"Figure of speech" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... elevate the style, and raise it above prose. My purpose was to imitate, and, as far as possible, to adopt the very language of men; and assuredly such personifications do not make any natural or regular part of that language. They are, indeed, a figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as such; but have endeavoured utterly to reject them as a mechanical device of style, or as a family language which Writers in metre seem to lay claim to by prescription. I have wished to keep the Reader ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... returned to the palace in a frightful condition. From the time he mounted his horse, at six o'clock in the morning, the rain had not ceased a single instant, and he was so wet that it could be said without any figure of speech that the water ran down into his boots from the collar of his coat, for they were entirely filled with it. His hat of very fine beaver was so ruined that it fell down over his shoulders, his buff belt was perfectly soaked with water; in fact a man just drawn ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... yet in general use in small provincial printing establishments. Even at Angouleme, so closely connected through its paper-mills with the art of typography in Paris, the only machinery in use was the primitive wooden invention to which the language owes a figure of speech—"the press groans" was no mere rhetorical expression in those days. Leather ink-balls were still used in old-fashioned printing houses; the pressman dabbed the ink by hand on the characters, and the movable table on which the form of type was placed in readiness for the sheet of paper, ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... rather than to diminish the persistent quantity of her emotion, and the few minutes during which Kemper had been absent from her had sufficed to exaggerate his image to a statue that was heroic in its proportions. It was as if her heart—she was still lucid enough to think in a figure of speech—were an altar dedicated to the perpetual flame before a deity who had already showed himself to ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... is mentioned that displeases him; but I was told when he smiled, the smile was of the sweetest and most amiable. I cannot say I saw him in smiling mood, but I saw him frown, and never did anyone so truly translate to me the figure of speech of "looking black." He advanced with self-possession, returned my salute without coldness or empressement, as if it were a mere matter of form, and sat down beside me. We had a long chat. Santa Cruz did not take much active part in it, ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
|
