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More "Bizarre" Quotes from Famous Books



... indeed 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 ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes

... being a faint approach to Beethoven in color. The unaccustomed rhythm of the slow movement is irritating. Our young Chopin does not move about as freely as Benjamin Godard in the scherzo of his violin and piano sonata in the same bizarre rhythm. Niecks sees naught but barren waste in the finale. I disagree with him. There is the breath of a stirring spirit, an imitative attempt that is more diverting than the other movements. Above all there is movement, and the close is vigorous, though banal. The sonata is the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... 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 is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... The Road to Damascus presents many mysteries to the uninitiated. Its peculiar changes of mood, its gallery of half unreal characters, its bizarre episodes combine to make it a bewilderingly rich but rather 'difficult' work. It cannot be recommended to the lover of light drama or the seeker of momentary distraction. The Road to Damascus does not deal with the superficial strata of ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg

... formed of large logs, which 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various

... 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 and heard the robins ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson

... 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 Tintoretto's daring ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas

... talking in a low, throaty, unnatural tone. Her words were meaningless, but the effect, at that hour and in those surroundings, was bizarre and fearsome. Esteban felt his scalp prickling uncomfortably. This was ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... is simply romanticism with a morning-after thirst. You're panting for romance, for something bizarre. Egypt and St. Petersburg and Buenos Ayres and Samoa have all become commonplace to you. You've overdone them. That's why you're back here in New York waiting with stretched nerves for the Adventure of Life to ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... its routine was regular; in its details bizarre and full of the unexpected. Every morning we arose an hour before day, and ate by lantern light and the gleam of fires. At the first gray we were afoot and on the march. F. and I, with our gunbearers, then pushed ahead down the river, leaving the men to come along as fast or as slowly ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... 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, ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green

... demolition. From the other side life had not departed wholly as yet. Facing the only gas-lamp yawned the cavern of a second-hand furniture dealer, where, deep in the gloom of a sort of narrow avenue winding through a bizarre forest of wardrobes, with an undergrowth tangle of table legs, a tall pier-glass glimmered like a pool of water in a wood. An unhappy, homeless couch, accompanied by two unrelated chairs, stood in the open. The only human being making use ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad

... 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

... City the Rainbow City at Buffalo was a startling contrast. But the artist knew what he was doing when he boldly applied the gayest and brightest colors to buildings and columns, and added to the quaint architecture that bizarre and oriental touch in keeping with the festal purposes of the occasion. The rich, warm tones formed a perfect background for the white statuary, the green foliage, and the silvery fountains. The Temple of Music was a Pompeian red, Horticultural ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... hand, after having read it, almost any one will be likely to imagine that a novel with so startling a heroine and with incidents so bizarre cannot possibly be based on any sound and genuine knowledge of its background; that the author has conjured out of his fantasy not only his plot and chief characters, but also their world; that he ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White

... 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 ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... several objects, the visitors might soon have detected and observed all of them; but, as it was, Pym and Peters stood gazing confusedly about them, momentarily beholding fresh objects, all of them strange, many of them bizarre, some of them frightful. It was apparently at the same instant of time that the sight of Pym and Peters fell upon an object so awesome that their hearts almost ceased to beat, and then bounded on with throbs that sent the cold blood leaping down ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... bizarre satin rag of a programme that they had given her. "I have never heard Madame Mansoni," she added. I glanced at her; there was a blush on her cheek. She had heard of Madame Mansoni, although she had not heard ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope

... front the every-day world and catch the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly face, need not fear the encounter, though it seems terrible to the sort nurtured in the superstition of the romantic, the bizarre, the heroic, the distinguished, as the things alone worthy of painting or carving or writing. The arts must become democratic, and then we shall have the expression of America in art; and the reproach which Arnold was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... definitions, must be on the track of truth. They did not see that these axioms were nothing better than very vague and very uncertain propositions; that the definitions were inexact, defective, and bizarre. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... supple, robust figure attracted his senses; her face was interesting; she had brains, uncommon brains. What would she become? Not a poet, not a novelist. Perhaps a literary critic, like Sainte-Beuve with shining Monday morning reviews. Perhaps—yes, perhaps a critic, a writer of bizarre prose-poems; she has personal style, she is herself, and no ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... when he had his cigar comfortably aglow. "I trust it isn't this little impromptu call of mine that's disturbing you. After all, life has its unusual moments, and this, I think, is one of them." He sniffed the bouquet of his wine and drank. "It is rare moments like this—bizarre, incredible, what you like—that compensate for the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... and the same authors who arouse against rough pessimism of naturalistic direction fell into pessimism themselves, and by this the principal importance and aim of a reform became weaker. What remains then? The bizarre form. And in this bizarre form, whether it is called symbolism or impressionism, they go in deeper and become more entangled, losing artistic equilibrium, common sense, and serenity of the soul. Often they fall ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,

... back and saw Sir Eustace leading Rose de Vigne to the ballroom. The light shone full upon them. They made a splendid couple. And a sudden bizarre thought smote her. This was what the gods had willed. This had been the weaving of destiny; and she—she—had dared to intervene, frustrating, tearing ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell

... extreme case of the use of books as ornaments, but it illustrates in a bizarre way what is a not uncommon use. There is this to be said for that illiterate millionaire: well-bound books are excellent ornaments. No decoration with wall paper or fresco can make a parlor as attractive as it ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others

... Project to flume the river for many miles. The California mining system a gambling or lottery transaction. Miner who works his own claim the more successful. Dr. C. a loser in his mining ventures. Another sleep-killer. Bowling-alleys. Bizarre cant phrases and slang used by the miners. "Honest Indian?" "Talk enough when horses fight". "Talk enough between gentlemen". "I've got the dead-wood on him". "I'm going nary cent" (on person mistrusted). All carry the freshness of originality to ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe

... peculiar spectacle 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, ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... Eve, in their fig-tree apparel, must have been en grande tenue. We passed them with serious faces, while they laughed and giggled, and pointed their index fingers at this and that, which to them seemed so strange and bizarre. ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... man. It remained a mystery, a single bizarre anomaly in the life of the camp. For some time thereafter the express went heavily guarded. The road was patrolled. Jimmy or George Gaynes in person accompanied each shipment of dust. Their pay streak held out, increased steadily in value. They would hire no ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... happened in the world. A time came when the East and West, two mighty unified hemispheres, rose up in arms: the civil war of a planet. I recall only chaotic visions of fire and thunder and hell. It was all incomprehensible to me: like a bizarre dream, things happened, people rushed about, but I never knew what they were doing. I lurked during all that time in a tiny shuddering hole under the city of Yokohama, and by a miracle I survived. And the East won. ...
— The Coming of the Ice • G. Peyton Wertenbaker

... 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 bring ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett

... mon Cosmos dans votre patrie; mais il en est des formes de composition litteraires, comme de la variete des races et de la difference primitive des langues. Un ouvrage traduit manque de vie; ce que plait sur les bords du Rhin doit paraitre bizarre sur les bords de la Tamise et de la Seine. Mon ouvrage est une production essentiellement allemande, et ce caractere meme, j'en suis sur, loin de m'en plaindre lui donne le gout du terroir. Je jouis d'une bonne fortune a laquelle (a cause de mon long sejour en France, de mes predilections ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville

... themselves to be embarked, for this one night only, in a 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 ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... opinion at least, was nothing of the sort. His genius was a genius of 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 ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... contorted rubber and followed Kenny up the path. Light glimmered dimly through the jungle of frost upon the shack window. Fronded whitely by the sleet, the panes loomed out of the dark like an incandescent series of camera plates, bizarre and oriental. Frank ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... alluring, yet ever eluding, the curiosity of the nineteenth; or a Henry VII, ineffectual and melancholic. Such "justice" passes easily by its own excess into the injustice which dispatches Alva's army or finds bizarre expression in the phrase of "le Roi soleil,"—"The State? I am the State." The ideal of modern life, the ideal of which Britain is the supreme representative amongst existing empires, starting not from justice but from freedom, may be traced beyond the French Revolution and the Reformation, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb

... 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 seventeenth-century, ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... 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 ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... muscular, yet not heavy, with a lean dark face, keen, steady eyes, and dignified walk. He wore a black soft felt hat and a red silk sash which just peeped from beneath his waistcoat—in all, striking, yet not bizarre, and notably of gentlemanlike manner. What arrested attention most, however, was his voice. People who heard it invariably turned to look or listened from sheer pleasure. It was of such penetrating clearness that if he spoke in an ordinary tone it carried far. Among the Indians ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker

... characteristics are more evident than elsewhere. Here is a people's 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 of hoi polloi—rotund merchants with walrus ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright

... surely," Madame de Chevreuse said; "bizarre, of course, and at present simple as a child. Moreover, I should say that the atmosphere of the court will not infect him as it has the others. It is refreshing to meet with one who, although he must have distinguished himself vastly, is still ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty

... the Villa Andrie and over the gardens of 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 ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... 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 ...
— 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 child ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall

... is 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 ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... for every kind of newspaper story. Many editors of the present day are trying to break away from the conventional form and to evolve a looser and more natural method of writing news stories. The results are often bizarre and sometimes very effective. Certainly originality in expression adds much to the interest of newspaper stories, and many a good piece of news is ruined by a bald, dry recital of facts. Just as the good reporter is always one who can give his yarns a distinctive flavor, great newspaper stories ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde

... an unexpected thunder from the Excelsior's 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 figures ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte

... performer according to the 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 cases gathered from all regions ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson

... musicians a group of persons were in animated talk: among them Sonia Danidoff, Thomery, and Jerome Fandor. Music was their theme, some admired Wagner and the classics, others voted for the moderns, for the sugariest of waltzes, for the romantic, the bizarre. ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... 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 near—are full of beauty. ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... unionism, syndicalism, birth control, feminism, and many other movements and propagandas, each of which in its turn induced ecstatic visions of a new heaven and a new earth. The same individuals have grown lyrical in praise of every bizarre and eccentric art fad. In the banal and grotesque travesties of art produced by cubists, futurists, et al., they saw transcendent genius. They are forever seeking new gods and burying ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... picturesqueness of Singapore with their bizarre crowds, but more interesting still are the bazaars or continuous rows of open shops which create for themselves a perpetual twilight by hanging tatties or other screens outside the sidewalks, forming long ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... words of our 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 ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael

... incident upon a vacation at a fashionable resort. I had not then 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 ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis

... 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 ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham

... of 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, ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... most dangerous thing in the world for Eugen to do—to put in an appearance at the present time. But another glance at Sigmund somewhat reassured me. In wondering whether girl had ever before been placed in such a bizarre situation as ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill

... 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 as thick as thistle-downs in summer, conceived ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... with canvas sheds open in front and covered with all kinds of signs, in all languages. Great piles of merchandise were in the open air, for lack of storehouses. The streets were full of people of as diverse and bizarre a character as their dwellings: Yankees of every possible variety, native Californians in serapes and sombreros, Chilians, Sonorians, Kanakas from Hawaii, Chinese with long tails, Malays armed with everlasting creeses, and others, in their bearded and embrowned visages, it was impossible ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various

... 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. Quiet as ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... 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 and a clank ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad

... of reckless elation pervaded this bizarre and terrible little army, although it was well aware that during two and a half years almost every other American force had been defeated by an enemy far less formidable. The anxious faces were those of the men of Louisiana who fought for ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine

... and the lurid and the grotesque who created the "Symphonic Fantastique," never, perhaps, became entirely abeyant. And some of the salt and flavor of Berlioz's greater, more characteristic works, the tiny musical particles, for instance, that compose the "Queen Mab" scherzo in "Romeo," or the bizarre combination of flutes and trombones in the "Requiem," macabre as the Orcagna frescoes in Pisa, are due his fantastical imaginings. But, gradually, the deeper Berlioz came to predominate. That deeper spirit was a ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... rather 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, provided ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker

... himself and deciding that such an insult was out of the question. It was his endeavour, especially towards the end of the proceedings, to cultivate a manner blending a dignity fitting his position with a sunny geniality which would allay the timid doubts of the tourist and indicate to him that, bizarre as the idea might seem, there was nothing to prevent him placing his poor silver in more ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... 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 ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall

... with democratic town 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

... luckily, not in Hyde Park; and I suppose a sleigh can't be too bizarre. Is this the creation of ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... 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 where Miss ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie

... It was Lopez's bizarre and wild ambition which frustrated his own schemes. A single tide of invasion was not sufficient to satisfy a mind such as his. Gathering together a second powerful army, he determined to strike at the south-eastern portion of Brazil in addition to its province of Matto Grosso. ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel

... mild-mannered creature with 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

... 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

... and things nursed by Colonel Feraud. Recruiting his strength in a little German town for three weeks, Colonel D'Hubert was surprised to discover within himself a love of repose. His returning vigour was strangely pacific in its aspirations. He meditated silently upon this bizarre change of mood. No doubt many of his brother officers of field rank went through the same moral experience. But these were not the times to talk of it. In one of his letters home Colonel D'Hubert wrote, "All your plans, my dear Leonie, ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad

... with life normal, but with life abnormal; not with every-day characters, but with such as are seen rarely; not with frequented places, but with unfrequented places. The "Memoirs of a Sportsman" is a collection of sketches which form a sort of variety museum of all manner of bizarre and even grotesque figures. Critics naturally marvelled at this; and as in the days of old, men explained the effects of morphine by saying that it contained the soporific principle, and the action of the pump by nature's ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... 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 ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure

... words, one may search for the bizarre and unusual rather than for the truly picturesque. Stevenson at times seems to have lapsed. When he says that Modestine would feel a switch "more tenderly than my cane;" that he "must instantly maltreat ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... foliage constituted an impenetrable wall on either side. Everywhere his eyes met a maze of lianas, creeping plants, begonias, and bizarre vegetable forms, shapes and hues of which he had never before had any adequate conception. Often he caught the glint of great, rare butterflies hovering in the early sunlight which filtered through the interlaced fronds and branches. Often when the boat ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... 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 ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... share of it. It was very busy times along there for a while. It appeared certain that we must perish, but even that was not the bitterest thought; no, the abjectly unheroic nature of the death—that was the sting—that and the bizarre wording of the resulting obituary: "SHOT WITH A ROCK, ON A RAFT." There would be no poetry written about it. None COULD be written ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... 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 impression ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset

... 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

... hundred feet high shut off the view. Down these scrambled Lewis, not daring to look away from his feet till safely at bottom, when he faced about to see the river compressed by sheer cliffs over which hurled a white cataract in one smooth sheet eighty feet high. The spray tossed up in a thousand bizarre shapes of wind-driven clouds. Captain Lewis drew the long sigh of the thing accomplished. He had found the ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut

... which, during the state of sleep, seem to 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 ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... the other famous churches of France, at Amiens for instance, at Rheims or Beauvais, may seem but formal, and to a large extent reproducible, effects of mere architectural rule on a gigantic scale. The [29] somewhat Gothic soul of Gaston relished there something strange, or even bizarre, in the very manner in which the building set itself, so broadly couchant, upon the earth; in the natural richness of tone on the masonry within; in its vast echoing roof of timber, the "forest," as it was called; in the mysterious maze traced upon its pavement; its ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... were coated with a 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

... appears so bizarre to the visitor from temperate climes that in such surroundings the cacao tree seems almost commonplace. It is in appearance as moderate and unpretentious as an apple tree, though somewhat taller, being, when full grown, about twenty feet high. It begins to bear in its fourth or fifth year. Smooth ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp

... they were loaded. The light seemed to shine directly through her delicate palms, and to fall upon her face and hair and quaint old-fashioned costume with singular effect. There was something so bizarre and yet so spirituelle in her appearance that Henley could not help observing in what perfect harmony she seemed with her environment. It was some minutes before either of them spoke—Paul loth to express his ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale

... primitive religion well know the role that has been played in primitive society by 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, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... grotesque 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 • John Addington Symonds

... when he was a sailor, when he grew up and became a world famous tattooer. There is Dutch surrounded by queens of the Midway, Dutch with his arms debonairly thrown round the shoulders of snake charmers and other bizarre and vanished contemporaries. The photographs are yellowed. They make a curious collection. They make the soulless piano sound a bit softer. A "where are the snows of yesteryear" motif played on a ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... behind us; we had paused at the golden portals; they swung inward. A wide corridor filled with soft light was before us, and on its threshold stood—bizarre, yellow gems gleaming, huge muzzle wide in what was evidently meant for a smile of welcome—the woman frog of the Moon ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... conditions, they very naturally make mistakes. For instance, their cunning in nest-building sometimes deserts them. The art of the bird is to conceal its nest both as to position and as to material, but now and then it is betrayed into weaving into its structure showy and bizarre bits of this or that, which give its secret away, and which seem to violate all the traditions of its kind. I have the picture of a robin's nest before me, upon the outside of which are stuck a muslin flower, a leaf ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs

... date should be assigned the bizarre and even comical expression of hopes and fears for the future which Balzac confided to his sister Laure. In order to force himself to take exercise, he used to correct his proofs either at the printer's or at her house. Sometimes the ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... careered along the house-tops; or perched on some jutting angle, skinny elbows crooked, absorbed in the pursuit of fleas. For sunset is the monkey's hour, and the eerie jibbering of these imps of darkness struck a bizarre note in the ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... 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, and I would draw upon my imagination, ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... empressement; but I took it for thanks, and made the best of it. Then at last she sat down and rested her head on her hand. Her absent air allowed me to study her closely, and I was struck by a new beauty which the bizarre boy's dress had concealed. Moreover, with the doffing of that, she seemed to have put off her extreme hostility; but perhaps the revelation I had made to her, which showed her the victim of an unscrupulous schemer, had more to do with her softened air. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various

... Edw. III. I suspect that it was not 'till towards the close of the 15th century, when the sister art of painting directed that of engraving, that books were bound in thick boards, with leather covering upon the same; curiously stamped with arabesque, and other bizarre, ornaments. In the interior of this binding, next to the leaves, there was sometimes an excavation, in which a silver crucifix was safely guarded by a metal door, with clasps. The exterior of the binding had oftentimes large embossed ornaments ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... convulsion of nature had been used as an excuse for one of the wildest freaks of extravagance that Carquinez Springs had ever known. Perhaps that quick sense of humor which dominates the American male in exigencies of this kind kept the extravagances from being merely bizarre and grotesque, and it was presently known that the hotel and its menage were to be appropriately burlesqued by some of the guests, who, attired as Indians, would personate the staff, from the oracular hotel proprietor himself down to ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte

... Borneo, armless wonders and charioteers, some of them well in their cups, all of them excited and happy and dazzled by the flow of light and colour round them and by the familiar faces strangely unfamiliar under bizarre wigs and barbaric paint. The voluminous chords of the wedding march done in mad syncopation issued in a delirious blend from the saxophones and trombones—and the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various

... to the life of 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. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... of cologne bottles neatly piled together, and the brightly-tinted labels gave it a bizarre but beautiful effect. It was square in shape and very high, with a splendid cupola of clear glass arches—the labels probably would not show, up so high. It stood in an enchanted land with the sea behind it—nobody had ever thought of taking Barbara down ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed

... my eyes. What a fantastic life it had been hitherto, how sheltered, how remote from actuality! I seemed to have been building up a rococo stucco habitation out of whims and fancies, adding a room here and a row of pinnacles there, all utterly bizarre and grotesque. Vague dreams of poetry and art, nothing penetrated or grasped, a phrase here, a fancy there; one's ideal of culture seemed like Ophelia in Hamlet, a distracted nymph stuck all over with flowers and anxious to explain the sentimental value of each; the friendships themselves— ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson

... me. Nothing had come to me by conception, everything by sensation. These confused emotions, striking me one after another, did not warp a reason that I did not yet possess, but they gradually shaped in me a reason of another cast and temper, and gave me bizarre and romantic ideas of human life, of which neither reflection nor experience has ever been able wholly to cure me."[5] Thus these first lessons, which have such tremendous influence over all that follow, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... he promptly becomes the terror of the jungle and bites the jugular veins of hostile man and beast with such a precision of technique that he becomes king of the ape-folk, as his father, Tarzan, had been before him. Plausibility, even within the limits of his bizarre plan, is not Mr. BURROUGHS' strong suit, but exciting incident, ingeniously imagined and staged, with swift movement, undoubtedly is. If the author wouldn't let his favourites off so easily and would give their enemies a better sporting chance, he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various

