"Exotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... itself to the chest and stomach of children, for whom it is well adapted; and it is an aliment that cannot be too generally used, as much on account of its wholesomeness as its cheapness, and the ease with which it is kept, which are equal, if not superior, to all the much-vaunted exotic feculae; as, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... these colonies; the divisions among them; the separate pursuits, prejudices, languages; they seem to have nothing in common; no aggregation of interests; it is existence without nationality; sectionalism without emulation; a mere exotic life with not a fibre rooted firmly in the soil. The colonists are English, Irish, Scotch, French, for generation after generation. Why is this, O Picton? Why is it that the captain's lady has high cheek-bones, and speaks the ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... of our vices Raise human pine-apples and spices. Of all the children of John Bull 120 With empty heads and bellies full, Who ramble East, West, North and South, With leaky purse and open mouth, In search of varieties exotic The usefullest and most patriotic, 125 And merriest, too, believe me, Sirs! Are ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... some fair exotic brought unto a foreign strand, She lost her bloom and pined to see once more her native land, And only when from earthly scenes death summoned her to part A blissful smile played round her lips, and ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... bearing to those about you. The critical attitude to society and individuals is a bad one for a successful practitioner of medicine to fall into. It is more than that—it is illiberal; it comes from a continued residence in a highly exotic society, in a narrow ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... hardly knowing what he meant. He was leaning over the small table and looking steadfastly at her. She noticed that the wine and food had made his skin greasy. It suddenly occurred to her that Mark Bower resembled certain exotic plants which must be viewed from a distance if they would gratify the critical senses. The gloss of a careful toilet was gone. He was altogether cruder, coarser, more animal, since he had eaten, though ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... love of nature, which, through all his busy life, had never left him. It was not until the year 1845 that he took an active interest in horticultural pursuits. Then he began to build new melon-houses, pineries, and vineries, of great extent; and he now seemed as eager to excel all other growers of exotic plants in his neighbourhood, as he had been to surpass the villagers of Killingworth in the production of gigantic cabbages and cauliflowers some thirty years before. He had a pine-house built 68 feet in length and a pinery 140 feet. Workmen were constantly employed ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... and especially in the central and everywhere radiating literature of France, there were sometimes local and almost parochial touches—sometimes unimportant heroes, not seldom savage heroines, frequently quaint bits of exotic supernaturalism. But all this was subdued to a kind of common literary handling, a "dis-realising" process which made them universally acceptable. The personal element, too, was conspicuously absent—the generic character is always uppermost. Charlemagne ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... at the Court was enthusiastic. Men and women read it eagerly and longed for the next section as our grandfathers longed for the next section of Pickwick. They really liked it, really loved the intricacy and luxuriousness of it, the heavy exotic language, the thickly painted descriptions, the languorous melody of the verse. Mainly, perhaps, that was so because they were all either in wish or in deed poets themselves. Spenser has always been "the poets' poet." Milton loved him; so did Dryden, who said that Milton confessed to ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... is the true Huysmans, the Huysmans of A Rebours, and it is just such surroundings that seem to bring out his peculiar quality. With this contempt for humanity, this hatred of mediocrity, this passion for a somewhat exotic kind of modernity, an artist who is so exclusively an artist was sure, one day or another, to produce a work which, being produced to please himself, and being entirely typical of himself, would be, in a way, the quintessence ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... of a great conservatory. A dozen tropical growths mingled their odors into an indefinable whole; and the effect was akin to that of a subtle exotic drug, lulling the senses, filling the whole being with a languor, a relaxation, a pleasant enervation which it seemed well not to throw off. Outside on the prairie the sun burned harshly; within, the scented shadows shielded away the sun and wrapped round one a drugged warmth ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... murderer of Sydney. To such prostration of soul, such blindness of intellect, even the noblest people will be subjected, when liberty, which should be the growth of ages, spreading its roots through the strata of a thousand customs, is raised, the exotic of an hour, and (like the Tree and Dryad of ancient fable) flourishes and withers with the single ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... ate the remaining half of the omelette, making five-sixths in all. He glanced at her surreptitiously, in her fine dress, on which was not a single splash or stain. He might have known that so extraordinary and exotic a female person would not concoct anything so trite as a Yorkshire ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... significance has the tropical radiance of the lotus flower, the sacred symbol of Buddhism, for the Mongolian lama in the cold and arid borders of Gobi or the wind-swept highlands of sterile Tibet? And yet these exotic ideas live on, even if they no longer bloom in the uncongenial soil. But to explain them in terms of their present environment would ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... frizzled, which was always braided in a manner that suggested some Southern or Eastern, some remotely foreign, woman. She had a large collection of ear-rings, and wore them in alternation; and they seemed to give a point to her Oriental or exotic aspect. A compliment had once been paid her, which, being repeated to her, gave her greater pleasure than anything she had ever heard. "A pretty woman?" some one had said. "Why, her features are very bad." "I don't know about her features," a very discerning ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... first home of Italian opera, strictly speaking. It had long housed opera in the vernacular, and remained to serve as the fortress of the English forces when the first battles were fought between the champions of the foreign exotic and the entertainment which had been so long established as to call itself native. Its career came to an end in 1848, when, like its predecessor and successor, it went up in ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... things; the great Symbolic Eye glanced wickedly out from the white beauty of her heaving breast; and as he surveyed her, thus resplendent in all the startling seductiveness of her dangerous charms, her loveliness entranced and intoxicated him like the faint perfume of some rare and powerful exotic, ... his senses seemed to sink drowningly in the whelming influence of her soft and dazzling grace; and though he still resented, he could not resist her mesmeric power. No wonder, he thought, that Sah-luma's eyes darkened with passions as they dwelt on her! ... and no wonder that he, like ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... boarding-houses, standing in the doorways, and silently regarding the animated scenes without. His beauty, dress, and manner struck me as so out of place in such a street, that I could not possibly divine what had transplanted this delicate exotic from the conservatories of some Regent-street to the ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... boring 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, made of pine wood, containing the cells and young in various ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... they're a ways lots better when there ain't; but sometimes, of course, you jest have to use it. There! an' now I've read 'em both to you—an' how much do you s'pose I can get for 'em—the two of 'em, either singly or doubly?" Susan was still breathless, still shining-eyed—a strange, exotic Susan, that Daniel Burton had never seen before. "I've heard that writers—some writers—get lots of money, Mr. Burton, an' I can write more—lots more. Why, when I get to goin' they jest come autocratically—poems ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... frontiers, making it futile to pursue the consecutive order of events in the seclusion of a separate nationality.[19] They compel us to share the existence of societies wider than our own, to be familiar with distant and exotic types, to hold our march upon the loftier summits, along the central range, to live in the company of heroes, and saints, and men of genius, that no single country could produce. We cannot afford wantonly to lose sight of great men and memorable lives, and are bound to ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... observe a larger proportion of species and genera which, although they may agree with well-known Asiatic or other foreign types, are at present wanting in Italy. If we then examine the Miocene formations of the same country, exotic forms become more abundant, especially the palms, whether they belong to the European or American fan-palms, Chamaerops and Sabal, or to the more tropical family of the date-palms or Phoenicites, which last are conspicuous in the Lower Miocene beds of Central Europe. ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... color of her long, beautiful, expressionless face. Amid the scattered property and the crowd on the open space, she, in her rich satin cloak with a bright lilac shawl on her head, suggested a delicate exotic plant thrown out onto the snow. She was sitting on some bundles a little behind the old woman, and looked from under her long lashes with motionless, large, almond-shaped eyes at the ground before her. Evidently she was aware of her beauty and fearful because ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... from the works of Miss Charlotte Yonge or some similar novelist of a later date. But that was found to be too disturbing to their sense of the ludicrous. For she read very stiltedly, with a strange exotic accent for the love passages or the death scenes. As Lady Victoria Freebooter said, she would have been priceless at a music-hall matinee which was raising funds for war charities, if only she could have been induced to read ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... where Mary sat, the Mediterranean sighed upon its ancient rocks. A faint breath of the mysteriously perfumed air stirred the exotic palms over her head and made their fronds rub against each other gratingly, as if some secret signal were being carried on from one to another. Turning to right, to left, or to look behind her, dimly seen mountains soared toward a sky that deepened from asphodel ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Spanish pueblo, reared as a child of the mines, and fed on all the exhilarants of the gold-spangled days of the Argonauts, San Francisco is like a dashing Western beauty with the eyes of an exotic ancestry. ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... varieties of race, all peculiarities of individual temperament, all depths of degradation and distances of alienation, are capable of receiving the word, which, like corn, can grow in every latitude, and, though it be an exotic everywhere, can anywhere be naturalised; the firm promises of unchanging faithfulness, the universal aspect of Christ's work, the prevalence of His continual intercession, the indwelling of His abiding Spirit, and, not least, the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... plea. Her questions—or at least her own answers to them—kindled, on Mrs. Stringham's part, a backward train: she hadn't known till tonight how much she remembered, or how fine it might be to see what had become of large, high-coloured Maud, florid, exotic and alien—which had been just the spell—even to the perceptions of youth. There was the danger—she frankly touched it—that such a temperament mightn't have matured, with the years, all in the sense of fineness; it was the sort of danger ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... the other hand, shows a complete mastery of form. He was a close student of Horace; he tried successfully the most exacting of exotic verse-forms, and enjoyed the distinction of having written the only English example of the difficult Chant-Royal. Graceful vers de societe and bits of witty epigram flowed from him without effort. But it was not to this often dangerous facility that Bunner owed his poetic ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... noble as it was, that alone drew from me a cry of admiration when I stooped over his coffin. From the feet to the breast, utterly hiding the grave clothes, and tastefully grouped about his last pillow, were the most beautiful exotic flowers I ever beheld. Flowers lately introduced that I had never seen, flowers that I knew to be rare, almost priceless—flowers of gorgeous colours and delicate hothouse ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... remarked, in all their primitive purity, the beautiful Greek ones of Garamon, engraved by order of Francis I, and which served for the editions of the Stephen, the Byzantine, &c, the oriental characters of the Polyglot of Vitraeus, and the collection of exotic characters from the printing-office of the Propaganda. The government business alone constantly employs one hundred presses. A much greater number can be set to work, ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... though it had been introduced into Europe by the Spaniards before this. According to Gerard, the old English botanist, it was, on its first introduction from America, only cultivated in the gardens of the nobility and gentry as a curious exotic; and in 1606 it occurs among the vegetables considered necessary for a nobleman's household.[241] It is curious to find Gerard comparing it to what he calls the 'common potato', in reality the sweet potato brought to England by Drake and Hawkins earlier in the century. In James I's reign the ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... to the stranger's admiration of the views, the exquisite framings of the summer sea and sky made by tree, rock, and rising ground, and the walks so well laid out on the little headland, now on smooth turf, now bordering slopes wild with fern and mountain ash, now amid luxuriant exotic shrubs that attested the mildness ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... kicked, if she were of a kickable substance, than either honored or humored. To speak moderately, I truly confess, it is beyond the ken of my understanding to conceive how those women should have any true grace or valuable virtue, that have so little wit as to disfigure themselves with such exotic garbs, as not only dismantles their native, lovely lustre, but transclouts them into gaunt bar-geese, ill-shapen, shotten shell-fish, Egyptian hieroglyphics, or at the best into French flirts of the pastry, which a proper English woman should scorn with her heels. It is no marvel they wear trails ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... immense. Under the ceilings of the former even the great canopied bed seemed of only average size. On the floor an exotic rug of crimson velvet was soft as fleece on his bare feet. His bathroom, in contrast to the rather portentous character of his bedroom, was gay, bright, extremely habitable and even faintly facetious. Framed around the walls were photographs of four celebrated thespian beauties of the day: ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the death of John May. A John May's death was a few years since in the papers. We think the tale one of the quietest, prettiest things we have seen. You have been temperate in the use of localities, which generally spoil poems laid in exotic regions. You mostly cannot stir out (in such things) for humming-birds and fire-flies. A tree is a Magnolia, &c.—Can I but like the truly Catholic spirit? "Blame as thou mayest the Papist's erring ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... driftwood. The literature he knows is the fossil literature taught in colleges—worse, in high schools. It must be dead before he is aware of it. And in particular he appears ignorant of what is going forward in other lands. An exotic idea, to penetrate his consciousness, must first become stale, and even then he is apt to purge it of all its remaining validity and ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... became, from much pondering on it, almost unreal, and, with the blurring of the impression it had caused, there rose a doubt as to the accuracy of his vision of Mrs. Branscome's distress, which he had conjured out of it. His chivalry, in a word, had grown too quickly to take firm root. It was an exotic planted in soil not yet fully prepared. David began to think himself a fool, and at last, as the train neared Dover, a question which had been vaguely throbbing in his brain suddenly took shape. Why had she not sent for him? True, the locket was lost, but she might have written. The formulation ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... 