"Irony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gives instructions as to the vocal expression with which certain lines are to be delivered, as in the case of his comments on gesture, they are almost painfully evident from the context. He cites for instance irony[95], anger[96], exhaustion [97], amazement [98], sympathy[99], pity[100]. He appears as the lineal ancestor of the modern "coach" of amateur theatricals in somewhat naively remarking[101] that upon leaving Thais for two days, ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... in the highest degree significant of the thoroughness of the revolution accomplished by Wagner. The production of "Otello" and "Falstaff" created as great an excitement in Italy as the first performance of "Parsifal" did in Germany; and it must have seemed like the irony of fate to many that Wagner should have to be filtered through Verdi in order to bear fruit in the original home of the art form. But that is surely the lesson of "Otello," "Falstaff," and the fervid works of Leoncavallo, Mascagni, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... premature pretensions to be thus made public. The finesse of La Fayette enabled him to penetrate the secret hope of the First Consul, who was already occupied, and for most serious reasons, with the re-establishment of religion in France. He was able to say to him, with an irony that was a little scornful, "Come, general, confess that this has no other aim than to get the little phial broken on your head." Public opinion was not yet calling for the re-establishment of the monarchy; it did not connect the idea of hereditary power with a victorious general, ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... the promised story was a German of that particular type in which the sombre irony of Goethe's Mephistopheles is blended with a homely cheerfulness found in the romances of August Lafontaine of pacific memory; but the predominating element in the compound of artlessness and guile, of shopkeeper's shrewdness, and the studied carelessness of a member ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... as time passed my evil grew worse, my moments of malignity and irony became more somber and intractable. A real physical fever attended my outbursts of passion; I awakened trembling in every limb and covered with cold sweat. Brigitte, too, although she did not complain ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... knew nothing of the poetry of the moment—felt nothing of its pathetic irony in view of the deed she was half-unconsciously designing. She saw only, at first dimly, then distinctly, that here were the means by which mamma's enemy might be punished and swept from mamma's place, and that if she failed her opportunity now she would be a traitor and a coward, and would fail in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... telling funny stories in private conversation, they disappeared more and more from his public discourse. He would still now and then point his argument with expressions of inimitable quaintness, and flash out rays of kindly humor and witty irony; but his general tone was serious, and rose sometimes to genuine solemnity. His masterly skill in dialectical thrust and parry, his wealth of knowledge, his power of reasoning and elevation of sentiment, disclosed in language of rare precision, strength, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... eight books, the first of which, in irony of some histories which had previously been published, gives a description of the world and a history of its creation, and in brief, the story of Noah and the discovery of America, and a dissertation on the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Rich as the situation was, keenly as he had savored its unsuspected irony, the humor was all over for him. Here was a woman, still young, sweet and kind, and gentle as a childish memory, with her fine eyes full of tears! That was bad enough. To make it worse, she went on ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... who, in the heat of his zeal, had neither permitted himself to see matters in this light, nor to perceive that Clement's arguments concealed, under a grave aspect, something of irony and satire, looked upon his curate with dismay—the smooth and rosy cheek got pale, as did the whole purple face down to the third chin, each of which reminded one of the diminished rainbows in the sky, if we may be allowed to except that ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... dialogue; d With slang, etc.; e With words set apart; f Quotation within a quotation; g Together with other marks; h Quotation interrupted by he said; i Omission from a quotation; j Unnecessary in the title of a theme, or as a label for humor or irony 97. The Apostrophe: a In contractions; b To form the possessive; c To form the possessive of nouns ending in s; d Not used with personal possessive pronouns; e To form the plural of certain signs and letters 98. The Question ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... slave-owner in Porto Rico. His manners were grave and dignified, as due to himself; courteous, as not denying equal or superior worth in others. He had seen the world, and spoke of it habitually with a fine irony. We had many a walk together. He was nervous about his health. One day, as our path lay along the banks of the Rhine, his conversation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... A dismal irony seemed to lie in the words, and its effect was to irritate him. Downe, then, had spoken truly. He stuck his umbrella into the sod, and seized the post with both hands, as if intending to loosen and throw it down. Then, like one bewildered by an opposition which would exist ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... trade has well been called the systematic plunder of a continent. But in the irony of fate those Africans who lent their hands to the looting got nothing but deceptive rewards, while the victims of the rapine were quite possibly better off on the American plantations than the captors who remained in the African jungle. The only participants who got unquestionable profit ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... steady moral and mental discipline, for manliness at once and virtue, for delighting in ancient lore, and promoting its free circulation far and wide with the sole purpose and intent of sowing virtue and discountenancing vice. Such an effusion would have savoured rather of irony and bitter sarcasm, than of a desire to write what would be acceptable to the individual addressed. Lydgate's is the testimony, we confess, of a poet and a friend, but it is the testimony of a contemporary; of one who saw Henry in his daily walks, conversed with him often, had a personal knowledge ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... he was English, and to some extent reticent, but he felt that his comrade's dramatic utterance was more or less warranted, for the irony and pathos of the situation was clear to him. Grenfell had found the mine at last, but the gold he had sought so persistently was not for him. Men great in the mining world had smiled compassionately at ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... a dreadful irony in that useless life, prolonged in sleep beyond the limits of human age. Yet she had thought it worth the labour and care and endless watchfulness it had cost for years. And now her own, strong, young and fresh, seemed ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... of Brother Egidio well brings out the slight esteem in which theology was held by the early Brothers Minor. One day, in the presence of St. Bonaventura, he cried, perhaps not without a touch of irony, "Alas! what shall we ignorant and simple ones do to merit the favor of God?" "My brother," replied the famous divine, "you know very well that it suffices to love the Lord." "Are you very sure of that?" replied Egidio; "do you believe that a simple ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... labyrinth of casuistry, with its windings, turnings, secret chambers, whispering galleries, blind alleys, issues of evasion, came into existence; the whole vicious and monstrous edifice being crowned with the saving virtue of obedience, and the theory of ends justifying means. After the irony of Pascal, the condensed rage of La Chalotais, and the grave verdict of the Parlement of Paris (1762), it is not necessary now to refute the errors or to expose the abominations of this casuistry in detail.[174] Yet it cannot ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... statesmen, as Critias and Critobulus; some were politicians, in the worst sense of that word, as Glaucon; and some were young men of fashion, as Euthydemus and Alcibiades. These were all alike delighted with his inimitable irony, his versatility of genius, his charming modes of conversation, his adroitness of reply; and they were compelled to confess the wisdom and justness of his opinions, and to admire the purity and goodness ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... perplexity, that Mildred was not even trying to conceal her vexation and amazement, and that Belle had stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth to prevent laughter, a spark of anger glittered in his eyes. His first thought was that Mr. Jocelyn was indulging in unexpected irony at his expense, and the ready youth whose social habits had inured him to much chaffing was able to reply, although a little stiffly and awkwardly, "I suppose most young men have ambitious hopes of doing something in the world, and yet that does not prevent mine from seeming absurd. At any rate, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... from Canada, the doctors and the nurses (and the stretcher bearers, of which Jeb was one, although he had not yet discovered it) realized their transport was an old reconverted German tub, they would have cheered an irony so delightful had not orders been issued for complete silence. No one must know that this ship, secretly restored from the ravages of her former crew, entertained the slightest idea of sailing; not one of the swarm of spies in German pay, infesting New ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... Oh, irony of fate! the same thing precisely happens when men of scientific eminence indulge in religious dissertations, for of course, though it is not quite so obvious to such writers, the same blunder is quite possible in non-scientific fields of knowledge. I once asked one versed in ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... in Tai yue's apartments relating about the rat-elves, when Pao-ch'ai entered unannounced, and began to gibe Pao-yue, with trenchant irony: how that on the fifteenth of the first moon, he had shown ignorance of the allusion to the green wax; and the three of them then indulged in that room in mutual poignant satire, for the sake of fun. Pao-yue had been giving ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... toward this man. But my less easily affected companion, seeing his opportunity and possibly considering that it was this gentleman's right to know in what a doubtful light he stood before the law, remarked with as light a touch of irony as ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... in treasonable intrigues with Scottish nobles, and in fomenting border troubles. But the truce was renewed in 1533, and a more definite peace was made in 1534. Henry now attempted to enlist James as an ally against Rome, and, by the irony of fate, offered him, as a temptation to become a Protestant, the hand of the Princess Mary. James refused to break with the pope, and negotiations for a meeting between the two kings fell through—fortunately, for Henry was prepared to kidnap James. The King of Scots arranged in 1536 ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... superficial beauty, but they only made that admission in order to emphasize the hideousness of the body when deprived of this film of loveliness, and strained all their perverse intellectual acumen, and their ferocious irony, as they eagerly pointed the finger of mockery at every detail of what seemed to them the pitiful figure of man. St. Odo of Cluny—charming saint as he was and a pioneer in his appreciation of the wild beauty of the Alps he had often traversed—was yet an adept ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... hospital—all were sorry; yet they could not understand to the point of quite forgiving their vagaries. The twain were outcast, wandering each in a dumb world of his own, each in the endless circle of one or two hopeless notions. It was irony—or the French system—which had ordered the Breton Roche to get well in a place whence he could see nothing flatter than a mountain, smell no sea, eat no fish. And God knows what had sent Gray there. His story was too vaguely understood, for his stumbling speech simply could ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... eyes searched the other's impassive face for some trace of the irony he suspected. They were as wide asunder as the poles, these two, in their political views; and mistrusted as Andre-Louis was by all his colleagues of the Literary Chamber of Rennes, he was by none mistrusted so thoroughly as by ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... his own eminence of mind, though willing on all right occasions to forget it. "Once," records Mr. Irwin, "when I remarked on the omission of his name in an article on 'Minor Poets' in one of the magazines, he said, with a smile, 'Perhaps I am among the major!'" That smile had just sufficient irony—no more. ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... daintiest and self-complacentest sarcasm the lifelong loyalist scoffs at the Independent—or as he calls him, with cutting irony, the Mugwump; makes himself too killingly funny for anything in this world about him. But—the Mugwump can stand it, for there is a great history at his back; stretching down the centuries, and he comes of a mighty ancestry. He knows that in the whole history of the race of men no single great ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... I don't know anything about it," he said, with his chaffing and rather insulting irony. "Besides, I ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... the narrow south window, full in the smiling irony of Nature's sunshine; but only a moment. Then the mocking smile that had become an instinctive part of his nature spread over ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... he said, wiping the sweat from his eyes. "How's tricks?" There was a shadow of irony in his voice ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... superstition and profanity, deliberate atrocity and fear of judgment, are united in the same nature; and to make the complex still more strange, the play-wright has gifted these tremendous personalities with his own wild humour and imaginative irony. The result is almost monstrous, such an ideal of character as makes earth hell. And yet it is not without justification. To the Italian text has been added the Teutonic commentary, and both are fused by a dramatic genius ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... from the dressing-rooms in the clothes of saner moments, Charlie Hunt approached Mrs. Hawthorne, who, flushed with excitement, was looking almost too much like an American Beauty rose. He paid his compliments in a tone tinged with irony, all the while watching her with a penetrating, inquiring, ironical eye. But the irony was wasted. She was too ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... Mark answered, in a rich, full voice, and with elaborate irony. "You promised to go to the Orpheum with me, and I waited—and I waited—and you did not come. But that ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... His originality, indeed, sometimes over-reached the comprehension both of the public and his superiors; he was imprisoned for an attack on the Hanoverian succession, which was intended ironically; apparently he was ignorant of what every journalist ought to know that irony is at once the most dangerous and the most ineffectual weapon in the whole armoury of the press. The fertility and ingenuity of his intellect may be best gauged by the number of modern enterprises and ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Hester raised her eyes to those of the preceptress. Miss Burkham was the acme of all that was cultured and elegant. No imagination was strong enough to picture her, other than deliberate, low-voiced, serene of countenance. Hester who knew more of bluntness than irony, replied fearlessly, "No, there is no fire. I wished to get to my room as quickly ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... thought not," said Sir Kasimir, with a shade of irony in his tone. "It would be a troublesome siege; but the League numbers 1,500 horse, and 9,000 foot, and, with Schlangenwald's concurrence, you would ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ruled paper, as if I had not got past pothooks and hangers. Sealing wax, I have none on my establishment. Wafers of the coarsest bran supply its place. When my Epistles come to be weighed with Pliny's, however superior to the Roman in delicate irony, judicious reflexions, etc., his gilt post will bribe over the judges to him. All the time I was at the E.I.H. I never mended a pen; I now cut 'em to the stumps, marring rather than mending the primitive goose quill. I cannot bear to pay for articles I used to get for nothing. When Adam laid ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... hear of her extremity," the captain answered, with a fine irony, "but I am here to do my duty. I am thinking, my dear, that you are ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... was quite incapable of understanding the irony of her cousin's last remark, and was inclined to be well pleased with the reception her news had ...
— The Store Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... "I know you've got a brace of guns; and I know you can plant a bullet where you want it to land, about as quick as the next one. I haven't a doubt but what you're equal to the Vigilantes, with both hands tied! Of course," he went on with heavy irony, "I have known of some mighty able men swinging from the oak, lately. There'll likely be more, before the town wakes up and weeds out some of the cutthroat element that's running things now to ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... form one of those political groups, numerous enough in history, who at a crisis arrest our imagination because of the irony of their situation. Unsuspecting, these men went their way, during the last summer of the old regime, busy with the ordinary affairs of state, absorbed in their opposition to the Southern radicals, never dreaming of the ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... replied Nani, who was still smiling with that keen, intelligent smile of his, sharpened by a touch of almost imperceptible irony. And after a short pause he added in a very simple way: "The misfortune is that on the day before yesterday your book was condemned by the Congregation of the Index, which was convoked by its Secretary expressly for that purpose. And the judgment will be laid before his Holiness, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... nose; yet it was by peering into her eyes that one first obtained the idea of a womanhood somewhat superior to the generality of her sex. Their expression was not to be caught at once: they told of both meditation and resolve, and hinted at irony or badinage, which works so queerly when it comes from deep ground. The other lady was "burgherly-genteel," a handsome, cultivated girl, had certainly also some soul, but yet was far less busy with a world in her own heart than with the world of fashion. ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... slightest exaggeration?" said the officer, looking searchingly at Pen, and there was a touch of irony in his tone. "Well, that is what I want from ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... approach so softly? I do not sleep, you see, but you feared, perhaps, to have the misfortune of wakening me, and so you came—is it not so?—to leesten, and looke in very gentily; you want to know how I was. Vous etes bien aimable d'avoir pense a moi. Bah!' she cried, suddenly bursting through her irony. 'Wy could not Lady Knollys come herself and leesten to the keyhole to make her report? Fi donc! wat is there to conceal? Nothing. Enter, if you please. Every one they are welcome!' and she flung the door wide, turned her back upon me, and, with an ejaculation which I did not understand, strode ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... forgot his differential air, and relaxed into a very pleasing but highly reprehensible state of friendliness. A touch of the old jauntiness cropped out here and there, a tinge of the old irony marred his otherwise perfect mien as a soldier. His laugh was freer, his eyes less under subjugation, his entire personality more arrogant. It was time, thought she resentfully, that his temerity should meet some ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... pleasure of making them out in duplicate, that you propose to show them here?" asked he, some irony in his tone. "I thought they were in the study ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... le Plus beau diner du monde, betrayed a singularly inventive and keenly bantering mind. The whole order of contemporary and utilitarian ideas, the whole commercialized baseness of the age were glorified in stories whose poignant irony transported Des Esseintes. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Sophists, as he describes them in the Republic, are the imitators rather than the authors, being themselves carried away by the great tide of public opinion. Socrates approaches his antagonist warily from a distance, with a sort of irony which touches with a light hand both his personal vices (probably in allusion to some scandal of the day) and his servility to the populace. At the same time, he is in most profound earnest, as Chaerephon remarks. Callicles soon loses his temper, but the more he is irritated, the more provoking and ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... all things the ways of a dog and a cow respectively, in the hope of thus obtaining salvation. When pressed to say what their next birth would be, he opined that if their penance was successful they would be reborn as dogs and cows, if unsuccessful, in hell. Irony and modesty are combined in his rejection of extravagant praise. "Such faith have I, Lord[392]" said Sariputta, "that methinks there never has been nor will be nor is now any other greater or wiser than ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... commented with deep irony, "the loose laws of the State, governing all classes of State lands, has enabled wealthy parties to obtain much of it under circumstances which, in some countries, where laws are more rigid and terms less refined, ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... undermine, but most likely they would disclose before Nero how dear Lygia was to Plautius, and then Nero would all the more resolve not to yield her to him. Here the old sage began to speak with a biting irony, which he turned against himself: "Thou hast been silent, Plautius, thou hast been silent for whole years, and Caesar does not like those who are silent. How couldst thou help being carried away by his ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... had pleaded 'not guilty' to the indictment, to raise an unseemly laugh by saying that Lady Arabella 'hath no more title to the Crown than I have, which, before God, I utterly renounce.' Raleigh was noticed to smile at this, and we can imagine that his irony would be roused by such buffoonery on an occasion so serious. There was no more jesting of this kind, but the whole trial has remained a type of what was uncouth and undesirable in the conduct of criminal trials through the beginning of the seventeenth century. The nation so rapidly ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... instincts, old conservative Athenians who let themselves go—"for the sake of happiness," as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated—and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led, IRONY was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that said plainly enough "Do not ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... unless in buskins; had no idea that such deeds only showed the habit of her mind. Others talked of the delicacy of her sex, advised her to withdraw from perils and dangers, and had no comprehension of the feelings within her breast that made this impossible. The gentle irony of her reply to these self-constituted tutors (not one of whom showed himself her equal in conduct or reason), is as good as her indignant reproof at a later period to the general, whose ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the world seems, indeed, to be penetrated by a good-natured irony; it is as if the Power controlling us saw that, like children, we must be tenderly wooed into doing things which we should otherwise neglect, by a sense of high importance, as a kindly father who is doing accounts keeps his children quiet by letting ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the party, with his back to the fire, appeared displeased at their levity—shook his head, and was on the point of speaking one of those polite but cynical reproofs, whose irony, cold and intangible, intimidated the less potent spirits of the club-room. But he dismissed it with a little shrug. And a minute after, Major O'Neill and Arthur Slowe became aware that Dangerfield had glided behind them, and was looking ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... moment, so strange is the ordering of human affairs and so much irony is there in the lessons of life, we who were all ready to weep for the loss of our mainmast would have been only too glad to say good-bye to it. For while its fall augmented the shock, and made us in worse case that way, we were not lightened of it for all our pains, for it was so entangled ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... gone again, and already half-way to the Farallone, before Herrick turned and went unwillingly up the pier. From the crown of the beach, the figure-head confronted him with what seemed irony, her helmeted head tossed back, her formidable arm apparently hurling something, whether shell or missile, in the direction of the anchored schooner. She seemed a defiant deity from the island, coming forth to its threshold with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and rugged an aspect to his sentences; while, perpetually checking himself, from a wise man's shame at excessive emotion, and from the knowledge that others will but half sympathise with him, he adds to his most weighty utterances a turn of irony which relieves the excessive strain.... Add to this, that Mr. Carlyle's resolution to convey his meaning at all hazards, makes him seize the most effectual and sudden words in spite of usage and fashionable taste; and that, therefore, when he can get a brighter tint, a more expressive ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... attuned to the national note of irony for her not to perceive that her companions were making sport of the painter. She winced at their banter as if it had been at her own expense, yet it gave her a dizzy sense of being at last in the very stronghold ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... The irony dropped from Mr. Wotherspoon's tone. He faced the business squarely. "Do you mean to say that you do not know of the suicide ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... offerings of some people who were having prayers said for them, and the whole was lighted by two lamps burning low. On a step of the altar a much-contorted devil was crouching uneasily, for he was subjugated and, by a grim irony, made to carry a massive incense-burner on his shoulders. In this temple there were more than a hundred idols standing in rows, many of them life-size, some of them trampling devils under their feet, but all ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... little, nevertheless, this confidence diminished, and irony gave place to astonishment; astonishment changed to stupor. Those who have passed through that extraordinary minute will not forget it. It was evident that there was something underlying all this. But what? Profound obscurity. Can one imagine Paris in a cellar? People felt as though they ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... called it "rot". Mr. Rosenberg was to Thyrsis a living embodiment of Moses Rosen in the play—so much so that he felt the resemblance in the names to be perilous, and winced every time he heard Rosenberg speak of Rosen. But fortunately neither Rosenberg nor Rosen possessed a sense of irony, and so there were no feelings hurt. Thyrsis had written the play without having met either a press-agent or the head of a music-bureau; he had drawn the character of Moses after the fashion of the German, evolving the idea of an elephant out of his inner consciousness. ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... at the irony of the argument, and their laugh did much to do away with the constraint, the tension of their mood. More gayly she ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... with the acrid sub-flavor of irony and insincerity with which an insincere woman can not help tainting ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... even the oldest places—S. Paolo al Orto, for instance, with its beautiful old tower that is now a dwelling—are put to some use, and are really living still like the gods who have taken service with us, perhaps in irony, to console themselves for our treachery in watching our sadness ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... Anne Fletcher, was over and done with for Anne Majendie. Like some mourner for whom superb weather has been provided on the funeral day of his beloved, she felt in this young, wantoning, unsympathetic Spring the immortal cruelty and irony of Nature. She was bearing her own heart to its burial; and each street that they passed, as the slow cab rattled heavily on its way from the station, was a stage in the intolerable progress; it brought her a little nearer ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... asked in a pretty irony; "well, then, of co'se, sisteh or no sisteh, you muz' instan'ly go!" The steady tinkle of the sister's laughter as she passed with a chair provoked her own: "Yes, go! Me, I'll rimmain with her till ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... gentleness. The outline of that little head, . . . the delicate, fine features, the subtle curve of the lips, the mobile face itself, wore an expression of delicate discretion, a faint semblance of irony suggestive of craft and insolence. It would have been difficult to refuse forgiveness to those two feminine failings in her in thinking of her misfortunes, of the passion that had almost cost her her life. Was it not an imposing spectacle (still further ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... posting back to Denver with the worst case of monopoly fright he had ever experienced. The day after his arrival the Tribune had something to say in every department of his nefarious mission, and every reference to him bristled with biting irony and downright accusation. Never was a "good fellow and ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... Richard Fitzpatrick is meant, who later on joined in writing The Rolliad, and who was the cousin and 'sworn brother' of Charles Fox. Walpole describes him as 'an agreeable young man of parts,' and mentions his 'genteel irony and badinage.' Journal of the Reign of George III, i. 167 and ii. 560. He was Lord Shelburne's brother-in-law, at whose house Johnson might have met him, as well as in Fox's company. There are one or two lines in The Rolliad which ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Madame de Laumieres, who was very much touched by this story and whose nerves were rather highly strung, was drying her tears behind her open fan, suddenly the harsh and shrill voices of the fast women who were returning from the Casino, by the strange irony of fate, struck up an idiotic song which was then in vogue: "Oh! the poor, oh! the poor, oh! ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... possibility of friendship between us. You are a poor judge of human nature, and conceited past my understanding, to imagine that it is a matter which is entirely optional with you." With the slow one-sided smile of irony which her face sometimes wore, she bowed slightly. Then, "You will ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... Dorchester was founded, and soon afterwards four "prudent and honest men" went out from it and founded Salem. John White procured a patent and royal charter for them also, which was sealed on March 4th, 1629. It seemed the irony of fate that on the same day 147 years afterwards Washington should open fire upon Boston from the Dorchester heights in ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... There is irony in the fact that the works of the illustrious authors mentioned have perished, that we should hardly know of their existence were it not for the tribute of their modest, youthful rival. But Kalidasa could not read the future. We can imagine his feelings of mingled pride ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... the whole truth. He longed, with morbid longing, to share his knowledge. She, after all, was the only human being who knew the story of his tragic, incomplete love. It would be an infinite comfort and relief to tell her, if not everything, then at least of the irony, the ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... "It seems the irony of fate," said McKnight, getting up, "that a man should kill another man for certain papers he is supposed to be carrying, find he hasn't got them after all, decide to throw suspicion on another man by changing berths ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Christianity has always approved itself to French Freethinkers. They regard the statement that he treated religious questions in a spirit of levity as the weak defence of those who know that irony and sarcasm are the deadliest enemies of their faith. Superstition dislikes argument, but it hates laughter. Nimble and far-flashing wit is more potent against error than the slow dull logic of the schools; and the ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... The fact that four of the six British army-commanders (Plumer, Byng, Rawlinson, Cavan) in the West at the end of the war were old Etonians, testifies to more things than their military skill; and it was a characteristic irony that from first to last the British armies should have been commanded by cavalry officers in a war in which cavalry ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... once, as though someone had turned on a faucet. In ten seconds a very competent streamlet six inches wide had eroded a course down through the guano, past the fire and to the outer slope. And by the irony of fate that one—and only one—leak in all the roof expanse of a big cave was directly over one end of our tiny ledge. The ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... Irony of Fate—that's how "A Book of verses underneath the Bough" Is what I hear from Morn to Dewy Eve. A Wilderness ...
— The Rubaiyat of a Huffy Husband • Mary B. Little
... other 'Reminiscences,' so like and yet so unlike. It is not possible to transfer the impression of a character; we can only suggest it by means of some resemblance; and it is a singular illustration of that irony which checks or directs our sympathies, that in trying to give some notion of the man whom, among those who were not his kindred, Carlyle appears to have most loved, I can say nothing more descriptive ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... window, and spoke to me with furious irony from the street. For God's sake, hide me. I feel that ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... not wish to think that his father would be untrue to his new commission," she said, trembling at her boldness and yet exultant too; and taking no pains to keep the irony out of her voice. ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... With characteristic irony Horace puts his fancies into the mouth of Alphius, a miserly money-lender. No one yearns so keenly for the country and its imagined peace as the overworked city man, when his pulse is low and his spirits weary with bad air and the reaction of over-excitement; no one, as a rule, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... very possible that there's truth in your irony—as I remember him, however, he was not as you ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... she detained him, Clo had indeed dared the great adventure. For a moment Beverley thought of the pearls almost with distaste. That they should come to her to-day, when she cared for nothing in the world but the lost papers, was an irony of fate. She did not return to the boudoir. She forgot the mystery of the open door, and neglected to close it. She was nervously anxious to excuse herself to Sister Lake. Above all, it was her duty to defend ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... carried tenderly to the nearest field hospital. He was seen to be in great pain, besides being much exhausted from loss of blood, but hopes were entertained that his wound would not prove mortal. By the irony of fate, the occupant of another dhoolie, which was presently placed by his, turned out to be his brother Charles, whose arm had been shattered. The two had met ...
— John Nicholson - The Lion of the Punjaub • R. E. Cholmeley
... and most elegant novelties. She was one of the very persons whom the Emperor had expressly forbidden to enter the palace; and he did not anticipate finding her there. Yet he made no outburst; and Josephine, who knew him better than any one else, was the only one who understood the irony of his look as he retired, saying, "Continue ladies; I am sorry to have disturbed you." The milliner, much astonished that she was not put rudely out of the door, hastened to retire; but when she reached the last step of the stairs leading to ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... circumstances. Although descended from New England's finest stock, Miss Woodhull also possessed her full share of the New Englander's nervous irritability which all the good breeding and discipline ever brought to bear can never wholly eradicate. Her sarcasm and irony had caused more than one girl's cheeks to grow crimson and her blood to boil under their stinging injustice, for Miss Woodhull did not invariably get to the root of things. She was a trifle superior to minor details. But Aileen possessed an armor to combat just such a temperament and her companion, ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... It is the same sort of instinct as shows itself in our love of certain kinds of fiction. We know that some of the happy endings in the plays and in the novels are often far-fetched; but we like to have the happy endings, or the "poetic justice" endings, or the "irony of fate" endings, just the same. When the child makes up his endings to fit his sense of justice or beauty, we must not condemn him, as we are often tempted to do, by calling his fabrication a "lie," for that at once puts it in the same ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... Roosevelt's coming into the Presidency as he did, but there was irony as well. An evil chance dropped William McKinley before an assassin's bullet; but there was a fitting irony in the fact that the man who must step into his place had been put where he was in large measure by the very men who would least like to ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... you do, my dear diplomatist," replied Morcerf, with a slight degree of irony in his voice, "if you did nothing? What? private secretary to a minister, plunged at once into European cabals and Parisian intrigues; having kings, and, better still, queens, to protect, parties to unite, elections to direct; making more ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... there no trace of her former irony, of her old hatred and enmity, and of that dreadful laughter, the very recollection of which sent a cold chill down Totski's back to this very day; but she seemed charmed and really glad to have the opportunity of talking seriously with him for once ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... dryads, where it intercepts the "avenue" that slips over from the Elm Street trolley-cars, lies, such as it is, my own acre; house, lawn, shrubberies and, at the rear, in the edge of the pines, the study. Back there by the study—which sometimes in irony we call the power-house—the lawn merges into my seven other acres, in Paradise. Really the whole possession is a much humbler one than I find myself able to make it appear in the flattering terms of land measure. Those ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... He is a man set apart from all those who live lives of service, who do the work of the world. And then that he should be distinguished from these world-workers, these servers, by this noblest of all titles—a minister, is the bitterest irony that the mind ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... Madame Graslin; Besancon, Savarus and his misguided love; Angouleme, Rubempre; Sancerre, Madame de la Baudraye; Alencon, that touching, artless old maid to whom her uncle, the Abbe de Sponde, remarked with gentle irony: "You have too much wit. You don't need so ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... was born in Boston in 1809—a stroke of purest irony on the part of fate, for he was in no respect a Bostonian, and it was to Bostonians especially that he was anathema. His parents were actors, travelling from place to place, and his birth at Boston was purely accidental. They had no home and no fortune, ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... given much to have been able to translate. Was it merely my imagination—I asked myself—or was there really a recurrent shade of her former hauteur of manner, mingled with just the faintest suggestion of irony and impatience? The fact is that I was at that moment as far from being able to comprehend this lovely but inscrutable woman as when I met her for the first time in the saloon of the City of Cawnpore: her moods were ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... McCormick has unfortunately disappeared. Those that have survived are here published for what they are worth. There is no necessity to apologise for their faults and deficiencies, which do not, I think, obscure their value as documents illustrating the development of that gift of irony which Butler was afterwards to wield with such brilliant mastery. 'Napoleon at St. Helena' and 'The Shield of Achilles' have already appeared in THE EAGLE, December, 1902; the "Translation from Herodotus," "The Shield ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... is a great place for iron; this is found in coarse red sandstone, or it may be fine granite, forming precipices; this is scraped or pushed down by iron rods, it is then washed by a stream turned off on to it: the stream is dammed up, and the irony particles by their weight fall to the bottom: they are very heavy, of a dull blackish appearance. All the streams are of a whitish colour, and the rocks ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... insatiable explorer of the earth has disappeared from it except in his own writings. The only monument to his memory existing is a shabby little marble shaft erected on the southerly summit of Star Island, one of the Isles of Shoals. By a kind of irony of fortune, which Smith would have grimly appreciated, the only stone to perpetuate his fame stands upon a little heap of rocks in the sea; upon which it is only an inference that he ever set foot, and we can almost ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the irony of the fates ordered it, the two mates, each in charge of one of the Flamingo's lifeboats, were commanding crews made up entirely of Germans and Scandinavians, and pluckier and more careful sailormen could not have been wished for. The work was dangerous, ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... in him. The irritability approaching to violence, which had attended every speech and infused itself into every movement since he came into the room, had left him. He spoke quietly, and with a touch of irony in his tone. He seemed more the man, but not a whit more prepossessing, and, if anything, less calculated to inspire confidence. The district attorney showed that he was baffled, and Dr. Perry moved uneasily ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... be some facts which support this theory; and if there are," he added with gentle irony, "our learned friend ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... grand and simple irony in this not easily surpassed. Some very evident proofs had been given in England, that to deny the King's spiritual supremacy was "wilfully to be dead," although neither the King nor the Parliament had vouchsafed to inform the victims in what part of the Gospel the keys of ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... taking the sting from her emphasis by his prompt adoption of it. Dick had always had a wholesome way of thus appropriating to his own use such small shafts of maternal irony as were now and then ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... seemed to occur to Gayarre, upon whom, however, it made a very different sort of impression. There was irony mixed with anger in his reply, which was ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... really am what you said I was, an idler. I didn't like the taunt from your lips; but it was true. Well, I am going to change all that. I am tired of posturing as one of Daudet's 'Kings in Exile.' We expelled potentates all live in Paris; that is the irony of it. I want to be candid with you, Joan. I have seen you every day since we met at Rudin's; but I did not dare to meet you too often lest you should send me away. You have given me a purpose in life. You have created ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... human Cosmos within the eternal Cosmos. It is perhaps at first sight strange that many kings and governors also followed Epicurus. Yet after all the work of a public man is not hindered by a slight irony as to the value of worldly greatness and a conviction that a dinner of bread and water with love to season it 'is better than all the crowns of the Greeks'. To hate cruelty and superstition, to ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... thoughts, which charm and nourish it as only good books can. No one was ever worse from reading Charles Lamb's writings; but many have become wiser and better. Sometimes, as he hints, "he affected that dangerous figure, irony;" and he would sometimes interrupt grave discussion, when he thought it too grave, with some light jest, which nevertheless was "not quite irrelevant." Long talkers, as he confesses, "hated him;" and assuredly he ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... Augustus—who can doubt that he deserves our worship?" said the philosopher, a subtle irony in his voice. It was this learned man who had long been the instructor ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... she hesitate between her ruin and mine? . . . How strange! I would have publicly disgraced her in my own house. She accepts public disgrace in the house of another to save me. . . . There is a bitter irony in things, a bitter irony in the way we talk of good and bad women. . . . Oh, what a lesson! and what a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us! For even if she doesn't tell, I must. Oh! the shame of ...
