"Ludicrously" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one another, and there was in their eyes the half-bitter, half-weary smile of those to whom the cure prescribed is ludicrously impossible. It was Winifred who ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... scene of the outrage closely. For this purpose, he had started for the school-house fully an hour before his usual time. He was even light-hearted enough to recognize the humorous aspect of Uncle Ben's appeal to him, and his own ludicrously paradoxical attitude, and as he at last passed from the dreary flat into the fringe of upland pines, he was smiling. Well for him, perhaps, that he was no more affected by any premonition of the day before ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... any external suggestion, and by this reflection alone I was still further sundered from the faith in which I had been trained. I gathered very diligently all I could pick up about the Greek gods and their statues; it was not much, it was indeed ludicrously little and false, but it was a germ. And at this aesthetic juncture I was drawn into what was really rather an extraordinary ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... greed of power and the greed of gain. They interfere with the projects of those venerable politicians who are continually appealing to the public to surrender, bit by bit, its humanity, its morality, its Christianity, for what are ludicrously misnamed practical advantages, and who slowly sap the moral vitality of a people through an insinuating appeal to their temporary interests. The heart of a nation may be eaten out by this process, without its losing any external signs of prosperity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... How was it possible that he—plain Horace Ventimore, a struggling architect who had missed his one great chance—could have achieved (especially without even being aware of it) anything that would not seem ludicrously ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... snail's pace through the sharp flints, she showed in a thousand ways how high the gaiety of her animal spirits had mounted. She sang airy little pieces of songs. She uttered single clear notes. She mocked, with a ludicrously feminine croak, the hoarse voice of a crow sailing over them. She rallied Bennington mercilessly on his corduroys, his yellow flapped pistol holster, his laced boots. She went over in ridiculous pantomime the scene of the ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... Lovelace to Belford.— He ludicrously turns Belford's arguments against him. Resistance inflames him. Why the gallant is preferred to the husband. Gives a piece of advice to married women. Substance of his letter to Lord M. desiring him to give the lady ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... evidence of the bitter necessity which had prompted this illegal invasion of pastoral leasehold. There were (including myself) 23 claimants, present in person, or arriving by twos or threes. A few of these were ludicrously abashed; others were insolent; but the large majority observed a fine nonchalance, shading down to apathy. And Mr. Smythe, true to his order of mind, treated the first with outrageous contumely, the second ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Half the clinging-vine love with which women entwine their husbands is not love at all, but a nameless anxiety due to their sense of helplessness. Transpose the conditions of each and the same beseeching look so often seen in women's faces will be ludicrously mixed with the whiskers on the faces of their lords. The only ineradicable difference between men and women is gender. They are singularly alike in every other particular. Give a woman liberty, and she will go a man one better in license. Take a man's liberty from him, and ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... comedy-piece, where you see two sofas and three little tables, to which a man enters with his hat on, to talk to another man—and in respect of which you know exactly when he will get up from one sofa to sit on the other, and take his hat off one table to put it upon the other—which strikes one quite as ludicrously as a good farce.[199]. . . There seems to be a good piece at the Vaudeville, on the idea of the Town and Country Mouse. It is too respectable and inoffensive for me to-night, but I hope to see it before I leave . . . I have a horrible idea of making friends with Franconi, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... ungrammatically. As the Swiss force out their guttural tones from the lowest depth of their throats, and with the strongest possible aspiration, so do the Peruvians of the Cordillera. The inhabitants of the sand flats of North Germany, on the contrary, impart a ludicrously soft sound to the harsher consonants; and the same peculiarity is observable in the people who inhabit the coast ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... had readily picked up a good many French words, in the course of her sojourn; but her Gallic pronunciation was blended with all the other dialects, among which the brogue of her own mother tongue ludicrously enough predominated. ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... how soon he would begin to regard the "emolument" as ludicrously inadequate, he set to work on "Pickwick." The first part was published on the 31st of March or 1st ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... the Second's temper, several examples have been given: but it was never, perhaps, more ludicrously displayed than in his first interview with Dr. Ward. The King having been afflicted for some time with a violent pain in his thumb, for which his regular medical attendants could afford him no relief, he sought the assistance of Ward, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... from this circumstance. The perforation of the cartilage that divides the nostrils, and the strange disfiguring ornament of a long bone or stick thrust through it, was now observed, as described by Captain Cook; and the same appellation of sprit-sail yard, was ludicrously applied to it by the sailors. But several very old men were seen in this excursion who had not lost the tooth, nor had their noses prepared to receive that grotesque appendage: probably, therefore, these are marks of distinction: ambition must have its badges, and where cloaths are not worn, the ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... stepped out into the main avenue, and now returned with the fallen sword, which looked ludicrously large and theatrical when attached to his dumpy figure, at once clerical and commonplace. "Just before the police come," he said apologetically, ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... position, being last developed, suffer first and heaviest. The bowed back, the droop of the shoulders, the hanging jaw, and the shuffling gait, tell the story of chronic, wasting disease more graphically than words. We have a ludicrously inverted idea of cause and effect in our minds about "a good carriage." We imagine that a ramrod-like stiffening of the backbone, with the head erect, shoulders thrown back and chest protruded, is a cause of health, instead of simply being an effect, or one of the incidental symptoms ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... that its visor almost hid the weak eyes sunkenly peering from under droopy eyebrows, his pompous rooster-like body immaculately attired in a shiny uniform, his puttees sleeked, his cross polished)—The Fencer. There was a renovated look about him which made me laugh. Also his pose was ludicrously suggestive of Napoleon ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... was not singular in confounding Dati and Deodati; it has been done by Fenton and others: but that Dr. Symmons, in his Life of Milton (p. 133.), should transform La Tina into a wine-press, is ludicrously amusing. La Tina is the rustic mistress to whom the sonnets are supposed to be addressed; and every one knows that rusticale and contadinesca is that naive and pleasing rustic style in which the Florentine poets delighted, from the expressive nature ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... a succession of great periods. Louis XIV, though beautiful at its best, is of the three the most ornate and is characterised in its worst stage by the extremely bowed (cabriole) legs of the furniture, ludicrously suggestive of certain debauched courtiers who surrounded ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... Japanese display both taste and its lack in the choice of colors for clothing; this contradiction is the more striking in view of the taste manifest in the decorations of the homes of all classes of the people. Few sights are more ludicrously unaesthetic than the red, yellow, and blue worsted crocheted caps and shawls for infants, which shock all our ideas ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... shout behind me. The men checked, sprawling over each other in the snow—ludicrously, if I had been seeing much humor in things—and it was then it struck me that I should have had an accident if I had bolted straight into a dark house, instead of delaying in the stable till Macartney's gang got ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... in the Rue St. Honore, near the Palais Royal, to take one of our daily rambles. On going out we saw approaching, in the direction of the market, a mob, which Bonaparte calculated at five or six thousand men. They were all in rags, ludicrously armed with weapons of every description, and were proceeding hastily towards the Tuilleries, vociferating all kinds of gross abuse. It was a collection of all that was most vile and abject in the purlieus of Paris. "Let us follow the mob," said Bonaparte. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... kicking up ludicrously in the air attracted the attention of Carl, who could not refrain from ...
— The Wizard of the Sea - A Trip Under the Ocean • Roy Rockwood
... Bull of Bashan: Psalm XXII, 12-13] one of the policemen swung his elbow around and hit him in the belly and knocked him through the doorway, so that the last part of the bawl was outside in the alleyway; it struck me so ludicrously to think how the fellow must have looked when he found himself "hollering" outside that I could not refrain from laughing outright. The audience immediately stopped its uproars, wondering what I was laughing at, and that gave me another chance, and I caught it. So we kept on for about ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... imagine a hungry wolf feels, when crouching to catch a tender ewe lamb he finds that the watchful shepherd has safely locked it in the fold. Evidently he believes that you and Erle Palma have conspired to starve him out, and really he is ludicrously irate. Don't trifle with his expanding affections; they are not quite fledged yet, and are easily bruised. Deal with him kindly; he is better than his cousin, better than any of us. What have you done to render him ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Berlin; one cannot take account of New York, which is merely the commercial metropolis of America, with a possibility of becoming the business centre of both hemispheres. Washington is still in its nonage and of a numerical unimportance in which it must long remain almost ludicrously inferior to other capitals, not to dwell upon its want of anything like artistic, literary, scientific, and historical primacy. It is the voluntary political centre of the greatest republic of any time and of a nation which is already unrivalled in its claim upon the future. ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... and nearly 300,000 were reported as armed, either with firelocks or pikes. Of this total, 110,000 alone were returned for Ulster; about 60,000 for Leinster, and the remainder from Connaught and Munster. A fund, ludicrously small, 1,400 pounds sterling, remained in the hands of the Executive, after all the outlay which had taken place, in procuring arms, in extending the union, and in defending prisoners arrested as members of the society. Lord ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... used to send up a prayer for humility, lest evil and downfall of pride come to her. She was a pious woman, a member of the First Baptist Church, and active in charitable work. Mrs. Norman Lloyd adored her husband, and her estimate of him was almost ludicrously different from that of the grimy men who flocked to his factory, she seeing a most kindly spirited and amiable man, devoting himself to the best interests of his employes, and striving ever for their benefit rather than his own, and the others seeing an aristocrat by birth and training, ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... keen Gammon enjoyed anything more exquisitely than the scene which I have been describing. To a man of his practical sagacity in the affairs of life, and knowledge of human nature, nothing could appear more ludicrously contemptible than the conduct of poor Tag-rag. How differently are the minds of men constituted! How Gammon despised Tag-rag! And what opinion has the acute reader by this ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... literature, and may fairly diverge into a little politics; but it is certainly comic when he suddenly remembers one of Landor's pet grievances, and the unlucky Rousseau has to discuss a question for which few people could be more ludicrously unfit—the details of a plan for reforming the institution of English justices of the peace. The grave dignity with which the subject is introduced gives additional piquancy to the absurdity. An occasional laugh ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... convenient sofas or couches round the walls of the apartment, and there, seated on cushions, submitted to be arrayed in bridal apparel. None but a lady's pen could do full justice to her stupendous toilet. We shall therefore do no more than state that the ludicrously high head-dress, in particular, was a thing of unimaginable splendour, and that her ornaments generally were so heavy as to render her incapable ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... said, "the taking of men's property." Melville succeeded in effecting a compromise. Patronage was abolished; but it was enacted that every patron should receive six hundred marks Scots, equivalent to about thirty-five pounds sterling, as a compensation for his rights. The sum seems ludicrously small. Yet, when the nature of the property and the poverty of the country are considered, it may be doubted whether a patron would have made much more by going into the market. The largest sum that any member ventured to propose was nine hundred marks, little more ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... The Australian habit is here followed of using 'bush' for country, though no word could be more ludicrously inapplicable, for there is hardly anything on the way that can really ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... and that movement not only is not dead, but in many communities is gaining strength. What in the name of reason does this nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe economic competition, without political rights, and with ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities? What can it expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country will come to ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... that fight in more ways than one. When I managed to find a candle and light it, I discovered that Stodger was the one who had groaned. He was sitting up, not badly hurt, and staring dazedly at the candle. His mouth hung ludicrously open. But in a moment he ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... face, dearest to the daughter's heart—rude studies, in charcoal, of natural objects—outlines, from memory, of pictures she had seen, among which Meliora's eye proudly discerned several of Mr. Vanbrugh's; while, scattered here and there, were original pencil designs, ludicrously voluminous, illustrating nearly every ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... nor Jacques combined the elements of lasting popularity with those of instant success; but they roused a stir and strife which created an impression of her as a writer systematically inimical to religion and marriage—an impression almost ludicrously at variance with facts, taking her fiction as a whole, but which has only recently begun to give way, in this country, to a ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... birds would sing and flow again and again in many a young head bending carefully over its task. The excursion of the next year was on a grander scale: 250 started from Vauxhall Bridge, to go down the river to Herne Bay, which, though it may sound ludicrously Cockneyfied, was quite as much as the strength, and more than the stomachs of the little candlemakers could stand; yet very delightful, notwithstanding the qualmishness and face-playing of the majority. This year, they are all invited by ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... New York has an aspect very different from that of London, or the large towns in England. One striking feature of it is formed by the number of blacks, many of whom are finely dressed: the females are ludicrously so, generally in white muslin, with artificial flowers and pink shoes. Mr. Fearon saw very few well-dressed white ladies; but this was a time of the year when most of them were absent at the springs of Balston and Saratoga, places of fashionable resort, ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... fashionable trash of the day, were gratified with untiring good-nature. Somehow I thought that she avoided my eye, and answered my remarks with less than her usual archness and vivacity. I could bear it on this evening less than ever; a hair will turn the scale, and I had just been, half ludicrously, half seriously, affected by Welsh nationality. One cannot help warming towards a community which are so warm-hearted among themselves. Visions of I know not what—love and a living, Clara and a cottage—were floating dreamlike before ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... there's great allowance," said she, "to be made for him, that lost his son and heir—that would have been heir to all, and a fine youth that he doted upon. But," continued the old woman, in whose mind the transitions from great to little, from serious to trivial, were ludicrously abrupt, "that was no reason why the old gentleman should scold me last time he was here, as he did, for as long as ever he could stand over me, only because I killed a mouse who was eating my cheese; and, before night, he beat a boy ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... six inches in length, project from the cuffs, which come not far below his elbows. The coat itself is what is called a jerkin; and as the buttons behind are half-way up his back, it is a matter of course that the tail, which runs rapidly to a point, is ludicrously scanty. Now, that youth, who is probably under no sense of gratitude to the graces, has put his "co-medher" on the prettiest girl, with one or two exceptions, in the whole parish. The miserable pitch-fork, the longitudinal rake—we speak now in a hay-making ...
— Lha Dhu; Or, The Dark Day - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... the Secret Service is that it has no worrying audit. That Service is ludicrously starved, of course, but the funds are administered by a few men who do not call for vouchers or present itemized accounts. Mahbub's eyes lighted with almost a Sikh's love of money. Even Lurgan's impassive face changed. He considered ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... instant he was sitting ludicrously in the snow, Gerald's fist having rung against the side of his head. But Loerke pulled himself together, rose, quivering, looking full at Gerald, his body weak and furtive, but his ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... mind the picture of a little man I had seen that day, a suburban commuter by his looks, frowning from a ferryboat upon a cheering crowd of strikers. I laughed to myself as I thought of him. He had seemed so ludicrously small. ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... 13] 'You mean like the dream presented to my mind when under the influence of the night-mare. This is most ludicrously expressed.' ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of course, offer our eighty-nine per cent of "pagans, I regret to say" the alternative of death or Christianity but for a vague impression that these lost ones are all being converted gradually by the missionaries. But no statesman can entertain such ludicrously parochial delusions. No English king or French president can possibly govern on the assumption that the theology of Peter and Paul, Luther and Calvin, has any objective validity, or that the Christ is more than ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... harnessed to a dust-covered buggy, whose strained fore-axle, bent by the last mile of heavy road, had slanted the tops of the fore-wheels towards each other at an alarming angle. The light, graceful dress and elegant parasol of the young girl, who occupied half of its single seat, looked ludicrously pronounced by the side of the slouching figure and grimy duster of the driver, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... to the roots of Greg's hair, suffusing his face. But Mr. Brayton had already turned to another candidate whom he found in a ludicrously bad position. After some minutes of this attempt to instruct the candidates in the seemingly simple matter of standing correctly, Brayton gave the welcome ...
— Dick Prescott's First Year at West Point • H. Irving Hancock
... it was impossible not to think of the line about 'a pard-like spirit'. He was dressed just in the ordinary way, except that he wore a low blue collar, and blue shirt and tie, all uncommon in those days. Evidently he did not want to be conspicuous, but the whole effect was almost ludicrously beautiful." ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. A dozen were added to them from the pure well of Welsh undefiled, and mark the districts settled by Cambro-Britons. Out of our Bibles we got thirty-three Hebrew appellations, nearly all ludicrously inappropriate; and these we have been very fond of repeating. In California, New Mexico, Texas, Florida, and the Louisiana purchase, we bought our names along with the land. Fine old French and Spanish ones they are; some thirty of them names ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... in the same form, under the title of The Tatler Revived, which I believe was 'born but to die.' Johnson was, I think, not very happy in the choice of his title, The Rambler, which certainly is not suited to a series of grave and moral discourses; which the Italians have literally, but ludicrously translated by Il Vagabondo; and which has been lately assumed as the denomination of a vehicle of licentious tales, The Rambler's Magazine. He gave Sir Joshua Reynolds the following account of its getting this name: 'What ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... icy streams, at the largest of which we halted, not willing to get wet in fording. The Indian attendant promptly carried us over on his back. When my turn came I told him I would ford, but he bowed his shoulders in so ludicrously persuasive a manner I thought I would try the queer mount, the only one of the kind I had enjoyed since boyhood days in playing leapfrog. Away staggered my perpendicular mule over the boulders into the brawling torrent, ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... vacant a proprietor receives innumerable applications for the vacant office, often from persons ludicrously ignorant of its duties. Thus, some time ago a seeker of such an office accompanied his application—he was a retired army officer—by a sketch of a sort of watch-tower whence he proposed to watch the tenantry, and fire upon them as occasion required! With few exceptions ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... outer hatch they waited until the air pressure reduced to a practically complete vacuum. Their suits distended ludicrously now by the pressure within, they unclamped the hatch and stepped out to the surface of the great copper shell. It vibrated under their feet to the blast from the huge gap that was not five ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... 'Sir,' I replied, rubbing my eyes, 'I am far from convinced that a Christian is permitted to read either newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary interest.' This remark, so ludicrously inapposite to, or rather, incongruous with, the purpose for which I was known to have visited Birmingham, and to assist me in which they were all met, produced an involuntary and general burst of laughter; and seldom indeed have I passed ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... thing, he was mortally afraid that she might suddenly bethink herself of Paul and Virginia, and be annoyed by a situation which was certainly none of his contriving. What was still worse, she might be amused! He could not get it out of his head that there was something dangerously, almost ludicrously, conventional in the whole position; it seemed to suggest some foolish, old-fashioned, sentimental picture. The solitary dell, and the two figures; why, he felt as if blue ribbons were beginning to sprout at his knees; and he feared to turn ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... word can be said—the Oriental "costume" and phraseology have almost entirely disappeared, and between Petis de la Croix and the author of "Gil Blas"—who is said to have had a hand in the work—the tales have become ludicrously Frenchified. The English translation made from the French is, if possible, still worse. We there meet with "persons of quality," "persons of fashion," with "seigneurs," and a thousand and one other inconsistencies and absurdities. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... to remark how the professions fare when they appear in these tales. The Church cannot be said to be treated with respect, for 'Father Lawrence' is ludicrously deceived and scurvily treated by the Master-Thief, No. xxxv; nor does the priest come off any better in Goosey Grizzel, No. xxxiii, where he is thrown by the Farmer into the wet moss. Indeed, it seems as if the popular mind were determined to revenge itself when left to itself, for ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... a reflection ludicrously inappropriate to the occasion passes from guest to guest under the same safe wrapper. Here you have the pleased beatitude of Leonard Astier, who has this very morning received the order of Stanislas (second class), as a return ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... Susan Hayman, the married Forsyte sister, followed her husband at the ludicrously low age of seventy-four, and was cremated, it made strangely little stir among the six old Forsytes left. For this apathy there were three causes. First: the almost surreptitious burial of old Jolyon ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... laughing look ran ludicrously into consternation when, twisting away from the prospect ahead, she happened to look suddenly backward under the looped-up curtain, and saw a head dodging down. Somebody was hanging to the ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... features; the dress was altogether different—but was it not she? I saw her move across the lawn, and take the arm of a tall, venerable-looking man; and his dress was the same as that of the Dean, at the Dulwich Gallery—was it? was it not? To have found her, and a river between us! It was ludicrously miserable—miserably ludicrous. Oh, that accursed river, which debarred me from certainty, from bliss! I would have plunged across—but there were three objections—first, that I could not swim; next, what could I do when I had crossed? ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... a last disgusted glance and, looking ludicrously intellectual in her corded glasses, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... meanings, and the phrase is oftentimes ludicrously mistaken by many individuals. A friend with whom we once travelled thought he was roughing it daily for the space of three weeks, because he was obliged to lunch on cold chicken and un-iced Champagne, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... out, flat on the deck-boards, and wormed his way slowly and ludicrously aft. He did not bring those uncouth vermiculations to a stop until he was well back in the shelter of a rusty capstan, cut off from the light by a lifeboat swinging on its davits. As he clambered to his ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... other people). Not content with making fun of him among themselves, they insist on his seeing the joke. They mimic and caricature him for his own edification. One, pretending to imitate him, goes outside and comes in again in a ludicrously nervous manner, explaining to him afterward that that is the way he—meaning the shy fellow—walks into a room; or, turning to him with "This is the way you shake hands," proceeds to go through a comic pantomime with ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... old woman seized hold of an outlying sack and tried to lift it, a ludicrously impossible feat, at witnessing which a cripple leaner than his crutches laughed boisterously, saying, "Och, good luck to you, granny. You're makin' a great offer at it entirely. Is it often you do be liftin' up the Hill of Howth? More ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... the petty vices to which eaters of the drug are supposed to be peculiarly liable. To be sure, he was not without his eccentricities. He was absent-mindedly careless in his attire, unusual in his hours of waking and sleeping, odd in his habits of work, ludicrously ignorant of the value of money, solitary, prone to whims, by turns reticent and loquacious. But for all his eccentricities, De Quincey—unlike Poe, for example—is not a possible object for pity or patronage; they would be foolish who ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... name to be a good head line; "The Spider and the Fly" was worn out years ago. (3) Either title alone is good; "The Holdup of No. 4" is preferable because of its definiteness. (4) "The Battle of the Black Cats" alone would pass, in spite of its hint of sensationalism; but the second part is of course ludicrously impossible. (5) "Fate" is too indefinite; the second title is cheap and old. (6) Either would do, though the first is somewhat vague, and "Curse" savors of sensationalism. (7) Either would do, though the first sounds rather silly. (8) The first is good; the ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... it has poured with rain every single day since we came, till this one;—and just think!"—said Constance with a ludicrously scared face,—"I must make haste and be back again. You see, I came away on principle, that I may strike with the effect of novelty when I appear again; but if I stay too long, ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... of frequent occurrence on the great plains; some of them wonderful examples of the refracting properties of light. They assumed all manner of fantastic, curious shapes, sometimes ludicrously distorting the landscape; objects, like a herd of buffalo for instance, though forty miles away, would seem to be high in air, often reversed, and immensely magnified ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... would have done very well. Yes, you have a very pretty way, and would have made a very decent, grave speaker." And here she began to imitate Esmond's way of carrying himself and speaking to his face, and so ludicrously that his mistress burst out a-laughing, and even he himself could see there was some likeness in the fantastical ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... of the Indian numbers in any battle given by British or Americans, soldiers or civilians, are ludicrously exaggerated as a rule; even now it seems a common belief of historians that the whites were generally outnumbered in battles, while in reality they were generally much more numerous than ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... their assistance. The command of the army was then handed over to a ridiculous personage named Smythe, who issued proclamations so bombastic that they really must have come from an unsound mind, and then made a ludicrously abortive effort at invasion, which failed almost of its own accord. A British and Canadian force of less than 400 men was foiled in an assault on Ogdensburg, after a slight skirmish, by about 1,000 Americans under ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... write 'em in here, because the snow would freeze our fingers so the ink would spatter all over," said Dot, ludicrously. ...
— The Blue Birds' Winter Nest • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... see clearly themselves are almost always intolerant of those who do not. We often see this ludicrously exemplified, even in the trivial matter of near-sightedness. We are almost always a little vexed, when we point out a distant object to a friend, and hear ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... to take their nocturnal rambles in the most public streets of the metropolis. What heart, so void of sensibility, as not to heave a pitying sigh at their deplorable situation? Vice is not confined to colour, for a black woman is ludicrously exhibited, as suffering the penalty of those frailties, which are imagined peculiar ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... sad forebodings, which the amusements fail to dispel. In the second act, Hernando Cortez appears, with soldiers. While the costumes of the indians were gay, and more or less attractive, those of these European warriors were ludicrously mongrel and unbecoming. The new-comers demanded that Montezuma acknowledge the authority of the King of Spain and the cross of Christ. Conversations, demands, replies, tableaus, sword-dances, ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... generous, serene, and playful, grew absolutely ferocious about politics, as his articles in the "Quarterly Review" showed all the world. Wordsworth, who had some of the irritability and pettishness, mildly described by himself as "gentle stirrings of the mind," which occasionally render great men ludicrously like children, and who was, moreover, highly conservative after his early democratic fever had passed off, grew more and more liberal with advancing years. I do not mean that he verged towards the Reformers,—but that he became more enlarged, tolerant, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... effect of committing them more deeply to this kind of intercourse. Such men shrink with affright from giving hostages to society for a more faithful compliance with its most dismal exactions. To them there is nothing more unendurable than the monotonous round of general hospitalities and ceremonials, ludicrously misnamed pleasure. A detestation of wearisome formalities does not imply any clownish or misanthropic reluctance to remember that those who feel it live in a world with other people, and that a thoroughly social life is the ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... intreating Johnson to write an English epitaph on an English author. His reply was, in the genuine spirit of an old scholar, "he would never consent to disgrace the walls of Westminster abbey with an English inscription." One of his arguments, in favour of a common learned language, was ludicrously cogent: "Consider, sir, how you should feel, were you to find, at Rotterdam, an epitaph, upon Erasmus, in Dutch!" Boswell, iii. He would, however, undoubtedly have written a better epitaph in English, than in Latin. His compositions in that language are not of first rate ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... again for a look of curiosity at the person who could produce so much sound. As he watched him and his nose, like the magnified beak of a hen,—the nose of a man who loves to talk,—he tried a little to imagine those merry evenings spoken of by Aurora. The fellow looked almost ludicrously solemn at this moment. He took himself and his art right seriously, there could be no doubt of it. His face was a map of the emotions expressed by the music, and wore, besides, according to his conception of the part, the look of a great man ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... Himself? And is this a Man, like the rest of us, with blotches and sins, with failures to embody His own ideas, and still more to carry out in life the will that He knows to be God's will? Is this a man like other men who thus speaks to us? If Jesus had this consciousness, either He was ludicrously, tragically, blasphemously, utterly mistaken and untrustworthy, or He is what the Church in all ages has confessed Him to be, 'the Everlasting ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... spirit of the Epic Songs stealing over me. I settled in my own mind the site of Fair-Sun Prince Vladimir's palace of white stone, the scene of great feasts, where he and his mighty heroes quaffed the green wine by the bucketful, and made their great brags, which resulted so tragically or so ludicrously. I was sure I recognized the church where Diuk Stepanovitch "did not so much pray as gaze about," and indulged in mental comments upon clothes and manners at the Easter mass, after a fashion which is not yet obsolete. I imagined that I descried in the blue ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... hand out of his breeches-pocket and stuck it in his back hair for a scratch, giving his hat a tilt over his nose, his one method of invoking wisdom. He stared at the ground with a ludicrously puzzled look, and presently looked up and met East's eyes. That young gentleman slapped him on the back, and then put his arm round his shoulder, as they strolled through the quadrangle together. "Tom," said he, "blest if you ain't ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... of the original authors, as means of cultivating their taste and improving their style. These paradoxes become with them serious grounds of action, upon which they proceed in regulating the most important concerns of the state. Cicero ludicrously describes Cato as endeavouring to act, in the commonwealth, upon the school paradoxes, which exercised the wits of the junior students in the Stoic philosophy. If this was true of Cato, these gentlemen copy after him in the manner of some persons who lived about his time—pede nudo Catonem. ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... calling of names and the introduction of Providence. He is most petulantly disdainful of others when he has nothing but paradoxes with which to oppose their truisms. He has a trick of adopting the manner and expressions of Carlyle, in speaking of incidents and characters to which they are ludicrously inapplicable, and becomes flurried and flippant on occasions where Carlyle would put into the same words his whole scowling and scornful strength. He frequently mistakes sympathy with suffering for insight ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... sensuous charm. The reader feels the author's joy in close analysis, and his sensitive discriminations. In 'Outre-Mer,' especially interesting to Americans as a study of the United States, which he visited in 1894, he shows the same receptivity to new feelings and new ideas. The book is often ludicrously inaccurate, and fundamentally incomplete in that it ignores the great middle class of our people, yet it is full of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... thing to be dealt with, that whole life, the Christ of the Gospels. And I venture to say that any explanation professing to account for Him which leaves out His coming from an unseen world, and His possession of powers above this world of sense and nature, is ludicrously inadequate. Suppose you had a chain which for thousands of years had been winding on to a drum, and link after link had been rough iron, and all at once there comes one of pure gold, would it be reasonable to say that it had been dug from ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... heart with floods of honied love, And every principal street And obscure alley and lane Of the intricate brain With brimming rivers of light and breezes sweet Of the primordial heat; Till, unto view of me and thee, Lost the intense life be, Or ludicrously display'd, by force Of distance; as a soaring eagle, or a horse On far-off hillside shewn, May seem a gust-driv'n rag or a dead stone. Nor by such bonds alone— But more I leave to say, Fitly revering the Wild Ass's bray, Also his hoof, Of which, ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... up. On the shelves all around him were books which it had been his pleasure—because during some of those hard years they were to be had in no other way—to order himself and pay for from his own almost ludicrously meagre salary. He remembered the excitement there always was in getting them fresh from the publisher and bringing them over there in his arms; the satisfaction in coming in next day and finding them ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... Aunt Patience was a privileged character, whose comments upon people and things were free and frequent; when she heard that a party of hunters, accompanied by ladies, proposed to make the hall their temporary headquarters, her remarks were ludicrously indignant. ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... pretended to go to sleep. But she didn't. It was true then. Her miracle, it seemed somehow, had gone ludicrously awry. ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... S. Philibert, in Dijon, now a forage magazine, has an inscription let into the wall almost ludicrously out of keeping with the present desecrated state of the building,—Dilexi Domine Decorem ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... to sleeve. To sleeve silk means to divide or ravel out a thread of silk with the point of a needle till it becomes floss. (A.S. slefan, to cleavedivide.) This, I think, explains the 'sleeveless errand' in 'Troilus and Cressida' so inadequately, sometimes so ludicrously darkened by the commentators. Is not a 'sleeveless errand' one that cannot be unravelled, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Hotel they were plunged into a denser fog than ever, and by means so ludicrously simple that even a budding dramatist would hesitate to avail himself of such a crude device. The police had searched the dead man's clothing without finding any positive clew to his name. His linen ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... coalition, and it was the greatest attempt ever made to mould the form of a society by force into harmony with a speculative form of Government. An explanation which treats self-interest as its primary motive, and judges other elements as merely qualifying it, is ludicrously inadequate. ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... than you would, do not refuse it gravely and sententiously, alleging the folly of staking what would be very inconvenient to one to lose, against what one does not want to win; but parry those invitations ludicrously, 'et en badinant'. Say that, if you were sure to lose, you might possibly play, but that as you may as well win, you dread 'l'embarras des richesses', ever since you have seen what an encumbrance they were to poor Harlequin, and that, therefore, you are determined never to venture the winning ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... jewel-box, fingered it, found it locked, and abandoned her idle project. A gentleman was 'dangerous.' She had not found him so. He had the reputation, perhaps, because he was earnest. Not so very many men are earnest. She called to recollection how ludicrously practical he was in the thick of his passion. His third letter (addressed to the Countess of Ormont—whom he manifestly did not or would not take to be the veritable Countess—and there was much to plead for his error), or ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... You're the red rag, Duke. This spirit of revolt in her—it's ludicrously extravagant; but it will die out in time, when she has become used to being happy and cared for—[partly to himself, with ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... about four feet from the ground, to form a continuous pathway. A man must be a tight-rope walker to stick to the pole trail when ice and snow have sheathed its logs. If he makes a misstep, he is precipitated ludicrously into feathery depths through which he must flounder to the nearest timber horse before he can remount. In summer, as has been said, it resembles nothing so much as a thick one-rail fence of considerable height, around which a fringe ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... tide, the fishermen spend the months of their captivity. Their women live here all the year round, labouring incessantly in drying and salting the fish which have been taken by the men, or pounding prawns into blachan, that evil-smelling condiment which has been so ludicrously misnamed the Malayan Caviare. It needs all the violence of the fresh, strong, monsoon winds to even partially purge these villages of the rank odours which cling to them at the end of the fishing season; and when all has been done, the saltness of ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... plot may be either comical or tragic. Mr. Botts ludicrously fights against a black-hand enemy—who proves to be his mischievous small son. Plump and fussy Mrs. Jellifer lays deep but always transparent plans to outwit her daughter's suitor and is finally entrapped ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... lost amid the sound of the waters. Only the sea talked now, wildly, moodily; flying feathers of foam flecked the night. The boat took the waves laboriously and came down with shrill seething. She seemed ludicrously minute amid that vast unrest. The youth steered steadily; to Betty Dalrymple he seemed just going on anyhow, dashing toward a black blanket with nothing beyond. It was all very wonderful and awe-inspiring as well as somewhat ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... likely to be so close that, to give Democracy any chance to win, the few Democrats opposed to Free-Trade must be quieted, the utterances of the Democratic National Platform of that year, on the subject, were so wonderfully pieced, and ludicrously intermixed, that they could be construed to mean "all things to ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... a moment Beth saw nothing but a mad grotesquerie of horse and man, almost ludicrously unnatural, and crazed ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... to inspire the girl with Nature-worship, though crudely cast in a fashion most likely to attract her, yet failed just then, and failed ludicrously. Her mind comprehended barely enough to accept his idea in a sense suggested by her acquaintance with fable, and when he instanced a rabbit as an earthly manifestation of the Everlasting, she felt she could cap the example from ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... defeated. And yet there is one view of the case which saddens us when we turn our eyes in that direction. Among the reasonings and expostulations of the Schismatic church, one that struck us as the most eminently hypocritical, and ludicrously so, was this: "You ought," said they, when addressing the Government, and exposing the error of the law proceedings, "to have stripped us of the temporalities arising from the church, stipend, glebe, parsonage, but not of the spiritual ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... side, something like that to be seen upon the busts of Julius Caesar, and a long thin nose. One good feature, however, he did possess, a mouth of such sweetness and beauty that set, as it was, above a very square and manly-looking chin, it had the air of being ludicrously out of place. "Umph," said his old aunt, Mrs. Massey (who had just died and left him what she possessed), on the occasion of her first introduction to him five-and-thirty years before, "Umph! Nature meant to make a ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... friends, though the little nurse was ever a threatening shadow in the background. Irene, in short, did not improve with acquaintance. I found her to be high and mighty, chiefly, I think, because she now wore a nurse's cap with streamers, of which the little creature was ludicrously proud. She assumed the airs of an official person, and always talked as if generations of babies had passed through her hands. She was also extremely jealous, and had a way of signifying disapproval of my methods that led to many coldnesses ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... glad to find it no worse that he wasted a moment in embracing the dog, whose delirious joy at the prospect of this probably dinnerless and supperless expedition was ludicrously exaggerated. Then he took up the rope and trundled the chariot gently down a side street ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... called revulsions, as our own. Before urging his "restraints," the President ought to have inquired a little into the history of such restraints; and he would then have saved himself from the absurdity of patronizing remedies which an actual trial had proved ludicrously inapt and inefficacious. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... throat contracted so it hurt her; her face drew up in an unbecoming grimace; she cried with a child's abandon, indifferent to the fact that her tears made her ludicrously ugly. ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... of weakness or vanity, and, without the least personal wish or ambition in public life, may take part in politics solely from a commanding sense of duty, and yet find himself and his efforts not only unavailing for his own purposes, but ludicrously and hopelessly perverted to serve those of others. Honestus was such a man: in the truest sense a patriot in feeling, yet he confessed that he had hitherto neglected his political duties, but declared that henceforth he would lose no opportunity of correcting his conduct. He saw with joy ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... resist the tendency to laugh when a human being stands before you in a ludicrously-meagre costume, making hideous grimaces with his features, and remarkable contortions with his limbs, in the vain efforts to make himself understood by one who does not speak his language! Ned's powers of endurance ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... shallow water, in colonies, and that their nests, BEING PLACED ON RAFTS of buoyant material, float about in the bayous, and are propelled and guided at the will of the sitting bird by the use of her long legs and feet as oars. The position of the bird upon the nest is also ludicrously depicted. It is described as sitting astride the nest, with the toes touching the ground; and to add still more comicality to the picture, it is asserted that the limbs are often thrust out horizontally behind the bird. The results of close observations prove that these accounts are ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... having been coadjutors in his own country—his old friend Gallatin Mackey, in honourable memory among Masons; a Scotchman named Longfellow, whom some French writers have ludicrously confused with the poet; one Holbrook, about whom there are few particulars; and, finally, Phileas Walder, a native of Switzerland, originally a Lutheran Minister, afterwards said to have been a Mormon, but, in any case, at the period ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... stout man had returned to his newspaper, Patty found Gershom standing beside the perambulator, with the black-eyed baby in his arms. He was gazing gravely over the round bald head, and his face wore a funereal expression which contrasted ludicrously with the clucking sounds he was making to the attentive and interested baby. When Patty joined him he put the child back into the carriage, carefully tucking the crocheted robe about the tiny shoulders. "I kind of thought the little one might like a chance to ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... O'Malley, I thought to see the essential futility of all dreamers nakedly revealed. His vision was so fine, sincere, and noble; his difficulty in imparting it so painful; and its marriage with practical action so ludicrously impracticable. At any rate that combination of vision and action, called sometimes genius, which can shake the world, assuredly was not his. For his was no constructive mind; he was not "intellectual"; he saw, but with the heart; he could not build. ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... hair on the face as nature or art can supply, and all wear their hats very much on one side. Believe me, there is on the face of this world no scamp like an English one, no blackguard like one of these half-gentlemen, so mean, so low, so vulgar,—so ludicrously ignorant and conceited, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... noise was heard as if from a score of rattlesnakes, and now the cow-punchers emerged on all sides from the darkness, stepping high, with ludicrously exaggerated caution, and "hist"-ing to one another to observe the utmost prudence in approaching. They formed a solemn, wide circle about the hat, gazing at it in manifest alarm, and seized every few moments by little stampedes of ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... irresistible. The old lady, naturally strong-minded, was nevertheless frail and fading; she was notoriously subject to that confusion of ideas, or, to say the least, of speech, to which age and garrulity are liable. The slight, the very slight, confusion apparent in these expressions is manifest, and is ludicrously easy of correction. 'Aye, aye,' quoth she, and it will be observed that no emendation whatever is necessary to be made in these two initiative remarks, 'Aye, aye! This lantern was carried by my forefather'—not fourth son, which is preposterous—'on the fifth of November. And HE was Guy ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... This name, ludicrously enough, has been bestowed on the range of mountains separating Oregon and California, and also on a county in the latter State. The origin of this designation, as related to me by Mr. Anderson, was as follows. Mr. Archibald R. McLeod, a chief factor ...
— Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, or, Trade Language of Oregon • George Gibbs
... was that of the born combatant. The class that laughed openly at his first tremblingly bashful, and ludicrously inapt answer at quiz, was indelibly photographed upon ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Micawber had a relish in this formal piling up of words, which, however ludicrously displayed in his case, was, I must say, not at all peculiar to him. I have observed it, in the course of my life, in numbers of men. It seems to me to be a general rule. In the taking of legal oaths, for instance, deponents seem ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... the least. I enjoy it excessively. Besides, the shower is just over.—What church is that, Monsieur, with the very disproportionate steeple?" inquired Miselle, pointing to a square gray box, surmounted by a ludicrously short and obtuse spire, expressive of a certain dogged obstinacy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... opened his mouth, shut it again ludicrously, without saying a word, and Margaret gave ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby |
