"Stylist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... generation has more than sustained the judgment of his own as to the unique and wonderful beauty of his compositions. Hardly any concert programme is considered complete without one or more numbers selected from his works; and though there are but few pianists, even in a day when Chopin as a stylist has been a study, who can do his subtile and wonderful fancies justice, there is no composer for the piano-forte who so ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... more than a mere stylist. The art of writers who are too consciously that is a sort of decorative representation of life, a formal composition, not a plastic composition. One element particularly characteristic of Jacobsen is his accuracy of observation and minuteness of detail welded ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... remained was ready for Flaubert. From the author of "L'Education Sentimentale," I daresay, came the deciding influence, with Nietzsche's staggering brilliance offering suggestions later on. Thus Huneker, as stylist, owes nearly all to France, for Nietzsche, too, learned how to write there, and to the end of his days he always wrote more like a Frenchman than a German. His greatest service to his own country, indeed, was not as anarch, but as teacher of writing. He ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... Professor Maspero is one of the most famous of living Orientalists. His most important special studies have to do with Egyptology, but his writings cover the entire field of Oriental antiquity. He is a notable stylist, and his works are ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... experiences of young readers. For instance, there will be found among these tales the detective story by the inimitable Conan Doyle; the true story of adventure, with an animal for the central figure, by Katherine Mayo; the fanciful story by the great stylist Hawthorne; tales of humor or pathos; of simple human love; of character; of nature; of realism; and of idealism. The settings give glimpses of the far West, the middle West, the East, of several foreign countries, of great cities, of little villages, ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... then discovered a mechanical stylist in a recess beside the bathroom mirror. She swung the gadget out into the room, set it for a dye removal operation and sat down beneath it. A redhead again a minute or so later, she switched the machine to Orado styles and left ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... man was a consummate literary stylist is beyond doubt. He spoke in parables and maxims, short, brief and musical. He wrote for his ear, and always his desire, it seems, was to convey the greatest truth in the fewest words. The Chinese, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... triumphs over all.' That is the script of the Russian War Office. That is how official documents addressed to important personages should be written. The letters are round, the type black, and the style somewhat remarkable. A stylist would not allow these ornaments, or attempts at flourishes—just look at these unfinished tails!—but it has distinction and really depicts the soul of the writer. He would like to give play to his imagination, and follow the inspiration of his genius, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... even in those more decadent days of my childhood did I admire the man as a stylist. Even then I was angry that he should treat English as a dead language, bored by that sedulous ritual wherewith he laid out every sentence as in a shroud—hanging, like a widower, long over its marmoreal beauty or ever ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... it was, I shouldn't be calling it a mystery," replied Mrs. Postwhistle, who was a stylist in ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... a game of jerk-straws, and Mr. Whittier has other and better claims on us than as a stylist. There is true fire in the heart of the man, and his eye is the eye of a poet. A more juicy soil might have made him a Burns or a Beranger for us. New England is dry and hard, though she have a warm nook in her, here and there, where the magnolia grows after a fashion. It is all very ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... follow rules. Wise men precede them." (Query: this being a quotation from myself, was I bound to put the inverted commas?) Shakespeare has violated every rule of the schoolroom, and the more self-conscious stylist of our own day—Stevenson—would be caned for composition. I find him writing "They are not us," which is almost as blasphemous as "It's me." His reputation has closed the critics' eyes to such sentences as these in his essay on "Some ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... practical visionary, a dreamer whose dreams never confused his metallic intellect, a stylist who fascinated even the poor mind forced to express itself in colloquialisms, a man of immense erudition for his years (he was only thirty); and he was insatiably interested in the affairs of the ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... made it look easy. There are two sorts of successful stories; one that makes the reader marvel at its art; the other one that makes the reader believe that almost anybody could have written it. The first appeals to the stylist and may soon die. The other may ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... dignity of history, could have used. So Mr. Sparks without blushing went through Washington's letters and substituted for the originals words which he decided were more seemly. Again the public came to know George Washington, not by his own words, but by those attributed to him by an overzealous stylist-pedant. Well might the Father of his Country pray to ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... of the fisherman or fishmonger), whose name was Abu al-Abbas Mohammed bin Sabih, surnamed Al- Mazkur (Ibn al-Athir says Al-Muzakkar), was a native of Kufah (where he died in A.H. 183 799-80), a preacher and professional tale-teller famed as a stylist and a man of piety. Al-Siyuti (p. 292) relates of him that when honoured by the Caliph with courteous reception he said to him, "Thy humility in thy greatness is nobler than thy greatness." He is known to have been the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the lectures, practising on short stories meanwhile, devoting most of her effort to becoming a stylist, that she might attain immediate recognition whatever her matter. She lived in a small but comfortable hotel, for not only had she saved the greater part of her salary, but the Bolands, however oblivious ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... erect the visionary superstructure of pacificism. They form a strange and suspicious company. Among their early representatives stand prominent the able advocate, but furious schismatic, Tertullian; the amiable scholar, but heretically Gnostic, Origen; the accomplished stylist, but bigoted and ignorant special-pleader, Lactantius. It would not be a harsh judgment to say that most of the early pacificists had some twist of mind or character that disturbed the perfect balance of ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... factor in their boy's education. It is a spot peculiarly secluded, to be within sight and sound of Edinburgh, lying hidden in the lap of the hills, sheltered "frae nirly nippin' Eas'lan' breeze and haar o' seas." It was there Stevenson began deliberately to educate himself to become the Master Stylist—the "Virgil of prose" of his contemporaries. These Pentlands were to him always the hills of home. He lifted his eyes to them from the old manse of Colinton, when he played there in his grandfather's garden. He longingly, in gaps between the tall, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... the difficulty. Every day for a week he had exercised himself in letter—writing: he had practiced every style, from the jocular to the gravely interrogative, and had succeeded pretty well as a stylist, but the point, the point, the bank deposit, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... that you in America would take him to heart. He is a tonic, a deep refreshing drink, with a strange and wonderful flavour; he is a mine of new interests, and ways of thought instinctively right. As a simple narrator he is well-nigh unsurpassed; as a stylist he has few, if any, living equals. And in all his work there is an indefinable freedom from any thought of after-benefit—even from the desire that we should read him. He puts down what he sees and feels, out of sheer love of the thing seen, and the emotion felt; the smell of the lamp has ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... fourth was left unfinished at his death, but was completed later by Diogo do Conto, who added eight more volumes. A complete edition was printed at Lisbon in twenty-four volumes (1778-88). Barros was a conscientious writer and a good stylist. (New ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... Gauden, no mean stylist, set out in the best academical language of the period. Frigid and artificial it may read now, but the passion and pity, which is not in the book, was supplied by the readers of the time. And men are not dainty as to phrase when they meet with an expression of their own sentiments. ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... Harold and Dickens's Tale of Two Cities, have been used as pioneers of history and treated as a sort of holiday history books. For in our day history is tending to grow more documentary and less literary; and "the historian who is a stylist," as one of our contributors, the late Thomas Seccombe, said, "will soon be regarded as a kind of Phoenix." But in this special department of Everyman's Library we have been eclectic enough to choose our history men from every school in turn. We have ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... charming book of travel and philosophy. This tramp is a stylist, and if you have a friend who can appreciate really intimate and beautiful writing, buy it, and read it carefully word by word yourself. The pages are cut, and by this means you have a fund for reverie and talk that is not chatter. In an ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... argument into a pamphlet which may be easily read by the instructed layman in half an hour, for, as is invariably the case with Marshall, his condensation made for greater clarity. In this opinion he also gives evidence, in their highest form, of his other notable qualities as a judicial stylist: his "tiger instinct for the jugular vein"; his rigorous pursuit of logical consequences; his power of stating a case, wherein he is rivaled only by Mansfield; his scorn of the qualifying "buys," "if's," and "though's"; ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... craftsmanship. I know of several famous magazine writers who never in their lives have got their material into print in the form in which it originally was submitted. They are what the trade calls "go-getters." They deliver the "story" as best they can, and a more skillful stylist completes the job. ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... busy disposing of his heap of manuscripts. He was overwhelmed by requests from editors. It had been discovered that he was a stylist, with meat under his style. The Northern Review, after publishing "The Cradle of Beauty," had written him for half a dozen similar essays, which would have been supplied out of the heap, had not Burton's Magazine, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... imagination and he understands the gentle art of arranging facts in kaleidoscopic patterns so that they may attract and not repel the reader. America, indeed, has not produced a round dozen authors who equal him as a brilliant stylist with a great deal to say. And yet this man, who wrote some of his best books in the Eighties and who is still alive, has been allowed to drift into comparative oblivion. Even his early reviewers shoved him impatiently aside or ignored him altogether; a writer in "Belford's Magazine" ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... after page, analysing his character, enumerating his iniquities, reporting whole conversations, tracing all the causes and the growth of her misery. She was beside herself with passion, and though she could hardly think or see, she suddenly attained to magnificence and pathos which a practised stylist might have envied. It was written like a diary, and not till its conclusion did she realize ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... phrases, and weighed my synonyms, and echoed this or that vowel very skilfully, I thought, and alliterated my consonants with discretion. In fine, I did not overlook the most meticulous device of the stylist; and I enjoyed it. It was a sort of game; and they taught me at least, those six delightful months, that a man writes admirable prose not at all for the sake of having it read, but for the more sensible reason that he ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... is no fault of the heart in it, that being the one unpardonable fault in an author—if you have put your own individuality into your work—I'll answer for it that you will arrive sooner and be read longer than the most admired stylist of the day. Be prepared to sacrifice form to accuracy, to avoid the brilliant and the marvellous for the simple and direct. What matters it how the effect is got so that it comes honestly? But of course it will be said that this, that, and the other person did not get their effects so; they will ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... talked like that, just as he wrote and as he spoke in public, his style, if style it can be called, being the most simple, direct, and colloquial ever written. And for this reason, when we are aweary of the style of the stylist, where the living breathing body becomes of less consequence than its beautiful clothing, it is a relief, and refreshment, to turn from the precious and delicate expression, the implicit word, sought for high and low and at last found, the balance of every sentence ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... in the North Sea, her guns were in action." Very naturally he desired to do honour to this gallant light cruiser, and I admire prodigiously the modest way in which he has done it. "ETIENNE" is not a stylist; a professor of syntax might conceivably be distressed by his confusion of prepositions; but apart from this detail all is plain sailing—and fighting. I have read no more thrilling account of the Battle of Jutland than is to be found here. The author does it so well because he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... less perceptible. Scott was never a great stylist; he struck out at the very first a nervous, hurrying meter, and a strong though rather commonplace diction, upon which he never substantially improved. Abundant action, rapid transitions, stirring descriptions, common sentiments and ordinary language heightened by a dash of pomp and ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... he had a keen instinct for the dissonant element (witness passages in the G minor Ballade); he was a daring harmonic innovator; and much of his music is surcharged with tragic significance. A born stylist, he nevertheless did not avoid incessant labor to secure the acme of finish. So perfect in his works is the balance between substance and treatment, that they make a direct appeal to music-lovers of every nation. In listening to Chopin we are never conscious ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... interesting position. Devoid of the noble and romantic sympathies of Scott, and corrupted to the basic fibres of his being by Early Victorian snobbishness, he is yet—none can deny it—a powerful creator of living people and an accomplished and graceful stylist. ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... subject matter of a letter. Its only concern is in the language used—in the words and sentences which describe, explain and persuade, and there is no subject so commonplace, no proposition so prosaic that the letter cannot be made readable and interesting when a stylist takes up ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... or two visits from Bok, having grown accustomed to him, Stevenson would discuss some sentence in an article, or read some amended paragraph out loud and ask whether Bok thought it sounded better. To pass upon Stevenson as a stylist was, of course, hardly within Bok's mental reach, so he kept discreetly silent when Stevenson ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... criticism, it is only conversation. Yet there is sufficient self-revelation in the fact that those who have been ready enough to praise the 'Lady of Lyons,' with its tawdry rhetoric and its shabby morality, have not seen the superiority of Mr. Pinero over Lord Lytton even as a stylist, as a master of English, tense, nervous, and flexible, adjusting itself to the thought, never protruding itself on our vision, and yet withstanding verbal criticism when we take time afterward to subject it ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... last we say, "Oh Heavens! if he could and would but let himself go or forget himself what he might achieve." But he doesn't—never does, and therefore remains but a second-rate creator though more and more the stylist and the artist. This is more especially