"Digressive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of John Buncle, Esq., a book which Lamb (and also Hazlitt) frequently praised, is a curious digressive novel, part religious, part roystering, and wholly eccentric and individual, by Thomas Amory, published, Vol. I., in 1756, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... painful contusion, although the air continues full of stones, Mr. BUMSTEAD takes JOHN MCLAUGHLIN'S arm, as they move onward, to protect the old man from harm, and is so careful to pick out the choice parts of the road for him that their progress is digressive in ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 13, June 25, 1870 • Various
... keep their sentences straight, and to avoid the tangle of parentheses, long or short. Here, again, Mr Spurgeon gives me an admirable illustration. His sentences, never thin or weak in matter, are always straight. If any of my younger Brethren are tempted, as I confess I am, in the digressive direction, I would recommend them (if they usually preach without writing) to write a sermon now and then, and rigorously to exclude, or re-write, all sentences which transgress. It occurred to me recently, when acting as a summer chaplain in Switzerland, ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... particular train of ideas. It requires however great judgment in the Poet to pursue this course with approbation, as he must not only fix upon metaphors which in some points have a striking similarity to the object illustrated, but even the digressive circumstances must be so connected with it, as to exhibit a succession of sentiments which resemble, at least remotely, the subject of his Poem[67]. It must be obvious, at first view, that as the Lyric ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... in a long digressive discussion were we to inquire how the spirit of the laws in England, so famed for lenity, has been exasperated into such severity against insolvent debtors; and why, among a people so distinguished for generosity and compassion, the gaols should be more filled with prisoners than they are in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... a term of Ossian's for the different divisions of a digressive poem. See his "Cath-Loda," vol. ii. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... reflections and striking allusions, a wilderness of thought, in which the fertility of fancy scatters flowers of every hue and of every odour. This is one of the few poems in which blank verse could not be changed for rhyme but with disadvantage. The wild diffusion of the sentiments and the digressive sallies of imagination would have been compressed and restrained by confinement to rhyme. The excellence of this work is not exactness but copiousness; particular lines are not to be regarded; the power is in the whole, and in the whole there is a magnificence like that ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... where he stayed in 1158. Ibn Ezra was famed, not only for his poetry, but also for his brilliant wit and many-sided learning. As a mathematician, as a poet, as an expounder of Scriptures, he won a high place in Jewish annals. In his commentaries he rejected the current digressive and allegorical methods, and steered a middle course between free research on the one hand, and blind adherence to tradition on the other. Ibn Ezra was the first to maintain that the Book of Isaiah contains the work of two prophets—a view now almost universal. He never ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... thought, in which the fertility of fancy scatters flowers of every hue and of every odour. This is one of the few poems in which blank verse could not be changed for rhyme but with disadvantage. The wild diffusion of the sentiments, and the digressive sallies of imagination, would have been compressed and restrained by confinement to rhyme. The excellence of this work is not exactness, but copiousness; particular lines are not to be regarded; the power is in the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... streams from me like the rest. Its tone was somewhat derived from those peculiar, sad feelings, and that pang-provoking course of thought, which it has been the purpose of this narrative to embody. In the expression of digressive but earnest notions like these, I could momentarily divert myself from deeper and more painful emotions. I had really gone through a great trial: I say a great trial—always assuming human indulgence for that disease ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms |
