather than cultural or aesthetic pleasure, although the latter were never really ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... man stood still for a moment admiring her exquisite features in their soft contour and delicate colouring. He pictured her to himself as a white wildflower in a grey wilderness. He could not see himself as an exotic growth in that rugged setting—a rather dandified young man in a well-cut suit, with an expression at once restless and bored on ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... like the older church of St. Gumpertus, is Gothic, with the two unequal towers which seem distinctive of Ansbach; at the St. Gumpertus end of the place where they both stand the dwellings are Gothic too, and might be in Hamburg; but at the St. Johannis end they seem to have felt the exotic spirit of the court, and are of a ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... divine operation; and all divine operation, conversely, obeys law. Whatever phenomena we consider as specially divine ought, then, to be most orderly and true to nature. Religion, as far as it is genuine, must, therefore, be natural. It should be no exotic, no foreign graft, as it is often regarded, but the normal outgrowth of our native instincts. Evolution does not banish revelation from our belief. Recognizing in man's spirit a spark of the divine energy, "individuated to the power of self-consciousness and recognition of God," ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... While grateful citizens with pompous show, Rear the triumphal arch, rich with the exploits Of thy illustrious house; while virgins pave Thy way with flowers, and, as the royal youth Passing they view, admire, and sigh in vain; While crowded theatres, too fondly proud 10 Of their exotic minstrels, and shrill pipes, The price of manhood, hail thee with a song, And airs soft-warbling; my hoarse-sounding horn Invites thee to the Chase, the sport of kings; Image of war, without its guilt. The Muse Aloft on wing shall soar, conduct with ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... life as a pilot abounded in dramatic adventures,—a few always standing out clearly from his many confused recollections of exotic ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... warmth and colour were a very part of her nature, was an exotic, a lost tropic bird, in these icy mountains. In a letter to her mother-in-law her heart cried out: "I cannot deny that living here is like living in a well of desolation. Sometimes I feel quite frantic to look out somewhere, and almost ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... the adventures of a monkey in Morayshire, whose wanderings sadly alarmed the inhabitants who saw him, all unused as they were to the sight of such an exotic stranger. ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... clasping Miss Tox to his heart, with an energy of action in remarkable opposition to his disconcerted face, while that poor lady trickled slowly down upon him the very last sprinklings of the little watering-pot, as if he were a delicate exotic (which indeed he was), and might be almost expected to blow while the gentle rain descended. Mrs Chick, at length recovering sufficient presence of mind to interpose, commanded him to drop Miss Tox upon the sofa and withdraw; and the exile promptly ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... up, had developed into a mature beauty that rivaled the exotic loveliness of the wild orchids of Io. And in debarking at the rocket port on a business trip to earth, because hurricanes had forced him to land far south of New York, Negu ...
— The Indulgence of Negu Mah • Robert Andrew Arthur
... Keats, sir - and Shelley were his favourite bards. I cannot remember if I tried him with Rossetti; but I know his taste to a hair, and if ever I did, he must have doted on that author. What took him was a richness in the speech; he loved the exotic, the unexpected word; the moving cadence of a phrase; a vague sense of emotion (about nothing) in the very letters of the alphabet: the romance of language. His honest head was very nearly empty, his intellect like a child's; and when he read his favourite authors, ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Earl's peculiar status in the world, Eunice, beloved as a wife, was far more to him than a wife. He looked upon himself as a sort of exotic in the non-resisting Negro race and considered himself a special object of scorn on the part of the white people of the South, who seemed to him to resent his near approach unto them in blood, and ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... last in the Toy Shop, took off her hat in front of the mirror and saw her red cheeks. She set the cyclamen safely in a warm corner. The four elephants with their fragrant freight of violets made an exotic and incongruous addition to the Christmas scene in ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... Lance?" she asked. Her eyes took in, in their quiet fashion, every detail of his appearance, even to the dainty exotic in his button-hole. ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... the house of our old friend Planchet. It was about eight o'clock in the evening, and the weather was exceedingly warm; there was only one window open, and that one belonging to a room on the entresol. A perfume of spices, mingled with another perfume less exotic, but more penetrating, namely, that which arose from the street, ascended to salute the nostrils of the musketeer. D'Artagnan, reclining upon an immense straight-backed chair, with his legs not stretched out, but ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... unquiet in the strangeness of it all, restless under its exotic beauty, conscious of the languor stealing over him—the premonition of a physical relaxation that he had never before known—that he ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... their Odyssey upon their brows at the beach of the genteel and respectable Sussex town, and visiting a perhaps slightly perturbed Auntie Isabel, and afterwards the fire-escape, I felt that here was the glimpse of the wild exotic adventure for which the hearts of all of us yearn. It left the cinema standing. It beat the magazine ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... unequally distributed over the mountain slopes of central and southern Europe and Asia Minor. The typical form, under the name of the Austrian Pine, is a familiar exotic of the Middle and Eastern States of America. As Mathieu states (Flore Forest., ed. 4, 597), this species is quite constant in cone and bark. It may be added that the anatomy of the leaf is also constant, while the dimensions of both leaf and cone present no unusual variations. ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... day in and day out, with the same vague but unceasing terror of life and the same forlorn sense of helplessness before currents of destiny that week by week seemed to grow too strong for him. He turned away from the soft, exotic loveliness of the sea and sky before him, with a little gesture of impatience. The movement was strangely like that of a feverish invalid turning from the ache ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... taste, there is always something a little exotic, almost artificial, in songs which, under an English aspect and dress, are yet so manifestly the product of other skies. They affect us like translations; the very fauna and flora are alien, remote; the ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... rises and recedes in cruel waves, "like little pointed rocks." It is a desolate picture, and the tale is one of our greatest short stories. In the other tales that go to make up the volume are wild, exotic glimpses of Latin-America. I doubt whether the color and spirit of that region have been better rendered than in Stephen Crane's ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... erratic Swede, who changed his course and deposited me, with genuine compassion, in a small town on the Pacific coast of one of the Central American republics, a few hundred miles south of the port to which he had engaged to convey me. But I was wearied of movement and exotic fancies; so I leaped contentedly upon the firm sands of the village of Mojada, telling myself I should be sure to find there the rest that I craved. After all, far better to linger there (I thought), lulled by the sedative ...
— Options • O. Henry
... such advantages of solitude; how every leaf and bud and flower is pored over, and admired, and loved! A whole conservatory, flushed with azaleas and brilliant with forests of camellias and every precious exotic that blooms, could not impart so much delight as I have known a single rose to give, unfolding in the bleak bitterness of a day in February, when this side of the planet seemed to have arrived at its culmination of hopelessness, ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... throne, and is but too apt to complain of non-appreciation of his muse on the part of the world. The fault rather is in their own too sensitive souls; and it is a fact that there is scarcely a name in the roll of poets, whose fame is not harmed by divulging his exotic ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... first forty-seven species, including the orange, apricot, pomegranate, &c. were introduced previously or during the reign of Henry VIII., and no fewer than 6756 in the reign of George III. For this proud accession to our exotic botany in the last century, the public are chiefly indebted to Sir Joseph Banks, and Messrs. Lee and Kennedy, of ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... irrepressible, uncalculating mood of undefined longing, utterly absent from his latest work. Perhaps one of the most remarkable instances is that of Rossetti. In the course of the House of Life, the dark curtain of the exotic mood, with its strange odours and glimpses, its fallen light, its fevered sense, is raised at intervals upon a sonnet of pure transparency and delicate sweetness, as though the weary, voluptuous soul, in its restless passage ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... spiritual joy; the "whole sunrise, not to be suppressed" is a limitless splendour, but the reflected beam cast up from the splash of her ewer and dancing on her poor ceiling is the same in kind; in the shrub-house up the hill-side are great exotic blooms, but has not Pippa her one martagon lily, over which she queens it? With God all service ranks the same, and she shall serve Him all this long day by gaiety ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... rot away piecemeal. There was nothing very inviting in the object, but Mr Nickleby was wrapt in a brown study, and sat contemplating it with far greater attention than, in a more conscious mood, he would have deigned to bestow upon the rarest exotic. At length, his eyes wandered to a little dirty window on the left, through which the face of the clerk was dimly visible; that worthy chancing to look up, he beckoned ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... my first taste of fame. It was a short-lived, limited sort of fame, but at that time it stretched throughout all Central America. I doubt if it is sufficiently robust to live in the cold latitudes of the North. It is just an exotic of the tropics. I am sure it will never weather Cape Hatteras. But although I won't amount to much in Dobbs Ferry, down here in Central America I am pretty well known, and during these last two months that ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... the multitudes of exotic products in the Hospital Earth stores that came from the great Garvian ships on their frequent visits. But this was more than a planetary trader loaded with a few items for a single planet. The space ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... the most symmetrical tunnels in solid wood reaches its perfection in the large Virginian Carpenter bee (Xylocopa Virginica, Fig. 19). This bee is as large as, and some allied exotic species are often considerably larger than, the Humble bee, but not clothed with such dense hairs. We have received from Mr. James Angus, of West Farms, N. Y., a piece of trellis from a grape vine, ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... of Thy tears and teachings, of Thy prayers and pleadings; the love which Thou hast so often inculcated is but a passing sentiment, that has never rooted itself in the soil of these wayward hearts. It is a plant too rare and exotic for the climate of earth. Take it back with Thee to Thine own home if Thou wilt, but seek not to achieve the impossible." It was heartrending that this exhibition of pride should take place just at this juncture. ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... left of the road to Effingham, is a large, grey, castellated building; its entrances might be fortifications. The park holds some superb beeches. But the grey coldness of Horsley Towers is a little exotic among these stretches of southern English parkland. Good Jacobean or Georgian red-brick much better suits oaks and beeches than the chateau-like towers ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... the side of the hill opposite to that by which they had come up, and which perversely turned southeastward for a while, it having been constructed on the theory that a park walk should describe the longest distance between any two points. Here he found a seat shaded by the horizontal limbs of an exotic tree and confronted by a thicket that shut out at this season almost all but little glimpses of the Tiffany house and the frowning Lenox. He asked Phillida to sit down, and he sat beside her. The momentary silence that followed was unendurable to Phillida's ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... that year when we set sail down the Adriatic, and I had never seen anything so heavenly beautiful as the coast and sea. We were five days on our journey; and now, when I have travelled the wide world over, have seen most of its show places, and have made myself familiar with exotic beauties of the landscape and seascape sort, I can recall nothing like that five days' dream of heaven. Perhaps the fact that I was going to look at war for the first time, and had some premonition of its horrors, made ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... said in his animated, exotic way, and all creased with smiles, "my cinema business is not business alone! No! It is Art! It is the art hunger that ever urges me onward, not the desire for commercial gain. For me, beauty is ever first; the box-office last! You understand, Mr. Shotwell? With me, ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... Handelian type of opera was the laughingstock of musical critics; they wondered how any audiences could have endured to sit through it, and why the fashionable society of London should have neglected native music for what Dr. Johnson defined as "an exotic and irrational entertainment." The modern reader's impression of an Italian opera of Handel's days is a story about some ancient or mediaeval hero whose very name is often to most people unknown; if he happens to be someone as ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... in the art of getting on in the new world, which is at the root of all immigration. Bridge for money and dining out with your friend's wife are within the reach of any ambitious immigrant. The Smart Set in Ottawa is an exotic colony all by itself. Montreal and Toronto and Winnipeg can merely copy it. Some of the farmers have their eye on the Set; no, not to abolish it. Women must have their share in the Government. Petticoats and politics are affinities. Farmers ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... for business or pleasure, among the moderns, dates from the era of the Crusades. The barriers of the East were once again thrown open by that general ferment in the European world. Piety, the passion of enterprise, the dawning instincts of commerce, a new thirst for exotic luxuries, all contributed to inspire a desire for exploring the seats of the most ancient civilization. To this desire and to its effects we owe some of the most graphic and entertaining of modern writings. If we were, through any misadventure, sent to jail, we would stipulate ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... ground, an imperial spondyle, bright-coloured, bristling with spines, a rare specimen in the European museums—(I estimated its value at not less than L1000); a common hammer-fish of the seas of New Holland, which is only procured with difficulty; exotic buccardia of Senegal; fragile white bivalve shells, which a breath might shatter like a soap-bubble; several varieties of the aspirgillum of Java, a kind of calcareous tube, edged with leafy folds, and much debated by amateurs; a whole series of trochi, some a greenish-yellow, found in the ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... grievances were feign'd, King James has been abused, and we trepann'd; Bugbear'd with popery and power despotic, Tyrannic government, and leagues exotic; The revolution's a fanatic plot, William's a tyrant, King James was not; A factious army and a poison'd nation, Unjustly forced ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... the light grating where the antelopes were inclosed. The birds, too, awakened his compassion. The ostriches and cassowaries looked mournful enough in the shade of their solitary exotic; but the parrots and smaller birds in a long cage, without even a green leaf or twig, were absolutely pitiful, and Madou thought of the Academy Moronval and of himself. The plumage of the birds was dull and torn; they told a tale of past ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... should be used in park planting; for there is no economy in planting trees or shrubs which are liable to be killed any year, partially, if not entirely, by frost or heat or drought, which annually ruin many exotic garden plants, nor is it wise to use in public parks plants which, unless carefully watched, are disfigured every year by insects. It costs a great deal of money to cut out dead and dying branches from trees and shrubs, to remove dead trees ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... an exotic in Ireland. It has been imported from England, but it will not grow. It suits neither soil, nor climate. If the English wanted order in Ireland, they should have left none of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... cabbage, and customs. My laoban could say in English, or pidgin English, chow, number one, no good, go ashore, sit down, by-and-by, to-morrow, match, lamp, alright, one piecee, and goddam. This last named exotic he had been led to consider as synonymous with "very good." It was not the first time I had known the words to be misapplied. I remember reading in the Sydney Bulletin, that a Chinese cook in Sydney when applying for a situation detailed to the mistress his undeniable qualifications, concluding ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... ramifications and interstices of so great a department, for a man or two who could help to count up or pack munitions, or, if that proposal were hopelessly wide of the mark, for the services of something even more recondite and exotic—an intelligent corpse-washer, for instance, or half a dozen astrologers. I felt I could distinguish myself, at a national crisis like this, in either capacity. Anyhow, it was only one more afternoon wasted—one ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... with so unnatural an accomplice, a girl might amuse herself who really did experience that savage antipathy towards her father's memory. Perhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself, as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... from this is the view that anthropology gives us. The foreign plant, it is true, will gradually change, but a native plant will ultimately take its place by the law of the "survival of the fittest." The exotic must die out, for it was but a hothouse plant, reared in universities ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... because he wore a top hat with gold lace about it and a green coat and trousers that he had found upon a skeleton in the basement of the Urban and District Bank. The women, even Jessica, came in jackets and immense hats extravagantly trimmed with artificial flowers and exotic birds' feather's—of which there were abundant supplies in the shops to the north—and the children (there were not many children, because a large proportion of the babies born in Bun Hill died in a few days' time of inexplicable maladies) had similar clothes ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... shattered, were, for once, right. They gauged correctly from which direction the wind was blowing. They probably heard, faintly piping in the distance, the pentatonic scales of Moussorgsky and Debussy, the scales of Scriabine and Strawinsky and Ornstein, the barbarous, exotic and African scales of the future, the one hundred and thirteen scales of which Busoni speaks. And to-day there are no longer musical rules, forbidden harmonies, dissonances. Siegfried has broken them along with Wotan's spear. East and West are near to merging once ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... in this country as a stove exotic for about two hundred and fifty years. In one of the histories of Hull, ginger is supposed to have grown in this street, where, to a recent period, the stables of the George Inn, and those of a person named Foster opposite, occupied the principal ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... of lawn in front of the house was varied by three circular garden beds, one of red tulips, a second of yellow tulips, and the third of some white, waxen-looking blossoms that the visitors did not know and presumed to be exotic. A heavy, hairy and rather sullen-looking gardener was hanging up a heavy coil of garden hose. The corners of the expiring sunset which seemed to cling about the corners of the house gave glimpses here and there of the colours of remoter flowerbeds; and in a treeless space on one side of ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... shooting excursions. Bread stuffs, he would have to admit, were scarce in that cornless land: but hard exercise and fresh air sharpen the appetite and strengthen the digestion; and a keen woodsman will not heed bannocks when he can get beef, varied by such an exotic viand as kangaroo venison, and by such delicate and fantastical volatiles as harlequin pigeons and rose-breasted cockatoos. Nay, so easy is it to fight battles in one's back parlour, and to endure hardships with one's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... about you, Daddy Mundson." Her rich contralto voice matched her exotic beauty. "Since you and Adam had that quarrel the day you left, I did not see him until this morning, when ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... rhetoric, and spoke of suffering, toiling, sorrowing, onward-looking humanity, its impassioned relations, its great wistful heart. Hugh again, could not understand him; he thought that his friend had formed some exotic and fanciful conception, arrived at by subtracting from humanity all that was not pathetic and solemn and dignified, and then fusing the residue into a sort of corporeal entity. He did not see any truth ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to recognise the influence of French precept and of French example. Great masters of our language, in their most dignified compositions, affected to use French words, when English words, quite as expressive and sonorous, were at hand: [173] and from France was imported the tragedy in rhyme, an exotic which, in our soil, drooped, and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Invalides, among the exotic and colonial encampments, a building in a more severe style overawes the picturesque bazaar; all these fragments of the globe have come to gather round the Palace of War, and in turn our guests mount guard submissively ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... mountains roam, Easy and free as if they were at home; 50 Nymphs, naiads, nereids, dryads, satyrs, fauns, Sport in our floods, and trip it o'er our lawns; Flowers which once flourish'd fair in Greece and Rome, More fair revive in England's meads to bloom; Skies without cloud, exotic suns adorn, And roses blush, but blush without a thorn; Landscapes, unknown to dowdy Nature, rise, And new creations strike our wondering eyes. For bards like these, who neither sing nor say, Grave without thought, and without feeling gay, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... wherefrom humanity does not always issue without serious blotches, he yet is free from pessimism. He has no nervous disorder, no "brain fag," he is no pagan, not even a nonbeliever, and has happily preserved his wholesomeness of thought; he is averse to exotic ideas, extravagant depiction, and inflammatory language. His novels and tales contain the essential qualities which attract and retain the reader. Some of his works in chronological order, omitting two or three novels, written when ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... gray-eyed man, straight nosed, firm lipped, correctly shaved down to the triangular trim of his mustache, his dark hair evenly parted—a normal-seeming, kindly individual who wore his linen and his features with a certain politely exotic air—the air of ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... enough amusement to last him till evening. He also found heaps of amusement in looking at the monkeys, and could conceive no greater luxury for a rich man than to own these animals as one owns cats and dogs. This kind of taste for the exotic he had in his blood, as people have a taste for the chase, or for medicine, or for the priesthood. He could not help returning to the quay every time the gates of the barracks opened, drawn toward it ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... thereby be able to confine myself solely to the group you are studying and to other matters touched upon in your letter. I had heard from Mr. Stevens some time ago that you had begun collecting exotic Geodephaga, but were confining yourself to one or two illustrations of each genus. I was sure, however, that you would soon find this unsatisfactory. Nature must be studied in detail, and it is the wonderful ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... come from the atelier of Herbault, or the less recherce magasin de modes of some more humble modiste. How rapidly can they see whether the Cashmere shawl of some passing dame owes its rich but sober tints