the case at the very points where writers like Scott would have risen and roused all the readers' interest. When Stevenson reaches such points, he is always as though ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... respect—what most impressed her Stapyltonian mind was the fact that these books represented, in a perfectly tangible way, success. Patricia very heartily admired success when it was brevetted as such by the applause of others. And while to be a noted stylist, and even to be reasonably sure of annotated reissuement for the plaguing of unborn schoolchildren, was all well enough, in an unimportant, high-minded way, Patricia was far more vividly impressed by the blunt figures which told how many of John Charteris's ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... student at such pains to discover the fact as to a wrong done should have used barbed words in the portrayal of injustice? Strong convictions spurred on his pen, already taught to shape vigorous and incisive sentences. Not a stylist, as measured by the highest Elizabethan standards of charm and mellifluence, he possessed a clearness and directness which win the modern reader. By his methods of analysis he displayed a quality of mind akin to and probably ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... passion he does not feel, into love of an accomplished and intellectual woman; while in his heart's core is registered the image of Jean Armour, the mother of his children. He shows his paces before Clarinda and tears passion to tatters in inflated prose; he poses as a stylist, a moralist, a religious enthusiast, a poet, a man of the world, and now and again accidentally he assumes the face and figure of Robert Burns. We read and wonder if this be really the same man who wrote ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... narrowness of vision, Mrs. Inchbald possesses another quality, no less characteristic of her French predecessors, and no less rare among the novelists of England. She is essentially a stylist—a writer whose whole conception of her art is dominated by stylistic intention. Her style, it is true, is on the whole poor; it is often heavy and pompous, sometimes clumsy and indistinct; compared with the style of such a master as Thackeray it sinks at once into insignificance. But the interest ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... of the elder Italianated type, an elegant Latin stylist, who commented indifferently on the Priapeia and the Stoic philosophy. He abjured Protestantism, and like Muretus, sold his pen to Rome. The Jesuits, in his pompous panegyric, were first saluted as 'the praetorian cohort of the camp of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... 1570. A man of lofty character, he preferred leaving his children an example of good morals and learning to bequeathing them a large pecuniary inheritance, and, though he received many royal benefactions, they were volunteered, never asked for. As an historian and a stylist Barros deserves the high fame he has always enjoyed. His Decades contain the early history of the Portuguese in Asia and reveal careful study of Eastern historians and geographers, as well as of the records of his own country. They are distinguished ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... little finger, I drewe him to me with my whole hand[28]." Other little delicate turns of phrase may be found in the mine of Euphues—for the digging. Our author was no genius, but he had a full measure of that indefinable quality known as wit; and, though the stylist's mask he wears is uncouth and rigid, it cannot always conceal the twinkle of his eyes. Moreover a certain weariness of this sermonizing on the stilts of antithesis is often visible; and we may suspect that he half sympathises with the petulant exclamation of the sea-sick Philautus ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... thin and sallow youth was a master. Upon his face could be seen contempt of the easy marvels he performed as he moved in swift precision from one smooth agility to another; and if some too-dainty or jealous cavalier complained that to be so much a stylist in dancing was "not quite like a gentleman," at least Walter's style was what the music called for. No other dancer in the room could be thought comparable to him. Alice told ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... occupies a very curious position in English literature and a very enviable one. He is, perhaps, the most widely known, and widely spoken of, of any stylist we possess, and the least understood. It was his humour, while living, to create misunderstanding, and he creates it still. And yet he is recognized on all sides as a Classic of the unapproachable breed. Charles ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... this picturesque style will tempt the most heedless to read. Prof. McMaster is more than a stylist; he is a student, and his History abounds in evidences of research in quarters not before discovered by the ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... forming our students on the Latin models I recommend the Greek, especially Demosthenes . simplicity! This may be seen by a reference to Leopardi, who is perhaps the greatest stylist ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... years ago writers on the subject were content to draw their information as to the first voyage of Cook to the South Seas from the so-called history of Dr. Hawkesworth. This gentleman, who posed as a stylist (Boswell calls him a "studious imitator of Dr. Johnson"), was introduced by Dr. Charles Burney to Lord Sandwich for the express purpose of writing an account of the expedition, and was supplied with all the records in the possession of the Admiralty relating to it, he had access to the Journal of ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson |
