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More "Bizarre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... give some indication that, although universally regarded as a man of action, he is entitled also to be considered as a man of thought. The lecture at the University of Berlin was a brilliant and picturesque academic celebration in which doctors' gowns, military uniforms, and the somewhat bizarre dress of the representatives of the undergraduate student corps, mingled in kaleidoscopic effect. One interesting feature of the ceremony was the singing by a finely trained student chorus without instrumental accompaniment, of Hail Columbia and The Star-Spangled Banner, ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... they thought. But to Larry, suddenly, occurred a gleam of hope. That strange sense of unseen presences! It was bizarre, of course, but doesn't a drowning person catch at straws? And Lord knows they were drowning, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... first time—and indeed it was for the first time—he really and thoroughly comprehended her self-sacrifice, the almost bizarre generosity of her implacably unselfish nature. He measured the force of her love and the greatness of her sacrifice, by the depth of her disillusion; and he began to wonder, almost as a child wonders ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... could enunciate neither the one sentence nor the other. There are some truths so bizarre that they make you feel self-conscious and guilty before you have begun to state them; you state them apologetically; you blush; you stammer; you have all the air of one who does not expect belief; you look a fool; you feel a fool; and you ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... dazzling gems, which at once set off, and were foiled by, the beauty of nature. Her hair was of the most luxuriant, and of the deepest, black; and it was worn in a fashion—then uncommon, without being bizarre—now hackneyed by the plainest faces, though suiting only the highest order of beauty—I mean that simple and classic fashion to which the French have given a name borrowed from Calypso, but which appears to me suited ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... gazed at, however, was this bizarre figure of a despot who held the power of life and death. It was one of his quieter interludes when he laid aside the ferocious and bombastic play-acting which made it hard to discover whether he was very cunning or half-mad. ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... right in his conjectures, for on going to the spot the next night, he found beneath the bush a little boy clad in a strange melange of Indian finery, and the bizarre attire worn by Paul Hubel when he set out on his strange ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... eccentric owner of the Secret House all the privacy he desired. He might do things which were unheard of, as indeed he did, and Great Bradley, standing aloof, was content to thank God that it was not cast in the same bizarre mould as this wealthy unknown, and took ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... overlap each other and approach with their ends the middle of each span after the semblance of an arch. Parasitic plants, and even considerable trees, take root in their crevices and disguise the structure in an even more bizarre way than the mediaeval buildings did Old London Bridge. There are seven of these bridges within the city, about three hundred feet long, and between them on either hand the houses overhang the water at the expense of all visible ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... weird, bizarre nightmare, no more astonishing than the novels the Lapierres had read. America, they understood, was a land where the rivers were full of gold—a country of bronzed and handsome savages, of birds of paradise ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... would often give it away the next week. For he really liked money only for freedom and ease. The general look of the house was, consequently, distinguished, sincere and extremely comfortable. It was neither hackneyed nor bizarre, and, while it contained some interesting things, had ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... but rather suspicious eyes studied her; he answered lightly; behind them now, he who had been riding with my lady could hear their gay laughter. Lord Ronsdale was apparently telling her a whimsical story; he had traveled much, met many people, bizarre and otherwise, and could be ironically witty when stimulated to the effort. John Steele did not look at them; when the girl at a turn in the way allowed her glance a moment to sweep aside toward those following, she could see he was riding with head ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... heard aright, "little puff"? This battle of wind and wave a little puff! And she who regarded this cataclysmic scene with such contempt—that brave and confident figure, swaying so easily to the deck's reel, that bizarre costume, that sparkling face—was she the distressed maid he had fought for the night before? Yes, he remembered that vivid, expressive face. By George, ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... Certainly, at first, as one passes into the strange vestibule which intervenes still between the front and the interior of the shaitya, one does not think at all—one only feels the dim sense of mildness raying out from the great faces of the elephants, and of mysterious far-awayness conveyed by the bizarre postures of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... me?" He hesitated, trying to think of some polite form of address. Those he knew which were appropriate to their sex on other worlds seemed incongruous when applied to the bizarre figures now facing him. "Wise ones," he ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... K. Anthony, the father, saw in the person of Adelbert Higgins a budding criminal of rare precocity, and a menace to his son; while to the object of his solicitude the aforesaid criminal was nothing more than an entertaining companion, whose bizarre disregard of all established rules of right and wrong matched well with his own careless temper. Higgins, moreover, was an ardent follower of athletics, revolving like a satellite about the football stars, and attaching himself especially to Kirk, who was too good-natured ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... thus by certain aestheticians (and among them, De Sanctis), as also in discussions relating to concrete art: they have held fancy, not imagination, to be the special faculty of the poet and the artist. Not only does a new and bizarre combination of images, which is vulgarly called invention, not constitute the artist, but ne fait rien a l'affaire, as Alceste remarked with reference to the length of time expended upon writing a sonnet. Great artists have often preferred to treat groups of images, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... thinking. 'I met him at dinner at the Vice-Chancellor's, now I remember. A bizarre and formidable person—very difficult to talk to,' ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cool breath of mountain and river sweep his cheek and mingle a few escaped threads of her fair hair with his own. With that glimpse and that sensation the vulgarity and the tawdriness of their surroundings, the guttering candles in their sconces, the bizarre figures, the unmeaning faces seemed to be whirled far into distant space. They were alone with night and nature; it was they who were still; all else had receded in a vanishing perspective of dull reality, in ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... military classes mingled indiscriminately, their divers uniforms and decorations suggesting a dress ball in the capital of the world. But the motley costumes of the women, who dressed with the license of unrestrained individuality, were even more startling and bizarre—a kaleidoscopic fantastic masquerade. ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... place over there, Miss Heron; rather bizarre and conspicuous, but striking and rather artistic. ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... not hard to realize that here we were in the country of Bras-de-Fer, of Memling, of Cuyp, and Thierry d'Alsace, for, on descending from the halting, bumping train at the small brick station, we were face to face with a bizarre, bulbous-topped tower rising above the houses surrounding a small square, and now quite crowded with large, hollow-backed, thick-legged Flemish horses, which might have been those of the followers of Thierry gathered in preparation ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... purpose, a definite human application. When the cup of human life is so overflowing with woe and pain and misery, it seems to me a narrow dilettanteism or downright charlatanism to devote one's self to petty or bizarre problems which can have no relation to human happiness, and to prate of self-satisfaction and self-expression. One can have all the self-expression one wants ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... Bedouin rumbled: "Exquisite! But she is not of your land. Italian, Spanish, or some bizarre mingling of strange races, but none of ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... figure, Sidwell's black eyes tightened, but he returned and took the place Scotty had vacated. He gave his companion a glance which, swift as a flash of light upon a sensitized plate, took in every detail of the figure, the bizarre dress, the striking face. ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... has composed little, and that little is done on simple lines, but the simplicity is deep, and the harmonies, without being bizarre, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... Airworthy, K.C.M.G., I must forthwith explain, was that distinguished colonial statesman whose retirement to the quiet and bizarre enjoyments of life was so sincerely deplored at the time. His taste for the picturesque characters of our coast was discriminating and insatiable. 'Twas no wonder, then, that he delighted in my uncle, whose familiar companion he was in St. ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... between CD-ROM and network pricing and in doing so highlighted something bizarre in information pricing. A large institution such as the University of California has vendors who will offer to sell information on CD-ROM for a price per year in four digits, but for the same data (e.g., an abstracting and indexing database) on magnetic ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... strength of this outfit, and got it off the bat. There's the suit paid for in two months and a pair of shoes over." He thrust out a leg, from below the sharp-pressed trouser-line of which protruded a boot trimmed in a sort of bizarre fretwork. "Like me to ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Coleridge's letters are often bizarre in construction and quite regardless of the conventions of style, and abound in the most curious freaks of emphasis and imagery. They resemble the letters of Cowper in that they were not written for publication; and, like Cowper's, they have a character of their ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... more. She sat long on her bed, dazed by the rush of bitter-sweet memories. The Convent, her father, her early years, this dear boy ... all was washed together in tears. There was something so bizarre, unexpected and ingenuous about it all; it touched the elemental in her. If he had excused himself even, she would have tossed him off impatiently. But his frank exposure of his own self-contradictoriness appealed ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... and bizarre, was not justly entitled to rank among great statesmen. But the characteristics of Congress, as a body, can be brought into better relief in the narrative of his life than in that of any other person of his day. These characteristics were so striking, so essential ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... glutinous substance. The main body of the plant was studded with warty projections about the size of walnut halves. And just below the terminal funnel was a corona of tapering members like leaves beneath a bizarre blossom. They ended in sharp points, bore flimsy surface bristles, and seemed to serve as ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... inspiration, yet we are minded of Elijah's experience with the wind and the fire and the still small voice. So we cannot help sympathizing with Browning's protest against "friend Naddo's" view that genius is a matter of bizarre and grandiose sensations. [Footnote: Sordello.] At least it is pleasant to find verse, by minor writers though it be, describing the quietude and naturalness of the poet's best moments. Thus Holmes tells us of ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... doubts that there is a peculiar heel-tickling, smile-provoking, joy-awakening, response-compelling charm in Ragtime needs only to hear a skilful performer play the genuine article, needs only to listen to its bizarre harmonies, its audacious resolutions often consisting of an abrupt jump from one key to another, its intricate rhythms in which the accents fall in the most unexpected places but in which the fundamental beat is never lost in order to be convinced. I believe it has its ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... and the States-General vied with each other in generosity to the great champion of protestantism, who was combating the holy league so valiantly, and rarely has a great historical figure presented itself to the world so bizarre of aspect, and under such shifting perplexity of light and shade, as did the Bearnese in the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... as I come to the dark conclusion of a story which had seemed to me to be only childish and bizarre, I experience once again the dismay and horror with which I was filled. Would that I had some brighter ending to communicate to my readers, but these are the chronicles of fact, and I must follow to their dark crisis the strange chain of events which for some days made ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tapers which burned in the huge crystal chandeliers. The Landhofmeisterin's own musicians discoursed rhythmical strains from the gallery, and a gay motley crowd moved on the inlaid polished floor. There were dominoes of every colour, bizarre, fantastic shapes; and somehow this masked assemblage had a strangely sinister appearance, a mysterious lurking menace ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... to mend it. Like all truly idle people, he had an artistic eye. He chose the print stuff for his wife's dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patch-work quilt, always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated eye, always with bizarre and admirable taste—the taste of an Indian. With all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in word and act. Take his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for any society but that of fools. Quiet as he was, there burned a deep, permanent excitement ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... itself. High-bowed and pooped, and curved like the crescent moon, it was the strangest craft that he had ever seen. Even as he gazed it glided on nearer and nearer, and at last beached itself noiselessly on the sands before his own feet. A score of figures as bizarre and outlandish as the ship itself now thronged its high forecastle—really a castle in shape and warlike purpose—and leaped from its ports. The common seamen were nearly naked to the waist; the officers looked more ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... "I am rejoiced to make your acquaintance, Sir Edwin Landseer, I am so fond of beasts." An equally ardent sympathy with Frank Buckland's specialty was necessary to his friends while he was alive, and is required by those who read this delightful, bizarre, and admirable history of a man whose fellow-feeling for all creatures endowed with life was as broad and comprehensive as Dame Nature's for all her children. He had, it might seem, no antipathies. Everything excited his interest, curiosity, and tenderness. Bears, eagles, vipers, jackals, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... capacious sailing boat to Nepenthe, in order to pleasure Mr. Keith's guests. And here they sat, huddled together in dignified repose and abashed, as it seemed, by the strangeness of their surroundings; a bizarre group stained to an almost negro tint by exposure to sun and ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... is quite a metropolis. It has a grand establishment known as the Societe d'Automobiles Bauchet, which will cater for any and every want of the automobilist, and has a half-dozen sights of first rank, from the old Hotel Dieu to the bizarre doubled-up Eglise St. Nicolas and the ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... in Italy before he could paint as he did; and what other Great Man, out of the exact Sciences, have they to show? This you will call impudence. Now Beethoven, you see by your own experience, has a depth not to be reached all at once. I admit with you that he is too bizarre, and, I think, morbid; but he is original, majestic, and profound. Such music thinks; so it is with Gluck; and with Mendelssohn. As to Mozart, he was, as a musical Genius, more wonderful than all. I was astonished at the Don Giovanni lately. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... has turned to ten swords in his hand. But this is not really because the man is playing with ten swords, it is because he is aiming very straight with one. Moreover, a man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope. Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity, because they are hurried ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... wish that you should think of something bizarre to be included in the festivities of tonight. The Prince and myself do not seem able to put ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... bent over a row of phials and lit the flame under the crucible. The doctor had a small hand-lamp, shaded as the larger one, on a ledge above his apparatus, and Clarke, who sat in the shadows, looked down the great dreary room, wondering at the bizarre effects of brilliant light and undefined darkness contrasting with one another. Soon he became conscious of an odd odour, at first the merest suggestion of odour, in the room; and as it grew more decided he felt surprised that he was not reminded of the chemist's shop ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... sea, O shapes of air, O lands whose names are made of spice and tar, Old painted empires that are ever fair, From Cochin-China down to Zanzibar! O Beauty simple, soul-less, and bizarre! I would take Danger for my bosom-wife, And light our bed with some wild tropic star— O how I long to run ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... time, was a bizarre, half-civilized, half-oriental place, where, among the very highest-born, a thin veneer of French elegance covered every form of brutality and savagery and lust. It is not surprising, therefore, that Frederick the Great was unwilling to have his sister plunged into ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... sinned in giving way to his anger. He prostrated himself before the divine vengeance. If this was his apportioned punishment, might God give him meekness and strength to bear it. The tremulous, crying voice, the rapt, fanatical face, and the beseeching attitude struck a bizarre note in the comfortable and worldly room. Supported on either side by Jane, helpless and anxious, and Barney Bill, crooked, wrinkled, with his close-cropped white hair and little liquid diamond eyes, still nervously tearing his ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... transmuted by the Italian genius into something fanciful and quaint, survived as a frail work of art. The men-at-arms of the Condottieri still glittered in gilded hauberks. Their helmets waved with plumes and bizarre crests. Their surcoats blazed with heraldries; their velvet caps with medals bearing legendary emblems. The pomp and circumstance of feudal war had not yet yielded to the cannon of the Gascon or the Switzer's ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... look briefly at the other instances of protective coloration in nature generally which lead up to these final bizarre exemplifications of the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... that the remarkable capacity of the dancer for the execution of quick, graceful, dextrous, bizarre, and oft-repeated movements has not been utilized in America as it has in Japan. The mice are inexhaustible sources of amusement as well as invaluable material for studies in animal behavior ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... grotesquerie, keen insight into "the black thoughts of men," and insistent awareness of the quick passing of all good things, diablerie and mordancy. Strange, then, should be his love passages and strange too, they are at times, ranging from the bizarre delight of "In Kerry" to the triumphing nobility of Deirdre's farewell to Alban. One thinks of Mr. Hardy and one thinks of Donne ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... vessel. From the open skylight of the engine room sounded the sharp beat of the engine, and the smell of hot oil spread over the deck, making the burning heat even more unbearable. Parrington stood on the bridge and through his glass examined the steep cliffs at the entrance to the bay, and the bizarre forms of the little ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... landscape is worthy of the best that man can do. And I didn’t undertake to build a crazy house so much as one that should have some dignity and character. That passage around the chimney is an indulgence, Jack,— I’ll admit it’s a little bizarre,—you see that chimney isn’t so big outside as it is in!”—and he laughed and rubbed his knees with the palms of his hands,—“and my bringing foreign laborers here wasn’t really to make it easier to get things done my way. Wait till you have seen the May-apples blossom ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... thing was bizarre and unreasonable. Given her opinion, with no other evidence, she would have rejected the idea at once. She simply did not understand anything ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... compel notice; its many peculiarities repugnant to our waking thought; the incongruence between its images and the feelings they engender; then the dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it—all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory. Before all there is the question as to the meaning of the dream, a question which is in itself double-sided. ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... commonplace. The songs and cries of birds acquire a strange sound to me: I cannot understand the little spontaneous tongues, the quivering throats, the open beaks, the small bright eyes that gleam with unknown emotion, the nimble capricious heads that twist this way and that with such bizarre unreasonableness. ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... is at the summit of delighted vanity. They cannot compete with Grandon Park, but they have taken a rambling old country house on the outskirts of Westbrook, and Marcia has certainly managed to accumulate no end of bizarre articles. The rooms are large and the ceilings low; there are corner fireplaces and high mantels, there are curtains and portieres and lambrequins, there are pictures and brackets and cabinets, easels with their "studies," and much bric-a-brac. Jasper Wilmarth insists that the sleeping ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... reflections of her very comely person as she dipped and splashed or dried her royal skin. She set a hot pace for all the votaries of dress to follow. All kinds of fashions came in from abroad with the rush of new-found wealth; and so, instead of being sanely beautiful, they soon became insanely bizarre. 'An Englishman,' says Harrison, 'endeavouring to write of our attire, gave over his travail, and only drew the picture of a naked man, since he could find no kind of garment that could please ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... disaster. What he was afraid of in the coming night was sleeplessness and the endless strain of that wearisome task. It had to be faced however. He lay on his back, sighing profoundly in the dark, and suddenly beheld his very own self, carrying a small bizarre lamp, reflected in a long mirror inside a room in an empty and unfurnished palace. In this startling image of himself he recognised somebody he had to follow—the frightened guide of his dream. ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... room, with colorful bizarre decorations and a bare shiny floor. The first person his glance encountered was a young girl, strikingly beautiful, facing him with red lips parted. She had violet eyes that seemed to have a startled expression as they met Lane's. ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... with long heavy chains of nuggets, with glittering and prominently displayed pistols, revolvers, stilettos, knives, and dirks. Some even plaited their beards in three tails, or tied their long hair under their chins; but no matter how bizarre they made themselves, nobody on the streets of blase San Francisco paid the slightest attention to them. The Mission, which they, together with the crowd, frequented, was a primitive Coney Island. Bear pits, cockfights, ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... the masonry of the city wall; another deplored pathetically the "defective foreshortening of a dog's shoulders"; the picture "lacked depth of tone"; the "coloring was too bizarre", ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... endowment. His cool irony associated him more closely to the Schlegels than to Novalis, with his life-and-death consecrations. His absurd play-within-a-play, Puss in Boots (1797), is delicious in its bizarre ragout of satirical extravaganzas, where the naive and the ironic lie side by side, and where the pompous seriousness of certain ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... was one of the most popular forms of chance, and it often reverted in bizarre tangents. This, then, is what happened at a golden fiesta during the ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... same sort of thing, we may take the description of another object, a curious metal casket brought to Europe by a member of the Punitive Expedition. In design, according to Ling Roth, this casket "is bold and artistic; the high relief of the bizarre face and the zigzag conventionalized serpents and tadpoles being well thrown up by enchasing of the ground work. The proportions are all good, and this is especially the case with an enchasing of the enclosed lines." Ling Roth says that the relief portions ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... marvelous. What miracles around him were wrought out of golden virtue, and what out of brazen vice, did not as yet concern him. New worlds are not long new worlds. The boy from Misery was presently less bizarre to the eye than many of the unkempt bohemians he met in the life of the studios: men who quarreled garrulously over the end and aim of Art, which they spelled with a capital A—and, for the most part, knew ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... the fifth century arose the powerful dynasty of the Merovingians, one of the most picturesque royal houses in the roll of history. In their records we see the clash of barbarism with advancement, the bizarre tints of a semi-civilization unequalled in rude magnificence. Giant shadows of forgotten kings stalk across the canvas, their royal purple intermingling with the shaggy fell of the bear and wolf. One, Chilperic, a subtle grammarian and the inventor of new alphabetic symbols, is yet the most ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... with a bit of real news brightened by imagination," answered Furneaux promptly. "Hilton Fenley couldn't have fired the rifle himself, except by certain bizarre means which I shall lay before the court later; but he planned and contrived the murder, down to the smallest detail. He wore Brother Robert's boots when available; from appearances Brother Robert is now wearing the identical pair which ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... Strasbourg and Paris, entitled 'Le veritable homme, dit au MASQUE DE FER, ouvrage dans lequel on fait connaitre, sur preuves incontestables, a qui le celebre infortune dut le jour, quand et ou il naquit'. The wording of the title will give an idea of the bizarre and barbarous jargon in which the whole book is written. It would be difficult to imagine the vanity and self-satisfaction which inspire this new reader of riddles. If he had found the philosopher's stone, or made a discovery which would transform the world, he could ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... than merely to express them after they have become common. Understanding is more valuable when it encompasses the things that tend to separate and distinguish men than when it is limited to the things that unite them. There is nothing so bizarre that art may not express it, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... restrained applause from the executives. This moist and muted sound had reminded Dewforth of a hippopotamus venting its wind under water, and in a moment of thoughtless exhilaration he had even thought of sharing this bizarre notion with his wife. He never ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... propre vin, il se persuade que la cause de ses passions est la cause de Dieu (p. 72), mais quelque violent qu'ait pu tre l'enthousiasme de S. Paul, il sentait trs bien que la doctrine qu'il prchait devait paratre bizarre et insense des ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... before, you see'; and he no more laughed at her than he had laughed at Mother's 'nunculus.' Even Jane Anne, he knew, would settle down comfortably before long into the great big pattern where a particular nook awaited—aye, needed—her bizarre, odd brilliance. The most angular fragments would nest softly, neatly in. A little filing, a little polishing, and all would fit together. To force would only be to break. Hurry was of the devil. And later, while Daddy played an ancient tune that was written originally as a mazurka ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... soon after. Johnny Dromore! Bizarre guardian for that child! Queer life she must have of it, in that bachelor's den, surrounded by Ruff's Guides! What would become of her? Caught up by some young spark about town; married to him, no doubt—her father would see to the thoroughness of that, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... older knowledge and supplementary to it. But suppose a man have thoughts which are not true, which do not fit the topic of their application, which contradict established knowledges, or which result in bizarre and fanciful combinations of them; to that man we deny the name genius; he is a crank, an agitator, an anarchist, or what not. The test, then, which we bring to bear upon the intellectual variations which men show is that of truth, practical ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... have children from a Bacchic vase and the crowned Virgin; two naked saints and a Venetian lady; and a centaur watching a hermit. The foreground is a mosaic terrace; the background is rocks and water. It is all bizarre and very curious and memorable and quite unique. For the rest, I should mention two charming Guardis; a rich little Canaletto; a nice scene of sheep by Jacopo Bassano; the portrait of an unknown young man by an unknown painter, No. 1157; and ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... lack of amusement. Whether he was beloved by his people is doubtful; it is certain that the courtiers had little esteem and less love for their prince. For this reason, they had given him the surname of King Bizarre, the only title by which he is known in history, as is seen in the Great Chronicles of the Kingdoms and Principalities of the World Which Have Never Existed, a learned masterpiece which has immortalized the erudition and criticism of the reverend father, ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... impishly, pointing out Seniha's rooms, facing on the street, and contributing several bizarre anecdotes of the palace life. But Billy was not to be diverted, and went over the plans again and again, before the diminished number of lights and the hoverings of the attendant Arabs recalled the lateness of the ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... devotion to a young woman, a paragon of beauty, finally marries her mother, and ends with a few pious observations concerning Heaven's mercy and his own happy lot. Such an ending seems disappointing, almost bizarre, in view of the romantic novels to which we are accustomed; but we must remember that Thackeray's purpose was to paint life as he saw it, and that in life men and things often take a different way from that described in romances. As we grow acquainted ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... inch and more of its 12,080 ft.; and this is said by the Canary fishermen to be a certain sign of rain, or fine weather, or a gale of wind; but whenever and however it may be seen, soft and dream-like in the sunshine, or melodramatic and bizarre in the moonlight, it is one of the most beautiful things the eye of man ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... noted that the above responses are partly true and partly false. The error they contain renders them unacceptable. Most of the failures are due to misstatements as to size, shape, or color, but occasionally one meets a bizarre answer. ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... a good example of Mary Shelley's methods of revision. A study of the manuscript shows that she was a careful workman, and that in polishing this bizarre story she strove consistently for greater credibility and realism, more dramatic (if sometimes melodramatic) presentation of events, better motivation, conciseness, and exclusion of purple passages. In the revision and rewriting, many additions were made, so ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... precepts he clothes in a garment of amazing and bizarre richness. There is nothing else in English faintly resembling the astonishing eccentricity and individuality of his style. Gifted with an extraordinarily excitable and vivid imagination; seeing things with ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Fortitude; Esther, Prudence; Ruth, Meekness; Patience could only be Penelope. The effect of the shining stone and painted arches is of extraordinary brilliance and completeness—the completeness of an unrivalled collection. But there is somewhere something bizarre; perhaps it is the setting. Marble demands marble neighbours, and the setting of these exotic treasures is the simple beauty of English parkland. The little church fits better with the great trees and the ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... of the Blaneys in the city was much like the one Patty had seen at Lakewood, only a little more elaborately bizarre. The Moorish lamps were bigger and dustier: the thick brocade draperies a little more faded and tattered; the furniture a little ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... did not reply to the blunt question, but looked down at the flags. His feet were cased in red velvet slippers, I noticed, and they struck me as quite indescribably bizarre in the moonlight. His hesitation was too ominous, heavy with unimaginable complexities. His voice was muffled when ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... walls were covered with book-shelves from floor to ceiling, and the shelves were packed to overflowing with books in most unusual and bizarre bindings. A red carpet was on the floor and a red-shaded lamp hung from the ceiling, which was conventionally white-washed. Although there was no fireplace, the room was immoderately hot, and heavy with the perfume of roses. On three little tables ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... the smallest value—it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Helene Jegado was mad. In spite, however, of evidence called in her defence—as, for example, that of Dr Pitois, of Rennes, who was Helene's own doctor, and who said that "the woman had a bizarre character, frequently complaining of stomach pains and formications in the head''—in spite of this doctor's hints of monomania in the accused, the jury, with every chance allowed them to find her irresponsible, still saw nothing in her extenuation. And very properly, since the law held the extreme ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... the Hotel du Faubourg. Here, on the afternoon of September 26th, 1833, among others strollers, were two who might have seemed to an observant eye to be waiting for somebody: one was a stout, inelegant little man, with something bizarre about his costume, and the other a dark, handsome lady, dressed in the height of fashion, and perhaps known to some of the loungers as the rich Russian Countess. The manner of their meeting is uncertain; but whether Madame Hanska, with one of Balzac's novels in her hand, recognised ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... mermaids, griffins, harpies, winged horses, lizards, and knights in armour—all these are elements that might, we fancy, have been developed into a noble national style. As it is, the churches in question are often more bizarre than really beautiful. Their peculiar character, however, is inseparably associated with the long reaches of green plain, the lordly rivers, and the background of blue hills and snowy Alps that constitute the ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... these facts known to him, Lamarck did not see that such changes were due to changes of level of the land rather than to their being abandoned or invaded by the sea, but explained these by his bizarre hypothesis of westward-flowing currents due to the moon's action; though it should be in all fairness stated that down to recent times there have been those who believed that it is the sea and not the land ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... substance, what Darwin did. There are many species in which the male, singly or with others, practises antics or sings during the love-season before the female; and when all such cases, or rather those that are most striking and bizarre, are brought together, and when it is gratuitously asserted that the females do choose the males that show off in the best manner or that sing best, a case for sexual selection seems to be made out. How unfair the argument is, based on these ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... authority for that?" Phil turned a large, bizarre ring round on his slender left little finger and the whole room waited, testing this ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... learned that one can seldom make a more fatal mistake than to allow a clothier or tailor to choose for you. It is true that these gentry have in stock what persons of refinement demand, but they also have fabrics and garments bizarre in color and cut, in which they revel and carry for apparently no other reason than the delectation of their own perverted taste, since they seldom or never sell them. But at times they light upon some one whose ignorance or easy-going disposition ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... the bridle and purple housings; as to combinations, though the components may be of the most beautiful (as Comedy and Dialogue in the present case), that will not ensure a good effect, unless the mixture is harmonious and well-proportioned; it is possible that the resultant of two beauties may be bizarre. The readiest instance to hand is the centaur: not a lovely creature, you will admit, but a savage, if the paintings of its drunken bouts and murders go for anything. Well, but on the other hand is it not possible for two such components ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... satellites. Thus the outer ring had long been observed to be less bright than the inner. Of course it did not seem impossible that the outer ring might be made of different materials; yet there was something bizarre in the supposition that two rings forming the same system were thus different in substance. It would not have been at all noteworthy if different parts of the same ring differed in luminosity—in fact, it was much more remarkable that each zone of the system seemed ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... which appeared to contain jewellery, and offered Logan a ring. Between two diamonds of the finest water it contained a bizarre muddy coloured pearl. 'Never let that leave your finger,' said Bude. 'Your life may ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... solemnity could make such a statement other than bizarre. What a strange condition to be in. Very likely one of the parents only was dead? But no; it couldn't be, since Fyne had said just before that "there was really no one" to communicate with. No one! And then remembering Mrs Fyne's snappy ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... came and spent the hours until it was time to go forth to bout or assignation. Here too came sometimes the curious who wanted to see something of the other side of life. Among these, white visitors were not infrequent,—those who were young enough to be fascinated by the bizarre, and those who were old enough to know that it was all in the game. Mr. Skaggs, of the New York Universe, was one of the former class and a constant visitor,—he and a "lady friend" called "Maudie," who had a penchant for dancing to "Rag-time" melodies as only the "puffessor" of such a club ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... odd cases, and suddenly wished he were somewhere else. Anywhere else. This one showed sudden signs of developing into something positively bizarre. "I see," he said, wondering if ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... sonatas, are no less notable for range and power of expression, their adaptation to meet all the varied moods of passion and sentiment. Other pianoforte composers have given us more warm and vivid color, richer sensual effects of tone, more wild and bizarre combination, perhaps even greater sweetness in melody; but we look in vain elsewhere for the spiritual passion and poetry, the aspiration and longing, the lofty humanity, which make the Beethoven sonatas the suspiria de pro-fundis of the composer's inner life. In ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... world which surrounded me, so new to me, I experienced at first a kind of bizarre curiosity, at once sad and profound, that caused me to look at things as does a restless horse. An incident occurred which made a deep ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... playground in which all manner of amusements are thrown together, from the balhaus, where nothing but expensive champagne is sold, to the scenic railway, on which one may ride for fifty heller. This park presents a bizarre and chaotic mingling of outdoor concerts, variety theatres, bierkabaretts, moving picture halls, promenades and sideshow attractions of the Atlantic City type. The Kaisergarten is the rendezvous of the bourgeoisie, the heaven ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... The idyllic manner alternates with the satiric, the pathetic, even the sublime, by such imperceptible gradations, and continual delicate variations of key, that the harmonious medley of his style becomes the fit outward expression of the bizarre and yet harmonious fairyland in which his fancy ranges. In this work, too, Mr. Tennyson shows himself more than ever the poet of the day. In it more than ever the old is interpenetrated with the new—the domestic and scientific with the ideal and sentimental. He dares, in every page, to make use ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... 88, 93, 100.) On east and west of this central group of eight palaces are the Palace of Machinery and the Palace of Fine Arts (p. 105, 112), serving architecturally to balance the scheme. East of the exhibit palaces is the Joy Zone, a mile-long street solidly built with bizarre places of amusement. Balancing the Zone on the west is the State and Foreign section, with the live-stock exhibits, the polo field, race track and stadium beyond, at the western extremity of the grounds. The state buildings stand along two avenues on the north side of the section; the foreign ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... before the mob spilled out into the square. The fleeing dwarf stared about wildly for an instant, his head jerking from side to side so rapidly that it was impossible to get even a fleeting impression of his face—human or nonhuman, familiar or bizarre. Then, like a pellet loosed from its sling, he made straight for the ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... circles. But if one wishes to win the applause of the multitude one may do it easily enough by proclaiming some new and untried plan. At our educational gatherings you notice above everything else a straining for spectacular and bizarre effects. It is the novel that catches attention; and it sometimes seems to me that those who know the least about the educational situation in the way of direct contact often receive the largest share of attention and have the ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... intellectual—the presence in him, namely, of a certain vein of opinion; that other, constituent but contending, person, in his complex nature. "The relation of thought to action," he writes, "filled my mind on waking, and I found myself carried towards a bizarre formula, which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it. Action is but coarsened thought." That is but an ingenious metaphysical point, as he goes on to show. But, including in "action" that literary production ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... would pull it over my head, shut my eyes tight, and evoke a flow of fantastic shapes, bright, beautifully tinted, and incessantly changing form and color. While the play of these figures and hues was going on before me I would see all sorts of bizarre visions, which at times seemed to have something to do with my ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... did not. When we began to produce something that was the product of our own soil and our own social conditions, it was still judged by the old standards, or, if it was too original for that, it was only accepted because it was curious or bizarre, interesting for its oddity. The criticism that we received for our best was evidently founded on such indifference or toleration that it was galling. At first we were surprised; then we were grieved; then we were indignant. We have long ago ceased to be either ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... head on one side, putting the scarlet head of a poppy among her black hair. Jess had strange tastes, which would be called artistic nowadays in some circles. Her liking was always BIZARRE and excellent, the taste of the primitive Galloway Pict from whom she was descended, or of that picturesque Glenkens warrior, who set a rowan bush on his head on the morning when he was to lead the van at the battle of the Standard. Scotland was beaten ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... unequalled, an eye always eloquent with admiration, a step from which grace could never be divorced, a voice that spoke in a silver key, and uttered flatteries delicate in thought and poetical in word; even a certain originality of mind, remark, and character, occasionally approaching to the bizarre, yet sometimes also to the elevated, possessed a charm for the imagination of a young and not unenthusiastic female, and contrasted favourably, rather than the reverse, with the dull insipidity of those she ordinarily saw. Nor are we sure that the mystery thrown ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a paddle flashing on either side, was slipping down the current. In the stern a man's form, and in the bow a woman's, swung rhythmically to the work. Mrs. Sayther had no eyes for the woman till the canoe drove in closer and her bizarre beauty peremptorily demanded notice. A close-fitting blouse of moose-skin, fantastically beaded, outlined faithfully the well-rounded lines of her body, while a silken kerchief, gay of color and picturesquely ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... elbows on the sill and her chin in the palms of her hands. The loose sleeves of Miss Thackeray's bizarre dressing gown fell away, revealing two round, smooth, white arms. The sun shot its mellow light into the ripples of her tousled hair, and it shone like burnished gold. Her white teeth gleamed against the red of her smiling lips. He ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... needed W. S. Gilbert (in Patience) or Robert Hichens (in The Green Carnation) to satirize its distorted attitudinizing. It strained itself to death; it became its own burlesque of the bizarre, an extravaganza of extravagance. "The period" (I am again quoting Holbrook Jackson) "was as certainly a period of decadence as it was a period of renaissance. The decadence was to be seen in a perverse and finicking glorification of the fine arts and mere artistic virtuosity ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... after him by-and-by, as he used to do after his old father when he was a child—in his own country. And I discovered he longed for their boy to grow up so that he could have a man to talk with in that language that to our ears sounded so disturbing, so passionate, and so bizarre. Why his wife should dislike the idea he couldn't tell. But that would pass, he said. And tilting his head knowingly, he tapped his breastbone to indicate that she had a good heart: not hard, not fierce, open to compassion, charitable to ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... light blond strips of side-whiskers, a dress-coat shiny with age-, and rosettes on his noiseless shoes, led him up two flights to a room furnished neatly and patriarchally, whose window opened up in the twilight a picturesque and medieval prospect of courts, gables, and the bizarre masses of the church near which the hotel stood. Tonio Kroeger stood awhile at this window; then he seated himself with folded arms on the rambling sofa, drew his eyebrows together, and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... him as if feeling a new dependence, and this filled his cup to overflowing. It was an outrageous thing to do; no one save a Courteau would have thought of subjecting the woman who bore his name to such a humiliation. But he was a perverse individual; his mind ran in crooked courses; he took a bizarre delight in the unusual, and morality of the common sort he knew not. To smirch her, even a little bit, to subject her to seeming disgrace, not only taught her a lesson, but also united them more closely, so he told himself. That he had the ability to compel her to do anything against her ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... Prince to see upon the garden-like deck the amusing, frivolous, elegant society, which was the one he mingled with, but which he towered above from the height of his great intelligence, his conscience, and his convictions. It was a mixed and bizarre society, of different nationalities; an assemblage of exotic personages, such as are met with only in Paris in certain peculiar places where aristocracy touches Bohemianism, and nobles mingle with quasi-adventurers; a kaleidoscopic society, grafting its vices upon Parisian follies, coming ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... examined and dressed my wounds. He found my shoulders very much inflamed and prescribed an ointment which had an excellent effect. I fell into a profound sleep which was interrupted by the most bizarre imaginary scenes; there was not one of the hideous episodes of the last fortnight which did not pass in some form ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... to himself: This Siddhartha is a bizarre person, he expresses bizarre thoughts, his teachings sound foolish. So differently sound the exalted one's pure teachings, clearer, purer, more comprehensible, nothing strange, foolish, or silly is contained in them. But different from his thoughts seemed to me Siddhartha's ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... players, and on from the shouting tennis players to the teasing golfers, and back from the teasing golfers to the peaceful writing-room, where in a great, lazy chair by the open window he settled down once more with unwonted morbidness to brood over the grimly bizarre ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... exaltation—irony and grotesquerie, keen insight into "the black thoughts of men," and insistent awareness of the quick passing of all good things, diablerie and mordancy. Strange, then, should be his love passages and strange too, they are at times, ranging from the bizarre delight of "In Kerry" to the triumphing nobility of Deirdre's farewell to Alban. One thinks of Mr. Hardy and one thinks of Donne as ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... coarse black hair joined the scalp. And there was not the least evidence of make-up on the face. Nevertheless, Orme did not feel warranted in giving up the marked bill without a definite explanation. The little man was a comic figure, but his bizarre exterior might conceal a dangerous plot. He might be a ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... central group of eight palaces are the Palace of Machinery and the Palace of Fine Arts (p. 105, 112), serving architecturally to balance the scheme. East of the exhibit palaces is the Joy Zone, a mile-long street solidly built with bizarre places of amusement. Balancing the Zone on the west is the State and Foreign section, with the live-stock exhibits, the polo field, race track and stadium beyond, at the western extremity of the grounds. The state buildings stand along two ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... them after they have become common. Understanding is more valuable when it encompasses the things that tend to separate and distinguish men than when it is limited to the things that unite them. There is nothing so bizarre that art may not express it, provided it ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... decriant ta medicine, Et de ses propres mains mina Les fondemens de sa machine: Tres rarement il opina Sans humeur bizarre ou chagrine, Et, l'esprit qui le domina Etait ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... followed at Papeete Grief caught numerous and bizarre glimpses of Aloysius Pankburn. So did everybody else in the little island capital; for neither the beach nor Lavina's boarding house had been so scandalized in years. In midday, bareheaded, clad ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... him. But the next man was worse—hygienic. While with this creature I read Poe for the first time, and I was singularly fascinated by some of his grotesques. I tried—it was an altogether new development, I believe, in culinary art—the Bizarre. I made some curious arrangements in pork and strawberries, with a sauce containing beer. Quite by accident I mentioned my design to him on the evening of the festival. All the Philistine was aroused in him. 'It will ruin my digestion.' 'My friend,' I said, 'I am not your ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... the second room was rude and bizarre, but not without a singular originality and even tastefulness of conception. What had been the counter or "bar" of the saloon, gorgeous in white and gold, now sawn in two and divided, was set up on opposite sides of the room as separate dressing-tables, decorated ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... governments, and with an intense pride in education. In the South, gentlemen of good old English families lived like feudal lords among their slaves and cultivated manners quite as assiduously as morals. Of forms of the Christian religion, the Atlantic coast presented a bizarre mixture. In the main, New England was emphatically Calvinistic and sternly Puritanical; Virginia, proudly Episcopalian (Anglican); and Maryland, partly Roman Catholic. Plain-spoken Quakers in Pennsylvania, Presbyterians and Baptists in New Jersey, and German ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... traditional standard. And this was, in substance, what Darwin did. There are many species in which the male, singly or with others, practises antics or sings during the love-season before the female; and when all such cases, or rather those that are most striking and bizarre, are brought together, and when it is gratuitously asserted that the females do choose the males that show off in the best manner or that sing best, a case for sexual selection seems to be made out. How unfair the argument is, based on these carefully selected ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... High-bowed and pooped, and curved like the crescent moon, it was the strangest craft that he had ever seen. Even as he gazed it glided on nearer and nearer, and at last beached itself noiselessly on the sands before his own feet. A score of figures as bizarre and outlandish as the ship itself now thronged its high forecastle—really a castle in shape and warlike purpose—and leaped from its ports. The common seamen were nearly naked to the waist; the officers looked more like soldiers than sailors. What struck him more strangely was that ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... cast a quick glance toward the tree, then, still on her knees, covered her face and shuddered. For a long time, it seemed, I gazed toward the tree without sight conveying any mental effect whatever. Quite aside from my dazed state, the thing was too bizarre; it gave no foothold to experience for ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... was very soft and white, and the care with which it was arranged indicated a certain harmless vanity in it. There was something a little conscious, too, about her dress—an effect difficult to describe without exaggeration. It was not bizarre nor "artistic," but you would have understood at once that its departures from the prevailing mode were made on principle. If you took it in connection with a certain resolute amiability about her smile, you would be entirely prepared to ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... believe me when I tell you that I am more than sorry I shall not be able to come to you to-day? I was caught in an annoying but superficial motor smash-up last night and the broken windshield has made a bizarre spectacle of me, but I shall be my normal self again in a few days. My sister, Mrs. Beekman, will call to-morrow and I shall present my apologies in person at the earliest possible moment, if ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... be noted that the above responses are partly true and partly false. The error they contain renders them unacceptable. Most of the failures are due to misstatements as to size, shape, or color, but occasionally one meets a bizarre answer. ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... broken, but it never seemed to occur to him to mend it. Like all truly idle people, he had an artistic eye. He chose the print stuff for his wife's dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patchwork quilt, always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated eye, always with bizarre and admirable taste—the taste of an Indian. With all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in word and act. Take his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for any society but that of fools. ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the genetic instincts. Among the older naturalists, such as Pliny and Aristotle, and even in the older historians, whose scope included natural as well as civil and political history, the atypic and bizarre, and especially the aberrations of form or function of the generative organs, caught the eye most quickly. Judging from the records of early writers, when Medicine began to struggle toward self-consciousness, it ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... hysterically, with the mirth which is akin to tears, when the query was explained to him. He looked bizarre enough under ordinary conditions, but laughter converted him into a fair semblance of one of those blood-curdling demons which a Japanese artist loves to depict. Evidently, he depended on make-up to supplement ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... her extraordinary persistence, the fierce firmness of character that was concealed by her quiet and generally impersonal manner. Certainly she had the temperament of a ruler. He remembered—it seemed to him with a bizarre abruptness—the smile on Dumeny's lips in the Divorce Court when the great case had ended ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... face, several tall apartment houses thrusting up their lighted windows into the night, telegraph offices, bars, apothecaries, florists, confectioners, tobacconists, jewelry shops galore, all signed with electricity, and producing that wonderful glitter and glare that is both so bizarre and so enchanting. A street, do we call this? It is a scene, most theatrical and gorgeous, and set for the great human comedy which is even ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... influence of the man makes itself felt. I have seen Huysmans in his office—he is an employe in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a model employe; I have seen him in a cafe, in various houses; but I always see him in memory as I used to see him at the house of the bizarre Madame X. He leans back on the sofa, rolling a cigarette between his thin, expressive fingers, looking at no one and at nothing, while Madame X. moves about with solid vivacity in the midst of her extraordinary menagerie of bric-a-brac. The ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... garage, Michel, all seriousness, polished the Ford that was to carry away the bridal pair. Recently demobilized, he wore the bizarre combination of military and civilian clothes that all over France symbolized the transition from war to peace—black coat encroaching upon stained blue trousers, khaki puttees, evidence of international intimacy and—most brilliant emblem ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... as a mode of finally settling disputes and serious questions of precedence shades off into the obligatory, unprovoked private fight, as a social obligation due to one's good repute. As a leisure-class usage of this kind we have, particularly, that bizarre survival of bellicose chivalry, the German student duel. In the lower or spurious leisure class of the delinquents there is in all countries a similar, though less formal, social obligation incumbent on the rowdy to assert his manhood in unprovoked combat with his fellows. And spreading ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... the Secret House all the privacy he desired. He might do things which were unheard of, as indeed he did, and Great Bradley, standing aloof, was content to thank God that it was not cast in the same bizarre mould as this wealthy unknown, and took comfort from ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular emotion began stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, there crept unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... that the decadence obvious in the sartorial modes for society women reached its limit last year and that a saner and more decent sense of propriety would evince itself in the revulsion of public taste. But the tendency to bizarre indecency has increased so that now we are offered in our public ballrooms the spectacle of criminal impropriety—of women's bare legs with painted knees, of naked backs and lewdly veiled bosoms, of transparent skirts and suggestive nudity, of decorated flesh and vulgar exposure generally—the ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... or buck tails in their hats, with long heavy chains of nuggets, with glittering and prominently displayed pistols, revolvers, stilettos, knives, and dirks. Some even plaited their beards in three tails, or tied their long hair under their chins; but no matter how bizarre they made themselves, nobody on the streets of blase San Francisco paid the slightest attention to them. The Mission, which they, together with the crowd, frequented, was a primitive Coney Island. Bear pits, cockfights, theatrical attractions, side-shows, innumerable hotels and small ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... conjectures, for on going to the spot the next night, he found beneath the bush a little boy clad in a strange melange of Indian finery, and the bizarre attire worn by Paul Hubel when he set out on his strange adventure. That ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... the stone, whence gas escaped steadily and burned with a blue flicker, hung copper pots fairly well fashioned, though of bizarre shapes. Here the communal cuisine went steadily forward, tended by the strange, white-haired, long-cloaked women; and odors of boiling and of frying, over hot iron plates, rose and mingled with the shifting, swirling ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... recompense for his weakness and his lack of capacity for happiness. He was a master of the exquisite nuances of vision, but since he touched real life at the circumference, and not at the centre, his philosophical valuations are bizarre, and have only a ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... of Mary Shelley's methods of revision. A study of the manuscript shows that she was a careful workman, and that in polishing this bizarre story she strove consistently for greater credibility and realism, more dramatic (if sometimes melodramatic) presentation of events, better motivation, conciseness, and exclusion of purple passages. In the revision and rewriting, many additions were made, so that ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... garden-like deck the amusing, frivolous, elegant society, which was the one he mingled with, but which he towered above from the height of his great intelligence, his conscience, and his convictions. It was a mixed and bizarre society, of different nationalities; an assemblage of exotic personages, such as are met with only in Paris in certain peculiar places where aristocracy touches Bohemianism, and nobles mingle with quasi-adventurers; a kaleidoscopic society, grafting its vices upon Parisian follies, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... famous painter with, "I am rejoiced to make your acquaintance, Sir Edwin Landseer, I am so fond of beasts." An equally ardent sympathy with Frank Buckland's specialty was necessary to his friends while he was alive, and is required by those who read this delightful, bizarre, and admirable history of a man whose fellow-feeling for all creatures endowed with life was as broad and comprehensive as Dame Nature's for all her children. He had, it might seem, no antipathies. Everything excited his interest, curiosity, and tenderness. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... a cigar if you won't have anything else." Val accepted one, and in default of a match Lawrence made him light it from his own. He was entirely at his ease, though the situation struck him as bizarre, but he did not believe that Val was at ease, no, not for all his natural manner and fertility in commonplace. Lawrence was faintly sorry for the poor devil, but only faintly: after all, an awkward interview once in ten years was a low price to pay for that night which Lawrence never had forgotten ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... some bizarre idea in your head about this episode, and I can't fathom it," spoke Dick Marston. "What do you think happened anyway?" he demanded. And stopped, horrified at the ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... island, in a lake"; in the Hebrides it is "in an egg, in the belly of a duck, in the belly of a wether, under a flagstone on the threshold." It is impossible to imagine the human mind independently imagining such bizarre convolutions. They were borrowed from one nation to the other, and till we have reason shown to the contrary, the original lender was a Hindu. I should add that the mere conception of an external soul occurs in the oldest Egyptian tale of "The Two Brothers," but ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... replied, stretching himself luxuriously in the long lounge chair, "the most commonplace life hovers on the edge of the bizarre. But those of us who overstep the border become preposterous in the eyes of those who have never done so. This is not because the unusual is necessarily the untrue, but because writers of fiction have claimed the unusual as their particular province, and in ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... but a languid reception unless roused by something either horrible or sensational, but her bizarre appearance had the effect which the Manager ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... lifted the structure, a thing of glistening cones and spinning golden disks; fantastic yet disquietingly symmetrical; bizarre as an angled headdress worn by a mountainous Javanese god—yet coldly, painfully mathematical. In every direction the cones pointed, seemingly interwoven of strands of ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... a fearful din. That decided her. Coke, if he were not killed, would surely be driven out. She sprang to her feet, and literally ran down the steep ladder to the saloon deck. Through the open door of the officers' mess she witnessed another bizarre act—an act quite as extraordinary in its way as Coke's jump over the steersman's body. In the midst of this drama of death and destruction, Watts was standing there, with head thrown back and uplifted arm, gulping down a tumblerful of some ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... of the Marchioness of Montebello; and Marcello Capecce, a young man of exceptional beauty. Diana was a woman of thirty years, hot-tempered, tawny-haired, devotedly in love with Domiziano Fornari, a squire of the Marchese di Montebello's household. Marcello had conceived one of those bizarre passions for the Duchess, in which an almost religious adoration was mingled with audacity, persistence, and aptitude for any crime. The character of his mistress gave him but little hope. Though profoundly wounded by her husband's infidelities, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Entertainment" I set myself the task of reconstructing, in the fullest possible detail and with all the colour available from surviving records, a group of more or less famous events. I would select for my purpose those which were in themselves bizarre and resulting from the interplay of human passions, and whilst relating each of these events in the form of a story, I would compel that story scrupulously to follow the actual, recorded facts without owing anything to fiction, ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... handkerchief showed clearly about the man's neck. Then a slight limp in the left leg intruded itself, and a droop of the shoulders that spoke weariness. He was very near by this time, so near that the black beard which covered his face became discernible, likewise the bizarre breadth of the Mexican belt above the baggy chaperejos. The crunch of the snow-crust marked his ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... strange man before, you see'; and he no more laughed at her than he had laughed at Mother's 'nunculus.' Even Jane Anne, he knew, would settle down comfortably before long into the great big pattern where a particular nook awaited—aye, needed—her bizarre, odd brilliance. The most angular fragments would nest softly, neatly in. A little filing, a little polishing, and all would fit together. To force would only be to break. Hurry was of the devil. And later, while Daddy played an ancient tune that was written originally as a mazurka yet did duty now ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... of seizing on any bizarre incident reported in the morning papers, enfolding it in "funny language," adding a pun, and thus making it his own. He had a cunning mastery of periphrasis, and a ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... self-sufficient summer colony, and that all these subdued and inarticulate masqueraders were personages daily exploited by the press as the brightest stars in the social firmament, the incongruity of this dumb gathering seemed as glaring, as bizarre as ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the same sort as that described, though varying in size and varying also in their lines athwart the house. Those of the ground floor are all uniform in size and position. But those above are irregular both in size and place, and this irregularity gives a bizarre and not unpicturesque appearance to the building. Along the top, on every side, runs a low parapet, which nearly hides the roof, and at the corners are more figures ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... an 8vo volume in 1791, at Strasbourg and Paris, entitled 'Le veritable homme, dit au MASQUE DE FER, ouvrage dans lequel on fait connaitre, sur preuves incontestables, a qui le celebre infortune dut le jour, quand et ou il naquit'. The wording of the title will give an idea of the bizarre and barbarous jargon in which the whole book is written. It would be difficult to imagine the vanity and self-satisfaction which inspire this new reader of riddles. If he had found the philosopher's ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of the market place was of unusual interest. They saw its humor and its crowding, its bizarre effects and unwonted pageantry. Black giants and pigmies were there; kerchiefed aunties, giggling black girls, saffron beauties, and loafing white men. There were mules and horses and oxen, wagons and buggies and carts; but above all and in all, rushing through, piled and flying, bound and ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... of Paul, on the west side, was the Black Tom Cafe. Every attempt had been made to make the place bizarre. About the walls were palings that represented a back fence, along which crawled painted black cats in every conceivable state—a rather ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... much-discussed actress, whose wickedness had set the town agog, and her first impression was vaguely disappointing. Miss Demorest's beauty was by no means remarkable, although it was accentuated by the most bizarre creation of the French shops. She was animated, audacious, Gallic in accent and postures—she was vividly alive with a magnetism that meant much more than beauty; but she over-exerted her voice, and her song was nothing to excite applause. At last she was off, in a whirl of ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... a people, we seek to be entertained, but fail to make a nice distinction between entertainment and amusement. War, it is true, has caused us to think more soberly and feel more deeply; but the bizarre, the gaudy, and the superficial still make a strong appeal to us. We are quite happy to wear paste diamonds, provided only that they sparkle. So long have we been substituting the fictitious for the genuine that we have contracted the habit of loose, fictitious thinking. ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... her wine and sipped it, but her mouth again relaxed to scornful contempt as she saw him toss off the fiery liquor. She was somewhat astonished at the effect her words had had on the man, but she gathered that he was now considering her bizarre proposal with real interest. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... company. For Lydia was tired, and left alone with Miss Amabel, she settled to an hour's laziness. She knew Miss Amabel liked having her there, liked her perhaps better than Anne, who was of the beautiful old Addington type and not so piquing. Lydia had, across her good breeding, a bizarre other strain, not bohemian, not gipsy, but of a creature who is and always will be, even beyond youth, new to life. There were few conventions for Lydia. She did not instinctively follow beaten paths. If the way looked feasible and pleasant, ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different, as might have been expected from the duke's love of the bizarre. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... strange sound to me: I cannot understand the little spontaneous tongues, the quivering throats, the open beaks, the small bright eyes that gleam with unknown emotion, the nimble capricious heads that twist this way and that with such bizarre unreasonableness. ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... eight-pounder at the bow port; Captain Bunker and the second mate ranged themselves at the companionway, and the passengers for the first time became aware that they were participating at the reception of visitors of distinction, as two strange and bizarre ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... erratic and bizarre, was not justly entitled to rank among great statesmen. But the characteristics of Congress, as a body, can be brought into better relief in the narrative of his life than in that of any other person of his day. These characteristics ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... have no use for it. To me everything must have a direct human purpose, a definite human application. When the cup of human life is so overflowing with woe and pain and misery, it seems to me a narrow dilettanteism or downright charlatanism to devote one's self to petty or bizarre problems which can have no relation to human happiness, and to prate of self-satisfaction and self-expression. One can have all the self-expression one wants while doing ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... of her discovery, dazzled by the surprising brilliance of the Princess's capture, stupefied by the fear of saying or doing the wrong thing and ruining her idol's bizarre triumph, poor Miss Portman staggered as Virginia ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... the spirit's core. An idea came, at which he laughed. He bade it go, but it would not. It stayed, and his fevered fancy played around it as a moth around a candle. At first he knew it for a notion, bizarre and absurd, which presently he would dismiss. All day strange thoughts had come and gone, appearing, disappearing, like will-o'-the-wisps for which a man upon a firm road has no care. Never fear that he will follow them! He sees the marsh, that ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... distance of only six miles. The mountain crests were sharply outlined against the clear sky. Well wooded at the base, they grew more bare and showed only stunted evergreens toward the summit. There the scraggly trees, grotesquely twisted, gave to the rocky heights a bleak and bizarre appearance. Here and there the ridge rose in sharp peaks. On our right the Black Dome, nearly seven thousand feet high, reared its gigantic head, sparkling at times ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne
... treats it with a freedom and variety and a certain disregard of precedent—induced, perhaps, by his schooling in Blackletter—that often produces delightful, though sometimes, be it added, direful results. But if the extreme and bizarre forms be thrown aside the designer may obtain suggestions of great benefit and value from the more restrained examples of German work. Many eminent German draughtsmen, whose work is all too little known in this country, are [84] using letters with the same ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... nettete de son cou, par l'ornement de ses pennes et par la majeste de tout le reste de son corps, il ravit tous ceux qui le contemplent attentivement; toutefois au rencontre de sa femelle, pour l'attirer a son amour, il deploye sa pompe, fait montrer et parade de son plumage bizarre, et RIOLLE PIOLLE se presente a elle avec piafe, et luy donne la plus belle visee de sa roue. De mesme ce Dieu admirable, amoreux des hommes, pour nous ravir d'amour a soy, desploye le lustre de ses plus accomplies beautez, et comme un amant ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various
... imaginative works shows that this explanation is untrue. That the bizarre and apparently novel products arise from the experiences of the author, revived in imagination and combined in new ways. The horrendous incidents depicted in Dante's "Divine Comedy" never occurred within the lifetime experience of the author as such. Their separate ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... Cromwell; he had lived, had worked for the future—and now he had ceased to exist. His future—our past, had come to an end. The barge with the man still straining at the oar had gone out of sight under the arch of the bridge, as through a gate into another world. A bizarre sense of solitude stole upon me, and I turned my back upon the river as empty as my day. Hansoms, broughams, streamed with a continuous muffled roll of wheels and a beat of hoofs. A big dray put in a note of thunder ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... from a lecture, and being unusually pressed for time, I took a shorter cut homeward than was my wont, and at the corner of a narrow and ill-smelling street I came upon a little heterogeneous shop, in the windows of which were set out a variety of faded and bizarre articles of millinery. Hanging from a front shelf in a conspicuous position among the collection was a strip of the identical silver ribbon which had encircled Pepin's throat—I called the dog Pepin—on the night I rescued him from the streets. Without hesitation ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... your authority for that?" Phil turned a large, bizarre ring round on his slender left little finger and the whole room ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... curious excursions that even a Magic Land can offer is that to the Campo Santo of Genoa. A cloistered promenade encloses a square, and above are terraced colonnades, each and all revealing statues, and monuments, and groups of sculpture whose varied beauty, oddity, or bizarre effects are a curious study. Some memorials—as one of an angel with outstretched wings; another of a flight of angels bearing the soul away; another combining the figure of Christ with the cross, and angels hovering ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... assignment of the melody to just the right instrument, and the color-effect thereby produced, are integral parts of the conception. Notwithstanding the fact that some of his effects are extravagant or at times bizarre, he must be credited with revealing possibilities in orchestral shading and color which, still further developed by Wagner, Strauss and Tchaikowsky, have become conventional means of expression. ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... Esther, Prudence; Ruth, Meekness; Patience could only be Penelope. The effect of the shining stone and painted arches is of extraordinary brilliance and completeness—the completeness of an unrivalled collection. But there is somewhere something bizarre; perhaps it is the setting. Marble demands marble neighbours, and the setting of these exotic treasures is the simple beauty of English parkland. The little church fits better with the great trees and the green ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... great poet are the prism of the universe; all its wonders are there reflected, divided, and recomposed; sounds imitate colours, and colours are blended in harmony; rhyme, sonorous or bizarre, rapid or prolonged, is inspired by this poetical divination; supreme beauty of art! triumph of genius! which discovers in nature every secret in affinity with the ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... From one to another we were hurried, passing through jungles such as we of the North never dream exist. In that humid climate vegetation is prodigal beyond belief, gorgeous with spattered greens and yellows and crimsons bizarre enough to take ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... his turn, perceived that the tall man, ungainly as he was, affected a bizarre individualism in the matter of dress. His clothing cried out, rather than suggested, that it was expensive. His feet were cased in button shoes with fancy tops; his waistcoat, cut in the extreme of style, revealed that ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... city, and the shape of its buildings, were the most bizarre features of all. Only a few of the edifices bore resemblance to any which the travelers had ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... with an air of finality which effectually closed the discussion. By this time she was not herself an especially effective monument of cleanliness. The rice pudding and the mud pies had combined to produce a somewhat bizarre effect, and the dirt she had casually gathered from the paths, the flower-beds, and the hedges enlivened but did ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... his personal success outweighed even that, and the market on his books was exhausted. We cannot follow him on this trip of mingled arduous labor and personal satisfaction. The humorous reactions of his homely vision upon the quaint, the bizarre, the pretentious, aspects of life in remote parts of the world may be read in his own record of this journey, Following the Equator. There are few things to record of this great effort to ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... gold, with fine horses, with an eery, swooping, steadiness of direction, journeyed fast. He and his traveling companion reached Rome early in February. There was a villa, there were attendants, there was the Frenchman's especial circle, set with bizarre jewels, princes of the Church, Italian nobles of his acquaintance, exiles, a charlatan of immense note, certain ladies. He only asked of his guest, Monsieur Rullock, that he help him to entertain the whole chaplet, giving to his residence in ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... in the autumn rolling to the west,—La Verendrye and his voyageurs came to the forks of Red River and the Assiniboine, or what is now known as the city of Winnipeg. Where the two rivers met on the flats to the west were the high scaffoldings of an ancient Cree graveyard, bizarre and eerie and ghostlike between the voyageurs and the setting sun. On the high river bank of what is now known as Assiniboine Avenue gleamed the white skin of ten Cree tepees, where two war chiefs waited to ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... element. At the same time the sculptor, while discarding Gothic tradition, has not betaken himself yet to a servile imitation of the antique. He has used invention, and substituted for grinning dragons' heads something wild and bizarre of his own in ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the second century had one common link and badge; they all proposed a "way," often bizarre and strange-sounding to modern ears, by which the soul, astray, lost, encumbered, or imprisoned in matter, might attain its freedom and become spiritual. Most of the Gnostic teachers, who in their flourishing time were ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... more normal women seems very simple and probably too simple. In fact, it does not explain the hysteria, it merely gives a USE for its symptoms, and the writer is driven back to the statement that the neuropathic person is characterized by his or her bizarre and prolonged emotional reactions, which, in turn, brings us back to a defect ab origine. And the Freudians, starting out to prove that the experiences of the individual ALONE cause hysteria, by pushing back the TIME of those experiences to INFANCY (and lately to foetal life), have proved ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the car, and driving between two gigantic hotels, ran down to a beach with sands of gleaming gold, and a background of wind-blown dunes billowing away as far as the eye could reach. The very wildness of this background gave a bizarre sort of charm to the fantastic buildings which made up ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... certain that even the clever people who write them have moods and impulses far more vivid and thrilling, far more abnormal and bizarre, than they have the audacity to put into their work. A sort of perverted Puritanism restrains them. They have the diseased conscience of modern art, and they think that nothing can be true which is not draggle-tailed and nothing can be real which is not petty and unstimulating. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... the Blaneys in the city was much like the one Patty had seen at Lakewood, only a little more elaborately bizarre. The Moorish lamps were bigger and dustier: the thick brocade draperies a little more faded and tattered; the furniture a ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... gold, athwart which the afternoon sunlight lingered tenderly, picking out here the limpid blue of a bit of old Chinese "blue-and-white," there the warm gleam of polished copper, or here again the bizarre, gem-encrusted image of an Eastern god. All that was rare and beautiful had gone to the making of the room, and rarer and more beautiful than all, in the eyes of the man whose memory now recalled it, had been the woman to whom it had belonged, whose loveliness had ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... oddly. The swirling eddy became a small dense cloud of darker green light. Then abruptly, like the fade-in on a moving picture screen, from the cloud over the plate the misty outlines of an object swiftly cleared and solidified into a bizarre something at whose unfamiliar aspect both Marlowe and ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... advantageous location than the Swedish building. Situated on a narrow tongue of triangular shape, the architect has taken the fullest advantage of this original piece of ground. The building gives a very good idea of some of the very best tendencies in the modern art of Europe, without being bizarre, like some recent American attempts, in the most wrongly labeled of all art expressions ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... or bizarre stationery. A good quality of white or cream paper, in several sizes, is ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... unconsciously, while awake. Or they may be fragments of broken memories which have been picked up here and there and mingled by chance, composing an incoherent and unrecognizable whole. Before these bizarre assemblages of images which present no plausible significance, our intelligence (which is far from surrendering the reasoning faculty during sleep, as has been asserted) seeks an explanation, tries to fill the lacunae. It fills them by calling up other ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... man as "Pilgrim's Progress." Elsewhere, as in the fictional essay on the "The Cow" and in the delightful lies that Brann in rollicking mischief attributed to his fellow Texas journalists, we find the humorous tale enriched with the bizarre and scintillating figure. Nor was Brann unconscious of his fictional gift, for he was working on a novel at the time of his death. That O. Henry's ambition to write may be accredited to the influence of Brann seems more than probable. Brann's first attempt to start The Iconoclast ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... ware, and the carriages of Brewster are generally admired. Carriages are, however, such a matter of fashion that an exhibit of that kind cannot suit all nations, and what one considers graceful is to another strange and bizarre. There is no question of the fine quality, however: of course a nation with elm for hubs and ash for spokes wonders at American temerity in making wheels so light, and the casual observer thinks our roads must be better than the European ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... coast, and only where a river poured out from one of these ravines did there appear to be any gap through the long lines of reefs where the surf boomed like thunder. The coast seemed to trend from northwest to southeast, and might have been from thirty to fifty miles long, with strange bizarre arches of rock overhanging endless fields of kelp and seaweed. The land was absolutely treeless except for willow brushwood the size of one's finger. Lichens, moss, sphagnum, coated the rocks. Inland appeared nothing but billowing reaches of sedges ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... Highlanders. The sensitiveness to the picturesque, the liking for local color and for whatever is striking, characteristic, and peculiarly national in foreign ways is a romantic note. The eighteenth century disliked "strangeness added to beauty"; it disapproved of anything original, exotic, tropical, bizarre for the same reason that it disapproved ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... regulation of industry and commerce, the flood of missionary zeal which poured in upon it, the heroism and courage of its priests and voyageurs, the venality of its administrative officials, the anachronism of a feudal land-tenure, the bizarre externals of its social life, the versatility of its people—all these reflected the paternity ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... there is something magical, like going to the moon; and I say the thing should be kept exceptional and felt as something breathless and bizarre. My ideal hero would own his horse, but would have the moral courage to hire his motor. Fairy tales are the only sound guidebooks to life; I like the Fairy Prince to ride on a white pony out of his father's ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... moment the only thing that surprised him was the fact that he was not more surprised. There was something about this girl that made the most bizarre happenings seem right and natural. Ever since he had met her his life had changed from an orderly succession of uninteresting days to a strange carnival of the unexpected, and use was accustoming him to it. Life had taken on the quality of a dream, in which anything might happen ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... mounted his horse and ridden away—far off, no matter where. Goldite, bizarre and tragic—a microcosm of the world that man has fashioned—was a blot of discordant life, he felt, upon an otherwise peaceful world. As a matter of fact it had only begun its ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... novel and imposing character. But how shall I convey to you an idea of what I experienced, as, turning to the left, and leaving the broader streets which flank the quay, I began to enter the penetralia of this truly antiquated town? What narrow streets, what overhanging houses, what bizarre, capricious ornaments! What a mixture of modern with ancient art! What fragments, or rather ruins, of old delicately-built Gothic churches! What signs of former and of modern devastation! What fountains, gutters, groups of never-ceasing men, women, and children, all ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... forty-six years of age, a mathematician of European fame, and the holder of an honourable post at an ancient university, which he might have exchanged for other employment quite as dignified and far more lucrative. In dealing with a character as bizarre as his, it would be as a rule unprofitable to search deeply for motives of action, but in this instance it is no difficult matter to detect upon the surface several causes which may have swayed him in this decision to remain at Pavia. However firmly he may have set himself to win fame as a physician, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... tenders flocked in a flotilla near the stern of a rusty old schooner. All the tenders were burning Coston lights, and from several boats yachtsmen were sending off rockets which striped the pall of fog with bizarre colorings. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... a matter of fact, after this day no more notes are found in Rouletabille's memorandum-book. The last one is that above, bizarre and romantic, and necessary, as Sainclair, the Paris advocate and friend of Rouletabille, indicates opposite it in the papers from which we have taken all ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... this bizarre situation which had been thrust upon me, I ushered Katie into the living room and removed her hat ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... bearing a curious resemblance to a gigantic hand, the long lean fingers of which were stretched threateningly out as if to grasp the land and drag it back into the lurid sea of blood; altogether a cruel, weird-looking scene, fantastic, unreal, and bizarre as one of Dore's marvellous conceptions. Suddenly on the red waters there appeared a black speck, rising and falling with the restless waves, and ever drawing nearer and nearer to the gloomy cliffs and sandy beach. When within a quarter of a mile of the shore, the speck resolved ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... moyen age. Il se perpetua sous les rois de France, et l'emploi d'amuseur officiel devint une veritable charge a la cour des Valois. Les bouffons etaient, en general, des nains contrefaits que l'on affublait d'une livree bizarre et que les rois ou les princes entretenaient aupres d'eux pour ...
— French Conversation and Composition • Harry Vincent Wann
... JENNINGS' plot matters. She freely accepts the absurdities which her bizarre outline demands, but doesn't shirk the pains to make her situations possible within the pleasantly impossible frame. What is all-important is that she does shake the house with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... decoration, not of psychology. One might compare it to firelight in a dark room, throwing fantastic shapes on the walls. He loved the fantastic, and he was held by the darkness. Both in speech and in character, it was the bizarre and even the freakish that attracted him. In Riders to the Sea he wrote as one who had been touched by the simple tragedy of human life. But, as he went on writing and working, he came to look on life more and more as ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... to the most picturesque incident of the "incident." Most envied of all observers of the tournament was an aviator who looked down on a show bizarre even in the annals of aviation. The German planes had been driven to cover, which gave the Briton a fair field. A knightly admiration, perhaps a sense of fellowship not to say sympathy with the old arm of scouting from the new, possessed ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... said Holmes, relapsing into his arm-chair, and putting his finger-tips together, as was his custom when in judicial moods. "I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life. You have shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle, and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many of my ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... pistol by a jump. I bluffed for a raise of five dollars, on the strength of this outfit, and got it off the bat. There's the suit paid for in two months and a pair of shoes over." He thrust out a leg, from below the sharp-pressed trouser-line of which protruded a boot trimmed in a sort of bizarre fretwork. "Like me to take you around ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Berlin wit was a large part of his endowment. His cool irony associated him more closely to the Schlegels than to Novalis, with his life-and-death consecrations. His absurd play-within-a-play, Puss in Boots (1797), is delicious in its bizarre ragout of satirical extravaganzas, where the naive and the ironic lie side by side, and where the pompous seriousness of certain complacent standards ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... her parents—urged a dissolute and anaemic aristocrat—blue blood and a gold lining. Her grandfather, a strong unsilent sheep-rancher, was against this inept decadent and converted to his view that saintly worldling, the gorgeous Cardinal Camperioni. A neo-futurist of the most bizarre type prances through the pages upon his head, causing enough "tumult" to satisfy any one. So why drag in Pan? Miss VALLINGS can tell a story, cannot keep down the volume of her puppets' talk, has a sense of movement and colour, and ought to win ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... Marsh, to long for the glow of some romance to warm the fogs that filled his landscape. In spite of his father's jeers, he was no monk, and generally had some sentimental adventure keeping his soul alive—but he was fastidious and rather bizarre in his likings, and since he had come to North Farthing, no one, either in his own class or out of it, had appealed to him, except ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... plan too madcap for Peachy to undertake. She revelled in anything venturesome or bizarre. The Camellia Buds did as she decreed, and resigned the courts that afternoon to Bertha, Mabel, Elsie, Ruth, Rosamonde, Winnie, Monica, and Callie, who fell readily into the trap prepared for them. Leaving this double set busy at tennis they fled to the opposite ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... the tiny combined in one single strange impression. For, through this conception of great movement, stirred also a roving, delicate touch that his imagination felt as bird-like. Behind the solid mass of the Desert's immobility flashed something swift and light and airy. Bizarre pictures interpreted it to him, like rapid snap-shots of a huge flying panorama: he thought of darting dragon-flies seen at Helouan, of children's little dancing feet, of twinkling butterflies—of birds. Chiefly, yes, of a flock of birds in flight, whose separate units formed a single entity. ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... feelings on either side, let it be mentioned—to join the literary staff of the Aurora Borealis, an organ of quite a different complexion, and of considerable notoriety in the empire city, as it was famed for its bizarre sensations and ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... crystalline glass drops—a cool white pavement invited the gay minuet. Beyond, a huge banquet table groaned with delicacies and wines the cost of which would have gone far to rationing the thirty thousand hungry of the nearby City. Indeed, enough was wasted to have fed many. With bizarre and often gross entertainment Marquis de Praille amused his guests who themselves presented a wanton and amorous scene that seemed itself a part ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... notice; its many peculiarities repugnant to our waking thought; the incongruence between its images and the feelings they engender; then the dream's evanescence, the way in which, on awakening, our thoughts thrust it aside as something bizarre, and our reminiscences mutilating or rejecting it—all these and many other problems have for many hundred years demanded answers which up till now could never have been satisfactory. Before all there is the question as to the meaning of the dream, a ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... back presently, wonderfully lovely in the bizarre Oriental costume, and I wanted her to stand on tiptoe, ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... think, revered swami, that I could ever fight tigers?" This was the first, and the last, time that the bizarre ambition ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... Watson, here was a case of exceptional interest. In all the annals of criminal investigation I know of none that presented possibilities more bizarre, none that called more urgently for the subtlest qualities of the private detective. I rushed out of the building, letting doors slam behind me. Quickly I reached the railings, raised myself to the top, and glanced down ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... chapel close to each other, appeared to perform the duty of sweeping it, like menials; but as they used only one hand, the floor was not much benefited by the exercise, which they plied with such oddity of gestures and manner as befitted their bizarre and fantastic appearance. When they approached near to the knight in the course of their occupation, they ceased to use their brooms; and placing themselves side by side, directly opposite to Sir Kenneth, they again slowly shifted ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... "Exquisite! But she is not of your land. Italian, Spanish, or some bizarre mingling of strange races, but ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... hand-beaten metal, drilled stone and looped leather. The only recognizable item was a thin knife of unusual design. Loops of piping, flared bells, carved stones tied in senseless patterns of thonging gave the rest of the collection a bizarre appearance. Perhaps they had some religious significance. But the well-worn and handled look of most of them gave Brion an uneasy sensation. If they were used—what in the universe could ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... blurred and indeterminate that it had to be subdivided many times, and became only a quality. Amory's secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents—also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was quite irreconcilable to the ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... get on the front page a story must be rather unusual. A perusal of our daily rags will convince the most skeptical that the sensational, the unusual, the bizarre are what appeal most to the men who make the newspapers. The unusual thing about our deal lies in the fact that this is the first time in the history of Australia or the United States that the former country has exported wheat into the latter—the ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... of his foe has turned to ten swords in his hand. But this is not really because the man is playing with ten swords, it is because he is aiming very straight with one. Moreover, a man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope. Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity, because they are hurried into ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the girl's face at that moment so vital, so bizarre and arresting, that so long as Rupert Guest lived, it remained with him as one of the most striking pictures in his mental picture- gallery. He had but to pass a high green hedge in the June sunshine, to catch the fragrance of the honeysuckle ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Corinthian columns that lift its domes aloof on their prodigious bulk, huge as that of the grouped pillars in the York Minster. The white of the marble walls, the gold of altars, the colors of painted wooden sculpture form the tones of the place, subdued to one bizarre richness which I may as well leave first as last to the reader's fancy; though, let his fancy riot as it will, it never can picture that gorgeousness. Mass was saying at a side altar as we entered, and the music of stringed instruments and ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... it with us. He had a penchant for interesting situations, and in France today anything may happen. In a few scant months dukes have turned into pastry cooks, and barbers' boys into generals. Tomorrow it may be a republic, or a monarchy that governs, or some bizarre contrivance that is neither one nor the other. Just now it is Napoleon Bonaparte, a very determined little man. Ah, you have heard of him, my son? I sometimes wonder if he will not go further than many of ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... States-General vied with each other in generosity to the great champion of protestantism, who was combating the holy league so valiantly, and rarely has a great historical figure presented itself to the world so bizarre of aspect, and under such shifting perplexity of light and shade, as did the Bearnese in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... They were a bizarre mass of color on the sweet spring landscape, those patchwork quilts, swaying in a long line under the elms and maples. The old orchard made a blossoming background for them, and farther off on the horizon rose the beauty of fresh verdure and purple mist ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... attend the obsequies of a total stranger. At the end, without a word of explanation, still less of apology, he had been returned as an empty rejected package to the platform at Liverpool Street. Yes, I should dearly love to have met and cross-questioned that policeman, and have listened to the bizarre solution which he had to offer to it all. But most probably, in his stolid, faithful way, he never gave the subject any thought at all. To be tossed about at the whims of superiors was an experience which he would take as composedly as he would those exiguous weekly wages ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... greater than Signorelli chiefly through that larger and truer perception of aesthetic unity which seems to be the final outcome of a long series of artistic effort. The arabesques, for instance, with which Luca wreathed his portraits of the poets, are monstrous, bizarre, in doubtful taste. Michelangelo, with a finer instinct for harmony, a deeper grasp on his own dominant ideal, excluded this element of quattrocento decoration from his scheme. Raffaello, with the graceful tact essential to the style, developed ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... which has been already alluded to, Das fremde Kind, a curious mixture of reality and fairyland, and Der Zusammenhang der Dinge, which is not devoid of interest. Several of the things in this collection suggest comparison with Poe's writings for weirdness and bizarre imaginative power, though of course there are wide differences between the styles of ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... said, "but I want you to be abreast of the times. There's going to be a reaction from this reign of the bizarre. We've gone long enough to harems and odalisques for our styles and our manners and presently we are going to see the blossoming of ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... divers uniforms and decorations suggesting a dress ball in the capital of the world. But the motley costumes of the women, who dressed with the license of unrestrained individuality, were even more startling and bizarre—a kaleidoscopic fantastic masquerade. ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... that the most bizarre incident I saw during the bombardment of the outer forts was the flight of the women inmates of a madhouse at Duffel. There were three hundred women in the institution, many of them violently insane, and the nuns in charge, assisted by soldiers, had to take them across ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... discarded kilt and bagpipe on the eve of departure, marching in blouse and cap and breeks of army blue; but the 14th. Brooklyn departed in red cap and red breeches, the 1st and 2d Fire Zouaves discarded the Turkish fez only; the 5th, 9th, 10th Zouaves marched wearing fez and turban; and bizarre voltigeurs, foot chasseurs, hussars, lancers, rocket batteries in costume de fantasie poured southward,—no two regiments equipped and ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... A bizarre derivation based upon early Arabic (c. 1040 A.D.) sources is given by Kircher in his work[120] on number mysticism. He quotes from Abenragel,[121] giving the Arabic and a Latin translation[122] and stating that the ordinary Arabic forms are derived from sectors ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... Langham, thinking. 'I met him at dinner at the Vice-Chancellor's, now I remember. A bizarre and formidable person—very difficult to talk to,' ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... at, however, was this bizarre figure of a despot who held the power of life and death. It was one of his quieter interludes when he laid aside the ferocious and bombastic play-acting which made it hard to discover whether he was very cunning or half-mad. ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... a reaction of morality and refinement. The wits and beauties of the Salon Bleu may have committed a thousand follies, but their chivalrous codes of honor and of manners, their fastidious tastes, even their prudish affectations, were open though sometimes rather bizarre tributes to the virtues that lie at the very foundation of a well-ordered society. They had exalted ideas of the dignity of womanhood, of purity, of loyalty, of devotion. The heroines of Mlle. de Scudery, ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... blending Christianity and paganism; but Bellini's sole purpose was to do this. We have children from a Bacchic vase and the crowned Virgin; two naked saints and a Venetian lady; and a centaur watching a hermit. The foreground is a mosaic terrace; the background is rocks and water. It is all bizarre and very curious and memorable and quite unique. For the rest, I should mention two charming Guardis; a rich little Canaletto; a nice scene of sheep by Jacopo Bassano; the portrait of an unknown young man by an unknown painter, No. 1157; and ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... power.[1069] He partakes of the nature of both men and gods—he is all-powerful, yet a creature of caprice and a slave of accident. To him society is supposed to owe an incalculable debt; but his mixed nature affords a wide field for bizarre myths and folk-stories, and he of necessity gives way to more ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... the steps of a griping, miserly sire, he had risen to his present station by oppression and chicanery; by crushing the weak and cajoling the strong. And he was prepared to maintain his ground by means as vile and a hand as hard. But he loved; and—strange anomaly, bizarre exception, call it what you will—somewhere in the depths of his earthly nature a spark of good survived, and fired him with so pure an ardour that at the least hint of disrespect to his mistress, at a thought of injury to her, the whole man rose in arms. It was a ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... of the title. Cornelia had passed on. A bizarre story of Mr. Barrett's father was related to Adela by Sir Twickenham. She grappled it with her sense, and so got nothing out of it. "Disinherited him because he wrote to his father, who was dying, to say that he had gained a livelihood by playing the organ! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... loss to explain it. Whether it was music or perfume, or just the emanation from an intense personality, I have never determined. I only know that when I turned, I saw standing before me, in an attitude of waiting, a woman of such marvelous attractions, and yet of an order of beauty so bizarre and out of keeping with the times and the place in which she stood, that I forgot to question everything but my own sanity and the reality of a vision so unprecedented in all my experience. I therefore simply stood like her, speechless and lost, and only came to myself when ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... fragrance of love, is inconspicuous. The hero, after ten years of devotion to a young woman, a paragon of beauty, finally marries her mother, and ends with a few pious observations concerning Heaven's mercy and his own happy lot. Such an ending seems disappointing, almost bizarre, in view of the romantic novels to which we are accustomed; but we must remember that Thackeray's purpose was to paint life as he saw it, and that in life men and things often take a different way from that described in romances. As we grow acquainted with Thackeray's ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... when the sisters entered their drawing-room there were numerous evidences of an occupant during their absence. The sofa pillows had been rearranged so that the effect of their grouping was less bizarre than that favored by the Western women; a horrid little Buddhist idol with its eyes fixed on its abdomen, had been chastely hidden behind a Dresden shepherdess, as unfit for the scrutiny of polite eyes; and on the table ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... literary history. The "Dictionnaire Historique" has compiled the article of Lenglet entirely from this work; but the Journal des Scavans was too ascetic in this opinion. Etoit-ce la peine de faire un livre pour apprendre au public qu'un homme de lettres fut espion, escroc, bizarre, fougueux, cynique, incapable d'amitie, de soumission aux loix? &c. Yet they do not pretend that the bibliography of Lenglet du Fresnoy is at all ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... diverted by the bizarre on all sides, Grant avenue, the main artery of Chinatown, stretching before you in a many-hued arabesque of shop fronts, no two quite alike in tone or in the stuff they ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... wild, bizarre picture; the fire, fanned by the fierce winds that swept down the open chimney, kept sending out puffs of smoke that went like grey wraiths about the room; the top of the table rutted by hundreds of years' fierce feeding; the shattered crockery and forlorn-looking ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... stood before that column of light, with only a few seconds of the third dimension left to them. They had answered a weird advertisement, and had but a limited idea of what they were about to do. Grimly, though, they accepted it as a job, a bizarre job, but a job. They faced it as they had faced other equally ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... It was as bizarre a company as Graham had ever sat down to dinner with. The sheep-buyer and the correspondent for the Breeders' Gazette were still guests. Three machine-loads of men, women, and girls, totaling fourteen, had arrived shortly before the first gong and had remained ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... and go away. But there's a strangeness, a sort of haunting fascination in it all. To you, who don't know the people, it may only seem a piece of rather sordid folly. But it isn't the good, the obvious, the useful that puts a spell on us in life. It's the bizarre, the dimly seen, the mysterious for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... contrast between CD-ROM and network pricing and in doing so highlighted something bizarre in information pricing. A large institution such as the University of California has vendors who will offer to sell information on CD-ROM for a price per year in four digits, but for the same data (e.g., an abstracting and indexing database) on magnetic tape, regardless of how many people ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
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