... Nor is there any valid reason against the supposition that even the most remarkable cases of resemblance, such as that of the leaf insect, may have arisen through a process of mutation. Experience with domestic plants and animals shows that the most bizarre forms may arise as sports and perpetuate themselves. Were such forms, arising under natural conditions, to be favoured by natural selection owing to a resemblance to something in their environment we should obtain ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett

... their fig-tree apparel, must have been en grande tenue. We passed them with serious faces, while they laughed and giggled, and pointed their index fingers at this and that, which to them seemed so strange and bizarre. ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... in this manner; for have we not recounted in this present history how Livia was dowered and given in marriage to Augustus by her first husband, the grandfather of Claudius? The deeding of a wife with a dowry was a part of the somewhat bizarre marriage customs of the Roman aristocracy, which gradually lost ground in the first and second century of our era in proportion as the prestige and power of that aristocracy declined, and in proportion as the middle classes acquired influence in the state ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero

... Cosmos dans votre patrie; mais il en est des formes de composition litteraires, comme de la variete des races et de la difference primitive des langues. Un ouvrage traduit manque de vie; ce que plait sur les bords du Rhin doit paraitre bizarre sur les bords de la Tamise et de la Seine. Mon ouvrage est une production essentiellement allemande, et ce caractere meme, j'en suis sur, loin de m'en plaindre lui donne le gout du terroir. Je jouis d'une bonne fortune a laquelle (a cause de mon ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville

... the bizarre satin rag of a programme that they had given her. "I have never heard Madame Mansoni," she added. I glanced at her; there was a blush on her cheek. She had heard of Madame Mansoni, although she had not heard ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope

... His genius was a genius of 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 a pattern of extravagances, and ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... 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 ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall

... and bizarre costumes of the masked revelers on the dance floor and at the tables, unearthly in themselves, were made even more so by the altering light. Music flooded the room from unseen sources. Laughter—hysterical, drunken, filled with utter abandonment—came from the dance floor, the tables, and ...
— A Bottle of Old Wine • Richard O. Lewis

... backward bend, side practice, toe-practice, and all novelties. Dramatic authors had their cards among the rest, and one poor fellow, as if he had not the heart to name himself, advertised a play to be heard of at the office of the newspaper. Whatever related to the theatre was there, in bizarre solidarity, which was droll enough to Maxwell in one way. But he hated to be mixed up with all that, and he perceived that he must be mixed up with it more and more, if he wrote for the theatre. Whether ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells

... got 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 look on ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray

... physiognomy of a church be conveyed by words? It has one nevertheless; all its portions appearing together are combined in one chord and in one effect. If you examine the plans and old engravings you will appreciate the bizarre and captivating harmony of these grand Roman walls overlaid with Oriental fancies; of these Gothic ogives arranged in Byzantine cupolas; of these light Italian columns forming a circle above a bordering of Grecian caissons; ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various

... whole 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 of ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith

... 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

... I began to appreciate the reason for the strangeness of the landscape that had haunted me from the first with an illusive suggestion of the bizarre and unnatural—THERE WAS NO HORIZON! As far as the eye could reach out the sea continued and upon its bosom floated tiny islands, those in the distance reduced to mere specks; but ever beyond them was the sea, until the impression ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Lydia's 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 ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... 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

... sceptical, though realizing that Henderson Blake was not a man given to exaggeration. Nor did their scepticism altogether vanish when Kendrick had ended his bizarre story with a demonstration of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various

... presence of a coward, however passive, brings an element of treachery into a dangerous situation. Nostromo's nervous impatience passed into gloomy thoughtfulness. Decoud, in an undertone, as if speaking to himself, remarked that, after all, this bizarre event made no great difference. He could not conceive what harm the man could do. At most he would be in the way, like an inanimate and useless object—like a block of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... unwholesome reaction they turn towards the things as far as possible removed from those with which they are surfeited. But I will leave Father Cresswell alone. I will ask you whether it is not the bizarre, the grotesque in art, which to-day wins most favor. I will turn to the making of books—I avoid the term literature—and I will ask you whether it is not the extravagant, the impossible, the deformed, in style and matter, which is most eagerly ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... velvety darkness on the night in question there is a single bright light pouring through the open doorway of a dwelling-hut. Through the enfolding silence breaks the bizarre music of an indifferent gramophone, recklessly mocking the sublime grandeur of the age-old antiquities. Laughter and gay music and devil-may-care colonists awaking echoes that have been more or less silent to civilisation for how ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page

... 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 ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt

... 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

... to have seen all that happened as in a glass darkly,—with about it all an element of unreality. As I have already remarked, the things which revealed themselves, dimly, to my perception, seemed too bizarre, too hideous, ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... 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. He traversed endless galleries, no end of lofty halls, innumerable doors. He lost himself utterly—he ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad

... 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 Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... once around the Bucoleon and Sancta Sophia. From a high pavilion overhanging his quarters, he had surveyed the stretches of city in the west and southwest, sensible of a lively desire to become intimately acquainted with the bizarre panorama of hills behind hills, so wonderfully ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace

... such an individual? To them, hypnosis represents some sort of "magic spell" which invokes a state of complete helplessness and dependency upon the hypnotist. We previously discussed how this erroneous conception can take place because of the manner in which hypnosis is usually interwoven with bizarre fictional stories. ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers

... in the house of its friends. We have been so prone to give our attention to the non-essential in the book rather than the essential. We have had such keen eyes for the seemingly ridiculous and the bizarre. For this reason it has come to pass that you can hardly mention the name of Jonah to a modern audience without provoking a smile. Thus Jonah, coming to us as an evangelist, is mistaken by ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell

... 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

... grounds to be psychogenic. As a matter of fact, in two particulars these reactions show relationship to organic delirium. Knauer reports that in post-rheumatic stupors illusions are frequent—an ice bag thought to be a cannon, or a child, etc.—and there are bizarre misinterpretations of the physical condition, such as lying on glass splinters, animals crawling on the body, and so on. Such illusions are, in our experience, not found in stupor, and, on the other hand, are cardinal symptoms of delirium. Further, Knauer reports that even at the height ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch

... 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 with huge ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte

... 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 ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... no noise, and through the undergrowth I peered upon as odd a sight as ever pleased a lover of the bizarre. A blaze of torches lighted a cleared space among the tall palm columns, and in the flickering red glow a score of naked, tattooed figures crouched about a shining mat of sugar-cane. About them great piles of yellow-boxed Swedish matches caught the light, and ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... rather Cosimo's, for though the Grand Duchess paid, the Grand Duke controlled—was Ammanati, the designer of the Neptune fountain in the Piazza della Signoria. Other important additions were made later. The last Medicean Grand Duke to occupy the Pitti was Gian Gastone, a bizarre detrimental, whose head, in a monstrous wig, may be seen at the top of the stairs leading to the Uffizi gallery. He died ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas

... are all distinct and clean, No kindred tint, no blending streaks between: This is no shaded, run-off, pin-eyed thing; A king of flowers, a flower for England's king: I own my pride, and thank the favouring star Which shed such beauty on my fair Bizarre." Thus may the poor the cheap indulgence seize, While the most wealthy pine and pray for ease; Content not always waits upon success, And more may he enjoy who profits less. Walter and William took (their ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe

... 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 Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... 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

... man brought up in the atmosphere of elegant saloons, find any pleasure in playing bravoura pieces in the tap room of a miserable csarda to an audience of half-tipsy vagabonds? Was this an habitual diversion of these wealthy magnates, or was it only Hatszegi's bizarre humour? ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai

... 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 ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith

... 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 ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)

... 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 ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood

... during the last favourable oppositions of the nineteenth century, brought unequivocal confirmation to the accuracy of Schiaparelli's impressions.[997] Various conjectures have been hazarded in explanation of this bizarre appearance. The difficulty of conceiving a physical reality corresponding to it has suggested recourse to an optical rationale. Proctor regarded it as an effect of diffraction;[998] Stanislas Meunier, of oblique reflection from overlying mist-banks;[999] ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... of the twelve triumphal cars, gilded and ornamented with many fine figures and very noble devices; there were Romans and the heads of the districts of Rome, dressed in the old style, with all the pomp and pride that could be desired; one hundred sons of citizens on horseback, so brave and so bizarre in their gallantry of painted antiquity, that in comparison with them the velvet mantles and plumes and the infinity of novelties and costumes in which Italy exceeds every other province of Europe, appeared very ordinary. But when I had seen this noble ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd

... over the old man's mount, a beautiful little black-and-white-spotted pony, as clean limbed as a racer, and with a round and compact body. It was a bizarre-looking little animal, with a long, black mane and tail, at the roots of which was a round, white spot. It was the sort of animal that ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor

... elemental 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

... this story many, many times, Odal thought to himself. This was the first time he had been privileged to listen to it. If you closed your eyes, or looked only at the star map, the plan sounded bizarre, extreme, even impossible. But, if you watched Kanus, and let those piercing, almost hypnotic eyes fasten on yours, then the leader's wildest dreams sounded not only exciting, ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova

... 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; ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett

... were always ready to revolt, a strong army was necessary. But the life of a Carthaginian was too valuable to risk it without necessity. Carthage preferred to pay mercenary soldiers, recruiting them among the barbarians of her empire and among the adventurers of all countries. Her army was a bizarre aggregation in which all languages were spoken, all religions practised, and in which every soldier wore different arms and costume. There were seen Numidians clothed in lion skins which served them as couch, mounted bareback on small fleet horses, and drawing ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos

... deepest 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 ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... artists. The artists had under Akhunaten an unrivalled opportunity for development, of which they had already begun to take considerable advantage before the end of his reign and the restoration of the old order of ideas. Their style takes on itself an almost bizarre freedom, which reminds us strongly of the similar characteristic in Mycenaean art. There is a strange little relief in the Berlin Museum of the king standing cross-legged, leaning on a staff, and languidly smelling ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... Bedouin rumbled: "Exquisite! But she is not of your land. Italian, Spanish, or some bizarre mingling of strange races, but none of your ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple

... well-known scenes. How it would surprise her to see her carriage again here in this University building in West Philadelphia. The whole museum is delightfully French in flavour; as soon as one enters one seems to step back into the curiously bizarre and tragic extravagance of the ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley

... se medicina En 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 ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various

... to satisfi the desire which progressively animates the man of our century, that is to say, the fashion, that capritious and bizarre weathervane which changes ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... many interiors of moderate luxury, but never anything like this. For a second her attention was distracted from everything except the wonderful bizarre splendor in which she found herself. It was not Western magnificence, but Oriental; hangings of the richest Eastern stuffs, rugs, and dark gleams of bronzes and dull lights of brass, and the sheen of ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... several panes of glass were shattered with 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 ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy

... 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 ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

... to get some object of art he 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 ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson

... there is a conventional form for every kind of newspaper story. Many editors of the present day are trying to break away from the conventional form and to evolve a looser and more natural method of writing news stories. The results are often bizarre and sometimes very effective. Certainly originality in expression adds much to the interest of newspaper stories, and many a good piece of news is ruined by a bald, dry recital of facts. Just as the good reporter is always one who can give his yarns a distinctive ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde

... 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 ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson

... founded its system in the very bosom of a refined society, and without developing even a sociable character, we feel all the contagions and miseries of society. We subject our free judgment to its despotic opinions, our feelings to its bizarre customs, and our will to its seductions. We only maintain our caprice against her holy rights. The man of the world has his heart contracted by a proud self-complacency, while that of the man of nature often beats in sympathy; and every man seeks for nothing ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... 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 ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter

... becomes quicker, his eye keener, his voice rises a note on the scale, and grows a trifle sharper. In fine, the effects observed in our autumn foliage may be traced in the people themselves, a heightening of colors; and while this accounts for much that is prurient and bizarre, it infolds also the best promise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... 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 they were one ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte

... 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 more gilded ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells

... ideas. The amalgamation of races in such regions depends upon the similarity or diversity of the ethnic elements and the duration of the common occupation. The broad, open valley of the Danube from the Black Sea to Vienna contains a bizarre mixture of several stocks—Turks, Bulgarians, various families of pure Slavs, Roumanians, Hungarians, and Germans. These elements are too diverse and their occupation of the valley too recent for amalgamation to have advanced very far as yet. The maritime plain and open river valleys of northern ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... him for the first time, and thus he will always remain in my memory. It was at the Conservatoire de Musique when a big symphony of his was given, a bizarre nocturne, only here and there relieved by the gleam of a woman's dress, sentimentally white, fluttering to and fro—or by a flash of irony, sulphur yellow. My neighbour in my box pointed out to me the composer, who was sitting at the extremity ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes

... vigorous exuberance of similes that often recalled the Elizabethans, but marred her work by declamatory rhetoric and by a tormented and often obscure style. Robert Browning was yet more difficult, owing to his overpowering taste for subtlety and the bizarre—nay, even the grotesque. Almost ignored, or at least unappreciated by his contemporaries, he has since taken an exalted place in English admiration, which he owes to the depth, originality, and extreme richness of his ideas, all the more, perhaps, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet

... hear," he went on, "of a bizarre and fantastic figure which flits through the pages of this story, a mysterious somebody who is called the 'Jack.' But I shall ask your Worship, as I shall ask the jury, when this case reaches, as it must reach ultimately, the Central Criminal Court, ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace

... illuminated by a thousand waxen 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 seemed to ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... the hat's mere mass more monstrous grow Into a riot of repugnant shapes! Shapes ignominious, extreme, bizarre, Bulbous, distorted, unsymmetrical— Of no relation to the human head— To beauty, comfort, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... Crimes! The smile grew serious and wistful, as he knelt on the floor and began to loosen the section of the baseboard in front of him. There had never been a crime committed by the Gray Seal! Yes, it was strange, bizarre, incredulous even to himself sometimes, this life of his—the strange partnership formed so long ago now with her, the Tocsin, who had prompted those "crimes" that righted a wrong, that brought sunlight into some life where there had been gloom before, and hope where there had been misery—and ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... and has clearly shown that imagination is a function of mind common to all men in some degree, and that it is shown in as highly developed form in commercial leaders and practical inventors as in the most bizarre of romantic idealists. The only difference is that the manifestation is ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... 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 away ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne

... 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 ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various

... promised exceedingly well. I knew that Jim was strong, and that his old regard for me had taken new life and a firm hold upon him. But when, removed from his immediate influence, I looked the situation in the face, the future loomed so mysteriously bizarre that I shrank from it. All his skimble-skamble talk about psychology and hypnotism, and that other rambling discourse of pirate caves and buccaneering cruises, made me feel sometimes as if I were about to form a partnership with Aladdin, or the King of the ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... and with great boldness of touch struck the bizarre opening chords and then launched into the grotesque words of the latest New York "coon song," one of the first and worst of its kind, and the other young people joined ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt

... romances; books of hours; books of emblems; Roman Catholic literature; liturgies; Bewick; Bartolozzi; the first edition (which was sometimes equally the last); books on vellum, on India-paper, or on yellow or some other bizarre colour or material, debarring perusal of the publication; copies with remarkable blunders or with some of the text inadvertently omitted—all these and a legion of others have had their day; and to some of them it happens that ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... place of residence. Maurice's consulting-room and dining-room corresponded, perhaps, to Mr. Brooke's dining-room and study: it was upstairs where the difference showed itself. Ethel's drawing-room was like herself—a little whimsical, a little bizarre; pretty, withal, and original, and somewhat unlike anything one had ever seen before. She was fond of novelties, and introduced the latest fashions in draperies or china or screens as soon as she could get hold of them; and the result ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... told 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.' ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells

... trilogy The Road to Damascus presents many mysteries to the uninitiated. Its peculiar changes of mood, its gallery of half unreal characters, its bizarre episodes combine to make it a bewilderingly rich but rather 'difficult' work. It cannot be recommended to the lover of light drama or the seeker of momentary distraction. The Road to Damascus does not deal ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg

... engagement for the evening. The hour was unorthodox for a visit. Claude did not care. He had been drowned in his own music for hours. He was in a strongly emotional condition, and wanted to do something strange, something bizarre. ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens

... 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 ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... that it would be better for me to keep out of sight. On my way to the Potts House the bizarre elements in the situation struck me again with considerable force. It seemed so ridiculous, so puerile to have to go through with this political farce in order that a natural economic evolution might be achieved. Without doubt the development of certain industries had reached a stage where the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... scarf-pin, and the like. His movements were leisurely, his voice low. It seemed to me, then, that somehow the perfection of his appointments and the calm deliberation of his movement made him more incongruous and remarkable than did the most bizarre whims of ...
— Gold • Stewart White

... enough to front the every-day world and catch the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly face, need not fear the encounter, though it seems terrible to the sort nurtured in the superstition of the romantic, the bizarre, the heroic, the distinguished, as the things alone worthy of painting or carving or writing. The arts must become democratic, and then we shall have the expression of America in art; and the reproach which Arnold was half right in making ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... shoulders. It might have been the light fabric of the aborigine. Upon the foot of Mary Connynge, twinkling in and out as she walked, showed the crudely garnished little shoe of the Indian princess over seas, dainty, bizarre, singular, covering the smallest foot ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... 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 ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... artistic motive; it was the itch of jealous pride that sharply stressed the difference of musical style on the two sides of the Rhine. The very influence of German music was needed by the French rather than a bizarre invention of national traits. The broader art of a Saint-Saens here shines in contrast with the brilliant conceits of his younger compatriots, though it cannot be denied that the latter are grounded in classic counterpoint. ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... engaged—with no hard 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 ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson

... the feeling of cold contorted rubber and followed Kenny up the path. Light glimmered dimly through the jungle of frost upon the shack window. Fronded whitely by the sleet, the panes loomed out of the dark like an incandescent series of camera plates, bizarre and oriental. ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... 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 hear her tell Portia that she was reading a paper ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... taking a harlequin at his just worth, asking nothing of him but amusement, promptly forgetting him; and asking divine great deeds of those before whom she bends the knee. Everything is judged by laws of its being; the diamond must be flawless; the ephemeral creation of fashion may be flimsy, bizarre, inconsequent. So Lucien may perhaps succeed to admiration in spite of his mistakes; he has only to profit by some happy vein or to be among good companions; but if an evil angel crosses his path, he will go to the very depths of hell. 'Tis a brilliant ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... couple will probably dress with a view to decent convenience, they will not set the fashions, as I shall presently point out, but they will incline to steady and sober them, they will avoid exciting colour contrasts and bizarre contours. They will not be habitually promenaders, or greatly addicted to theatrical performances; they will probably find their secondary interests—the cardinal one will of course be the work in hand—in a not too imaginative prose literature, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... names for things. They ate lobster together one day, and he, in some mood, kept misquoting and distorting passages from the Persian poet, and thenceforth broiled lobster was known to the two as "a Rubaiyat." And there were a score or two of other bizarre titles they had made for things or for localities, with the instinct of so embalming a perfect recollection. And each had certain tricks of speech, of course, as have all human beings, and these two, so living in each ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo

... Villa Andrie and over the gardens of 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 ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... trousers, strapped over varnished boots. A murmur ran round the court. "Old 'Personally Responsible' had got his war-paint on," "The Old War-Horse is smelling powder," were whispered comments. Yet for all that the most irreverent among them recognized vaguely, in this bizarre figure, something of an honored past in their country's history, and possibly felt the spell of old deeds and old names that had once thrilled their boyish pulses. The new District Judge returned Colonel Starbottle's profoundly punctilious ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various

... evade it, to stifle and smother it; an inward struggle ensued which brought the perspiration in beads upon my cheeks—a struggle short, sharp, decisive. It was useless—useless to try to put it from me—this idea so wretchedly bizarre, so grotesque and fantastic, so utterly inane—it was useless to deny that the cat bore a distinct resemblance ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers

... wonderful how numerous the researches of naturalists, such as Mr Tomes, of Welford, near Stratford, have shown the order Cheiroptera to be in genera and species. Their profiles and full faces, even in outline, are often most bizarre and strange. Their interfemoral membranes, we may add, are actual "unreticulated" nets, with which they catch and detain flies as they skim through the air. They pick these out of this bag with their mouths, and "make no bones" of any prey, so sharp and pointed are their pretty insectivorous ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... Sing so to us, who are sick Of seeming-simple rhymes, bizarre emotions, Decked in the simple verses of the day, Infinite meaning in the little gloom, Irregular thoughts in stanzas regular, Modern despair in antique meters, myths Incomprehensible at evening, And symbols that mean nothing in the dawn. ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke

... discover, the fellow seemed to have developed a genuine affection for Lakalatcha, as the smoking cone was called by the natives of the adjoining islands. From long association he had come to know its whims and moods as one comes to know those of a petulant woman one lives with. It was a bizarre and preposterous intimacy, in which Leavitt seemed to find a wholly acceptable substitute for human society, and there was something repellant about the man's eccentricity. He had various names for the smoking cone that ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... protection from the rain was a waterproof ground sheet. Originally fawn-coloured it had been liberally camouflaged with bizarre circles, squares and triangles painted in a medley of colouring. At five hundred yards the wearer was practically invisible, the "colour-scheme" blending with the surrounding ground in a most effective manner. For the present the ground sheet, wrapped into a small compass, was strapped in front ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman

... gold. There were many pictures in large gilded frames and many mirrors similarly encircled with gilded wood. The grate, fender and fire-irons were of polished brass, and round the walls were numerous electric lamps with yellow shades. The whole room represented a bizarre appearance, flamboyant and rather tropical in looks. Apparently Miss Loach was fond of vivid colors. There was no piano, nor were there books or papers, and the only evidence as to how Miss Loach passed her ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume

... of the 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 ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris

... brightness simply indicate various degrees of condensation of these small 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 ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... literary standards. Even Lever, though he wrote for the English public, wrote mainly about Ireland. So, too, with his contemporary Le Fanu, whose reputation rests on a double basis. He made some wonderful excursions into the realm of the bizarre, the uncanny, and the gruesome. But in the collection known as The Purcell Papers will be found three short stories which for exuberant drollery and "diversion" have never been excelled. That the same man could have written Uncle Silas and The Quare Gander is yet ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... laughter, or rapt silence or a ready jest; and when she in her turn took the conversation in hand he found her sharing with him a new and unseen world. It was a woman's world, full of odd surprises. Everything she did seemed quite sweet and reasonable and at the same time daring and bizarre. She looked at things differently, with a sort of worldly-wise tolerance and an ever-changing, provocative smile. Nothing seemed to shock her even when, to try her, he moved closer; ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge

... stages, so far as its present developments went, the "racket" pleased him. It amused his active brain, besides (as he had said to Mr. Saffron) exercising his active body, though certainly in a rather grotesque and bizarre fashion. The attraction of it went deeper than that. It appealed to some of those tendencies and impulses of his character which had earned such heavy censure from Major-General Punnit and had produced so grave an ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony

... 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 near—are full of beauty. Others ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... place over there, Miss Heron; rather bizarre and conspicuous, but striking and rather artistic. New, too: ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice

... to this same date should be assigned the bizarre and even comical expression of hopes and fears for the future which Balzac confided to his sister Laure. In order to force himself to take exercise, he used to correct his proofs either at the printer's or at her house. Sometimes the weather, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... small crustaceans moving around on the sandy bottom, hunting, eating, or fighting with a ferocious entanglement of claws, the onlookers always search for a bizarre and extravagant little creature, the paguro, nicknamed "Bernard, the Hermit." It is a snail that advances upright as a tower, upon crab claws, yet having as a crown the long hair of ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... Sects of 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 as thick as thistle-downs in summer, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... week that 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 only in swimming trunks, Aloysius Pankburn ran down the main street from Lavina's to the water ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London

... 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 ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad

... in 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 vapors from ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... Opera and the Plaza were covered with figures in dominoes, blue, red or black, many grotesque and bizarre costumes, and not a few sober claw hammers. The great flare of yellow light which bathed and flooded the shifting, many-colored throng, also lent a strangely weird effect to the now heavily falling snowflakes. Carriages and cabs kept arriving in countless numbers. It ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers

... o'clock the barn was lit up, and strangely bizarre was the result. The draught through the broken windows set the candles a-guttering, until rivers of yellow fat decorated the black bottles in which they were set. The stench from these, and from the badly-trimmed coal oil lamps down the center, blended disgustingly with the native odor of the ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... the choice of words, one may search for the bizarre and unusual rather than for the truly picturesque. Stevenson at times seems to have lapsed. When he says that Modestine would feel a switch "more tenderly than my cane;" that he "must instantly maltreat this uncomplaining animal," meaning constantly; and ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... fairyland, and was treading among the colossal habitations of giants. On all sides were stupendous masses of rock, huge boulders of all colors—white, yellow and red—most fantastically shaped. There were lofty towers, strange, wind-wrought obelisks, pointed pinnacles, bizarre in shape as one sees in nightmares. It reminded her of the settings of Wagner's music dramas and the weird pictures of Gustave Dore. She admired the Graces, lofty fragments of strata shaped like obelisks. Then there was the Cradle, a ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow

... cases cited above there is nothing in the least bizarre or extraordinary, but there are other methods recorded of reaching the distant meetings. Sometimes the obvious means was by riding on a horse; sometimes the witches were accused, or claimed the power, ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray

... night, at that hour when bizarre fancies and actions may seem natural, she would ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman

... although rebelliously, his thoughts began to marshal themselves in a certain definite formation. And outstanding, alone, removed from the ordinary, almost from the real, was the bizarre ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer

... standard time. And in a later part of the Project report, the consultant admits this fact. But he has an alternate answer: "If the difference in time is real, the object was some form of known aircraft, regardless of its bizarre nature." ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe

... 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. ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... as Clement the cyclamen, and Rio the jasmin; while, at Venice, there is a stray leaf from his portfolio dotted all over with studies of violets and the wild rose. In him first appears the taste for what is bizarre or recherche in landscape; hollow places full of the green shadow of bituminous rocks, ridged reefs of trap-rock which cut the water into quaint sheets of light,—their exact antitype is in our own western seas; ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... waggon was 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. Quiet as he was, there burned a deep, permanent excitement in his dark ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... colony, with its strict centralization, the paternal 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 ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... same love of luxury and the bizarre even in the furnishing of his bedroom, which was a black-and-white room with furniture ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve

... craving for novelty and contempt of convention, became the organ of individual caprice and licence. In Nietzsche—that strange erratic genius—at once artist, philosopher, and rhapsodist—this philosophy of life found brilliant if bizarre utterance. If Schopenhauer reduces existence to nothing, and finds in oblivion and extinction its solution, (b) Nietzsche seeks rather to magnify life by striking the note of a proud and defiant optimism. He claims for the individual limitless rights; and, repudiating all moral ties, asserts the ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... two lads 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 ...
— 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 adventure. That ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall

... fanciful and bizarre attempt to rationalize art, to range it under the dominion of law, there is still a gap to be filled up. What is that common law of the mind, of which a work of art and the slighter acts of thought are alike products? Here Coleridge weaves in Kant's fine-spun theory of the transformation ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... leagues of the infidels, and that he would fight a Turk on foot with nothing on his arm but a glove. There was the same emulation in the vows as in the banquets and many of the self-imposed penalties were as bizarre as the side-shows. ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam

... on seeing a covey of strange creatures, Aztecs, Albinos, wild Africans, busied, by chance, in a game of romps together, the pure overflow of animal spirits. It was a curious scene. They made eerie faces at each other; they feigned assaults; they wove a maze, more fantastic and bizarre than any thing in Faust or Freysehutz. It was the mirth of Fauns, the mischief of Elves and Brownies. The glee, that lighted up those strange faces was not of this earth; but a thrill, pulsated through infinitude, of that joy of life which wells forever from the exhaustless ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... he thought 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 ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse

... all their work. Dr. Hunter said: "No man was ever a great man who wanted to be one." Artists cannot help putting themselves and their own characters into their works. The vulgar artist cannot paint a virtuous picture. The gross, the bizarre, the sensitive, the delicate, all come out on the canvas and tell the ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden

... changed into huge stones tossed together at random, like the inside of a wild beast's den, nor was the den without an inhabitant. The beautiful and innocent lips to which Artavan de Hautlieu had approached his own, were now changed into the hideous and bizarre form, and bestial aspect of a fiery dragon. A moment she hovered upon the wing, and it is said, had Sir Artavan found courage to repeat his salute three times, he would then have remained master of all the wealth, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... 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 ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge

... 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 ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne

... artistic utterance. Buonarroti is 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 ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... collected edition of his works in nine volumes was begun in 1830. Four only appeared. In 1833 a second edition in six volumes was published. As a man, Ballanche was warm-hearted and enthusiastic, but he was endowed with a too-vivid imagination and his strange thoughts are expressed in equally bizarre language. To give a connected account of his views is difficult; their full development should be studied in relation with his life-history, the stages of which are curiously parallel to his theory of the progress of man, the fall, the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... 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 stone, or made a discovery which would ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... 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 ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... in places to our knees, and beneath it we could feel the points of sharp boulders. As we climbed we plunged our hands deep into the cool cushion of the moss, and half dragged ourselves upward. It was like an Oriental rug covering the stony ribs of the hill, a rug of bizarre colouring, strangely patterned in crimson and amber, in emerald and ivory. Birch-trees of slim, silvery beauty arose in it, and ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... 'Ah,' said De Wimpffen, 'your positions are not so strong as you would have us believe them to be.' 'You do not know the topography of the country about Sedan,' was Von Moltke's true and crushing answer. 'Here is a bizarre detail which illustrates the presumptuous and inconsequent character of your people,' he went on, now thoroughly aroused. 'When the war began you supplied your officers with maps of Germany at a time when they could not study the geography of their own country ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... is bizarre coming from a doctor," interrupted Crozat, "since it would put an end ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot

... bring 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

... a way 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 ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse

... 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 scene as that in The Owl Taxi, where the dead-wagon, on its way in the night to the vast cemetery in a New York suburb, is held up for the removal of a much-needed corpse. Such material is bizarre. The handling of it must be very deft or the result will be revolting; and yet the thing can be done. In the latter part of that excellent play, Seven Keys to Baldpate, George M. Cohan and his company bandied ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... the character of the primitive artistic pantheism of the Orient, which either invests even the lowest objects with absolute significance, or forces all phenomena with violence to assume the expression of its world-view. This art becomes therefore bizarre, grotesque, and without taste, or it represents the infinite substance in its abstract freedom turning away with disdain from the illusory and perishing mass of appearances. Thus the meaning can never be completely molded into the expression, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... other children play with my toys than when I play with them myself." Other statements attributed to him imply the most astounding maturity of thought and mental process. Headaches finally came, and he died about four weeks later. The cause of the whole bizarre tragedy was found to be a tumor of the ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... turbans the size of a bandbox; others wear enormous sheep-skin busbies. A number of tall, angular figures stemming the turbid stream in the elegant costumes of our first parents, but wearing Khorassani busbies or Beerjand turbans, makes a bizarre and striking picture. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... la necessite des vertus et des vices D'un astre imperieux doit suivre les caprices? Et Delphes malgre nous conduit nos actions Au plus bizarre effet de ses predictions? L'ame est donc toute esclave; une loi soveraine Vers le bien ou le mal incessamment l'entraine; Et nous recevons ni crainte ni desir, De cette liberte qui n'a rien a choisir; Attaches sans relache a cet ordre sublime, Vertueux sans merite, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... 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, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... at the inn that evening cheered him somewhat; the most powerful minds being prone, I have observed, to snatch at omens in times of uncertainty. An elderly man, of strange appearance, and dressed in an affected and bizarre fashion, was seated at table when we arrived. Though I entered first in my assumed capacity of leader of the party, he let me pass before him without comment, but rose and solemnly saluted M. de Rosny, albeit the latter walked behind me and was much more ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... age of the little ones. I do not think that they have ever looked so lovely as they do in the pictures of that time. The dress of the last century in England is also peculiarly gracious and graceful. There is nothing bizarre or strange about it, but it is full of harmony and beauty. In these days, when we have suffered so dreadfully from the incursions of the modern milliner, we hear ladies boast that they do not wear ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... called forth much criticism. With the Chicago White City the Rainbow City at Buffalo was a startling contrast. But the artist knew what he was doing when he boldly applied the gayest and brightest colors to buildings and columns, and added to the quaint architecture that bizarre and oriental touch in keeping with the festal purposes of the occasion. The rich, warm tones formed a perfect background for the white statuary, the green foliage, and the silvery fountains. The Temple of Music ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... mining machinery. What a flume is. Project to flume the river for many miles. The California mining system a gambling or lottery transaction. Miner who works his own claim the more successful. Dr. C. a loser in his mining ventures. Another sleep-killer. Bowling-alleys. Bizarre cant phrases and slang used by the miners. "Honest Indian?" "Talk enough when horses fight". "Talk enough between gentlemen". "I've got the dead-wood on him". "I'm going nary cent" (on person mistrusted). All carry the freshness of originality to ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe









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