to an Indian loom, or to the fabric of M. Ternaux, who so skilfully imitates the exotic luxury; and what a difference does the circumstance make in their estimation of the wearer! The beauty of a woman, however great it may be, excites less envy in the minds of her own sex in France, than does the possession of ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... of themselves; at least, with only the maternal help. For like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower; and so, being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies all over the world; every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as the ardor of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends her solemn pauses; in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated Turk; then a love of ease and virtue supplants the love for maidens; our Ottoman enters ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... additionally curious was that the bush on which the flowers grew seemed to be the only rose-bush in the region. We looked about us in vain to find another. How had that single rose-bush come to be, an uncompanioned exotic, in the rough society of pines and oaks and hickories, on a rocky hill-top swept by the North wind, and how had those frail, scented petals found strength and courage thus to bloom alone in the doorway of Winter? And, why, out of all the roses of the world, had these two been chosen, ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... sank. Had I unwittingly picked some of his special treasures, some rare exotic which he ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... of the Greeks that you should have elected to write in their language, for it is easy to guess what choice work you could turn out in your mother-tongue, when you have produced such splendid results with an exotic language which has been transplanted into ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... reined in his horse in front of the great portico, and, dismounting, fastened his bridle to the bough of a magnificent exotic, one of a hundred which were scattered over ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... might not have been fashioned for the 'Faery Queen.' Lastly, the so-called heroic couplet is native to England; at any rate, it is in no way related to Italian metre. Therefore the only true Italian exotic adopted without modification into ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Wagner has done much to stimulate a serious attitude toward the lyric drama, but this is seldom found outside of the audiences in attendance on German representations. The devotees of the Latin exotic, whether it blend French or Italian (or both, as is the rule in New York and London) with its melodic perfume, enjoy the music and ignore the words with the same nonchalance that Addison made merry over. Addison proves to have been a poor prophet. The great-grandchildren of his contemporaries ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... winter. Her real name is Glycera, or Lukeria, as the common folk say it. But it is already an ancient usage of the houses of ill-fame to replace the uncouth names of the Matrenas, Agathas, Cyclitinias with sonorous, preferably exotic names. Tamara had at one time been a nun, or, perhaps, merely a novice in a convent, and to this day there have been preserved on her face timidity and a pale puffiness—a modest and sly expression, which is peculiar to young nuns. She holds herself aloof in the house, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... precepts of the higher life. Next to Miss Lee, Maggie was one of the most popular girls in the college. Annabel Lee had the kindest of hearts, as well as the most fascinating of ways. She was an extraordinary girl; there was a great deal of the exotic about her; in many ways she was old for her years. No one ever thought or spoke of her as a prig, but all her influence was brought to bear in the right direction. The girl who could do or think meanly avoided the expression of ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... upon which Mara danced in, like a naked elf floating in the air. While flying in wide circles about the flower, as yet unseen, she resembled a fabulous, exotic butterfly in her transparent veil shot with gold. Willy Snyders called her a naiad, Ritter a moth. Franck said nothing, merely keeping his eyes ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... before him in a strictly correct attitude, for the captain was not to be trifled with. But Madelung put him at his ease with a nod, and said, glancing sharply at him, "So you are the other exotic prodigy who is being ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... the beginning of the great development of machinery, and in these Georgian house fronts, the productions of a mechanical age, we see the deterioration of popular architecture. Every line is rigid and without human feeling: the style, where any exists, is exotic, not national or local; classical, not vernacular. It is a learned importation, not a popular growth. The mason has dwindled into an unreasoning tool in the hands of the architect; hence the lack of personality, the absence of charm; and only in rare instances has the architect ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... affairs of a wronged heroine with enthusiastic interest; but what was to be done with those of a possibly guilty one? She was so ready for the unexpected that as she stood at a back window, looking into the garden, it was almost a surprise not to find the night-blooming cereus really lifting its exotic head among the stout spring shoots of the peonies. With the vague feeling that the Park might prove more fruitful ground for the phenomenon, she moved to a front window, where she was not long unrewarded. If it was not the night-blooming cereus that ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... delineation of animals with unwearied industry: he had not the advantages of academical studies, which education in the metropolis might have afforded him, but he drew from life, taking sketches of all the striking specimens that came under his notice, and visiting whatever menageries of exotic animals were brought to Newcastle.[2] Thus he studied assiduously from nature, and to this course may be attributed the excellence of the cuts in the History of Quadrupeds. Many of the vignettes also, with which this publication was adorned, had uncommon merit as original sketches; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... of that exact degree of frigidity or bombast which may appear to his censors to be correct or sublime. Compositions thus constructed will always be worthless. The few excellences which they may contain will have an exotic aspect and flavour. In general, prize sheep are good for nothing but to make tallow candles, and prize poems are good for ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... served to emphasise the unusual characteristics of the child Magda. Her skin was wonderful, of a smooth, creamy-white texture which gave to the sharply angled face something of the pale, exotic perfection of a stephanotis bloom. Her eyes were long, the colour of black pansies—black with a suggestion of purple in their depths. They slanted upwards a little at the outer corners, and this ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... at table in accordance with old Italian custom, the rich adopted the oriental usage of reclining on couches at their meals. At the same time was introduced the affected and costly cookery of the East—exotic fishes, brains of peacocks, ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... stated that seventy-eight of the species are new or undescribed, the number will appear extraordinarily great, but when the comparatively neglected state of exotic Zoophytology is considered the wonder will be much diminished, and still further, as it may safely be assumed, that many of the species here given as new have been previously noticed, though so insufficiently ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... exactly suited this curious and learned age of ours. The species of verse which, originally Italian or French, have now so abundantly and so admirably been practised in England that we can no longer think of them as exotic, having found so many exponents in the Victorian period that they are pre-eminently characteristic of it. "Scorn not the Sonnet," said Wordsworth to his contemporaries; but the lesson has not been needed ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... be deemed to be wholly untenable. The structure of this pouch—the existence of which in some examples has been well established—is, however, variable; and though there is reason to believe that in one form or another it is more or less common to several exotic species of the family Otididae, it would seem to be as inconstant in its occurrence as in its capacity. As might be expected, this remarkable feature has attracted a good deal of attention (Journ. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... truth be called: Clear soup, a smallish slice of rare roast beef cut shaving thin, gluten bread sparsely buttered, a cloud of watercress no larger than a man's hand, another raw apple and a bit of domestic cheese—nothing rich, nothing exotic, no melting French fromages, no ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... unfamiliar, exotic, outlandish; novel, odd, unusual, queer, unique, nondescript, exceptional, singular, peculiar, rare, erratic, unique, bizarre, eccentric, inexplicable; unaccustomed, unfamiliar; reserved, distant, unfriendly; unknown. Antonyms: ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... for Johnny Simms. It was mostly elephant-guns and ammunition for them. Johnny, as the heir to innumerable millions back on earth, had had a happy life, but hardly one to give him a practical view of things. To him, star-travel meant landing on such exotic planets as the fictioneers had been writing about for a hundred years or so. He really looked upon the venture into space as a combined big-game expedition and escape from Lunar City. And he did look forward, too, to freedom from his family's ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... excited—so young—so brilliant—so beautiful. Mr. Grey, too, a man of handsome fortune, and Pauline an only daughter. There's a sort of charm in that, too, to young men's imaginations. It seems to make a girl more like a rare exotic, something of which there are few of the kind. And Pauline was a belle of the most decided stamp; and Mr. and Mrs. Grey's heads were more turned than was hers ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various |