— Lady Windermere's Fan • Oscar Wilde
... that he once complained to the queen, and said that he could no longer stay in the Isle of Wight, on account of the tourists who came to stare at him. The queen, with a kindly irony, remarked that she did not suffer much from that grievance, but Tennyson not seeing what she meant, replied, "No, madam, and if I could clap a sentinel wherever I liked, I should not be ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Observe how the irony of the whole of that, finishing with the grim innuendo of the last stanza but one, is at once ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... THE REVOLUTION by Michael Artzibashev, translated by Percy Pinkerton. (B. W. Huebsch.) The five tales by Artzibashev included in this volume all have the same quality of bitter irony and mordant self-analysis. The psychological revelation of the mind that has made the later phases of the present Russian Revolution possible is complete, and I know of no book that presents more clearly and truthfully the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... that right with the most cruel vigor, and he fulfilled that duty with the fiercest heroism, and to make matters worse, the mysterious irony of fate had caused him to be born with the name of Lebeau, while an ingenious godfather, the unconscious accomplice of the pranks of destiny, had given him the Christian name ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... let Deed Measure your words, indeed your flowers of speech Ill with your iron equipage atone; Irony indeed, ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... was not the less his duty to accept the judgment of the people.[42] Say that the people ought not to have done so; but it should have been sufficient for him that they had done so. Then he laughs with a beautiful irony at the pretensions of the accuser. "Let us suppose that it was so," he says.[43] "Let no one whose family has not soared above praetorian honors contest any place with one of consular family. Let no mere knight stand against one with praetorian relations." ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... of life was that of a Confessor of youthful nuns. Lowndes's Bibl. Man. p. 488, and Gent. Mag. xiii. 279. I. D'Israeli (Curiosities of Literature, ed. 1834, ii. 102) describes Campbell's book as a 'curious banter on the hermetic philosophy and the universal medicine; the grave irony is so closely kept up, that it deceived for a length of time the most learned. Campbell assured a friend it was a mere jeu-d'-esprit.' Lord E. Fitzmaurice (Life of Shelburne, iii. 447) says that Ingenhousz, a Dutch physician who lived with Shelburne, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... By the irony of fate this man, so gentle and good, so desirous of quiet joys and a mind free from care, was set at the head of the Roman Empire when great dangers threatened from east and west. For several years he himself commanded his ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... to change your mind and advise your mother," Lady Loring remarked with grave irony as ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... of bitterness in the displeased tone of Fernanda, whilst that of the count was calm and ceremonious, although slightly dashed with irony. ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... often wield rather clumsily. They joked about these free ions in solution, and they asked to see this chlorine and this sodium which swam about the water in a state of liberty. But in science, as elsewhere, irony is not argument, and it soon had to be acknowledged that the hypothesis of M. Arrhenius showed itself singularly fertile and had to be regarded, at all events, as a very expressive image, if not, indeed, entirely ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... with which to print an edition of Shakespeare's works, to be illustrated with the drawings then in Boydell's gallery. This William Martin had learnt his art in the foundry of Baskerville; and such is the irony of fate, that less than twenty years after the death of that eminent founder, his work, scorned by the booksellers of London in his own day, was imitated in what was certainly one of the most pretentious ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... life the King could not tell why he refrained from again attempting to embrace her—and yet he did refrain, standing and listening while she reproved him, and to his ears there seemed to be something of irony and something of mirth in ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of the evening he observed two of his men, who had slipped in and were sitting at the back of the little stifling room, hugely enjoying the irony of the situation, and determined on ending the discussion with an announcement of ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... the Greek: they only differ by 1 divided by 3n^2, where n is the infinite number of parts of which a parabola is composed. This must have been the conceit that tickled Leibnitz, and made him wish that Cluvier and Nieuwentiit should fight it out. Cluvier, was admitted, on terms of irony, into the Leipzig Acts: he appeared on a more serious footing in London. It is very rare for one cyclometer to refute another: les corsaires ne se battent pas.[619] The only instance I recall is that of M. Cluvier, who (Phil. Trans., 1686, No. 185) refuted M. Mallemont de Messange,[620] ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... was intimate through many years, and never on any occasion did he repeat a story or a phrase that contained a profane remark or carried a vulgar allusion. He had a relish for untainted wit and for genial humor, and for humor he had some capacity. He was not an admirer of Mr. Sumner and a trace of irony may be found in a remark attributed to him: When some one said: "Mr. Sumner does not believe in the Bible," General Grant said: "No, I suppose not, he didn't ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... fellow," said De Roberval, with a tinge of irony in his hard voice. "But now tell me more plainly the reason of ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... conjure with, so he capitulated with a willingness that savored somewhat of suspended animation (so fearful was he that he might do something to disturb the dream before it came true). That was two years ago. With exquisite irony, Lady Bazelhurst decided to have a country-place in America. Her agents discovered a glorious section of woodland in the Adirondacks, teeming with trout streams, game haunts, unparalleled scenery; her ladyship instructed them to buy without delay. It was just here that ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds |
