"Ironic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a small power itself. England exhibited this symptom of decadence very badly in the war with the Transvaal; but America exhibited it worse in the war with Spain. There was exhibited more sharply and absurdly than anywhere else the ironic contrast between the very careless choice of a strong line and the very careful choice of a weak enemy. America added to all her other late Roman or Byzantine elements the element of the Caracallan ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... chief attraction lay in his great vivacity and animated features, he had led a wild and dissipated life in which play, drink, passionate love affairs, and constant and prompt duelling had rung the changes. Ceremonious politeness, an ironic and pedantic coldness, which testified to bold self-confidence, combined with a very hot temper, formed the chief characteristics of this personage and natures akin to his. Degelow's wildness and passion were lent a curious diabolical charm by the possession ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... into dazzling relief the irony which governs the being of kings. Want of logic and defiance of ethical principle underlie their pride in magnificent ceremonial and pageantry. The ironic contrast between the pretensions of a king and the actual limits of human destiny is a text which Shakespeare repeatedly clothes in ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... to tell you how Merlin, having seen how beauty regards the wisdom of the years, walked into the little partition of Mr. Moonlight Quill and gave up his job then and there; thence issuing out into the street a much finer and nobler and increasingly ironic man. But the truth is much more commonplace. Merlin Grainger stood up and surveyed the wreck of the bookshop, the ruined volumes, the torn silk remnants of the once beautiful crimson lamp, the crystalline sprinkling of broken glass which lay in iridescent dust over ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... much so indeed that our machines and pilots were generally many too few to attempt more than the absolute essentials, and calls were often made upon them which were beyond their strength to meet. An ironic contrast to this was supplied, however, at the evacuation of the Dardanelles, where I was commanding the air service (the R.N.A.S.), and was asked to be careful not to do too much air work. This at a time when through stress and strain and loss we had, I think, a total of five machines ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes
... moral and vivifies the right principle for the youth to whom the dawning consciousness of morality is the first real psychological discovery of life. With hearty laughter at the stupid irritations of self-conscious virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid Puritanism of mechanical morality, Mark Twain enraptures that innumerable company of the sophisticated who have chafed under the omnipresent influence of a "good example" and stilled the painless pangs of an unruly conscience. With splendid satire for ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... "poetry"—if you do this, you are not likely to leave it unfinished. And before you reach the end you will have encountered *en route* pretty nearly all the moods of poetry that exist: tragic, humorous, ironic, elegiac, lyric—everything. You will have a comprehensive acquaintance with a poet's mind. I guarantee that you will come safely through if you treat the work as a novel. For a novel it effectively is, and a better one than any written by Charlotte Bront or George Eliot. ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... interests. And now was explained young Morgan's interest in himself. The thought that during all the days he had spent at the Rancho Seco, his movements had been watched by the man who had just killed Haydon, brought a glow of ironic ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... heighten Mr. Thompson's embarrassment—like a flank attack while he was in the act of waving a flag of truce. But he perceived that there was no malice in the words, only a flash of ironic humor. Carr chuckled dryly. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... not imagine what he had misinterpreted so flatteringly to himself. But what did it matter? How like ironic fate, to pierce him with a chance shaft when all the shafts she had ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... who had begun to publish very young that "he had taken down the shutters before he had anything to put up in the shop window." From being transfixt by such a jibe Maupassant was preserved by Flaubert. When he was thirty he contributed that masterpiece of ironic humor 'Boule de suif,' to the 'Soirees de Medan,' a volume of short-stories put forth by the late Emile Zola, with the collaboration of a little group of his friends and followers. On this first appearance in the arena of letters Maupassant stept at once to a foremost place. That was ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... to absurd rules laid down in drawing-books—why is she brought into such fatal juxtaposition with this other severe and classical-looking and statuesque lady! To be merely a foil? Much obliged, Mr. Sherwin! The offended belle expressing angry and ironic gratitude sweeps from the painter's studio, gathering her rustling skirts together that they may not be soiled by the least contact with the canvases and plaster casts, and other art-paraphernalia and rubbish about ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... his own epitaph. I believe he thought so himself; a few words he said in my last talk with him makes me believe that — now. At any rate, the history of literature, so full of Fate's exquisite ironies, has nothing more poignantly ironic, and nothing at the same time more beautifully appropriate, than the publication of Rupert Brooke's noble sonnet-sequence, '1914', a few swift weeks before the death they had imagined, and had already made lovely. Each ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... wordless atmosphere of devotion which had become to her as vital, as necessary, as is that of domestic peace and happiness to the average woman. But for Laurence Vanderlyn and his "friendship," Mrs. Pargeter's existence would have been lacking in all human savour, and that from ironic circumstance rather than from any ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... course, JERRY!" exclaimed Mrs. Carew in ironic scorn. "But why stop with Jerry? I'm sure Jerry has hosts of friends who would ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... seem playthings of ironic fate: One stoutly shod paces a velvet sward; And one is forced with naked feet to climb Sharp slaty ways alive with scorpions, While wolfish hunger strains to catch his throat; One lingers o'er his purple draught and ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... train, going down to Wendover, Laura talked to Jane. Nina did not talk. Her queer eyes, when they looked at him, had a light in them of ironic devilry and suspicion. They left him speculating on the extent to which he was cutting himself off. This journey down to Wendover was a stage in the process. He was going down to tell Nicholson, to ask Nicholson to ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... profound gesture of resignation and a single word: "Kismet!" and Gourou, with his most ironic smile, added: "You may count on us to support the crown, highness, even though we ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... fixed upon the speaker the hard ironic eye of one toughened and defiant in misery, and, in the end, grinned upon him with his unshaven face ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... way," assented Brock with ironic mildness. "Now, Chappy, follow me a minute and you'll see how you dished your own beans: You call up Worth 10,000—that's a private matter, as you say. But Central gets the call twisted and gives you another ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... the Dunciad meant to be poetic and not ironic and spiteful, he has "the panting gales" of a garden he describes. Match me such an absurdity among the ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... from its grimly ironic philosophy, the topography, the earthy quality—'take of English earth as much as either hand may rightly clutch'—of the Wessex master's work makes it indigestible reading for an exile of more than thirty or forty; ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... are to revert to the conditions of savagery in order to believe that in this matter of a sound aesthetic we must begin where art has always begun—with number and geometry. Nevertheless there is a subtly ironic view which one is justified in holding in regard to quite obvious aspects of American life, in the light of which that life appears to have rather more in common with ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... in his turn, but there was nothing ironic in the smile, nor in the look he turned on ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... in talking was rich and varied, and it was an ironic caprice which made him refuse to write in that language. I doubt, though, whether he would have composed with ease in any tongue, for he found it hard to concentrate, and his small stock of verse was the outcome of ten ...
— The Garden of Bright Waters - One Hundred and Twenty Asiatic Love Poems • Translated by Edward Powys Mathers
... of it in such a neighbourhood. It seemed as though the demon builder of the fantastic town, sporting with man's architectural ideals before his appearance on the earth, had hewn the red and yellow rocks above the Dourbie into the ironic semblance of ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... sharp and almost unique judgment passed upon Tacitus at the bottom of page 133 and the top of page 134, or again, the excellent sub-ironic passages in which he expresses the vast advantage of metaphysical debate: which has all these qualities, that it is true, sober, exact, and yet a piece of laughter and a contradiction of itself. It is prose ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... the one ironic touch the situation had lacked. It pierced the heart of Carleton Roberts and started him in ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... crucified sooner than obey Nero—and the Prior cried out for silence; and that he could not hear his Christian King likened to the heathen emperor. Monk after monk would rise; one following his Prior, and disclaiming personal learning and responsibility; another with ironic deference saying that a man's soul was his own, and that not even a Religious Superior could release from the biddings of conscience; another would balance himself between the parties, declaring that the ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... upon us a new internationalism. To-day the world is united by starvation, disease and misery. We are enjoying the ironic internationalism of hatred. The victors are forced to shoulder the burden of the vanquished. International philanthropies and charities are organized. The great flux of immigration and emigration has recommenced. Prosperity is a myth; and the ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... Spirit and Chorus of the Years, the Spirit and Chorus of the Pities, the Spirit Ironic, the Spirit Sinister, Rumours, Spirit-Messengers, and the ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... all hope be lost Some memory, like a thin white ghost, Might stealthily move in midnight hours Among those silent sacred towers, And glimmer on the moonlit lawn Until the cold ironic dawn Arises from her saffron bed— When love is dead, when ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... it is the bridge to every eternity which is not merely a spectral condition of earth disembowelled of its lusts. For sex holds the substance of the image. But we must remember with Heine that Aristophanes is the God of this ironic earth, and that all argument is apparently vitiated from the start by the simple fact that Wagner and a rooster are given an analogous method of making love. And therefore it seems impeccable logic to say that all that ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... ace of doing so. An omen, wasn't it? Five minutes she and Mr. Canning had talked, over so-called horses' necks provided by his sedate host, and before the end of that time she had perceived an interest dawning in the young man's somewhat ironic eyes. With the usual of his sex one could have counted pretty definitely on the thing's being followed up. However, Mr. Canning, the difficult, had merely saluted her fascinatingly, and retired to re-maroon himself in the rural villa of his kinsmen, the Allison Paynes, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... you in a hurry last night and forgot to pay my bill. What's the damage?" asked Clay in his gently ironic drawl. ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... silken cords to draw him. He had always averted his eyes from the god—that is to say, within reason. Yet now Daniel, on perhaps a couple of fine mornings a week, in full Square, with Fan sitting behind on the cold stones, and Mr. Critchlow ironic at his door in a long white apron, would entertain Samuel Povey for half an hour with Pan's most intimate lore, and Samuel Povey would not blench. He would, on the contrary, stand up to Daniel like a little man, and pretend with all his might to ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... cannot drop into conversation more easily than by here venturing upon the expression of a purely personal feeling—his own enjoyment in the weaving of the unsubstantial webs of improbable adventure that fill the preceding pages. With an ironic satisfaction was it that a writer who is not unaccustomed to be called a mere realist here attempted fantasy, even though the results of his effort may reveal invention only and not imagination. It may even be ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... merely as an insignificant little man with hollow cheeks and a thin grey beard; for the weariness of expression which was habitual to him vanished before the charming sympathy of his smile. His sunken eyes glittered with a kindly but ironic good-humour. Now passed a guard in the romantic cloak of a brigand in comic opera and a peaked cap like that of an alguacil. A group of telegraph boys in blue stood round a painter, who was making a sketch—notwithstanding half-frozen fingers. Here and there, ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... ironic, is used by officials in prisons, and repeated by prisoners. It has no religious import. The naming of God in that connection reminds me of a remark I heard from a moonshiner—as the distillers of illicit whiskey in the mountain regions of the ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... literally consorted and contended Girls, that we sat and strove, even though we drew the line at playing with them and at knowing them, when not of the swarming cousinship, at home—if that felt awkwardness didn't exactly coincide with the ironic effect of "Gussy's" appearances, his emergence from rich mystery and his return to it, our state was but comparatively the braver: he always had so much more to tell us than we could possibly have to tell him. On reflection I see that the most completely rueful period ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... efforts—and as he unwittingly yielded more and more to the mild persuasions of these genial influences, so the former Timon-like bitterness of his humor gradually softened. There was no trace in him now of the dark, ironic, and reckless scorn that, before his recent visionary experience, had distinguished his whole manner and bearing—the smile came more readily to his lips—and he seemed content for the present to display ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... In ironic response to the pleas of the Regulators, the Governor of North Carolina summoned a force of one thousand militia men and led them into the western settlements. At the end of the day, May 16, 1771, two hundred ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... boyhood. He still remembered the expression on Sylvia's face when he passed her by chance in Oxford Street, soon after he came back from his four years of exile in the East and Rome—that look, eager, yet reproachful, then stoically ironic, as if saying: 'Oh, no! after forgetting me four years and more—you can't remember me now!' And when he spoke, the still more touching pleasure in her face. Then uncertain months, with a feeling of what the end would be; and then their marriage. Happy enough—gentle, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... made better, nobler, finer in every quarter, if the poor would only recognise wise and silent leaders, and use the laws which men have made in order to repair the havoc which other men have also made." But he reverts to the note of sad and kindly cynicism as he contemplates this supreme ironic procession of life with the laughter of gods in the background, even although he hastens to remind us that much may be made of ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... essence of it. The piece is not drama for the stage, nor intended to be seen or heard outside the pages of a book; but it is meant to be, and is, a great, brief, dramatic poem, a lyric almost, of hate, ambition, fear, desire, and the conquest of ironic evil. Swinburne has written nothing like it before. The manner of it is new, or anticipated only in the far less effectual Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards; the style, speech, and cadence are tightened, restrained, full of sullen ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... failure; he stood for nothing in the world of achievement; for all the difference that his going made, he might never have been born. Then a thought as startling as the tangible appearance of some ironic, grinning imp flashed to his mind. Who was he, Bruce Burt, to criticise his partner, Slim? What more had he accomplished? How much more difference would his own death make in anybody's life? His mother's ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... eyes fastened. For a good minute he stared at her, as though in some sort holding her to ransom. Then with an upward jerk of the head and an ejaculation, half smothered oath, half sharp laughter—as of one who registers eminently ironic conclusions—he began deliberately ascending ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... "English industry" seemed tolerably active amid its "ruins." The clumsy falsehoods of the German official reports and the German newspapers affect me strangely! It is not so much their lack of truth as their lack of the ironic, the satiric sense, which is a certain protection, after all, even amid the tragedy of war. We have a tolerable British conceit of ourselves, no doubt, and in war we make foolish or boasting statements about the future, because, in spite of all our grumbling, we are at bottom ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that Jane could, for the same reason, no longer write to him. Ironic chance had so arranged that the landlady with whom he usually lodged in town, and whose house he used as a permanent address, had given up letting lodgings at the beginning of the tour, and had drifted into the limbo of London. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... very wantonness of ironic insult that our novelty-mongers come to these, bringing fantastic inventions. What is it to them, children of a nobler past, that this or the other newly botched-up caprice should catch for an hour ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... day Methuen tried by every rule he knew to draw the enemy; vainly, the Lancers rode recklessly to induce those human rock limpets to come out and cut them off. Cronje knew the mettle of our men, and an ironic laugh played round his iron mouth, and still he stayed within his native fastness; but Death sat ever at his elbow, for our gunners dropped the lyddite shells and the howling shrapnel all along his lines, until the trenches ran blood, ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... glass, I offered it to him. He lurched forward to take it, but the fumes of the wine suddenly drifted clear of his brain. "You seem very much distressed," he observed, with ironic concern. "One might think you were actually ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Hogarth had not long before stigmatised pictorially in the plate known to collectors as the "large Masquerade Ticket." As verse this performance is worthless, and it is not very forcibly on the side of good manners; but the ironic dedication has a certain touch of Fielding's later fashion. Two other poetical pieces, afterwards included in the Miscellanies of 1743, also bear the date of 1728. One is A Description of U—n G— (alias New Hog's Norton) in Com. Hants, which Mr. Keightley has identified ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... doubt you could," answered Mr. Green with a fresh leer, that contained this time something ironic. "I nothing doubt it! But by your leave, I'll pursue my quest without ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... of the term of relationship Tom Clark's attitude was respectful enough, more humorous than anything else, as if the news Adelle had given him merely completed his ironic philosophy ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... disaccustomed to living with an invalid. Poor Ralph made no nearer approach to conventional beauty as he advanced in life, and the now apparently complete loss of his health had done little to mitigate the natural oddity of his person. Blighted and battered, but still responsive and still ironic, his face was like a lighted lantern patched with paper and unsteadily held; his thin whisker languished upon a lean cheek; the exorbitant curve of his nose defined itself more sharply. Lean he was altogether, lean and long and loose-jointed; an accidental cohesion ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... a smile on his lips as he saw them fade into the yawning gulf of moonlit distance,—going in different directions toward their ranches—an ironic smile, softened by ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... have, too, a little band of musicians; among them, in the first rank, that great painter of dreams, Claude Debussy; that master of constructive art, Dukas; that impassioned thinker, Alberic Magnard; that ironic poet, Ravel; and those delicate and finished writers, Albert Roussel and Deodat de Severac; without mention of the younger musicians who are in the vanguard of their art. And all this poetic force, though not the most vigorous, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... leakage was terrible, and the sawdust lay scattered all about the stage. The four of us sat as solemn as statues—I don't think one of us smiled. It was during the second Act that I suddenly laughed. I don't know that anything very comic was happening on the stage, but I was aware, with a kind of ironic subconsciousness, that some of the superior spirits in their superior Heaven must be deriving a great deal of fun from our situation. There was Vera thinking, I suppose, of nothing but Lawrence, and Lawrence thinking of nothing but Vera, and Nina thinking of nothing but Lawrence, and the ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... Ransay. He received me quite politely and hospitably, but with every moment that passed I grew more acutely conscious of something deterrent behind his courtesy. A sense of a strong personality in the background, not actually hostile as yet, but ironic and critical, set me instinctively and instantly on guard. Not that I actually suspected the man; but to take him straightway into my confidence was simply impossible. A man of another temperament might have done so—and quite possibly have been ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... come to arrest him. And while his friend tries desperately to resist the agents of the force, he contemplates the brutal scene with an ironic smile. ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... almost blasphemous in his agony. Christ had died on his cross. He, Christ's servant, had crucified self—and it could not die. Was this the ironic destiny of all ideals too austere for earth, too ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... situation to be, that I was almost vexed to be challenged to renew our interrupted debate. The challenge, rather to my surprise, came from Audubon, who suddenly said to me, a propos of nothing, in a tone at once ironic and genial: ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... any one else knew a word of that language, the last vestige of which is lost. Schmoll said continually to Marmet: 'You do not know Etruscan, my dear colleague; that is the reason why you are an honorable savant and a fair-minded man.' Piqued by his ironic praise, Marmet thought of learning a little Etruscan. He read to his colleague a memoir on the part played by flexions in the ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... Something in the boy's devotion seemed to move him, for his eyes were very kindly though his laugh was ironic. "You'll have an almighty awakening one of these days, my son," he said. "By the way, if we are going to be brothers, you had better call ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... I shivered a little as I recalled that mocking and ironic laughter. And I quickened my step, with a glance over my shoulder; for if Godfrey was afraid, how much more reason had I to be! It was with a sense of relief, of which I was a little ashamed, that I reached my apartment at the Marathon ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... by a flood of sentiment. An irritated and irritating sensuality could accommodate itself either to sentiment or to philosophy. Voltaire's tales are, in narrative form, criticisms of belief or opinion which scintillate with ironic wit. His disciple, Marmontel, would "render virtue amiable" in his Contes Moraux (1761), and cure the ravage of passion with a canary's song. His more ambitious Belisaire seems to a modern reader a masterpiece in the genre ennuyeux. His Incas is exotic without colour or credibility. ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... its monotonous horizons; their mouths are flanked with those two deep lines of patience and of sorrow which you may note to-day in all the ghettoes of Europe; their smile, when they smile, is restrained by a sort of ironic strength in the muscles of the face. Their eyes are more bright than should be eyes of happy men; they are, as it were, inured to sterility; there is nothing in them of that repose which we Westerners acquire from a continual contemplation ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... a rival? This is becoming dramatic!' Lady Bridget's voice was amusedly ironic, but she carried her head erect. 'Tell me about the woman at the Bachelors' ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... ironic. "Well, it's not my line at all. I'm not a film-operator!" And he put his head on one side with a ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... nothing, velvet is a downy, discreet material, but, no matter, these precautions are in vain. The male devil is fairly matched by the female devil: Tophet will furnish them of all genders. Caroline has Mephistopheles on her side, the demon who causes tables to spurt forth fire, and who, with his ironic finger points out the hiding place of keys—the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... to be a popular bill, too," Mr. Schemer was saying, with a smile of ironic appreciation at the thought of demagogues advocating it. "We should have one ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was greeted by a shout of laughter, and an ironic "Played indeed!" from Cuthbert Gordon—Broome's grandson. Roy, tumbled from some starry dream of his own, flashed out imperiously: "Look alive, you blithering idiot. 'Who ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... her work and looked at her sister. She thought Gudrun so CHARMING, so infinitely charming, in her softness and her fine, exquisite richness of texture and delicacy of line. There was a certain playfulness about her too, such a piquancy or ironic suggestion, such an untouched reserve. Ursula admired her with ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... struck blind on the glass in one eye, but the other danced with a genial, a mad scintillation. The light of it caught like contagion, and touched the merest glancer at him with the spark of its warm, ironic mirth. The question which naturally rose to Flora's lips—"Who in the world is that?"—she checked; why, she didn't ask herself. She only felt as she followed Clara, trailing away across the floor, that the interest of the evening which had promised so well, beginning with ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... little dealer. Nobody. Jew, of course." Mr. Oxford's way of saying 'Jew' was ineffably ironic. Priam knew that, being a Jew, the dealer could not be his frame-maker, who was a pure-bred Yorkshireman from Ravensthorpe. Mr. Oxford continued, "I sold that picture and guaranteed it to be a ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... a laugh &c. (amuse) 840; play the fool, make a fool of oneself. Adj. derisory, derisive; mock, mocking; sarcastic, ironic, ironical, quizzical, burlesque, Hudibrastic[obs3]; scurrilous &c. (disrespectful) 929. Adv. in ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... wonderful view (mentioned in Baedeker—'fatiguing but repaying')—was disclosed to him after the effort of the climb, he had doubtless felt the existence of some great, dignified principle crowning the chaotic strivings, the petty precipices, and ironic little dark chasms of life. This was as near to religion, perhaps, as his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that the candle light flickering up on her white face must be distorting her swollen features and exaggerating the dark rings about her eyes. She snatched up the paper, her reassurance dissolving under his pitiless gaze, in which she seemed to read the grim perception of her state, and the ironic recollection of the day when, in that very room, he had offered to compel Harney to marry her. His look seemed to say that he knew she had taken the paper to write to her lover, who had left her as he had warned her she would be left. She remembered the scorn with which she had turned from ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... would be summed up in the remembrance that he was the old man who bankrupted himself to save his son from the gallows. He knew that this very house, which remained as the last refuge, was mortgaged again as when his father and mother had come into it before he was born. The ironic circle was complete. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... Casanova's ironic remark about his escape from England, see his conversation, on the subject of "dishonor," with Sir Augustus Hervey at London in 1763, which is given in ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... practitioners were to apply painful treatments like allopaths use, ones with such poor statistical outcomes like allopaths use, there would most certainly be witch hunts and all such irresponsible, greedy quacks would be safely imprisoned. I find it highly ironic that for at least the past twenty five hundred years the basic principle of good medicine has been that the treatment must first do no harm. This is such an obvious truism that even the AMA doctors pledge to do the same thing when they take the Hippocratic ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... blue house he had found only frank, disinterested friendship,—a somewhat ironic comradeship, the condescending tolerance of a person compelled by solitude to choose as her comrade the least repulsive among a host of inferiors. Alas! How clearly he remembered and could again foresee ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... portrait of the illustrious Concepcion, together with some sympathetic remarks about her, remarks conceived very differently from the usual semi-ironic, semi-worshipping journalistic references to the stars of Concepcion's set. ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... may gaze at it, it leaves no impression on the mind. As no delusive hope, that might be excited here, has the slightest attraction for me, I gain by my absolutely unimpassioned position towards these surroundings a calmness which—let me say it with a certain ironic humour—will probably be of advantage to me in gaining that for which I strove here in my early days, and which now, as it has become indifferent to me, I shall ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... was borne in upon me that a great change had come over her since the day of our first meeting. She had grown younger, more girlish, and more gentle. At first she had seemed much older than I; a sad-faced woman, weary, solemn, enigmatic, almost gloomy, with a bitter, ironic humour and a bearing distant and cold. Now she was only maidenly and sweet; tinged, it is true, with a certain seriousness, but frank ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... ironic tone in the last sentences which jarred upon Maude's sensitive nature. She glanced up quickly and was surprised at the look of pain which had come upon her companion's face. It ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... period from Strindberg's own annals reveals the following influences: Ibsen from his Norwegian throne had hailed woman and the laborer as the two rising ranks of nobility, and Strindberg asked himself if this was ironic, as usual, or prophetic. Feminine individualism was the cult of the hour. The younger generation had, through the doctrines of evolution, become atheistic. Strindberg tells of asking a young writer how he could get along without God. "We have woman instead," was the reply. This ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... was a fairly tall man, with a big head, big features, and a beard. His characteristic expression denoted benevolence based on an ironic realisation of the humanity of human nature. He was forty-six years of age and looked it. He had been for more than twenty years at the Treasury, in which organism he had now attained a certain importance. He was a Companion ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... fool. But I didn't know that with Martian stoicism he suspected the worst and took his own ironic means of combating it. He used the last lot of Indurate to make that booster, a device which he said would increase our take-off speed. He mounted it on the ...
— The Long Voyage • Carl Richard Jacobi
... of not being ironic, of looking into some person's eyes, and not finding that I had to look away, of resting with someone in a long silence full ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... the fire, Byng said to Jasmine meditatively, with that old ironic humour which was always part of him: "'Fee, fo, fi, fum, I smell ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... can do?" he demanded, looking down at her with something grimly ironic in his eyes. She steadied herself to meet ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... moved forward to the end of the house with Alan to meet her father. At that instant, by the ironic humor of chance, her glance fell upon a certain improvised wash-stand covered with oilcloth. She shook her head decisively. "No, he won't risk waiting to do that. He'll make ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... the head of each bed she would sit down and rummage in the bag, speaking in her slow but quite good French, to explain the use of the acidulated drops, or to give a lesson in cat's cradles. And the poilus would listen with their polite, ironic patience, and be left smiling, and curiously fascinated, as if they had been visited by a creature from another world. She would move on to other beds, quite unconscious of the effect she had produced on them and of their remarks: "Cette vieille dame, comme elle est bonne!" or "Espece d'ange ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... details of the visit, when Alzugaray came home, and seeing a light in Caesar's room, went in there. Alzugaray was quite lively. The two friends passed the persons met that day in ironic review, and in general they were agreed about everything, except about ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... was unable to discover a score of men ready and willing to murder Hilmer, but he was finding an ironic diversion in shoving a weary soul to the brink. He liked to confirm his faith in the power of sorrow and misery and bitterness ... he liked to triumph over that healing curse of indifference which time accomplished with such subtlety. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... a thin ironic smile hovered on his lips— "And you carried it off well! But—the poor child!—what an ordeal for her! You can hardly have felt it so keenly, being seasoned to hypocrisy for so many years!" Her eyes ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... dois arranger mes cheveux comme une statue? Oh, ciel!" mocked Mademoiselle, collapsing into tinkles of her sprite laughter.... "Oh-la-la! Et quelle statue par exemple?" she trilled, with ironic eyebrows, "la statue de votre Kaisere Wilhelm ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... routinieres jeunes filles. If women but knew they would prostrate themselves before him as did the weeping ones upon the body of the dead Adonis! The key of this discourse is high-pitched and cutting. Laforgue, a philosopher, a pessimist, makes his art the canvas for his ironic temperament. The Prince's interview with Ophelia is full of soundless mirth. And how he lavishes upon his own deranged head offensive abuse: "Piteous provincial! Cabotin! Pedicure!" This last is his ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensees?" He articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. "And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years," he went on, shewing that contempt for the things of this world which some men of the world like to affect, "we should read that the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... studies—"Soubrette," "Lover," "Witch," "Clown," "Villain," "Sweetheart"—besides two additions: a "Prologue" and "Epilogue." Here MacDowell is in one of his happiest moods. It was a fortunate and charming conceit which prompted the plan of the series, with its half-playful, half-ironic, yet lurkingly poetic suggestions; for in spite of the mood of bantering gaiety which placed the pieces in such mocking juxtaposition, there is, throughout, an undertone of grave and meditative tenderness which it is one of the peculiar properties of MacDowell's art to ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... its jests have ceased to effervesce, it is a good joke still. Mr. Bottle's mind, qua mind; the rowdy Philistine Adolescens Leo, Esq.; Dr. Russell, of the Times, mounting his war-horse; the tale of how Lord Lumpington and the Rev. Esau Hittall got their degrees at Oxford; and many another ironic thrust which made the reader laugh 'while the hair was yet brown on his head,' may well make him laugh still, 'though his scalp is almost hairless, and his figure's grown convex.' Since 1871 we have learnt the answer to the sombre lesson, 'What is it to grow ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... previous failure was the disintegrating effect on the will-power of the ironic, superior smile of friends. Whenever a man "turns over a new leaf" he has this inane giggle to face. The drunkard may be less ashamed of getting drunk than of breaking to a crony the news that he has signed the pledge. Strange, but true! And human nature must be counted with. Of course, on a few ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... for writing each, into "friendly," "commendatory," "reproving," "objurgatory," "consolatory," "castigatory," "admonishing," "threatening," "vituperatory," "laudatory," "persuasive," "begging," "questioning," "answering," "allegorical," "explanatory," "accusing," "defending," "congratulatory," "ironic" and "thankful," while the neo-Platonist, Proclus, is responsible for, or at least has attributed to him, a list of nearly double the length, including most of those given above and adding many. Of these last, "love-letters" ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... Mr. Lucas's. But Mr. Lucas, too, is a highly mysterious man. On the surface he might be mistaken for a mere cricket enthusiast. Dig down, and you will come, with not too much difficulty, to the simple man of letters. Dig further, and, with somewhat more difficulty, you will come to an agreeably ironic critic of human foibles. Try to dig still further, and you will probably encounter rock. Only here and there in his two novels does Mr. Lucas allow us to glimpse a certain powerful and sardonic harshness in him, indicative of a mind that has seen the ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... for a 'mildly Liberal' book?—'a fraction of the truth'? She could hear Manisty's ironic voice on that bygone drive to Nemi. If he saw his friend ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... put, "not only of a comfortable sanded parlor, a roaring fire, and plenty of good cheer and good company, but also of the circle of humbly appreciative auditors who gathered round an accepted wit, hung upon his words, offered themselves as butts for his ironic or satiric humor, and—stood treat." Or there was the inn of sinister aspect where highwaymen might congregate, or inns with hosts who let their guests down through trap-doors in the middle of the night to rob and murder them—or is this only ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... indefinable change had come over his aspect; he bowed and seemed about to utter an ironic apology. She felt puzzled and unconsciously she began to think. What was lacking in her statement? Something. Could she remember what? Something which he had expected; something which as presiding judge over John's trial he had been made aware of and ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... There is something in the year's youth—the sap is rising in the plants—something there is, anyway, beyond the sentimentality of the poets. And overhead was the great yellow lantern gleaming at them through the branches with ironic approval. ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... write to him to send the letter back?" palpitates poor little Laura; for she thought her husband was offended, by using the ironic method. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... cow one is able, indeed one is almost obliged, to feel the soul of a goddess. The incredible is accomplished. The dead Egyptian makes the ironic, the skeptical modern world feel deity in a limestone cow. How is it done? I know not; but it is done. Genius can do nearly everything, it seems. Under the chin of the cow there is a standing statue of the King Mentu-Hotep, and ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... was gathered together on the flagged path before the house. It greeted them with laughter and cries, cheerfully ironic. ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... before and they wouldn't take my word for my blameless past. They told me to keep my story for trial when they took me over to the court. Meanwhile they gave me a free lodging in their pen. Miss Arundel—" Hilliard dropped his ironic tone and spoke in a low, tense voice of child-like horror. His face stiffened and paled. "That was awful. To be locked in. Not to be able to get fresh breath in your lungs. Not to be able to go where you please, when you please. ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... that he was not the latter, for while they are lively they do not reveal much literary ability. But their writer saw with open eyes, eyes that were disposed to caricature the peculiarities of others. This trait, much clarified and spiritualized in later life, became a distinct, ironic note in his character. Possibly it attracted Heine, although his irony was on a ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... its generation, and which has gathered together a remarkable group of poets, novelists, and dramatists, who, as men and women, are a most interesting company—a fact to which even George Moore's Hail and Farewell, with its quick eye for defects and foibles and its ironic ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... call yourself an atheist now, David?' said Ancrum one day, in that cheerful, half-ironic tone ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... most kind," he returned with a bow and an ironic smile. "I trust you will let me prove my friendship ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... A faint ironic smile touched Jeff's face. "No, James, I'm helping it. Ever notice how blondes and brunettes chum together. Value of contrasts, you see. I'm a moral brunette. You're a shining example of all a man should be. I simply emphasize ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... clean-minded little person, her people were of the clean-minded type, therefore she did not understand all that this ironic speech implied, but she gathered enough of its significance to cause her to turn first red and then pale and then to burst into tears. She was crying and trying to conceal the fact when Hannah returned. She bent her head and touched her eyes furtively while her ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... time he became aware of motion. The flitter seemed to hurtle forward at comet-like speed. Kieran knew that this was merely an ironic little joke, because now they were proceeding at something in the range of normal velocity, whereas before their speed had been quite beyond his comprehension. But he could comprehend this. He could feel it. They were ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... commented with ironic emphasis. "He'll be broke in a week and the first camp that pays his fare out will get him. There's no fool like a logger. Strong in the back and weak in the head—the best ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of flesh with fascinated repulsion—the man and the "familiar" were so ghastly alike. Then he suddenly understood that this was a quaint double jest of the eccentric physician's—his grim fling at his lack of physical charm, his ironic jeer at ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... echoed the man, with ironic emphasis. "That is good counsel, seeing there isn't enough lard in the house for the frying of an egg; yes, ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... them forever, but you've no idea—you've no idea—how strange and welcome it is for my eyes to find them beautiful." She seemed almost to murmur to herself. Then she braced herself slightly against the nurse's shoulder, and went on, in her light, sweet, ironic voice. "They probably never told you—but I didn't care for Nature, exactly. I don't think I care for it now, as some people do, but I can see that this is beautiful. Of course you don't know what it means to me. It has simply changed the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... treacherous borders of a masked pool, she felt this speech with its ironic innuendo. She flushed, her vanity irritated. Rentgen saw ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... madly on self-destruction, that he may die with the taste of his great love fresh on his lips. All the grotesque accidents of violent death he records with visual exactness, and no pains to relieve them; the ironic indifference, for instance, with which, on the scaffold or the battle-field, a man will seem to grin foolishly at the ugly rents through which his life has passed. Seldom or never has the mere pen of a writer taken us so close to the cannon's mouth as ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... appointment, found a stranger standing there—a tall, aristocratic-looking Personage with silky, grey sidewhiskers. The bald-headed, sly little lawyer-fellow called out, "Come in—come in, Mr. Razumov," with a sort of ironic heartiness. Then turning deferentially to the stranger with the grand air, "A ward of mine, your Excellency. One of the most promising students of his faculty ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... awakened by noises on the doorstep. Looking out, I found a bullock, its four feet tied together with a straw rope, writhing in its last agonies; the butcher, in his hand a cruel 24-inch bladed knife still red with blood, smiling the smile of ironic torture as he looked down upon his struggling victim. He straightway skinned the animal and cut up the carcass immediately in front of my door, where Lao Chang waited to get the best cut for my dinner. My three fellow-lodgers squatted alongside, going ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... the young ladies in the affluent classes.) And it seems to me that they, in payment of their debt to Fate, ought to occupy the time that is on their hands by becoming ornamental, and increasing the world's store of beauty. In a sense, certainly, they are ornamental. It is a strange fact, and an ironic, that they spend quite five times the annual amount that was spent by their grandmothers on personal adornment. If they can afford it, well and good: let us have no sumptuary law. But plenty of pretty dresses will not suffice. Pretty manners are needed with ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... sure, Dagaeoga. Look at the bird with the red crest, perched on the topmost tip of the tall, green bush directly in front of us. I can distinguish his song from those of the others, and it seems that the note contains something saucy and ironic." ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... indeed, from the fabliaux themselves that we learn much of what we know about the jongleurs; and one of not the least amusing[134] deals with the half-clumsy, half-satiric boasts of two members of the order, who misquote the titles of their repertoire, make by accident or intention ironic comments on its contents, and in short do not magnify their office in a very modern ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... by raising his hat with ironic politeness, and Zora walked swiftly away, in appearance a majestic Amazon, but inwardly a quivering woman. She marched straight up to the recumbent Dix. The Literary Man from London would have been amused. She interposed herself between the conversing Teutons and awakened the sleeper. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... English to his daughter, "and so it is easy to turn them into officers." Then addressing the young man in French, he said, "Tell me, my good man, what regiment have you served in?" The young man nudged his second cousin's godson's father gently with his elbow, and suppressing an ironic smile, replied that he had served in the Infantry of the Guard, and that he had just quitted the Seventh Regiment ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... anything for Jane. The only thing that seemed possible to her in her simple reasoning, was to prevent such catastrophes for the future. It was not that pity was misplaced when shipwreck came, nor that charity ever failed. She understood, without being conscious of it, the ironic severity of Jesus, who would have no sudden pity and heart-searching on account of His poor. He had come into the world for righteousness and for judgment, and the judgment and righteousness both declared, not at the time of disaster ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... chuckle. "I really must trouble you to obey my wishes," he replied, with ironic courtesy. "Otherwise I shall be compelled to do some damage to that car of yours, a proceeding I always try ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... couple of blood-brothers," assented Maggard with an ironic flash in his eyes, "an' now Blood-brother Bas, go over thar an' ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck |
