"Episodical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that they might each contribute to a collective autobiography of the regiment. It was only in this way, he held, that the intensely personal character of the struggle could be recorded. He had felt his way to the fact that every battle is essentially episodical, very campaign a sum of fortuities; and it was not strange that he should suppose, with his want of perspective, that this universal fact was purely national and American. His zeal made him the repository of a vast mass of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... These represent the episodical characters in this drama of life; and Browning has scattered them, as it were, behind the chief characters, whom sometimes they illustrate and sometimes they contrast. Of these the whitest, simplest, loveliest is Pompilia, of whom I have already written. ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Grail, it must be avowed that the mystic cup, the object after which the French Parceval and the German Parsifal go in search, has not nearly the same importance among the Welsh. In the romance of Peredur it only figures in an episodical fashion, and without a ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... existing conditions and mental pictures, the disharmony between the perceptive and imaginative capacities and the preponderance of a lively fantastic coloring to the dry thinking of these individuals. They do not form disease processes of a definite characteristic form, but episodic psychotic manifestations on a degenerative soil, and the manifold phases of the collective forms are to be considered as repeated fluctuations about the psychic equilibrium of these individuals. He further noted ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... almost at once after the Civil War, gradually broadened out until it saw priests in every state and followers in every county. Obedient to the example of the prophet, most of the practitioners of the mode chose to be episodic rather than epic in their undertakings; the history of local color belongs primarily to the historian of the short story. Even when the local colorists essayed the novel they commonly did little more than to expand some episode into elaborate dimensions or to string beads of episode upon an ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... extraordinary writer; he was both, without being either a great man or a great artist. The dominant impression made by his personality, so much and often so unhappily discussed, is itself impressionistic. Curiously enough, as he viewed the world, so has he been judged by the world. His life, fragmentary, episodic, restless, doubtless the result of physical and psychical limitations, is admirably reflected in his writings with their staccato phrasing, overcoloured style, their flight from anything approaching reality, their uneasy apprehension ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... traveling out of the record. remote, far-fetched, out of the way, forced, neither here nor there, quite another thing; detached, segregate; disquiparant^. multifarious; discordant &c 24. incidental, parenthetical, obiter dicta, episodic. Adv. parenthetically &c adj.; by the way, by the by; en passant [Fr.], incidentally; irrespectively &c adj.; without reference to, without regard to; in the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... is much to blame in this respect. There are, we believe, comparatively few boys who acquire, until they seek it for themselves, even the roughest general outline of the world's history, to which their various episodic studies may be applied, so that each may fall into its proper place and order. 'Periods' and 'Epochs' are studied minutely and painfully, without any knowledge of the grand structure of which they form but a single fragment; ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... Spanish and French models, that the public of the day expected them, and so forth. This defence is enough, but it is easy to amplify and reintrench it. It is not by any means the fact that the Picaresque novel of adventure is the only or the chief form of fiction which prescribes or admits these episodic excursions. All the classical epics have them; many eastern and other stories present them; they are common, if not invariable, in the abundant mediaeval literature of prose and verse romance; they are not unknown by any means in the modern novel; and you will very rarely ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... fabric. His pages, particularly in the more recent works, are studded with examples of felicitous and dexterous counterpoint—poetically significant, and of the most elastic and untrammelled contrivance. Even in passages of a merely episodic character, one is struck with the vitality and importance of his inner voices. Dissonance—in the sense in which we understand dissonance to-day—plays a comparatively unimportant part in his technical method. The climax of ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... personal taste rather than strict critical evaluation which pronounces one more important to the development of the novel than the other. There is a little love interest in the Alexander poems—the heroine of this part being Queen Candace—but it is slight, episodic, and rudimentary beside the complex and all-absorbing passions which, when genius took the matter in hand, were wrought out of the truth of Troilus and the faithlessness of Cressid. The joys of fighting or roaming, of adventure and quest, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... way through the narrow framework of a half-opened door—infinitely remote, in colour quite different, velvety with the radiance of some intervening light, the little phrase appeared, dancing, pastoral, interpolated, episodic, belonging to another world. It passed, with simple and immortal movements, scattering on every side the bounties of its grace, smiling ineffably still; but Swann thought that he could now discern in it some disenchantment. It seemed to be aware how vain, how hollow was the happiness to ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... and events. Similarly, the gods must be historical. The sacred traditions or books of religion are largely occupied with this history. The more individual and anthropomorphic the gods, the more local and episodic will be the account of their affairs. In the higher religions the acts of God are few and momentous, such as creation or special providence; or they are identical with the events of nature and human history when these are construed as divine. To find God in this latter way requires an interpretation ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... a few elisions, however, the episodic story of Melicent and of the men who loved Melicent has been disembedded from what survives of the main narrative. This episode may reasonably be considered as complete in itself, in spite of its precipitous commencement; we are not told anything ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... it appears objectively more pernicious than the lying, but it is an expression of the same tendency. The most striking form of this type of conduct is, of course, self-accusation. Mendacious self- impeachment seems especially convincing of abnormality. Such falsification not infrequently is episodic. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... first two lines of this poem, which compose its refrain, be permitted to stand as the principal theme of a musical piece, we have in Mr. Bunner's triolet a rondo in nuce. There is in it a threefold exposition of the theme alternating with episodic matter. Another form for the finale is that of the first movement (the Sonata form), and still another, the theme and variations. Beethoven chose the latter for his "Eroica," and the choral close of his Ninth, Dvorak, for his ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... at her own ecstasy of exaggeration. "The other Josh will come back," she reminded herself, "and I must not forget to be practical. THIS is episodic." These happy, superhuman episodes would come, would pass, would recur at intervals; but the routine of her life must be lived. And if these episodes were to recur the practical must not be neglected. "It's by neglecting the practical that so many wives come to grief," ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... as Intelligence, science, philosophy, soul, sphere, spirit, nature, and so on. From these we may glean some information of the school to which Israeli belongs. And in the "Book of the Elements," too, some of the episodic discussions are of value for ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... "Papillons" and the "Carnaval" of Schumann or the "Valses nobles et sentimentales" of Ravel, for instance, works to which they are in certain other respects comparable. As he grew a little older, Ornstein's nature probably began to demand other forms beside these smaller, more episodic ones. It probably began to strive for greater scope, duration, development, complexity. And so, in order to gain greater intellectual control over his outflow, to learn to build piles of a bulk that require an entirely different workmanship and supervision ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... intrinsically episodic and discontinuous. Its audiences do not demand denouements. Sufficient unto each "turn" is the evil thereof. No one cares how many romances the singing comedienne may have had if she can capably sustain the limelight and a high note or two. The audiences reck not if the performing dogs ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... in him. He might have forgotten the years, the emaciation, even the rouge and the careless efforts at concealing gray hairs with badly-put-on dye. All this, perhaps, in time. But, well or ill, fate had determined, long before, that this, her one true friendship, was to be but episodic. It was the prologue to a drama undreamed of as yet; the last act of which was to take place many years after the apparent end, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... its own ambulatory self, and the more concrete description is branded as either false or insufficient. The bridge of intermediaries, actual or possible, which in every real case is what carries and defines the knowing, gets treated as an episodic complication which need not even potentially be there. I believe that this vulgar fallacy of opposing abstractions to the concretes from which they are abstracted, is the main reason why my account of knowing is deemed so unsatisfactory, and I will therefore say a word ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... incomplete, and was not published until four years after his death. It has been described as forming the earliest model for the art of prose. In our epitome we have followed the central thread of a story which has innumerable episodic extensions. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a Plot episodic when there is neither probability nor necessity in the sequence of episodes. Actions of this sort bad poets construct through their own fault, and good ones on ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... he was now quite determined to give Mr. Seven Sachs a brief episodic account of his career. A fair conversational opening was all he ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... hasty kiss on her lips, realising that she had fallen to the level of a mere episodic interest in Rose's life. The impassioned student of obstetrics had disappeared up the staircase before Leonora could reach the double-doors of the entrance. The mother was dashed, stricken, a little humiliated. But as ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... and something told him that in the right-hand lower vest pocket there was undoubtedly a certain amount of round hard silver bodies and moreover that this condition was not simply episodic but chronic. ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... its origin. Applying to it the same methods as had recently been used by Wolf in his criticism of the Homeric poems, he thought he was able to discover as the basis of the complete epic a cycle of twenty separate lieder, ballads or shorter episodic poems, on the strength of which belief he went so far as to publish an edition of the poem in which he made the division into the twenty separate lays and eliminated those strophes (more than one third of the whole number) that he deemed not genuine. It is now generally ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... campaigns. He had known rough jungle tussles in mud swamps, maddened by insects, thirst, and fever; he had fought in colder, cleaner dangers down the Khyber Pass, and he had gone through the episodic scientific flurries of South Africa; but France disconcerted him; he had never started a campaign before in a country like a garden, met by welcoming ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome |