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 ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... been ready to imitate the negligent garb, which is yet observable amongst the young men of our time, to wear my cloak on one shoulder, my cap on one side, a stocking in disorder, which seems to express a kind of haughty disdain of these exotic ornaments, and a contempt of the artificial; but I find this negligence of much better use in the form of speaking. All affectation, particularly in the French gaiety and freedom, is ungraceful in a courtier, and in a monarchy ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... On examining the exotic forms of orchids, which are so conspicuous in our conservatories, still more striking facts presented themselves. In the great group of the Vandeae, relative position of parts, friction, viscidity, elastic and hygrometric movements were ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... trial have yet to come. The colonist of our time is an exotic under glass,—full, as yet, of sap and stamina drawn from his native America, but nursed with care and exhibited as the efflorescence of modern philanthropy. Let us hope that this wholesome guardianship will not be too soon or suddenly ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... brilliant salon, the very reverse of antique. Here all was light and color. Here were hangings of flowered chintz; fantastic divans; lounge-chairs of every conceivable shape and hue; great Indian jars; richly framed drawings; stands of exotic plants; Chinese cages, filled with valuable birds from distant climes; folios of engravings; and, above all, a large cabinet in marqueterie, crowded with bronzes, Chinese carvings, pastille burners, ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... 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 to fight with the beasts at some Australian ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... cannot graduate as finely as structures. I have stated in my volume that it is hardly possible to know which, i.e. whether instinct or structure, change first by insensible steps. Probably sometimes instinct, sometimes structure. When a British insect feeds on an exotic plant, instinct has changed by very small steps, and their structures might change so as to fully profit by the new food. Or structure might change first, as the direction of tusks in one variety of Indian elephants, which ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... splinter, containing in it the spirit of the wounded man, is roused to active excitement by the contact of the ointment, whence there results to it a full commission or power to cure its cousin-german the blood in the patient's body. This it does by sucking out the dolorous and exotic impression from the wounded part. But to do this it has to implore the aid of the bull's fat, and other portions of the unguent. The reason why bull's fat is so powerful is that the bull at the time of slaughter is full of secret reluctancy and ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... translation of the word seems to be credit. Finally, we may allude to the invective against honor which Tasso puts into the mouths of his shepherds in Aminta[2] Though at this period the influence of France and Spain had communicated to aristocratic society in Italy an exotic sense of honor, yet a court poet dared to condemn it as unworthy of the Bell' eta dell' oro, because it interfered with pleasure and introduced disagreeable duties into life. Such a tirade would not have been endured in the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... dressing their windows,—all possessing talent far above their genius,—virtuosos to their backbone, knowing of secret passages to all that seduces, lures, constrains or overthrows; born enemies of logic and of straight lines, thirsting after the exotic, the strange and the monstrous, and all opiates for the senses and the understanding. On the whole, a daring dare-devil, magnificently violent, soaring and high-springing crew of artists, who first had to teach their own century—it is ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... the spirit of the dance which was fast losing its stiff and formal character. Punch and music had broken down barriers. The hall was noisy with the ringing, high pitched laughter of excitement. It was warm and filled with an exotic, stimulating odour, compounded of many perfumes and of perspiration. Every one danced. Young folk danced as though inspired, swaying their bodies in time to the tune. The old and the fat danced with pathetic joyful earnestness, going round and round the hall with red and perspiring ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... a murmur of delight, and the impertinent girl with laurel leaves in her dark hair suddenly looked exotic and full of languors. And Charmian thought of the yacht. Had Mrs. Shiffney received Claude Heath's answer yet? He was to make up his mind on Sunday. Rades was singing. His accompaniment was almost terribly rhythmical, with a suggestion of the little drums that the black ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... entirely in the taste of the day. But through it all he is conspicuously himself, and the dedication to beauty and the extraordinary intellectual exultation of such a book as Contarini Fleming are borrowed from no exotic source. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... holy life from early childhood—guided him where men without such power feel all astray. But yet, there is something about the book which may be quite right and true, but does not to me quite savour of the healthy sound theology of the Church of England; the fragrance is rather that of an exotic plant; here and there I mean—though I feel angry with myself for daring to think this, and to say it to you, who ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by manly exercises, in addition to his other qualifications, will excel him who is not favoured with such bodily endowments; but in a hot climate efficiency mainly depends on husbanding the resources. He must never forget that, in the tropics, he is an exotic plant. ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... course, primarily wanted European foods rather than exotic Indian crops. The foods also had to be comparatively nonperishable and easily transported. Grains, particularly wheat, and processed meat (hams, salt pork, and such) especially met European preferences. Commercial production of these ...
— Agricultural Implements and Machines in the Collection of the National Museum of History and Technology • John T. Schlebecker
... from the same Riviera window, 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 ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... of unknown things that have fallen from—somewhere. But something not to be overlooked is that if living things have landed alive upon this earth—in spite of all we think we know of the accelerative velocity of falling bodies—and have propagated—why the exotic becomes the indigenous, or from the strangest of places we'd expect the familiar. Or if hosts of living frogs have come here—from somewhere else—every living thing upon this earth may, ancestrally, ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... de Jussieu had previously supposed that the immense deposits of coal were due to sudden cataclysms or to one of the great revolutions of the earth during which the seas of the East or West Indies, having been driven as far as into Europe, had deposited on its soil all these exotic plants to be found there, after having torn them ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... simple discovery interpreted her. When you saw her surrounded by them, working and quarreling with them, talking that horrible polyglot of French, Italian and English, which she slipped into so easily, you realized how exotic the environment of the Dearborn Avenue house must have been to her and how strong a thing her passion for John Wollaston, to enable her to endure five years of it,—of finikin social observances,—of Aunt Lucile's ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... cultivated 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 portion of the short lane called "Land of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... has fled from the boards of our lyric theatres. It has been said, indeed, that the ballet d'action has never been really naturalised in this country; that although it has thrived for a while, it was but an exotic, needing careful watching and tending. Still it was for many years a most prosperous entertainment, especially at our Italian opera-house; and it is to be noted that its decline has not been confined to this country. ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... her image in the glass and paused, eyeing it. So far her appearance had had no value for her save as a stage asset. Now she looked at herself with a new, critical interest. Behind the footlights she was another person, blossomed into an exotic brilliance, took on fire and beauty with the music and excitement. Might not a man seeing her there be disappointed when he met her as she really was? She studied her face intently, viewing it at different angles, judging it by the standards of her world. By these she ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... attended by unmixed benefit to all concerned, does it follow that corresponding success would accompany the mission of fifty military officers to the cotton districts of India for the purpose of inducing the Ryots to substitute exotic for ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... and 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 feet on the fender, that this same imaginary and hastily-judging ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... science of mind advances with the progress of society like all other sciences. The poetry of the last forty years already shows symptoms of life in exact proportion as it is imbued with this science. There is least of it in the exotic legends of Southey, and the feudal romances of Scott. More of it, though in different ways, in Byron and Campbell. In Shelley there would have been more still, had he not devoted himself to unsound and mystical theories. Most of all in Coleridge and Wordsworth. They are all going or gone; but ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... in this setting, like an exotic plant in an old-fashioned garden, and his eccentricities aroused considerable amusement among the settlers, although he became in time a favorite with them, serving as a sort of counter-irritant to ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... from which a visitor may form the impression that there are no conventional signs. It may likewise occur that the self-expressive sign substituted will be met with by a visitor in several localities, different Indians, in their ingenuity, taking the best and the same means of reaching the exotic intelligence. ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... has above all else the gift of suggesting atmosphere and colour (ought I not in mere gratitude to bring myself to say "color"?); his picture of Linda's amazing mother and the rest of the luxurious brainless company of her hotel existence has the exotic brilliance of the orchid-house, at once dazzling and repulsive. Later, in the course of her married life, inspiring and inspired by the sculptor Pleydon (in whose fate the curious may perhaps trace some echo of recent controversy), the story of Linda becomes inevitably less vivid, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... 