"Eccentric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not think it," said the duke, sighing. "It is still shining over our heads—he is rather like a threatening meteor, and its eccentric course is over the snow-fields of Russia. But hush! footsteps are approaching." The duke was not mistaken. They heard the door of the hut violently open and close, and shortly after some one rapped ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... when I think of it now the whole story seems wildly incredible. Wilson and I were singled out to bear the whole burden of sin, though there were abundance of other criminals in the concern; and by and by, Wilson passing for being a very eccentric fellow, and I for a cool one, even he was allowed to get off comparatively scot-free, while I, by far the youngest and least experienced of the set, and who alone had no personal grudges against any of Blackwood's victims, remained under such an accumulation ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... of approving of the choice she made; for, certainly, as respected her own happiness, your mother did more wisely in confiding it to the regulated, mild, and manly virtues of your father, than in placing her hopes on one as eccentric and violent ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... the most striking illustrations of this neglected truth is Thomas Carlyle. How often has it been said that Carlyle's matter is marred by the harshness and the eccentricities of his style? But Carlyle's matter is harsh and eccentric to precisely the same degree as his style is harsh and eccentric. Carlyle was harsh and eccentric. His behaviour was frequently ridiculous, if it were not abominable. His judgments were often extremely bizarre. When you read one of Carlyle's fierce ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... be often both wild and erroneous, his principles of action eccentric and strange, his views of life partial, and almost misanthropical; but not one opinion that he held could be stirred or modified by any worldly motive: he acted up to his principles of action; and, if any touch of misanthropy mingled with ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... acted as Dick's servant when he was ashore, and as general housekeeper and caretaker when he was afloat, sounded the bugle as a signal to his master that it was time to turn out; and the neighbours in the houses round about—who, by the way, referred to Penryn as "that very eccentric young man"—had come to look upon the instrument somewhat in the light of a town clock; so much so that several of them set their watches by it, and one old gentleman was in the habit of leaving his front door and sprinting for ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... night; but when she arose in the morning, she felt doubly certain that she had acted to her own satisfaction. What real right had she to this money? It was coming to her as the result of the fancy of an eccentric old man, who, in a moment of needless pity and passing interest, had made a will in her favor to the prejudice of his natural heir. Of what odds was it that that heir had ample means already, or even that he was her bitter enemy? Did not the very ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... being occupied, and every nook in the garden too, we are accommodated with a rustic table in the "Grand Salon," part of which is screened off as a kind of bar. The "Grand Salon" is also full of quaint pictures and eccentric curiosities; it is cool and airy, bright flowers are in the windows, and the floor is sanded. We had stopped here to refresh the horses, intending to breakfast at Etretat. But so delighted were we, a party of "deux couverts," with this good ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... gentlemen when they showed me their houses—mere sheds of the humblest description, but in their eyes far superior to any palace of Europe. An imported chair or an antiquated desk would supply them with conversation to last hours. The wives of those settlers were generally eccentric persons who looked suspiciously at us. One of them at Requena made me feel most uncomfortable by the annoying way in which she looked at my only shoe—as I was unable to put a shoe on the other much swollen foot. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... that all our speculations will remain summaries of probabilities. No documents are extant to enlighten us; we have only mobile, complex and confused ideas, incarnate in eccentric, often contradictory theories. That this character attaches to such ideas should keep us on guard against framing theories whose symmetry is sometimes their condemnation' ('Daily ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... 'a detached and eccentric personality who had arisen on the outskirts; the world began to be conscious of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... peculiarly unattractive in this work of restoration, and it was a fortunate day for Margaret when the pedantic young man of the house proposed to marry her. After this we discover that she has both a history and a will of her own. She leaves the Quakers, and goes as secretary to a lady who holds eccentric if broadminded views on every conceivable subject, and the change of atmosphere, however delightful in various ways, was too much for Margaret's peace of mind. The young Quaker was an obstinate wooer and followed her up, but his chances of success, which were never rosy, grew ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... explain everything. It was a singularly bold, upright hand, distinct as print, free from all caligraphic flourishes, indicating, as most writing does indicate in some degree, the character of the writer. Slightly eccentric it might be, quick, restless, in its turned-up Gs and Ys, but still it was a good hand, an honest hand. Olive thought so, and liked it. Wondering who the writer could be, she opened it, ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... wish for the good C.F.B. as happy an evening as we spent (with our eccentric friend Mifflin McGill) bicycling from the Newhaven Inn in a July twilight. The Newhaven Inn, which is only a vile kind of meagre roadhouse at a lonely fork in the way (where one arm of the signpost carries the romantic legend "To Haddon Hall"), lies between Ashbourne and Buxton. ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... given this evening proves it; I admire your intellect and character, and your person pleases me. As for me, the step I am taking now gives you the opportunity of judging my worth—You may think my actions strange, improper, or eccentric—you are at liberty to appreciate me as you wish. If your judgment is favorable, however, I shall be proud and happy to become Madame de Saint-Herem and inhabit the Saint-Ramon mansion with you. ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... despised caste, he is, in the locality alluded to, truly a dull fellow. That the peasant there is not an ass or a sheep, you only know by his standing on end. You hear no strains of country drollery, and no characters of curious or eccentric humor; all is dull, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... a different stamp was one of the characters in Going into Society, who played the clarionet in a band at a Wild Beast Show, and played it all wrong. He was somewhat eccentric in dress, as he had on 'a white Roman shirt and a bishop's mitre covered with leopard skin.' We are told nothing about him, except that he refused to know his old friends. In his story of the Seven Poor Travellers Dickens found the clarionet-player of the Rochester Waits so communicative ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... and Princess of Wales descended this shaft, and Captain Jan was their amiable, not to say eccentric, guide. The Captain was particularly enthusiastic in praise of the Princess. He said that she was a "fine intelligent young lady; that she asked no end of questions, would not rest until she understood everything, and afterwards undertook to explain it ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... God, found it, after many a year of poorly requited toil; there he sat, with locks of silver gray which set off so nobly his fine bold but benevolent face, his faithful consort at his side, and his trusty dog at his feet—an eccentric animal of the genuine regimental breed, who, born amongst red-coats, had not yet become reconciled to those of any other hue, barking and tearing at them when they drew near the door, but testifying his fond reminiscence of the former by hospitable waggings of the tail whenever a uniform ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... The worthy but eccentric old chap then scrambled on board again, amidst the suppressed laughter of the boatmen, and kept his seat, wet clothes and all, until we ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... place Bob Power was not smuggling. In the next place the Chancellor of the Exchequer would never see Godfrey's letter. It would be opened, I supposed, by some kind of clerk or secretary. He would giggle over it and show it to a friend. He would also giggle. Then unless the spelling was unusually eccentric the letter would go into the waste-paper ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... by his idle friends, it was a long time before any of them discovered that he was engaged in practical business. In his own home he was not questioned, and he said nothing. The Saracinesca were considered eccentric, but no one interfered with them nor ventured to offer them suggestions. If they chose to allow their heir absolute liberty of action, merely because he had passed his twenty-first birthday, it was their own concern, and his ruin would be upon their ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... dassent go up, 'cause he thought the pope could see right through him, and would know he was a Baptist, but the rest of the Americans were going up, and dad didn't want to be eccentric, so he and I went up. The pope put out his hand to dad, and instead of shaking it, as he would the hand of any other man on earth, and asking how his folks were, dad bent over and kissed the pope's hand, ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... exclusiveness is wholly unknown. It is a society which includes every actor, whether he be Benedict or Hamlet, or the Ghost, or the Bandit, or the court-physician, or, in the one person, the whole King's army. He may do the "light business," or the "heavy," or the comic, or the eccentric. He may be the captain who courts the young lady, whose uncle still unaccountably persists in dressing himself in a costume one hundred years older than his time. Or he may be the young lady's brother in the white gloves and inexpressibles, whose duty in the ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... shop-keeper did not ask her very much more than its genuine value and next day all Paris knew of the transaction and flocked to the Opera to see her in the ornaments which had cost the Russian Duke his friendship for the bearer. But though eccentric, impulsive and domineering, no whisper had ever attached itself to her name. On her return to her native New York, was she not welcomed, feted, honored, besieged with invitations everywhere? People felt she was different ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... subject to continual and annoying interference from his colleagues. Before his arrival in Paris, Silas Deane had entered for Congress into semi-commercial relations with the French government through the eccentric and industrious Beaumarchais. Franklin was content to leave these affairs to him, and did not at the time even know their real nature. But with Arthur Lee it was different. Of all characters in American history Lee is almost the hardest ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... used to be seen on Wallack's stage, at the house he established upon the wreck of John Brougham's Lyceum, often rise in memory, crowned with a peculiar light. Lester Wallack, in his peerless elegance; Laura Keene, in her spiritual beauty; the quaint, eccentric Walcot; the richly humorous Blake, so noble in his dignity, so firm and fine and easy in his method, so copious in his natural humour; Mary Gannon, sweet, playful, bewitching, irresistible; Mrs. Vernon, as full of character as the tulip is of colour or the hyacinth ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... dock-gates, with a quaint balcony staircase, like the approach to a Swiss chalet, leading down into the yard. In London these apartments were his sole domicile; though, to his friends, none of whom lived nearer to him than Bloomsbury, this seemed a piece of conduct too flagrantly eccentric—on a parity with his explanation of it, alleging necessity of living on the spot: an explanation somewhat droll, in the face of his constant lengthy absence, during the whole of the winter, when he handed the reins of ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... drawing a line through the name of each saint up to the 2d of May, the day that she left the convent. A voice outside the door called "Jeannette." Jeanne replied, "Come in, papa." And her father entered. Baron Simon-Jacques Le Perthuis des Vauds was a gentleman of the last century, eccentric and good. An enthusiastic disciple of Jean Jacques Rousseau, he had the tenderness of a lover for nature, in the fields, in the woods and in the animals. Of aristocratic birth, he hated instinctively the year 1793, but being a philosopher by temperament and liberal by education, he execrated ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... a wealthy and eccentric Philadelphia merchant, financier, philanthropist and the founder of Girard College, was born near Bordeaux, France, in 1750, the son of a sea captain. He lost the sight of his right eye when eight years old and had only a meager education. Beginning a seafaring ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... loyalty were not founded upon memories, for she had none. They were given a father created by her own vivid fancy, aided by the photograph. This was a faded likeness of an unusually handsome man with waving hair of an eccentric length and bold dark eyes smiling straight out of the picture as if he were just about to speak to the Arethusa who worshipped it. He wore a Byronic sort of collar, with a wide tie, and his shoulders were draped in an Italian military cape, ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... The eccentric fisherman dropped his net and walked swiftly toward the spot, his new acquaintance following him. As they drew near there seemed a sort of monstrous irony in the fact that the dead machine was still throbbing and thundering as busily as a ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... An eccentric young millionaire had offered me eight thousand dollars for it. I had an absolutely original conception. But I cannot execute it. It's as if a breeze ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... struggled in vain to release myself from the eccentric female's claws, "where is the Capting—the man who was into the Crimea, amidst the cannon's ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 5 • Charles Farrar Browne
... "An eccentric, I fancy," drawled Miss Purvis. "You must know that each freshman class is bound to have numbered with it some most surprising individuals. Rarae aves, ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... who disliked all eccentric departures from custom and routine; and he felt especially suspicious of the change proposed in the life of Agnes. With new interests to occupy her mind, she might be less favourably disposed to listen to him, on the next occasion when he urged his suit. The influence ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... The eccentric Dean Swift, in the course of one of those journies to Holyhead, which, it is well known, he several times performed on foot, was travelling through Church Stretton, Shropshire, when he put up at the sign of the Crown, and finding the host to be a communicative good-humored man, inquired ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... than,—"Walk on;" and seizing the stole from the Taoist's shoulder, he flung it over his own. He did not, however, return home, but leisurely walked away, in company with the eccentric priest. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... superposed one above the other. The free use of white paint all over the sloping tiers of pews has prevented the interior from being as dark as it would have otherwise been, but the result of all this painted deal has been to give the building the most eccentric and indecorous appearance. Still, there are few who will fail to thank the good folks of Whitby for preserving an ecclesiastical curiosity of such an unusual nature. The box-pews on the floor of the church ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... The eccentric German alchemist and philosopher, Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), described a prosperous charlatan of his day as "clad in brave apparel, and having on his fingers showy rings, glittering with precious stones; a fellow ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... delightful book about his pipe and tobacco, full of suggestion to the young humorist, lets out nothing or next to nothing of his meat and drink. His hints about pipes are very extensively followed, and nowadays every ambitious young pressman smokes in public at least one well-burnt briar with an eccentric stem—even at some personal inconvenience. But this jealous reticence on the part of successful men—you notice they never let even the interviewer see their kitchens or the debris of a meal—necessarily throws one back upon rumour and ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... exclaimed, with a ringing laugh, "aren't you a little bit eccentric, signor? You talk like a long-haired prophet! I never met an artist before who couldn't stand praise; it is generally a matter of wonder to me to notice how much of that intoxicating sweet they can swallow without reeling. But you're an exception, I ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... picturesque villages with indifference, and it was only when they reached some great city, or came upon some exceptionally fine temple or eccentric deity, that their curiosity was aroused. Mendes worshipped its patron god in the form of a live ram,* and bestowed on all members of the same species some share of the veneration it lavished on the divine animal. The inhabitants of Atarbekhis,** on the island of Prosopitis, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... presence of mind, presently he peeps cautiously out, and begins to ascend again. Here he comes toward us—slowly, majestically! Strike at him with a fan, and lo! he retreats in great disorder to a remote corner of the room, dodging about in most eccentric fashion, when, recovering his self-possession after a time, he goes about examining the pictures on the wall with the air of a critic. You lie down on your back, on the comfortable sofa in the corner, watching the balloon as it sails slowly about, and wondering what it will do ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... influence of teachers like Hervey, Romaine, Cecil, Venn, Fletcher, Newton, and Thomas Scott. The fathers of the Evangelical school were men of naturally strong and vigorous understandings, robust and rugged, and sometimes eccentric, but quite able to cope with the controversialists, like Bishop Tomline, who attacked them. These High Church controversialists were too half-hearted and too shallow, and understood their own principles too imperfectly, to be a match for antagonists who were in deadly earnest, and put them ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... the brute seemed scarcely aware that anything unusual had gone down his throat; but, as he was making another dart at the boat, he suddenly began to move about in an eccentric way—as Paddy said, "as if something troubled him in his inside," and then, turning away, buried his huge body in the mud, while his tail lashed the water into foam. Round the spot above where his head was probably hidden, a red circle was formed, which, whirling round in the eddies of the ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... had a truly wonderful memory. He seemed to remember every sample he had ever seen—goods, lines, trimmings, price, and all. He was an eccentric man. Sometimes he would receive a crowd of salesmen in rapid succession, inspect their merchandise and hear their prices without making any purchase. Later, sometimes on the same day, he would send out orders for the "numbers" ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... almost deafening, and at a glance they saw that the steam was escaping furiously from the two long boilers at the end farthest from where they stood, but the new bright engine, with its cylinders, pistons, rods, cranks, driving-wheel, governor, and eccentric, seemed to ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... many Browning is only a joke, Whitman an eccentric, Dante insane and Turner a pretender. These have all sought to express things which the many can not feel, and consequently they have been, and are, the butt of jokes and jibes innumerable. "Except ye become as little children," etc.—and yet the scoffers are often people of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... sagged about them at intervals, weighted down with the dust; but again it rippled like a sail when an eccentric gust swept ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... turn from systematic objectivity to my unsystematic reminiscences of many years. Of course, they abound with eccentric abnormities and startling phenomena. As I have devoted myself to psychotherapeutics, always and only from scientific interest, as a part of my laboratory studies and therefore have refused to spend any time on cases which offered no special ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... Mercedes lived on in the little brick house, as he had promised. Only one thing the Bowdoins noticed: he now dressed and talked and acted like a man grown very old. His coats were different again; his manner was more eccentric than ever. His hair helped him a little, for it really grew quite white. He asked Mercedes now to ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... unity of effect. The bearing-arches, which span it from bay to bay, being parti-coloured, with voussures of alternate white and a kind of grey or green, [134] being also somewhat flat at the keystone, and literally eccentric, have, at least for English eyes, something of a Saracenic or other Oriental character. Again, it is as if the architects—the engineers—who worked here, had seen things undreamt of by other Romanesque builders, the ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Sybarite, "the first moth. Don't be precipitate, my dear fellow. Aunt Dora, pray sit quietly where you are, and don't disturb our operations. It is only a moth, to be sure; but don't let us cut short the moments of a creature that has no hereafter," said Jack, solemnly. He disturbed them all by this eccentric manifestation of benevolence, and flapped his handkerchief round Miss Dora, upon whose white cap the unlucky moth, frightened by its benefactor's vehemence, was fluttering wildly. Jack even forgot himself so far as to swear softly in French at the frightened insect as it ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... Camden says that Drinkwater is a corruption of Derwentwater. The incorrectness of this guess is shown by the existence as surnames of Fr. Boileau, It. Bevilacqua, and Ger. Trinkwasser. It is in fact a perfectly natural nickname for a medieval eccentric, the more normal attitude being represented by Roger Beyvin (boi-vin), who died in ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... century before, about the time when a great army passed over those parts, at a political crisis, one result of which was the final absorption of his small territory in a neighbouring dominion. Restless, romantic, eccentric, had he passed on with the victorious host, and taken the chances of an obscure soldier's life? Certain old letters hinted at a different ending—love-letters which provided for a secret meeting, preliminary perhaps to the final departure of the young Duke ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... convince men of the truth, or to lead them to think aright. The subtle human intellect can weave its mists over even the clearest vision. Remember that it is eccentric enough to ask unanimity from a jury; but to ask it from any large number of men on any point of political faith is amazing. You can hardly get two men in any Congress or Convention to agree;—nay, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... a clear, legible hand. Form a, o, u, n, e, i, properly. Write out and horizontally. Avoid unnecessary flourishes in capitals, and curlicues at the end of words. Dot your i's and cross your t's; not with circles or long eccentric strokes, but simply and accurately. Let your originality express itself not in ornate penmanship, or unusual stationery, or literary affectations, but in the force and keenness of ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... like Venus as painted by the ancients—why, I cannot think, for however fair a squint-eyed woman may be otherwise, I always look upon her face as distorted. I am sure that if Venus had been in truth a goddess, she would have made the eccentric Greek, who first dared to paint her cross-eyed, feel the weight of her anger. I was told that when Corilla sang, she had only to fix her squinting eyes on a man and the conquest was complete; but, praised be God! she did not fix them ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the success of which he came to think, in the latter part of his life, that the best interests of the community were dependent. The number of these honorably ambitious but ill-informed and somewhat eccentric testators increases every year, as the country grows in wealth and the habit of giving to ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... had been so anxiously expected, at length arrived, and the spell, which had bound every one to the spot was dissolved in a moment; they were then conducted to the king, and formally introduced to him, but the grave eccentric old man shook hands with them, without taking them from the tobe in which they had been enveloped, or even condescending to look in their faces, for he never made it a practice to raise his head above a certain height, fearing that he should discover the ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Subject to frequent {lossage}. This use is of course related to the common slang use of the word to describe a person as eccentric, crazy, or just unreliable. A system that is flaky is working, sort of — enough that you are tempted to try to use it — but fails frequently enough that the odds in favor of finishing what you start are low. Commonwealth ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... "Enough of him. Seems eccentric. I have to see a lot of buggy people. They don't take me in any more. But I'm keeping you and I'm in a hurry myself. ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... that inhabit the country around them—even the strong heavy rhinoceros is not feared by them, though the latter frequently foils and conquers them. Young elephants sometimes become their prey. The fierce buffalo, the giraffe, the oryx, the huge eland, and the eccentric gnoo, all have to succumb to ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... Valdarno with a sneer. "That angel of beauty has the ineffably eccentric idea that she loves that old transparency, that old magic-lantern slide of ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... creature in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a mean figure to look at. You can make your own comment; I am fanciful, you know. I believe she is trying to idealize what we vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light of one of Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections, though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like the circle and ellipse. At any rate, I cannot help referring this paradise of ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... were usually the same,—he was merely hoping for that relaxation and diversion which should freshen and fit him for later concentration. Still, he had often heard of the odd circumstances to which his craft were sometimes indebted for suggestion. The invasion of an eccentric-looking individual—probably an innocent tradesman into a railway carriage had given the hint for "A Night with a Lunatic;" a nervously excited and belated passenger had once unconsciously sat for ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... seriously, he was a puzzle to all who knew him, and had he died at this time he would only have left behind him the reputation of being one of the most brilliant, gifted, and honest, but at the same time one of the most unstable, eccentric, and ill regulated spirits of ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... around her, and said gently: "Poor child; it is cruel to make you suffer so. But rest assured Dr. Hartwell will never wound your feelings. I have heard that he was a very stern and eccentric man, though a remarkably learned one, yet I confess there is something in his manner which fascinates me, and if you will only be like yourself he will always speak kindly to you. But I am staying too long. Don't look so forlorn and ghostly. Positively I hate to come to see ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... recorded on several occasions at intervals of seventy-five or seventy-six years, he was led to the conclusion that these several apparitions related to one and the same object, which was an obedient vassal of the sun, performing an eccentric journey round that luminary in a period of seventy-five or seventy-six years. To realise the importance of this discovery, it should be remembered that before Halley's time a comet, if not regarded ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... history of this singular case may afford some hints and comfort to parents with children afflicted (as was my dear AUGUSTUS) with a disease so eccentric ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... dyspepsia, you sit still and grow in stature and knowledge. By Jove! you are too big to wear my cast-off suits now. My valet will bless the increase of your outward man, and I don't think you have at all profited by the circumstance. Where the deuce did you get that eccentric turn-out? It certainly does not ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... self-discipline. The great catastrophe, the ruinous blow, which rendered him hopeless, is told in the Memoir; but there are particulars which help to account for it. Hartley had spent his school-days under a master as eccentric as he himself ever became. The Rev. John Dawes of Ambleside was one of the oddities that may be found in the remote places of modern England. He had no idea of restraint, for himself or his pupils; and when they arrived, punctually or not, for morning school, they sometimes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... importance of his lot; he was proud of his hereditary honours, blended, as they were, with some glorious passages in the history of his country, and prouder of his still more ancient line. The eccentric exploits and the violent passions, by which his race had been ever characterised, were to him a source of secret exultation. Even the late lord, who certainly had no claims to his gratitude, for he had ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... Una than with the bouncing girls who were natives of Harlem. But he smiled at her, as though they were understanding friends, and once he said, but quietly, rather respectfully, "You have nice hair—soft." She lay awake to croon that to herself, though she denied that she was in love with this eccentric waster. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... the next scene two servants appeared with orders to clean out and remove the old chest from the landing. Hippy and Jessica, as the two mischievous prying servants, enacted their part to perfection. Hippy carrying a broom and dust pan, did one of the eccentric dances, for which he was famous, while Jessica, armed with a huge duster, tried ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... Richard made up his mind that the Christmas Eve dance would be a strictly family affair. "Probably the country relatives are a queer lot," he decided, "and the Grays don't care to show them off. Still—that's not like them, either. It's certainly like them to do such an eccentric thing as to get their cousins all here and try to give them a good time. I should like to ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... Arnold, alluding to an eccentric work of rationalizing tendencies written by an English scholar, and using M. Renan as his mouthpiece, expresses the opinion that 'an extravagance of this sort could never have come from Germany where there is a great force of critical opinion controlling ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... the path, and carry out the plans, of his predecessor. Great enterprises, commenced under one, were continued by another, and completed by a third. Thus, while all acted on a regular plan, without any of the eccentric or retrograde movements which betray the agency of different individuals, the state seemed to be under the direction of a single hand, and steadily pursued, as if through one long reign, its great career of civilization ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... much so that at first sight of the trapper and the Clown—two men whom Thayor had pointed out to him as being his most reliable assistants next to Holcomb—his only thought had been how Sam Thayor could have such eccentric boors on the place. He noticed, too, with irritation and astonishment, that none of the men raised their hats until Alice and Margaret arrived on the scene; then not a man among them ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... upon masses, not details; upon the use and shaping, not the ornamentation of features; and very few show half so plainly that mediaeval architects could realize this fact. We are too apt to think that Gothic art cannot be individual without being eccentric, or interesting without being heterogeneous ... but Salisbury is both grand and lovely, and yet it is quiet, rational, and all of a piece, clear and smooth, and refined to the point of utmost purity. No building in the world is more logical, more lucid in expression, more restful ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... Del Monte ate a box of bluing once, but it didn't hurt him. Later, however, he lost his mind and ran madly up the street, bumping into fences, rolling in gutters, and pursuing his eccentric course out of Amory's life. Amory cried on ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the door a figure which drew a stare of surprise from Markeld, accustomed as he was to eccentric habiliment. It was arrayed in a long, mouse-gray frock coat and shiny black trousers; a hand gloved in lavender kid carried a top hat, while the other caressed, from time to time, the carefully-waxed mustachios ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... off in the shallow dales of Hertfordshire there lies a village of great beauty, and I doubt not of admirable virtue, but of eccentric and unbalanced literary taste, which asked the present writer to come down to it on Sunday afternoon and ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... elsewhere sagely observes, "with more or less of what is truly remorse;" but he seems rather to have enjoyed even the remorse. It is needless to say that the complacency was its own reward, and that the resolution vanished like other more eccentric impulses. Music, he once told Johnson, affected him intensely, producing in his mind "alternate sensations of pathetic dejection, so that I was ready to shed tears, and of daring resolution so that I was inclined ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... got on capitally together. Frank soon become accustomed to the veteran's eccentric manners, and made great proficiency in his exercises. And it was not long before the hard-featured old drummer began to manifest, in his way, a great deal of friendly interest ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... extraordinary attention which had been given to the defense of the door. Besides the usual lock and key, it possessed two solid bolts, fastening inside at the top and the bottom. It had been one among the many eccentric sides of Reuben Limbrick's character to live in perpetual dread of thieves breaking into his cottage at night. All the outer doors and all the window shutters were solidly sheathed with iron, and had alarm-bells attached to them on a new principle. ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... springy and soft. But the mischief and spirit of both the runaways combined would not match his case. He did not indeed appear to be vicious, any further than a most vehement desire to please himself and that in all manner of eccentric ways, totally irrelevant to the purpose of getting ahead on the road or serving the will of his rider, might be called vice. It rather seemed the spirit of power in full play. However it were, there was no lack of either 'motion' or 'emotion' during the first ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... other all of our lives, and, although I have always regarded you as eccentric, I never saw you so completely off your balance before. The idea of you, with your proud family name, your vast wealth in land and negroes, intending to marry one of them, is a mystery I cannot solve. Do explain to me why you are going to take this extremely ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... necessary preface to any consideration of his literary work. Soon after his birth at Kensington (London) in 1846 his mother died, and thenceforward through all his youth he seems to have received little advice or attention from relations. His father, a barrister and literary man of retired and eccentric habits, exercised over him a merely nominal authority, and so he had liberty to gratify a spirit of inquiry and curiosity notably beyond his years. At his own home he became the pet of his father's acquaintances, a set ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... had become involved in a difference of opinion with the authorities. Though the matter was never made quite clear, it was generally believed that Wyllard had quietly borne the blame of a comrade's action, for there was a vein of eccentric generosity in the lad. In any case, he left Toronto, and the relative, who was largely interested in the fur business, next sent him north to the Behring Sea. The business was then a hazardous one, for the skin buyers and pelagic sealers ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... weed-like sea-anemones which outshone them in colored sheen. Fantastic pink-and-orange crabs sidled awkwardly but nimbly this way and that. Tiny sea-horses, yet more fantastic, slipped shyly from one weed-covert to another, aware of a possible peril in every gay but menacing bloom. And just above this eccentric life of the shoal sea-floor small fishes of curious form shot hither and thither, live, darting gleams of gold and azure and amethyst. Now and again a long, black shadow would sail slowly over the scene of freakish life—the shadow of a ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... I noticed when passing through the flat to the stoke- hold, which was, of course, on a still lower level, was working away pretty easily, the piston in the cylinder moving steadily up and down, and the eccentric, which always appeared to me as a sort of bandy-legged giant, executing its extraordinary double-shuffle in a more graceful fashion than when we were going at full speed, as it performed its allotted task of curvetting the up-and-down motion ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... to know who wrote it! Hm. . . . It is certainly a woman's writing. . . . The letter is written with genuine feeling, and so it can hardly be a joke. . . . Most likely it's some neurotic girl, or perhaps a widow . . . widows are frivolous and eccentric as a rule. Hm. . . . Who ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... She found her fate in an Englishman, who was the father of her only child, a daughter. She thought she had met in him a hero, a demi-god, a being of deep passion and original and creative mind; but he was only a voluptuary, full of violence instead of feeling, and eccentric, because he had great means with which he could gratify extravagant whims. Stella found she had made the great and irretrievable mistake. She had exchanged devotion for a passionate and evanescent fancy, prompted at first by vanity, and daily dissipating under the ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... most legitimate and most indispensable of ties. Even the Holy Scriptures, which were now circulated everywhere, while they imparted light and nurture to the sincere inquirer after truth, were the source also whence an eccentric fanaticism contrived to extort the virulent poison. The good cause had been compelled to choose the evil road of rebellion, and the result was what in such cases it ever will be so long as men remain men. The ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... it gay? She's a bit eccentric, and she advertised for a companion, saying the application must be a written one. So I pranced up to her house this ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... not subdue John Wesley: he was the original circuit- rider, and his steed was a Pegasus that took the fences of orthodoxy at a bound, often to the great consternation and grief of theological squatters. He was regarded as peculiar, eccentric, strange, extravagant, just as any man ever has been and would be today who attempted to pattern his life after that of the Christ. Perhaps it is needless to say that the followers of John Wesley do ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... are a scamp of the first water goes without saying, insinuating yourself into an eccentric old man's confidence in hopes to be his heir! I dare say, Amy is his daughter, and you will have to work for a living after all, and serve you right, too. But have a good time while you can, and I'll help you after a little, as I ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... him the soft voice of Madame Choudey, the hostess, could be heard. She was frankly gossiping and laughing a little. The name of the Marquise de Caron was mentioned. Delaven had told him of her—an aristocrat and an eccentric—a philanthropist who was now aged. For years herself and her son had been the patrons—the good angels of struggling genius, of art in every form. But the infamous 2d of December had ended all that. He was one of the "provisionally exiled;" he had died in Rome. Madame La ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... official had a moment of doubt. But he reflected that one is not a great artist without being eccentric; ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... furs, the fall before, having intrusted his interests to the care of Phillips; and now feeling, with the others, apprehensive for the result of the new expedition, he was anxiously awaiting the return of the absent trappers. Tomah, the eccentric young Indian, likewise had surprised the settlers by his sudden reappearance among them, in a suit of superfine broadcloth, hat and boots to match, gold watch, showy seals, and all the gewgaw etceteras that go to make up the animal they call a city dandy. ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... [Meditatively.] I cannot at the present moment recall what the General's Christian name was. But I have no doubt he had one. He was eccentric, I admit. But only in later years. And that was the result of the Indian climate, and marriage, and indigestion, and other things of ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... doubtless strengthened by Mr. Lincoln, whose homely but astute reasoning convinced him that the better and safer line of operations was overland against Lee's army wherever it might be encountered, and not through a widely eccentric movement by water to a secondary base on the James River and thence ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... Anglo- Saxons, simply and sincerely rooted in the German nature, we are not and cannot be; all we have accomplished by our onesidedness is to blur and confuse the natural basis in ourselves altogether, and to become something eccentric, unattractive, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... valley, quite enclosed by mountains. The present attorney has been in the island nine years, and is attorney for several other properties. In England he was a religious man, and intimately acquainted with the eccentric Irving. For a while after he came out he preached to the slaves, but having taken a black concubine, and treating those under his charge oppressively, he soon obtained a bad character among the blacks, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... although with a sufficiency to hire, if not keep, a carriage. She was, moreover, an authoress, having written two or three novels, not very good I was told, but still, emanating from the pen of a lady, they were well paid. She was very eccentric, and rather amusing. When a woman says everything that comes into her head, out of a great deal of chaff there will drop some few grains of wheat; and so sometimes, more by accident than otherwise, she said what is called a good thing. Now, a good thing is repeated, while all the nonsense ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... you Tom!" called John Mayrant; and after the man had come from the kitchen: "You may put the punch-bowl and things on the table, and clear away and go to bed. My Great-uncle Marston Chartain," he continued to me, "was of eccentric taste, and for the last twenty years of his life never had anybody to dinner but the undertaker." He paused at this point to mix the punch, and then resumed: "But for all that, he appears to have been a lively old gentleman to the end, and left us his version ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... Gabler, no doubt most of the dialogue would be given right at the back of the stage, out of ear-shot of the audience. In ordinary dramas the Villain who may have to use strong language, or in farce the Eccentric Comedian who frequently has to utter more or less playfully a meaningless "big big D," would by Imperial command be compelled to "retire up" to deliver himself of the expletive, and then would have to "come down to the front" and continue the stage-business. ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 101, November 21, 1891 • Various
... of age, through the influence of Mr. Barrett, an eccentric teacher who came to the village, he decided to go to college, and in six months he prepared for the sophomore class of Brown University. This preparation was a tremendous undertaking which broke down his health for life. He now had an opportunity to satisfy the cravings for knowledge, ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... are rather common, but still I have a great affection for these, because they were given to me by a dear old friend of our family named Murphy. He was a very charming man, but very eccentric. We always supposed he was an Irishman, but after be got rich he went abroad for a year or two, and when he came back you would have been amused to see how interested he was in a potato. He asked what it was! Now you know ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Louis Suffrage Association to go to Kansas and help in the woman's campaign. Accordingly he telegraphed that if the committee wanted him he was ready, would pay his own expenses and win every Democratic vote. Miss Anthony never had seen Mr. Train; she merely knew of him as very wealthy and eccentric. The Republicans not only had forsaken the women but were waging open war upon them. The sole hope of carrying the amendment was by adding enough Democratic votes to those of Republicans who would not obey their party orders to vote against it. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper |
