"Perverse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her express a preference, still more delighted to be able to gratify it by his own exertions. He took off his coat and waistcoat, turned up his shirt cuffs, and set to work. For an hour he laboured under her directions, struggling with pieces of furniture as perverse and obstinate as his wife, but ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... said their good things before these indeliberate authors. Even their own kind—children—have not preceded them. No child in the past ever found the same replies as the girl of five whose father made that appeal to feeling which is doomed to a different, perverse, and unforeseen success. He was rather tired with writing, and had a mind to snare some of the yet uncaptured flock of her sympathies. "Do you know, I have been working hard, darling? I work to buy things ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... a perverse accident turned good Mrs. Teachum's design of giving them pleasure into their sorrow, and raised in their little hearts nothing but strife and anger: for, alas! there happened to be one apple something larger ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... she had made, yet not meaning to make it, of her love to Romeo. She would fain have recalled her words, but that was impossible: fain would she have stood upon form, and have kept her lover at a distance, as the custom of discreet ladies is, to frown and be perverse, and give their suitors harsh denials at first; to stand off, and affect a coyness or indifference, where they most love, that their lovers may not think them too lightly or too easily won; for the difficulty of attainment increases the value of the object. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... a creditor To dun me for a debt But I was "cramped" or "bu'sted"; or I never knew one yet, When I had plenty in my purse, To make the least invasion,— As I, accordingly perverse, Have courted no occasion. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... had desisted from this practice. For these reasons, I the more thought it necessary to investigate the real truth, by putting to the torture two maidens who were called deaconesses; but I discovered nothing, but a perverse and excessive superstition. I have, therefore, deferred taking cognizance of the matter until I had consulted you; for it seemed to me a case requiring advice, especially on account of the number of those in peril. For many of every age, sex, and ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Kashima till Mrs. Vansuythen arrived. She was a charming woman, every one said so everywhere; and she charmed every one. In spite of this, or, perhaps, because of this, since Fate is so perverse, she cared only for one man, and he was Major Vansuythen. Had she been plain or stupid, this matter would have been intelligible to Kashima. But she was a fair woman, with very still gray eyes, the colour of a lake just before the light ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... was of course hard to write when one is being harassed by creditors. But if he had had it in him, it would have come out. The critic had very probably told him the truth. He could not hope to make a living out of literature. He had not the strength to write the masterpiece which the perverse cruelty of nature had permitted him only to see, and he was hopelessly unfit for journalism. But in his simple, wholesome mind there was no bent towards suicide; and he scanned every horizon. Once ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... at once. I had been there. I felt again the remorseless swash of the water over neat boots and immaculate hose; I saw the perverse intricacies of its meanderings over the carpet, upon which the "foolish" pitcher had been confidingly deposited; I knew, beyond the necessity of ocular demonstration, that, as sure as there were "pipe-hole" or crack ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... nothing. Pilate often declared that this office of ruling the Jewish people for the Emperor had been his evil star. He would rather have remained in cultured Rome, whose gods were much more amiable than the perverse Jehovah, about whom all kinds of sects disputed. And then came this Nazarene. When Pilate learnt the reason why he was disturbed from his sleep he cursed. "This stupid business again about the Nazarene who, accompanied ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... plea meets with a deaf ear. "You are stupid, indeed, if not perverse," the god answers Loge, when he delivers their appeal. "You find me in straits myself, how should ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... what the councils conclude and the Pope establishes in the Spiritless papal Church. The fact is, however, the doings of Pope and councils are mere outward matters; they relate to external commands and government. The above theory is, therefore, wholly inconsistent and perverse. Of the work of the Holy Spirit, the Papists make a dead, written law, when it is really a living, spiritual law. Thus they render the Holy Spirit a Moses, and his words mere human prattle. It is all ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... Some evenings, they march straight into their apartment with the directness and precision of soldiers filing into barracks; on others the very Prince of Darkness, backed by the three Fates and the three Furies, apparently takes possession of the perverse, shallow-pated birds. They wander backward and forward, with an air of vacancy as though they knew not what to do; they pass and repass the yawning portal of the turkey house, with heads erect and eyes fixed on futurity, ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... it merely that he must always be able to look Eve in the face? In sending the car for his idle use, Eve had performed a master-stroke which laid him low by its kindliness, its wifeliness, its touches of perverse self-sacrifice and of vague, delicate malice. Lady Massulam hung in the vast hollow of his mind, a brilliant and intensely seductive figure; but Eve hung there too, and Mr. Prohack was obliged to admit that the simple Eve was ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... you ought not to belittle yourself like that. I'm ashamed of you. But I'll tell you one thing: Patty is sometimes a little perverse. She can't seem to help it. She's a perfect dear, but she is a coquette. If you ask me, I think the more glad she is to see you, the more likely she is to be cool ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... exclaim, "How can Bonaparte employ, how dares he confide, in such a man?" Fouche is as able as unprincipled, and, with the most unfeeling and perverse heart, possesses great talents. There is no infamy he will not stoop to, and no crime, however execrable, that he will hesitate to commit, if his Sovereign orders it. He is, therefore, a most useful instrument in the hand of a despot who, notwithstanding what is said to ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... directly back again to Italy.' JOHNSON. 'I should not have wished to be dead to disappoint Campbell, had he been so foolish as you represent him; but I should have wished to have been a hundred miles off.' This was apparently perverse; and I do believe it was not his real way of thinking: he could not but like a man who came so far to see him. He laughed with some complacency, when I told him Campbell's odd expression to me concerning him: 'That having seen such a man, was a thing to talk of a century hence,'—as if he ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... and even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries of injustice and despotism, is but a poor excuse for such perverse blindness. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Paul Henry, has been translated from the German by the Rev. Dr. Henry Stebbing, of London, and we have the first of the two octavos of which it consists, from the press of Robert Carter & Brothers. So much inexcusable ignorance, so much perverse misrepresentation, so much insolent lying, may be found scattered through modern literature, respecting the great Genevan, that Dr. Henry deserves well the thanks of the christian world for exhibiting the chief facts ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... love thee past a change to hate, That word had been thy ruin; but no more, I charge thee, on thy life, perverse ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... cried a man who found An adder coil'd upon the ground, 'To do a very grateful deed For all the world, I shall proceed.' On this the animal perverse (I mean the snake; Pray don't mistake The human for the worse) Was caught and bagg'd, and, worst of all, His blood was by his captor to be spilt Without regard to innocence or guilt. Howe'er, to show the why, these words let fall His judge and jailor, proud and ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... perverse Turk bought for himself, Out of grief for the recent death Of plump Fatme, his favorite wife, From his white-slaver, two former mannequins, in quite good condition— You could almost say: brand new— Just imported from France. When he had them, he ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... Friend Sir ROGER, who I dare say never read this Passage in Plato, told me some time since, that upon his courting the Perverse Widow (of whom I have given an Account in former Papers) he had disposed of an hundred Acres in a Diamond-Ring, which he would have presented her with, had she thought fit to accept it; and that upon her Wedding-Day she should have carried on her Head fifty of the tallest Oaks ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Records. In anticipation of any possible charge of unfairness in judging from isolated instances, we disclaim simply all desire to judge—all wish to do anything beyond relating certain ascertained stories. Let it remain, to those who are perverse enough to insist upon it, an open question whether the monasteries were more corrupt under Henry VIII. than they had been four hundred years earlier. The dissolution would have been equally a necessity; for no reasonable ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... difficulty. My mother was thoroughly mortified by my conduct, and did not hesitate to lecture me soundly on my folly; and my aunt Alice emphatically declared I was the most consummate fool that she had ever seen! I knew it was true; but—so perverse is man—I did not feel at all obliged to her ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... 'T is a strangely perverse thing, the human mind. As there dimly dawned upon me a conception of her meaning,—a knowledge that this seemingly heart-free girl cared enough for me to exhibit such jealousy of another,—I would not undeceive her by a ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... which she bored perseveringly with a needle, that in her fingers seemed almost a skewer, pricking herself ever and anon, marking the cambric with a track of minute red dots; occasionally starting when the perverse weapon—swerving from her control—inflicted a deeper stab than usual; but still silent, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... time of occurrence, which has nevertheless turned and altered his whole career. 'Tis with almost all of us, as in M. Massillon's magnificent image regarding King William, a grain de sable that perverts or perhaps overthrows us; and so it was but a light word flung in the air, a mere freak of perverse child's temper, that brought down a whole heap of crushing woes upon that family whereof Harry ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... brave, true, magnanimous nature that was leaning so tenderly upon Mr. Belcher's arm! And he felt that no woman who was not either shabbily perverse, or a fool, could misinterpret her. He knew that his wife had been annoyed at finding Mrs. Dillingham in the house. He dimly comprehended, too, that her presence was an indelicate intrusion, but her ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... by their selfishness and malignity those great measures by which this country is destined to become great. The war is doing us the glorious service of bringing the 'copperheads' before the people in their true light—the light of foes to equality, to the rights of the many, and as perverse friends of all that is anti-American. Who and what, indeed, are their leaders! Review them all, from FERNANDO WOOD down to the wretched SAULSBURY, including W. B. REED, in whose veins hereditary traitorous blood seems, with every descent, to have acquired a fresh ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the land on fire, between King George and his foes: What call has a man of your kind—much less, a woman—to interpose? Yet you needs must be meddling, folk like you, not foes—so much the worse! The many and loyal should keep themselves unmixed with the few perverse. ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... sheep and all the foodstuffs for the journey were bought from Jabez at his own price, for which he thanked me much, and on the third day we started. At the last moment the Prince, whose mood seemed to be perverse that evening, refused to travel with the host upon the morrow because of the noise and dust. In vain did the Count Amenmeses reason with him, and Nehesi and the great officers implore him almost on their knees, saying that they ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... as to say, perverse and thieving knave that you are, that you permit yourself to be lacking in respect towards the Auditor of the Chatelet, to the magistrate committed to the popular police of Paris, charged with searching out crimes, delinquencies, and evil conduct; with controlling all trades, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... been a great deal of discussion lately as to the exact nature of the bond which united Great Britain and the United States. Some one says blood is thicker than water, whereupon another with perverse ingenuity begins at once to analyze the blood and discovers that the elements are not, when resolved, precisely the same. That, it is said, is the bond of the Anglo-Saxon race; whereupon a Scotchman insists, or a Welshman insists, that it ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... rejection of the British overtures for peace. But in every encounter Pitt won more than a personal triumph. He proved that the war was forced upon us; that on our side it was a defensive effort; and that despite the perverse conduct of Prussia and Spain, England had won notable gains oversea and might expect an advantageous peace, provided only that the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... suffers greatly. For he often falls into the fire, and often into the water. [17:16]And I brought him to your disciples and they could not cure him. [17:17] Jesus answered and said, O unbelieving and perverse generation! How long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Bring him here to me. [17:18]And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon went out of him, and the child was cured from that hour. ...
— The New Testament • Various
... more or less Christian with a curious mingling of pagan superstition with the new faith. The Indian voyageurs may laugh but they all do it—make offerings of tobacco to the Granny Goddess of the River before setting out. In vain we threw biscuit and orange peel and nuts to the perverse-tempered deity supposed to preside at the bottom of those amber waters. The winds were contrary, the waters slack, sluggish, dead, no responsive gurgle and flap of laughter and life to the ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... grants that the Pope may appoint an observance; he simply enquires, whether this were the intention of the Pope, to bind all equally to abstinence from meats, so that one who should partake would be liable to hell-fire, even although no perverse contempt should be committed. And he who says this in the Colloquies, adds that he hates fishes not otherwise than he does a serpent. Now, there are some so affected that fish is poison to them, ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... "That is the Perverse Daughter, sole disobedient Child of Night, whose stubborn, contrary ways are justly punished by her mother. For she must draw a veil across her brilliant face for a brief period during every ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... its net of crime;—Devouring insects, who weary and confuse men's minds, Ignorant, oppressive, negligent, Breeders of confusion, utterly perverse:—These ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... revelation, might be laid upon him. And it appeared that God had laid his command upon many to go among the unregenerate bearing testimony, and with sharp-tongued reproach and reviling to prick as with thorns the seared conscience of a perverse and stiff-necked generation. Persecution they welcomed as the martyr's portion, the sure evidence of well-doing. "Where they are most of all suffered to declare themselves, there they least of all desire to ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... at last they were to part. And, remembering what he owed to her, the Jester suddenly found himself regretting that here their paths separated forever. Swiftly his mind flew back to their first meeting; when she had flouted him in Fools' hall. A perverse, capricious maid. How she had ever crossed him, and ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... in particular, for the most exquisite specimen of pig-headedness that the world can furnish, his perverse evidence on the once famous case at the Warwick assizes, of Captain Donelan for poisoning his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... indeed was fatal. I had made myself a little specialty of seeing nothing in certain celebrities, of seeing overmuch in an occasional nobody, and of judging from a point of view that, say what I would for it (and I had a monstrous deal to say) remained perverse and obscure. Mine was in short the love that killed, for my subtlety, unlike Mrs. Highmore's, produced no tremor of the public tail. She had not forgotten how, toward the end, when his case was worst, Limbert would absolutely come to me with a funny, ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... Gibbs must be perversely exaggerating the horrors of modern war; that Mr. Hobson certainly views the industrial crisis with unjustifiable pessimism; that "business as usual" cannot be that socially perverse and incredibly inexpedient thing Mr. Veblen shows it to be; that Mr. Robin's picture of Lenin can only be explained by a disguised ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... the verge of the temptation and the opportunity; that there existed a subtle something in this man, in herself, that tempted to conventional relaxation. In all her repressed, regulated, and self-suppressed career, all that had ever been in her of latent daring, of feminine audacity, of caprice, of perverse provocation, stirred in her now, quickening with the ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... pronounce the word "Mated!" he regarded it as a fatal omen, more especially as Mr. Frank came to her side at that very moment; and when the young lady laughed, and said, "What a goose I am! whatever could I have been thinking of?" he thought within himself (persisting in his illogical and perverse conclusions), "It is very plain what she is thinking about! I was afraid that she loved him, and now I know it." So he put up the chess-men, while she went to the piano with her cousin; and he even wished that Mr. Bouncer had interrupted their apple-tree conversation at its commencement; but was ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... not by origin but by BELIEF, if he should dream of the future of music, must also dream of it being freed from the influence of the North; and must have in his ears the prelude to a deeper, mightier, and perhaps more perverse and mysterious music, a super-German music, which does not fade, pale, and die away, as all German music does, at the sight of the blue, wanton sea and the Mediterranean clearness of sky—a super-European music, which holds its own even in presence ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... incurs envy in matters of the highest importance."[672] But we, thinking it difficult to escape envy, and seeing that it is altogether impossible not to incur blame or give offence to those we live with, shall be well advised if we prefer the hatred of the perverse to that of those who might justly find fault with us for having iniquitously served their turn. And indeed we ought to be on our guard against praise from those who importune us, which is sure to be altogether ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Thou may'st prove false; at lover's perjuries, They say, Jove laughs. Oh, gentle Romeo, If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully! Or, if thou think'st I am too quickly won, I'll frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay, So thou wilt woo! but else, not for the world. In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond: And therefore thou may'st think my 'haviour light! But trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true Than those that have more cunning to be strange. I should have been more strange, I must ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... was hard for him. Though she had been five-and-twenty years a wife, she was still very handsome: but he was not going to be melted, and when the perverse old fellow obeyed her, it was with an aspect of resolute disgust that would have made any other woman indignant. Lady ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Mr. Colfax had evident reference to the perverse action of the Southern rebels, and were so entirely in harmony with the feeling of the House that at different stages of the brief address the Republican side of the chamber broke forth into loud applause. As soon as the election of Speaker and ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... found it engraved on the moral constitution of man by our beneficent Creator. They found it also transcribed on the pages of objective revelation,—the Bible. But, like other moral and scriptural principles, it has been perverted and misapplied by the perverse ingenuity of wicked men.—This "voice from heaven" is indeed the people's voice: and it is legitimate, as coming from the people, because it is first the voice of God. The "heaven" here mentioned is the seat of civil power,—"the ordinance ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... whose notice he contrived to bring the point while consulting him regularly on some other business. But the Baron would not listen to such a proposal for an instant. On the contrary, he used to have a perverse pleasure in boasting that the barony of Bradwardine was a male fief, the first charter having been given at that early period when women were not deemed capable to hold a feudal grant; because, according to Les coustusmes de Normandie, c'est l'homme ki se bast ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... felt so secure of her that morning, and now she had placed this immeasurable distance between them. He had never felt the full power of her beauty till then, as she stood there with that haughty pose of the head and the calm contempt in her eyes; he had seen her in most moods—playfully perverse, coldly civil, and unaffectedly gracious and gentle—and in none of them had she made his heart ache with the mad ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... the Cattle Trail, that most unique and stupendous of all modern migrations, and its founders must have been inspired with a malicious desire to perpetrate a crime against geography, or else they reveled in a perverse cussedness, for within a mile on every side lay broad prairies, and two miles to the east flowed the indolent waters of the Rio Pecos itself. The distance separating the town from the river was excusable, for at certain ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... that so men may not rashly and in the heat of discourse engage themselves too soon, which might bias them so much that, instead of consulting the good of the public, they might rather study to support their first opinions, and by a perverse and preposterous sort of shame hazard their country rather than endanger their own reputation, or venture the being suspected to have wanted foresight in the expedients that they at first proposed; and therefore, to prevent this, they take care that they ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... first region of departed spirits," said the chief. "We have power to compel answer to our interrogatories. Listen, perverse mortal. We are well assured that a vast treasure is concealed hereabouts, hidden by the Knights of St John. 'Tis beyond our unassisted power to discover. We have asked counsel of one whom we dare not disobey, and she it is hath commanded that we ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... perverse Harry, "because I don't like it;" and so saying, he rushed off to join "the boys," as ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... too much polemic stress upon the doctrine of future retribution as the vindication of present impunity. For though, indeed, to the right-minded that doctrine was true, and of sufficient solace, yet with the perverse the polemic mention of it might but provoke the shallow, though mischievous conceit, that such a doctrine was but tantamount to the one which should affirm that Providence was not now, but was going to be. In short, with all sorts of cavilers, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... lighter; her conversation, toned by the ideas of pride and self-love reflected from the society she moved in, was profane and irreligious; and soon the roses of Christian virtue that bloom in the cheek of innocent maidenhood became sick and withered in the heated, feverish air of perverse influences ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... now we love one another like sisters, or indeed better, for I often see such quarrel. Beside, they have taught us that we are generally in fault ourselves; and we find now that we take care not to be perverse, our neighbours are seldom in the wrong, and when they are, we bear with it in hopes they will bear with us when we are as much to blame, which we may be sure enough will happen, let us try ever so much to the contrary. Then the ladies ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... hath been desirous of taking back unto himself the energy that existeth in this Sisupala. O Chief of all intelligent men, O son of Kunti, the intelligence of this wicked-minded king of the Chedis, as also of all these monarchs, hath become perverse. Indeed, the intelligence of all those whom this tiger among men desireth to take unto himself, becometh perverse even like that of this king of the Chedis. O Yudhishthira, Madhava is the progenitor as also the destroyer of all created ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... itself. "Darkness" is the enemy of souls, the primary cause of death, the adversary of virtue. The words of the prophet, they say in their error, show that it exists and that it does not proceed from God. From this what perverse and impious dogmas have been imagined! What grievous wolves, tearing the flock of the Lord, have sprung from these words to cast themselves upon souls! Is it not from hence that have come forth Marcions and Valentinuses and the detestable heresy of the Manicheans which you may, without ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... troop of vivid memories—a pair of bright, dark-lashed gray eyes, the sound of a low, clear laugh, the turn of a rosy cheek, an opinion which had interested him, a pretty thought, a way she had of smiling appealingly after she had said something whimsical or perverse. And underlying and overlying and penetrating through all these was an irritated consciousness of the fact that it would be a long time until the ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... advocates, and the high and cultivated spirit of their illustrious martyrs. As scholars, citizens, gentlemen, and, in more than one instance, authors of real genius, these Liberals stand alone, and are not to be confounded with the perverse Radicals of a subsequent epoch. Moreover, their aspirations were, as we have seen, more reactionary than experimental; for the rights for which they conspired had been in a great measure enjoyed under Europe's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... nymph, may be, perhaps, detected in at least six places of his own sonnets. The love of Petrarch was neither platonic nor poetical; and if in one passage of his works he calls it "amore veementeissimo ma unico ed onesto," he confesses, in a letter to a friend, that it was guilty and perverse, that it absorbed him ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... and with panting heart, Perceived the danger, but with subtle art, (Lest he should see the place) spurs on the foe, 539 Confounds his thoughts, and blames his being slow. For shame! move on; would you for ever stay? What sloth is this, what strange perverse delay? — How could you e'er my little pausing blame? — What! you would wait till night shall end the game? Phoebus, thus nettled, with imprudence slew 545 A vulgar Pawn, but lost his nobler view. Young Hermes leap'd, with sudden joy elate; And then, to save the monarch from his fate, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... of colder air sighing up through narrow defiles and dark crevices touched my face as with airy fingers. A certain feeling of anxiety and insecurity began to take possession of me, though there was no definable cause for it, unless that I might be belated in getting home. With the perverse instinct of those who are lost I hastened my steps, but was impelled now and then to glance back over my shoulder, with a sensation of being pursued. But no living creature was in sight. The moon, however, had now risen higher, and the clouds that were drifting slowly ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... a radically and essentially vicious measure should promote the delusion that it is amendable. And any success in debate would be dearly purchased if it led the electors to suppose that the Government of Ireland Bill, which in fact embodies a policy, so fundamentally perverse that no alteration of details can render it tolerable, is a measure which, though faulty in its execution, is sound in principle. The Unionists leaders, however, whom we can absolutely trust, have decided that abstention from debate would be an error. As far as the matter is to ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... power was in three years broken down, by what perverse and frantic misgovernment the tyrant revived the spirit of the vanquished Whigs, turned to fixed hostility the neutrality of the trimmers, and drove from him the landed gentry, the Church, the army, his own creatures, his own children, is well known to our ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and willed Faustus to take a copy of it. With that the perverse Faustus being resolute in his damnation, wrote a copy thereof, and gave the devil the one, and kept in store the other. Thus the spirit and Faustus were agreed, and dwelt together; no doubt there ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... in unnecessary talk. To begin with, he has to control his staff, the men and boys who walk in line with you through the root-fields, or beat the coverts for pheasants. That might seem at first sight to be an easy business, but it is actually one of the most difficult in the world. For thorough perverse stupidity, you will not easily match the autochthonous beater. Watch him as he trudges along, slow, expressionless, clod-resembling, lethargic, and say how you would like to be the chief of such an army. He is always getting out of line, pressing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... peculiar: at the most perilous moment of all, which is the moment before she is actually overtaken by the breaking crest of the wave, she is apt to refuse to answer her helm, and he who is steering her loses all control over her; she seems to be seized with a perverse determination to take a broad sheer one way or the other, with disastrous results, despite a hard-over helm, and then the only thing to be done to retrieve the situation is to effect a lightning shift of helm against all your past experience and your better judgment. But notwithstanding this, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... acquaintance. This soon ripened into friendship, for there was much in the recluse to excite interest and esteem. I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy. He had with him many books, but rarely employed them. His chief amusements were gunning and fishing, or sauntering along the beach and through the myrtles, in quest of shells or entomological specimens—his collection of ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... and holy communion this inclination became also aroused in the soul; if you felt it increase in proportion as you gave yourself to God, you may safely conclude that it is the indicator of God's will in your regard, and that its vascillating or enfeebled condition was the work of your own perverse will. Hence, in order to ascertain whether the natural inclination or aptitude you feel for any state of life is from God or the effect of a deluded fancy, you need but compare your natural aptitude with those you have received through divine ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... perverse pony, veering about among those approaching on either side to seize, or head her, with sundry monitory kicks thrown out sidewise towards them as she went, the next moment reached, and, with a tremendous leap, cleared the barricade, and landed ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... the world a cursed race, Of nature so perverse and base, If from the gallows you should save, ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... dared to raise his voice against the "abjured and detested thraldom of kingship"; declaring that he would not be silent though he should but speak "to trees and stones: and had none to cry to, but {72} with the prophet 'O Earth, Earth, Earth!' to tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to,"—a passage, if interpreted by its original context, of awful imprecation upon Charles I. A man so famous, so utterly unrepentant, so defiant to the very end, seemed to challenge to himself the gallows. That his challenge would ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... the issue was dubious. Wright writhed about in his saddle, and swore and lashed like a madman; but who can count on a team of half-broken mules? At the most critical point, when all should have been harmony and combined effort, the perverse brutes fell into lamentable disorder, and huddled together in confusion on the farther bank. There was the wagon up to the hub in mud, and visibly settling every instant. There was nothing for it but to ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... believes in the sincerity of Russian promises to Poland, and claims that the Poles share his belief, but he does not pretend that this most unfortunate of nations has no grievances against its suzerain. I wonder whether our perverse Intelligences are capable of making the deduction that, if the progressives in Russia can forget their quarrel with reaction for sake of our great common cause, they themselves might mitigate some of the severity of their anti-tsarism. Mr. REYNOLDS has much ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully. Or if thou think'st I'm too quickly won, I'll frown and be perverse, and say thee nay, So thou wilt woo; but else not ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... philosophy, as it is fairer in appearance, and more capable of alliance with our natural feelings of enthusiasm and delight. Its dangerous tendency is this, that it perverts those very minds, whose office it was to resist the perverse impulses of society, and to proclaim truth under the dominion of falsehood. However precipitate may be at any time the current of public opinion, bearing along the mass of men to the grosser agitations of life, and to such schemes ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... they be ours still with a vast enrichment and a rare spiritual beauty; but if they remain selfish, insist on absorbing all attention and energy, then they must be broken. The love of father and mother and children is an holy thing wherever we find it, but it is capable of becoming a selfish and perverse thing, insistent upon its own ends and declining wider responsibilities. In that case it must be regarded from the standpoint of a higher good: if it stand in the path of the Kingdom it must be swept aside. So our Lord declared in one of the ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... and means well. If that be true, as perhaps it may, I only wish him a better place, where only honesty and well-meaning are required, and where his other qualities can do no harm.... I hope, however, that our affairs will not much longer be perplexed and embarrassed by his perverse and senseless management." But for the present Franklin was of opinion that it would be well "to leave this omniscient, infallible minister to his own devices, and be no longer at the expense of sending any agent, whom he can displace by a repeal of ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... of Luther's "ungovernable transports, riotous proceedings, angry conflicts, and intemperate controversies," of Luther's "contempt of all the accepted forms of human right and all authority, human and divine," of "his unscrupulous mendacity," "his perverse principles," "his wild pronouncements." He calls Luther "a lawless one," "one of the most intolerant of men," "a revolutionist, not a reformer." He says that Luther "attempted reformation and ended in deformation." He charges Luther with having written ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... beautified herself in the interests of the firm. This coquetry on his mistress's part drove Fromont Jeune to despair. Day after day he came unexpectedly to take her by surprise, uneasy, suspicious, afraid to leave that perverse and deceitful character to its own ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Egypt, by what perverse fate, has poison brought with knowledge, given us this— not days of trance, shadow, fore-doom of death, but passionate grave thought, belief enhanced, ritual returned ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... draught from an open window. Many are the reasons for love, but I confess I only love woman or book, when it is as a voice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly, a voice I am at once endearingly intimate with. This announces feminine depravities in my affections. I am feminine, morbid, perverse. But above all perverse, almost everything perverse interests, fascinates me. Wordsworth is the only simple-minded man I ever loved, if that great austere mind, chill even as the Cumberland year, can be called simple. But Hugo is not perverse, nor even personal. Reading him was like ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... from the curse of too much ability. He has both genius and talent, but the talent, instead of acting as a counterpoise to the genius, blows it yet more windily about the air. He has almost all the qualities of a great writer, but some perverse spirit in his blood has mixed them to their mutual undoing. When he writes prose, the prose seems always about to burst into poetry; when he writes verse, the verse seems always about to sink into ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... justice; you have been taken from your dungeon and brought to this jail. Legally summoned in the usual forms, formaliis verbis pressus; not regarding to lectures and communications which have been made, and which will now be repeated, to you; inspired by a bad and perverse spirit of tenacity, you have preserved silence, and refused to answer the judge. This is a detestable licence, which constitutes, among deeds punishable by cashlit, the crime and ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... more he told himself "impossible", the more positive grew a certain perverse inner asseveration that it was quite possible. And what if the person in the park had known it? He reviewed the circumstances of their different meetings; details that had not impressed themselves upon him at the time—that ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... loving darkness rather than light, and darkening himself in the delusions of his darkness, stubbornly persevered in his malice, and still contentiously affirmed that his wicked and perverse opinions excelled the doctrines of the saint. And the king feared that the works of the magician would be overturned, and he proposed a certain trial to be made between them: "Let your books be plunged into the water, and he whose writings ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... as yesterday should only be chronicled now and then to give an added halo to happy to-morrows,—disagreeables are remembered quite long enough by perverse human nature. ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... other Western powers, our relations with Japan have been brought into serious jeopardy through the perverse opposition of the hereditary aristocracy of the Empire to the enlightened and liberal policy of the Tycoon, designed to bring the country into the society of nations. It is hoped, although not with entire confidence, that these difficulties ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... fair example of these political and controversial Interludes is New Custom, printed in 1573, and possibly written only a year or two before that date. Here, for instance, are a few of the players' names and descriptions as given at the beginning: Perverse Doctrine, an old Popish Priest; Ignorance, another, but elder; New Custom, a Minister; Light of the Gospel, a Minister; Hypocrisy, an old Woman. Then, as to the matter, here is an extract from Perverse Doctrine's opening speech, the writer's intention ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... and his country the nuisances of Europe. Books have been made from English journals to show how extraordinarily they berated this country during the Secession war, because Americans were so brutally perverse and so selfishly silly as not to submit their country's throat to the Southern sabre for the benefit of Britain, which condescends to think that our national existence is something not altogether compatible with her safety. But a collection ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... direction, discerned the tall black figure of the father of Nesibeh in the road, looking out for him. The idea of evil in connection with the jolly priest suddenly struck him as perverse and ludicrous. He laughed in the ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... the life of this scared and enervated lady—whose existence might have been developed to so much higher purpose but for the ignoble ambition of her parents and the conventions of the time—was one of obsequious amativeness towards a perverse and cruel man. Little personal events came to her in quick succession—half a dozen, eight, nine, ten such events,—in brief; she bore him no less than eleven children in the eight following years, but half of them came prematurely into the world, or died a few days old; only ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... cultivation and commerce, in agriculture and in manufactures with the same rapidity in the same period. Her progress is now retarded, and it is a heart-breaking spectacle to every man who loves the country to see it arrested only by the perverse and factious folly of the people, stimulated and encouraged ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... that there may be such perfect synonyms, words, that is, with this absolute coincidence of the one with the other, yet these could not be the objects of any such discrimination; since, where no real difference exists, it would be lost labour and the exercise of a perverse ingenuity to attempt to ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... elements belonging to the system of slavery would under no circumstances be permitted, a much larger number would have launched their energies into the new channel, and, seeing that they could do "no better," faithfully co-operated with the government. It is hope which fixes them in their perverse notions. That hope nourished or fully gratified, they will persevere in the same direction. That hope destroyed, a great many will, by the force of necessity, at once accommodate themselves to the logic of the change. ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... appeared to be extraordinarily perverse. It was almost as if, knowing this was Celia's child, that Celia whose hatred it had felt from the first, it took pleasure in punctuating his attempt to sleep with shrieks and wailings, with piercing and ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... westwards 'towards the Beauce, intending to reach his own estates in Brittany for winter quarters. But his young captains got out of control. Led by a Gloucestershire knight, Sir John Minsterworth, "ready in hand but deceitful and perverse in mind," a considerable section of the troops refused to follow the old "tomb-robber" to Brittany, and determined to spend the winter where they were, under Minsterworth's leadership. Knowles would not give place to his subordinate, ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... questions of religious belief, should call up an army of assailants and defenders. Nor have the supporters of the theory much reason, in many cases, to blame the more or less unskilful and hasty attacks of adversaries, seeing that those attacks have been in great part due to the unskilful and perverse advocacy of the cause on the part of some of its adherents. If the odium theologicum has inspired some of its opponents, it is undeniable that the odium antitheologicum has possessed not a few of its supporters. ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... The perverse bird had heard Giles often dictate this avowal, but had entirely refused to repeat it, till, stimulated by the new surroundings, it had for the first ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... was a horrible fascination in it—human bodies and lives subjected in slavery to that symmetric monster of the colliery. There was a swooning, perverse satisfaction in it. For a ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Christianity, reducing it to cosmology and ethics, and that it served only as a bridge whereby the learned might pass over to Catholicism—that is to say, from reason to faith. To this same learned historian of dogmas it appears to be an indication of a perverse state of things that the man Athanasius, who saved Christianity as the religion of a living communion with God, should have obliterated the Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus, whom neither Paul nor Athanasius knew personally, nor yet Harnack himself. Among Protestants, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... history will concern us by and by. Preussen was to be incorporated with the Electorate,—were possession of it once had. But that is a ticklish point; still ticklish in spite of rights, and liable to perverse accidents that ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... varied in character as the speakers. They broke up into groups. It might have been a fashionable drawing-room where ladies and young girls offer after dinner the assistance that coffee, liqueurs, and sugar afford to diners who are struggling in the toils of a perverse digestion. But in a little while laughter broke out, the murmur grew, and voices were raised. The saturnalia, subdued for a moment, threatened at times to renew itself. The alternations of sound and silence bore a distant resemblance to a ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the ways between the major and minor contingents of poets comes when certain writers maintain, not merely their freedom from conventional moral standards, but a perverse inclination to seek what even they regard as evil. This is, presumably, a logical, if unconscious, outgrowth of the romantic conception of art as "strangeness added to beauty." For the decadents conceive that the loveliness of virtue is an age-worn theme which has grown ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... not, however, whilst re-establishing facts in their purity, dream the practical impossibility of confounding and disarming the ignorance of men unfortunately so ill educated and unread, and with intellect so incapable, apparently, of appreciating instruction, if not wilfully perverse, as the Cobdens, or of restraining the less coarse but more fluent flippancy and equally unscrupulous assurance of friend Bright, from resort to that stock and stale weapon of vulgar minds which is so readily drawn from the armoury of falsehood. To the end of the chapter they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... nights and look after the watchman. It's just the right place for me. There's nothing to do but to drink, when you have got the liquor; and to sleep, when you haven't. The Dead who come our way, my little friend, have one great merit. We are supposed to help them, if they're perverse enough to come to life again before they're buried. There they lie in our house, with one end of the line tied to their fingers, and the other end at the spring of the alarm-bell. And they have never rung ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... to find a common measure for these names, but it is clear that what is most distasteful to the writer, in theory at any rate, is variety. Epic is the most solemn, stately, and frigid of all kinds of composition. This was the result attained by the perverse following of precepts supposed to be classical. The critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were generally right in distinguishing between Epic and Romance, and generally wrong in separating the one kind from the other as opposite and mutually exclusive forms, instead ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... I've had some wonderful times . . . people who play in orchestra and make chamber-music are the real thing. But the music you make yourself . . . the music we make up here . . . well, perhaps my taste for it is like one's liking (some people call it perverse) for French Primitive painting, or the something so awfully touching and heart-felt that was lost when the Renaissance came up over the Alps with ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... and daughter, who, it appears, gave the commissioners no little trouble by their perverse conduct, returned to Savannah and were engaged to labor at the filature, at three shillings per day, at which Mr. Habersham exclaims, "monstrous wages!" The reelers now advanced with much proficiency, and five of them, on the 10th of May, wound off eleven pounds of cocoons each. The ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... the early morning, before visitors began to arrive who might be alarmed at seeing an elephant at large. He was addicted to minding his own business, and never paid the slightest attention to any occupants of cage or enclosure. He was quite unaware of the hostility which he had aroused in the perverse and ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... of their skaldic quality. Another he killed with his own hand, I know not for what reason. In brief, after about a year, Thangbrand returned to Norway and king Olaf; declaring the Icelanders to be a perverse, satirical, and inconvertible people, having himself, the record says, "been the death of three men there." King Olaf was in high rage at this result; but was persuaded by the Icelanders about him to try farther, and by a wilder ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... without giving him any interview, she had persistently kept away, yet though she was doing what she could, by fits and starts, to forget him, that perverse imagination of hers always pictured him as waiting, constant, ready. There was a particular tree in the glen behind which she had so frequently represented him to herself as standing patiently while she approached with furtive steps, ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... that the biggest and highest-placed Ajax among us may some day find himself prostrate before the pattens of his kitchen-maid; as that there is no poverty or shame or crime, which will not be supported, hugged even with delight, and cherished more closely than virtue would be, by the perverse fidelity and admirable constant ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... about the tendency of this race to laugh at the wrong time, and to persist in being disconsolate when every one can see that they ought to dance. Generation after generation of these perverse creatures in the good old days of slavery would insist on going in search of the North Pole under the most discouraging circumstances. On foot and alone, without money or script or food or clothing; without guide ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... seeing all beautiful around you—pleasant woods, winding white paths, green lawns, and blue sunshiny sky—and not having a free moment or a free thought left to enjoy them in. The children are constantly with me, and more riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs never grew. As for correcting them, I soon quickly found that was entirely out of the question: they are to do as they like. A complaint to Mrs. Sidgwick brings only black looks upon oneself, and unjust, partial excuses to screen the children. I have tried that plan once. ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... To deal seriously were to yield too much respect to such a baffler, and too much weight to his fancies; to raise the man too high in his courage and conceit; to make his pretences seem worthy the considering and canvassing. Briefly, perverse obstinacy is more easily quelled, petulant impudence is sooner dashed, sophistical captiousness is more safely eluded, sceptical wantonness is more surely confounded in this than in ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... and unwearied labour have been so successfully united. It is to Pope's credit, that, with everything against him in the race of life, he attained the goal for which he started in his youth. The means he employed to reach it were frequently perverse and discreditable, but the courage with which he overcame the obstacles in his path ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... friends with infamy. Hence the solemn caution, "Look not thou on the wine, when it giveth its color in the cup: at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder: thine eyes shall behold strange women, and thy heart utter perverse things." Those who, by gaming or intrigue, rob others of their property, and those who allure "the simple" to ruin, it is said, fully understand its perverting influence. "Is it not a little one?" say they; ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... and he placed his two hands(227) on him and made confession, and thus he spake: "I beseech Thee, O Name, Thy people, the house of Israel, have done perversely, have transgressed and sinned before Thee. I beseech Thee, O Name, pardon now their perverse doings, and their transgressions, and their sins, which they have perversely committed, and transgressed, and sinned before thee. Thy people the house of Israel, as is written in the law of Moses Thy servant, saying, 'For on that day shall he make an atonement ...
— Hebrew Literature
... passengerless; for even the mightiest cannot hold indefinitely an ocean liner setting out after a possible record. Almost at the moment that the man of power received a message stating positively that his daughter was not on the Clan Macgregor that perverse little person was saying to her preserver, who—foolish youth—had ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... nor is there any here so young, but she is of years to understand how women are minded towards one another, when they are alone together, and how ill they are able to rule themselves without the guidance of some man. We are sensitive, perverse, suspicious, pusillanimous and timid; wherefore I much misdoubt, that, if we find no other guidance than our own, this company is like to break up sooner, and with less credit to us, than it should. ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Baron's perverse attachment to his lately-acquired charger—an attachment which seemed to attain new strength from every fresh example of the animal's ferocious and demon-like propensities—at length became, in the eyes of all reasonable men, a hideous and unnatural fervor. In the glare of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Now it is done, (walking up and down pleased.) Now it is right, and—(stops suddenly,) but that perverse old-fashioned fellow, with his pious lamentations—Pshaw! my intended son-in-law must manage him, and that quickly too, or he shall not have the girl. He is in love with her and the money,—a twofold inducement! He is in my hand, because his conscience is ...
— The Lawyers, A Drama in Five Acts • Augustus William Iffland
... right. Paula deserved to own the stronger spell. Paula's emotional channels were open and deep. No choking snags and sandbars, no perverse eddies in them. Look at her with Rush to-day! There was a situation that fairly bristled with opportunities for blundering. She might, with this grown-up son of her husband's whom she had hardly seen, have shown herself shy, embarrassed, at a loss how to take him. She might ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... His was a perverse nature, endowed with rare gifts which he persistently abused. Pure physical sensation supplied a large part of the material for his poetry, and among the senses it was especially the one that has the remotest association with ideas that he drew upon most constantly—the ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... any, it will not, I hope, seem more strange than convincing to backsliders. This much I should have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to but with the prophet, 'O earth, earth, earth!' to tell the very soil itself what its perverse inhabitants are deaf to; nay, though what I have spoken should prove (which Thou suffer not, who didst make mankind free; nor Thou next, who didst redeem us from being servants of sin) to be the last words of our ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of injury. Of late she had seemed absolutely changed towards him; and from being his good friend, with established intimacies, she had turned before his very eyes into an alien, almost an enemy, more beautiful than ever, to be true, but perverse, mocking, impish. She flouted him for his youth, his bluntness, his guileless transparency. But hardest of all to bear was the delicate derision with which she treated his awkward attempts to express his passion for her, ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... weaknesses, humoured his corrupted and blase ways; to please him he affected malicious raillery and atheism, in his company criticised persons before whom in other places he would slavishly grovel. When at supper they talked of love and women, he pretended to be a subtle and perverse voluptuary. As a rule, one may say, Petersburg rakes are fond of talking of their abnormal tastes. Some young actual civil councillor is perfectly satisfied with the embraces of his cook or of some unhappy street-walker on the Nevsky Prospect, but to listen to him ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... will see that I am capable of sharing your literary glory on the sly, and without compunction. Indeed, the false role created in me a perverse mood. And I entered into a literary discussion with M—— that outraged his pedantic soul. It was my way of perjuring his judgment, in return for his unwitting approval of my reviews. Besides, the assumption of infallibility by dull, scholarly ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... she not capricious, teasing, tyrannical, obstinate, perverse, absurd? ay, a wilderness of faults and follies; her looks are scorn, and her very smiles—'Sdeath! I wish I hadn't mentioned her smiles; for she does smile such beaming loveliness, such fascinating brightness—Oh, death and madness! I shall die if ...
— The Duenna • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... haffen o' it. Cold winter nights, when the snow sifted in through the cracks, an' the wind blew in the rotten old door, 'Fambly' liked ter hev friz ter death. They hed the pneumonia, an' whoopin'-cough, an' croup; an' in summer, bein' a perverse set o' brats, 'Fambly' hed fever an' ager, an' similar ailments common ter the young o' the human race, the same ez ef 'Fambly' war folks! 'T war 'stonishin', kem ter think of it, how 'Fambly' hed the insurance ter grow up ter look like folks, let alone settin' out ter run fur ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock |