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, ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... is relatively unusual, but most of the Neuroptera have larvae of this kind, active, armoured creatures with long legs, though devoid of the tail-processes often associated with similar larvae among the Coleoptera. Such are the 'Ant-lions,' larvae of the exotic lacewing flies, which hunt small insects, digging a sandy pit for their unwary steps in the case of the best-known members of the group, some of which are found as far north as Paris. In our own islands the 'Aphis-lions,' larvae of Hemerobius and Chrysopa, prowl on plants infested with ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... on quiet back streets. He did not even ask her where she wanted to go. The night was soft and dark with a sky that hung low like black velvet in which was sprinkled a soft studding of stars. The air wrapped about them, lazy and warm; it was not like night air at all. There was a peculiar exotic feel to it which kept the senses in a state of semi-coma yet alive to the slightest change. Joe half closed his eyes and leaned back against the cushion like an old cat getting her back scratched. The soft perfume of the girl's hair, the delicious mystery of the impenetrable ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... fact, the hazel blight is very easily managed. Not knowing this at first, I allowed almost all of my exotic hazels to become destroyed, and a number of nurserymen told me of having given up the problem as hopeless. Recently I have learned of the ease with which the disease may be controlled, and now feel very comfortable ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... the "Queen" with sincere delight, her eyes drinking in hungrily the beauty of the exotic blossoms—for Robin and Beryl had helped themselves to the best the Manor had. "And fruit—ah, Brina's heart will rejoice. What is this?" Her slender, shapely hands fussed over the wrappings of the book, while ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... vain and silly thing to say, but I believe my book must be read twice carefully to be fully understood. You will perhaps think it by no means worth the labour.") Thank you for telling me about the Lantana (97/3. An exotic species of Lantana (Verbenaceae) grows vigorously in Ceylon, and is described as frequently making its appearance after the firing of the low-country forests (see H.H.W. Pearson, "The Botany of the Ceylon Patanas," "Journal Linn. Soc." Volume XXXIV., page 317, 1899). No doubt Thwaites' letter to ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... although its Chinese original has not survived for purposes of comparison, was undoubtedly copied from the work of the Tang legislators, the only modification being in degrees of punishment; but the code, though it, too, was partially exotic in character, evidently underwent sweeping alterations so as to bring it into conformity with Japanese customs and traditions. Each of the revisions recorded above must be assumed to ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... mercantile marine one-fifth of the amount that has been expended upon the Navy, our ships would have covered every sea, and the Navy would have grown of itself. Instead of that, we have been constructing the navy as an exotic, forcing it to grow without a favoring atmosphere, establishing it with officers and not with men, educating cadets on land, and not ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... that the physiological definition of species is likely to clash with the morphological definition. No one would hesitate to describe the pouter and the tumbler as distinct species, if they were found fossil, or if their skins and skeletons were imported, as those of exotic wild birds commonly are—and without doubt, if considered alone, they are good and distinct morphological species. On the other hand, they are not physiological species, for they are descended from a common ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... hand. The grain, on the other hand, is not native; it must be brought to the spot and sown; it must be cherished and protected as a stranger. The two occupants of the ground, consequently, are not on equal terms; it is not a fair fight. The thorns are at home; the wheat is an exotic. The thorns are robust and can hold their own; the wheat is delicate and needs a protector. The weeds accordingly grow with luxuriance, while the wheat stalks in the neighbourhood, cheated of their sustenance under ground, become ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... with Mr. Brudenell's solicitors, and then proceeded to New York, whence, at the end of the same week, she sailed for Liverpool. Thus the beautiful young English Jewess, who had dropped for a while like some rich exotic flower transplanted to our wild Maryland woods, returned to her native land, where, let us hope, she found in an appreciating circle of friends some consolation for the loss of that domestic happiness that had been so cruelly ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... they, in the guise of good agriculturists, first of all transplanted it from a wild locality to a cultivated one, and then in order that it might bear fruit earlier and better, cut away several useless shoots and substituted exotic and domestic ones, mostly drawn from the Greek language, which have grafted so well on to the trunk that they appear no longer adopted but natural. Out of these have sprung, from the Latin tongue, flowers and colored fruits in great number and of much eloquence, all of which things, not ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... to pose as a "friend of humanity," or a "friend of the working classes." The character, however, is quite exotic in the United States. It is borrowed from England, where some men, otherwise of small account, have assumed it with great success and advantage. Anything which has a charitable sound and a kind-hearted ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... 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
... up aloft, sees, through the curtain, the Christmas holly and the Captain—taking care to mark that individual with mental chalk. The musician's eyes are in the Brown pue; but the eyes that used to meet them are turned another way—all favour is centred upon their spurious exotic, who grows thicker, twines tighter, and takes deeper root, the more he is encouraged:—of the species, or genus, we cannot do better than quote Mr. B.'s own words, written against December 23rd, Sunday—(whilst the Waits, as usual, were serenading the semi-detached, in a full conviction ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... called public opinion been shaped by these scribbling purveyors of fables; and this public opinion has been taught to look upon Jay Gould's career as an exotic, "horrible example," having nothing in common with the careers of other founders of large fortunes. The same generation habitually addicted to cursing the memory of Jay Gould, and taunting his children ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... was again the most likely exotic, and played his revolting part with great gusto and a permissible amount of humour. Miss MARIE LOeHR, whose delicate grace of feature and colouring lost something by her dusky disguise, was sufficiently Japanese in the first scene, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... Bracondale Jean found extremely pleasant. The great house, with its luxuriously-furnished rooms, its fine picture-gallery, where, often, in her hours of recreation, she wandered; the big winter-garden with palms and exotic flowers, the conservatories, the huge ballroom—wherein long ago the minuet had been danced by high-born dames in wigs and patches—the fine suites of rooms with gilded cornices—all were, to her, ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... 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
... for fear of the footpads on the heath, and the insolence of the black-guard Cockneys. Their wives are staid dames, learned at the brew-tub and in the buttery,—but not speaking French, nor wearing hoops or patches. A great many of the older exotic plants have become domesticated; and the goodwife has a flaming parterre at her door,—but not valued one half so much as her bed of marjoram and thyme. She may read King James's Bible, or, if a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... two loves of the boy and the man stood out boldly. The old romantic fervour with which he had longed for the days of Marshall and Madison, of Jefferson and Henry, still lingered on as an exotic patriotism in an era of time-servers and unprofitable servants. There was an old-fashioned democracy about him—a pioneer simplicity—as one who had walked from the great days of Virginia into her lesser ones. A century ago he might have left his plough to fight, and, having ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... of our sober clime This way of writing will appear exotic; Pulci[233] was sire of the half-serious rhyme,[dj] Who sang when Chivalry was more quixotic, And revelled in the fancies of the time, True Knights, chaste Dames, huge Giants, Kings despotic; But all these, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... 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 ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... full weight to the two last-named ingredients, they are not more than a counterpoise to Competitive Examination, which is also a recent exotic belonging to education. ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... white substance most carefully at the breast buttonhole of his coat. It could hardly be a flower. Some drooping exotic of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... gracefully reclining in the deck chair. Her long, gray robe parted—by design, I have no doubt—to display her shapely, satin-sheathed legs. Her black hair was coiled in a heavy knot at the back of her neck; her carmined lips were parted with a mocking, alluring smile. The exotic perfume ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... dwell 'neath a palace dome, With rare exotic flowers, Whose perfumed splendour gaily gleams In ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... garden, what agriculture is to the farm, the application of labor and science to a limited spot, for convenience, for profit, or for ornament,—though implying a higher state of cultivation, than is common in agriculture. It includes the cultivation of culinary vegetables and of fruits, and forcing or exotic gardening, as far as respects ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... 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 Mah ...
— The Indulgence of Negu Mah • Robert Andrew Arthur
... wronged the public in limiting them to such words as 'immoral,' 'unintelligible,' 'exotic,' and 'unhealthy.' There is one other word that they use. That word is 'morbid.' They do not use it often. The meaning of the word is so simple that they are afraid of using it. Still, they use it sometimes, ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... reacted against its external forms. She might abhor her husband, her marriage, and the world to which it had introduced her, but she had become a product of that world in its outward expression, and no better proof of the fact was needed than her exotic enjoyment of Americanism. ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... 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
... exclaims Mrs. Rosebrook, her face infused with animation, and a curl of disdain on her lip. "Such things! Mere happy illustrations of the folly of our political affairs. The one was an exotic do-nothing got up by Mister Wanting-to-say-something, who soon gets ashamed of his mission; the other was a mixture of political log-rolling, got up by those who wanted to tell the Union not to mind the Nashville Convention. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... and so on in slenderer circles to the tiniest diminishing. Mary Makebelieve wished she knew the names of all the flowers, but the only ones she recognized by sight were the geraniums, some species of roses, violets, and forget-me-nots and pansies. The more exotic sorts she did not know, and, while she admired them greatly, she had not the same degree of affection for them as for the commoner, ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens |
