"Oddly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... began to seem oddly unreal and intangible, when she had looked at them in the light of Mistress Margaret's clear old eyes and candid face. It was a real event in her inner life when she first began to understand what the rosary meant to Catholics. Mistress Corbet had told her what was the actual use of the ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... Slowly she advanced, her pretty hands outstretched, and oddly enough she at once caught Lena Lindsey. Her little face was puzzled, and earnest, as she felt of the hair, the cap, and the gown. Then, in an instant, she passed her ...
— Princess Polly's Gay Winter • Amy Brooks
... drawl was effective now. He came down from his chair, carefully stepping on the roots, and loomed above Mr. Niles, amiable, tolerant, serene. His wrinkled crash suit, in whose ample folds his mighty frame bulked, contrasted oddly with the dusty, rusty black in which Mr. Niles defied the ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... the work that he had planned. To his successor, William of Trumpington, it therefore fell to carry on the work. He was a man of a more practical character, though not equal to his predecessor in matters of taste. He finished the main part of the western front. Oddly enough no dog-tooth ornament was used in the central and southern porches, and the character of the carved foliage differs also from that of the north porch. In Abbot John's undoubted work the curling leaves overlap, and have strongly ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Saint Albans - With an Account of the Fabric & a Short History of the Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... April 3, 1814. I hasten to impart to my kind and sympathising friend that I received-last night good tidings of my best friend of friends; they have been communicated to me, oddly enough, through the Alien office! Mr. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... very long letter, and I don't seem to have left myself any time to tell you about St. Agnes' Church. It reminds me of my father's mission church in Lima Street, and oddly enough a new church is being built almost next door just as one was being built in Lima Street. I went to the children's Mass last Sunday, and I seemed to see him walking up and down the aisle in his alb, and I thought to ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... well-calculated to catch the wandering gaze; the flowers in her hat, the great bunch of violets in her dress added insistent alluring bits of color in the dim spot where she sat. Erect as a lily stem, she looked oddly out of place in that large, somber room; there, where the harsh requiem of bruised and broken lives unceasingly sounded, she seemed like some presence typical of spring, wafted thither by mistake. The man continued to regard her. Suddenly he started, and his eyes almost eagerly searched ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... the rate of ten knots an hour; and I have often watched one keep ahead of a great Pacific liner under full steam for many minutes together in quick successive flights of three or four hundred feet each. Oddly enough, they can fly further against the wind than before it—a fact acknowledged even by the spectacled Germans themselves, and very hard indeed to reconcile with the orthodox belief that they are not flying at all, but only jumping. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... an awkward pause, for they were both thinking of that independent girl called Grizel. She was seldom discussed. Tommy was oddly shy about mentioning her name; he would have preferred Elspeth to mention it: and Elspeth had misgivings that this was so, with the result that neither could say "Grizel" without wondering what was in the other's mind. Tommy had written twice to Grizel, the first time unknown ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... always seemed to me exactly in keeping with the description given of an atheist by Lady Ashburton to Carlyle,—namely 'a person who robs himself, not only of clothes, but of flesh as well, and walks about the world in his bones.' And, oddly enough in spite of all the controversies going on about Christianity, I have always really worshipped Christ in my heart of hearts, . . and yet.. I CAN'T go to church! I seem to lose the idea of Him altogether there: . . but".. and his frank face took upon itself a dreamy light ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... volubility surely unrivaled in all taciturn Kazan, chatted interminably with a young Russian woman, evidently the wife of a petty shopkeeper. They bore the intense heat with equal equanimity, but their equanimity was clad in oddly contrasting attire. The woman looked cool and indifferent buttoned up in a long wadded pelisse, with a hot cotton kerchief tied close over ears, under chin, and tucked in at the neck. The Tatar squatted ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... carriage rides an elderly gentleman, who, were his seat firmer, might be mistaken for a picador. He wears a rich Mexican dress, all covered with gold embroidery; his hat with gold rolls is stuck jauntily on one side, contrasting oddly enough with his uneasy expression of countenance, probably caused by the inward trepidation of which he cannot wholly repress the outward sign while managing his high- bred steed, and with his feet pressing his silver stirrups, cautiously touching ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Oddly enough, one of the many points of agreement between Jack and Fred had been their aversion to girls in general. Fred judged them from his sisters, who were always nagging, always exhorting him to ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... singularity for the purpose of attracting attention to themselves, and thus obtaining the notoriety which they crave with every breath they inhale. They dress differently from other people, wearing enormous shirt-collars, or peculiar hats, or oddly cut coats of unusual colors, or indulging in some other similar whimsicality of an unimportant character, in the expectation that they will thereby attract the attention or excite the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... man had been oddly set on the map of the world, for the meridian of Discovery and the parallel of Conquest intersect at the birthplace of NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. The birthlines of Caesar and Columbus—drawn, the one due west from Rome, the other due south from Genoa—cross each other within ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... very next day to Mr. Raymond, and accepted his proposal; so that the week after having got another stall in the same stable, he had two horses instead of one. Oddly enough, the name of the new horse was Ruby, for he was a very red chestnut. Diamond's name came from a white lozenge on his forehead. Young Diamond said they were rich now, with such a big diamond ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... smooth voice replied from the speaker. Alexander X. M. Alexander, President of Outsold Enterprises—a lean, dark, wolfish man in his early sixties—eyed Kennon with a flat predatory intentness that was oddly disquieting. His stare combined the analytical inspection of the pathologist, the probing curiosity of the psychiatrist, and the weighing appraisal of the butcher. Kennon's thoughts about Alexander's youth vanished that instant. Those eyes ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... just round them hadn't mismatched her, hadn't made for her a medium involving compunction in the spectator, so, by the same stroke, that became the very fact of her relation with her companions there, such a fact as filled him at once, oddly, both with assurance and with suspense. If he himself, on this brief vision, felt her as alien and as ever so unwittingly ironic, how must they not feel her and how above all must ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... made, most excellent provisions. It is a rule that nothing so stimulates the production of cream in the financial pastures as that curious esculent the greenback. Oddly enough, also, although this esculent la greatly sought after by the other useful animals in Uncle SAM'S plantation, yet, from one and another cause, vast quantities of this exhilarating food have been amassed in and around the banks of Wall street—those banks where the woodbine vainly ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... stumbling-block to my belief that the means of living in New York are cheaper than in the European capitals is that the house rents here are so incomparably higher than they are there. But I must distinguish and say that I mean flat-rents, for, oddly enough, flats are much dearer than houses. You can get a very pretty little house, in a fair quarter, with plenty of light and a good deal of sun, for two-thirds and sometimes one-half what you must pay for a flat with the same number of rooms, mostly dark or dim, and almost ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... filled the viz-screen. It was planned to make at least a half-dozen braking passes around the planet for observational purposes before the actual business of bringing the ship in for landfall began. As expected the atmosphere proved to be thin. The speculated dead-sea areas, oddly enough, turned out to be just that. To the surprise of some, it was soon evident that Mars possessed, or had possessed, a high civilization. The canali of Schiaparelli were indeed broad waterways stretching from pole to pole, too regular to be anything but the work ...
— It's a Small Solar System • Allan Howard
... middle height, slight and square-shouldered; his forehead square; his hair black, likewise the short moustache twisted at the ends; while his eyes were of that singularly dark and luminous blue that one never sees, oddly enough, except in the eyes of sailors. However, there was nothing of the robustious, shiver-my-timbers, conventional sailor about him; his manner was somewhat reserved; he had a touch of gravity beyond his years; perhaps he had acquired it through being put at an early age in command of so many ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... an old generic name of Tournefort's, which has been superseded by utricularia, but, oddly enough, has been retained in the name of the order lentibulareae; but it probably comes from lenticula, which signifies the little root ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... felt again the little form and face of the wailing child; thought of the frightful struggle against the wind and snow; of the touch of the little hands and feet; of her pretty prattle and gleeful laughter; then of her helpful and oddly-womanish ways as she grew older; of the fresh, clear voice calling him "pap" and ordering him about with a roguish air; of her beauty now, when for the first time he had begun to hope that she might ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... quickness of eye, and steadiness of hand. I can declare honestly that in my best days I never knew a man who could beat me in shooting at a living object; I say nothing of target work, of which I have little experience. Oddly enough, also, I believe that at this art, although then I lacked the practice which since has come to me in such plenty, I was as good as a youth as I have ever been in later days, and, of course, far better than I am now. This I soon proved upon the present occasion, ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... did not openly resent the hand on her shoulder. So Martha Foote waited. And as suddenly as Six-eighteen had flung herself prone she twisted about and sat up, breathing quickly. She passed a hand over her eyes and pushed back her streaming hair with an oddly desperate little gesture. Her lips were parted, ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... an object suddenly coming under their eyes. An oddly-shaped creature that came scrambling in through the saguan, and made stop beneath their very noses. A human being withal; who, soon as entering, called out, in a clear ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... the peculiarities attributed to him, and was filled with curious expectation as to the manner of man he was about to meet, for, oddly enough, he had never yet seen him except at a distance; but anxiety, not untinged with awe, was mingled ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... hospital near Asnieres, where ailing pets can be tended in illness, or boarded for about ten cents a day; and very well cared for their pensioners are. There is also a charity ward where pauper patients are received and tended carefully, and afterward sold or given away to reliable people. Oddly, this sort of charity was begun by Mademoiselle Claude Bernard, the daughter of the great scientist who, it is said, tortured more living creatures to death than any other. Vivisection became a passion with him, but Mademoiselle ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... it has been erroneously said that they valued purity; but Bandelier has collected facts from the old Spanish writers, in summing which up he says: "This almost establishes promiscuity among the ancient Mexicans, as a preliminary to formal marriage." Oddly enough, the crime of adultery with a married woman was considered one against a cluster of kindred, and not against the husband; for if he caught the culprits in flagrante delictu and killed the wife, he ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... reflections. And, in the second place, I may repeat that in these lectures, at any rate for the most part, we are to be content with his dramatic view, and are not to ask whether it corresponded exactly with his opinions or creed outside his poetry—the opinions or creed of the being whom we sometimes oddly call 'Shakespeare the man.' It does not seem likely that outside his poetry he was a very simple-minded Catholic or Protestant or Atheist, as some have maintained; but we cannot be sure, as with those other poets we ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... her peccadilloes, she was not so bad as this Amelia. "My Great-Aunt's Picture" does the same for the vice of envy; "Dr. Deane's Governess" for discontent, and so on; only that this last story is so oddly mixed up with English class-distinctions and conventionalisms that one hardly knows when the young lady is supposed to be doing right and when doing wrong. The same puzzle occurs in the closing story, "Emily's Ambition," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... knob and the door swung shut behind them. Instantly there was a flash of light, and they were oppressed by a feeling of nausea: and then, out of a momentary pit of blackness, they emerged to find that the room of crystal had oddly changed its proportions and opaqueness. "Quick!" cried Ward; "let us get out of this place." Both men found ...
— The Heads of Apex • Francis Flagg
... Dresser hurried on after his friends. Sommers retraced his steps toward the station. Dresser's vulgar and silly phrase, "boot-licker to the rich," turned up oddly in his memory. It annoyed him. Every man who sought to change his place, to get out of the ranks, was in a way a "boot-licker to the rich." He recalled that he was on his way to the rich now, with a subconscious ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... boiler," said the artist; "I really wish you'd look at my picture, unfinished as it is. I should like you to have it. Anybody'll take the pot boiler. I want a model for the picture too, and, oddly enough, a boy; but one you ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... you?" said Flyaway, looking up in surprise at the large and oddly-dressed stranger. "Are you Daniel? My mamma's just been reading about you. You was in the ...
— Dotty Dimple's Flyaway • Sophie May
... but clearly. John scratched his head. His complexion had evidently been very fair. It was still fresh and pink, and the full cheek hung a little over the jaw. The mouth was shrewd, but its expression was oddly contradicted by the eyes, which had on the ...
— Bessie Costrell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "Yes. And oddly enough but for the accident of Gallon joining us, we should have gone by the Amoy, Cochin, Singapore route, which was our first plan. In fact, but for Gallon we should hardly have got through China at all. The Boxer insurrection had taken place only fourteen ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... while he's about it, save a little—" The boy paused, and his friend waited to hear what. Then Morgan brought out oddly: "A ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... Bargeton's past life, a dreary chronicle which must be given if Lucien's position with regard to the lady is to be comprehensible. Lucien's introduction came about oddly enough. In the previous winter a newcomer had brought some interest into Mme. de Bargeton's monotonous life. The place of controller of excise fell vacant, and M. de Barante appointed a man whose adventurous life was a sufficient ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... reproach to my wasteful saunterings in so devoted a culture of opportunity. "There are two moods," I remember his saying, "in which we may walk through galleries—the critical and the ideal. They seize us at their pleasure, and we can never tell which is to take its turn. The critical mood, oddly, is the genial one, the friendly, the condescending. It relishes the pretty trivialities of art, its vulgar cleverness, its conscious graces. It has a kindly greeting for anything which looks as ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... heroine of the play. The other characters are knights, friars, orphaned damsels, and feudal retainers; there is mention of cloisters, drawbridges, the Vaudois heretics, and the assassination of Henri III. and Henri IV.; and the author's Whig and Protestant leanings are oddly evidenced in his exposure of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... knees (though with strange reluctance) and strove to win clear from the tangle of ropes that encompassed me; in the which labour I came upon the body of a dead man and beyond this, yet another. Howbeit I was out of this maze at last and rising to my feet, found the deck to heave oddly 'neath my tread, and so (like one walking in a dream) came stumbling to the quarter-ladder and paused there awhile to lean against the splintered rail and to clasp my aching head, for I was still greatly bemused and my ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... the planting of several choice shrubs. In the midst of the sand thus exposed a single head-stone rose. On his knees beside this simple monument I saw the figure of Uncle David, dressed in his finest clothes and showing in his oddly contorted face the satisfaction of great prosperity, battling with the dissatisfaction of knowing that one he had so loved had not lived to share his elevation. He was rubbing away the mold from the name ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... took my money readily enough and offered no objections when I told him what I wished to do. Also, he claimed to be familiar with the cross-country road to Vilasville, saying that he could set me down in the village before daylight. Oddly enough, he made no comment on the absence of the deputy, and seemed quite as willing to haul one passenger as two. With my liberal bribe for a stimulant he whipped up his horses, and in a few minutes we were out of town and rolling smoothly ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... They were an oddly matched pair. The one was a tubby little man with short bristly grey hair and a short bristly grey moustache to match. His stumpy legs looked ridiculous in his baggy golf knickers of rough tweed, which he wore with gaiters ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... of oddly assorted elements that include a man, a woman, a black cat, a treasure—and an invisible being that had to be seen ...
— All Cats Are Gray • Andre Alice Norton
... Oddly shaped rocks, dimly seen, strengthened the impression of wind-abraded topography. Rocks were reddish, overlain by smears of bright yellow. Lot of trouble placing all that flowers of sulfur, but we postulated a ...
— Question of Comfort • Les Collins
... all the moods and figures of what was ridiculous, oddly. In short, as vinegar is not accounted good till the wine be corrupted, so jests that are true and natural seldom raise laughter with that beast the multitude. They love nothing that is right and proper. The farther it runs from reason or possibility, with ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... some underground flow came near enough to the surface to slake their thirsty roots. Elsewhere the sand shifted noiselessly across the plain, under the touch of the wind, which fashioned innumerable oddly shaped hummocks, and then gently purred them away ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... schoolfellow Murkel Minor, with the certainty of work for which I should be paid, and with something like a ray of hope, and oddly enough I did not lament over the strange fortune which had prevented any one from accepting any of my books or poems, but had given me instead the writing of a catalogue of bric-a-brac. There was one thing I often resented in my own mind, and frequently sneered ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... (1603-1648), English writer, known as "The Puritan,'' has been oddly and persistently mistaken for others. He has been described as a clergyman, which he never was, and as son of Sir Morris (or Maurice) Abbot, and his writings accordingly entered in the bibliographical authorities as by the nephew of the archbishop of Canterbury. One of the sons of Sir Morris Abbot ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... An oddly chap and russet red, He capered and he hopped, A bit o' sacking on his head Although the rain had stopped: Tu-wee he blew, he blew tu-wit, All in the clean sunshine, And oh, the creepy charm of it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... the sinking sled, but hindered by his fur swaddling, crashed through and lunged heavily in his struggles to mount the edge of the film. As he floundered onto the caving surface it let him back and the waters covered him time and again. He pitched oddly about, and for the first time they saw his eyes were bound tightly with bandages, which ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... throat gratefully. He felt as if he had been under a hard nervous strain for some time past. Cold Feet, the craven, the weak of hand and the frail of spirit, had tested him in a new way. He had been confronting a novel and unaccountable thing. He felt very oddly as if someone had been prodding into corners of his nature yet unknown even to himself. He tingled from the rapier ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... the young English boy as much as they might have done, for he had already stayed one night at an almost equally luxurious hotel in Berlin and so approached them somewhat familiarly; but the impression, oddly conceived and incurable, that he had no right to enjoy such luxuries and was in some way an intruder, remained. No one would have guessed this, the silent valet least of all; but in truth, Alban dressed shyly, afraid of the splendor and the richness; and his feet fell softly upon the thick Persian ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... present mission and its practical object, his honest zeal in its pursuit, and the cautious skill and experience he had brought to it, all seemed to be suddenly displaced by this romantic and unreal fantasy. Oddly enough it appeared now to be the only reality in his life, the rest was ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... is a proof that this rather oddly-mated couple never arrived at perfect intimacy,—in spite of a fact which remains to be related. He thought of this afterwards, and thought how strange it was that he had not felt more at liberty to ask her what she did for him, and how she did it, and how ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James
... the shaping of human life on trivial objects, like Othello's strawberry handkerchief, is thereby heightened, while witness is borne to the enjoyment of beautiful handiwork by primitive people, their simple wonder at it, so that they give it an oddly significant place among the ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... A number of oddly unmasculine duties fell to the lot of the R.A.M.C. orderly prior to the time when "V.A.D.'s" were allowed to take his place (at least to some extent) throughout our English war-hospitals. One of my first tasks in the morning ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... against such exercises as learning strings of promontories, battles, and minerals." As to the number of subjects taught, he was in favour of few rather than many. He dreaded for the children the strain of having to receive a large number of "knowledges" (as he oddly called them), and "store them up to be reproduced in an examination." But in spite of this well-founded dread of an undue multiplication of subjects, he wished to make Latin compulsory in the upper standards ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... the most brilliant of boots. He had a white rose in his buttonhole, and his great black dog was lying at his feet, having for a wonder found his master, for the beast was given to roaming, or to the plebeian society of Barker's servant. The American's careful attire contrasted rather oddly with his sallow face, and with the bony hand that rested against the column. He was a young man, but he looked any age that morning. Before long his eye twinkled and he changed his position expectantly, for he saw the tall figure of Claudius striding ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... oddly (since Thunderland had turned against Blunderland) that she didn't feel a bit surprised at finding the Red Queen and the White Queen sitting close to her, one on each side. But she found it rather difficult to be quite civil to them—especially the White Queen, who had once been ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various
... at his father and saw that he was oddly affected by the inquiry. But the young man had his own reasons for wishing ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... sight, a just indignation grew within the breast so strongly fortified outside, so vulnerable within; and without even waiting to call her giggling young ladies to order, she pinned on her hat and departed to send Mrs. Coombe's postal note to the Detroit druggist, who, oddly enough, was ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... enlarged the large staff by another clerk, yet even now the preparation of such an immense number of new tickets constantly, and the keeping and checking of the accounts, keep them hard at it. And they get so oddly divided! Kelly is at Philadelphia, another man at Baltimore, two others are stamping tickets at the top of this house, another is cruising over New England, and Osgood will come on duty to-morrow (when Dolby starts off) to pick me up after the reading, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... see the machine performing its functions. One day, about the middle of the month of March, as they were passing the Pont d'Arcole, having to do some commission for Rosanette in the Latin Quarter, Frederick saw approaching a column of individuals with oddly-shaped hats and long beards. At its head, beating a drum, walked a negro who had formerly been an artist's model; and the man who bore the banner, on which this inscription floated in the wind, "Artist-Painters," was no other ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... He looked oddly, Nan thought, at the doctor. "I don't know but that is it, Doc," he said. "That sea voyage ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... Again the oddly expressive face had changed completely. Her scarlet lips—those vividly red lips which go with an opaque white skin—were instantly parted with genuine terror. Her eyes looked soft and shining, full ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... I am,' said she oddly and calmly; 'but all I have seen of life teaches me that every betrayal of a feeling or a sentiment is like what gamblers call showing your hand, and is sure to be taken advantage of by the other players. It's an ugly illustration, dear Kate, but in the same round game we call life there ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... principal Parade of Leamington, so arranging it as to present a sketch of the British out-of-door aspect on a morning walk of gentility; but I find no personages quite sufficiently distinct and individual in my memory to supply the materials of such a panorama. Oddly enough, the only figure that comes fairly forth to my mind's eye is that of a dowager, one of hundreds whom I used to marvel at, all over England, but who have scarcely a representative among our own ladies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... elder, in greasy sea-stained garments, contrasting oddly with the huge gold chain about his neck, waddles up, as if he had been born, and had lived ever since, in a gale of wind at sea. The upper half of his sharp dogged visage seems of brick-red leather, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Oddly enough, she wasn't feeling so angry, now that she had committed herself and Vall. Come to think of it, she had never been on Police Terminal Time Line; very few people, outside the Paratime Police, ever had. And, she had always ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... in the courts of the United States, and before your honors, by appeal, in which it is attempted to prove that the characters of this drama have been oddly and wrongly cast; that there has been a great mistake in the courts of Rhode Island. It is alleged, that Mr. Dorr, instead of being a traitor or an insurrectionist, was the real governor of the State at the time; that the force used by him was exercised ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter experiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God. But it would clearly not have been unnatural to interpret them as a revelation of the deity's existence. When we reach the subject of mysticism, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... union of opposites makes the happiest marriage, and perhaps it is on the same principle that men who chum are always so oddly assorted. You shall find a man of letters sharing diggings with an auctioneer, and a medical student pigging with a stockbroker's clerk. Perhaps each thus escapes the temptation to talk "shop" in his hours of leisure, while he supplements his own experiences ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... my scanty letters are worth encouraging, especially with such long and excellent answers as that I have just got from you. It has found its way down here: and oddly enough does your Italian scenery, painted, I believe, very faithfully upon my inner eye, contrast with the British barrenness of the Field of Naseby. Yet here was fought a battle of some interest to Englishmen: and I am persuading farmers to weed well the corn ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... should run across it. We were not deceived. The monarch was far away when we first saw him, but there was no such thing as mistaking him. He has the rare peculiarity of standing by himself; he is peculiarly steep, too, and is also most oddly shaped. He towers into the sky like a colossal wedge, with the upper third of its blade bent a little to the left. The broad base of this monster wedge is planted upon a grand glacier-paved Alpine platform whose elevation is ten thousand feet above sea-level; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... what unhappy musician lies hidden in this new ruin, behind the bars of this melancholy confusion. There is something familiar but elusive, like a face that one has known and loved and lost and met again after the cruel changes of intervening years. It conjures up oddly enough a vision of a long room in the twilight, and an acacia in silhouette against the pale gold of the western sky. Ah! ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... a well-known Mongol characteristic; and it is rather oddly attributed by Arabic writers to the Jinn. "Two of them appeared in the form and aspect of the Jarm, each with one eye slit endlong, and jutting horns and projecting tusks."—Story of Tohfat-el-Kulub (Thousand and One ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... he waited almost breathlessly, feeling the same beating of his heart that he had felt when he was following the vanished train the day before. At last he could stand the suspense no longer, and opened the door. Everything was still in the motionless caravan, except—it struck him oddly even then—the unconcerned prattling voice of Susy from one of the nearer wagons. Perhaps a sudden feeling that this was something that concerned HER, perhaps an irresistible impulse overcame him, but the next moment he had leaped to the ground, faced about, and ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... and Davis cut not only occupies a somewhat different position in relation to the top and sides of the tablet, but, as will be seen by reference to the figure, it assumes a distinct form, having in some mysterious way been metamorphosed into a figure which oddly enough suggests the manatee. It does not appear that the attention of archaeologists has ever been directed to the fact that such a resemblance exists; nor indeed is the resemblance sufficiently close to justify calling it a veritable manatee. But with the aid of a little imagination ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... of people who, oddly enough, appear to appertain exclusively to the metropolis. You meet them, every day, in the streets of London, but no one ever encounters them elsewhere; they seem indigenous to the soil, and to belong as exclusively to London as its own smoke, or the dingy bricks and ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... you have to live here to know. It means something to be a pioneer. You can't be one if you've got it in you to be a quitter. The country will be all right some day." He reached for his greatcoat, bringing out a brown-paper parcel. He smiled at it oddly and went on ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... returned to her schemes both for regenerating the estate and managing the Squire—schemes which were beginning to fascinate her, both by their difficulty and their scale—she found her thoughts oddly interfered with, first by recollections of the past—bitter, ineffaceable memories—and then by reflections on the recent course of ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... knew him well, and liked him immensely—as he did me, I think. It was in Tuolumne County, California, where he had a gold mine—the Miss Cunningham. It was I who named that, oddly enough it may seem to you, after my sister, of course. He wasn't aware of that, but thought it was just a whim of mine, that probably I'd admired some girl called 'Miss Cunningham,' and wanted to pay her a compliment. You see, no one knew me by my right ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... circumstance which had determined that so noticeable peculiarity of ground-plan. Its kernel was not, as in most similar buildings of that date, [3] a feudal fortress, but an unfortified manor-house—a double manoir—two houses, oddly associated at a right angle. Far back in the Middle Age, said a not uncertain tradition, here had been the one point of contact between two estates, intricately interlocked with alien domain, as, in the course of generations, the family of Latour, and another, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... oddly tired, but her eyes were shining brightly, and Norma was charmingly happy and at ease. She jumped up to shake hands with Acton with a bright comment that he was not in the least like his brother, and recalled herself to Leslie before offering her all sorts of good wishes. ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... the profusion of these little human flowers, or weeds, that we even liked the change to the dried stalk of an old man, flowering at top into a flat basket of pale-pink shrimps. He gave us our first sight of sea-fruit, when we had got, without knowing it, to Seville Junction. There was, oddly enough, no other fruit for sale there; but there was a very agreeable-looking booth at the end of the platform placarded with signs of Puerto Rico coffee, cognac, and other drinks; and outside of it there were wash-basins and clean towels. I do not know how an old woman with a blind daughter ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... out for themselves. Their nerves, their sensibility, their imagination, were conductors and revealers, and the beauty of May Bartram was in particular that she had given herself so to his case. He felt in these days what, oddly enough, he had never felt before, the growth of a dread of losing her by some catastrophe—some catastrophe that yet wouldn't at all be the catastrophe: partly because she had almost of a sudden ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... ax, a rifle, which on these days I never left far from hand; but I saw no living thing here, except a small spider, which had nested in a dry log that I boated to the sloop. The conduct of this insect interested me now more than anything else around the wild place. In my cabin it met, oddly enough, a spider of its own size and species that had come all the way from Boston—a very civil little chap, too, but mighty spry. Well, the Fuegian threw up its antennae for a fight; but my little Bostonian downed it at once, then broke its legs, and pulled them ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... quite so much as GENIAL GEORGE. Oddly enough, Budget Night, which ought to be the apex of comfort and glory for CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER, is with him ever the season of tribulation. House of Commons is, regarded as audience, always at its best on Budget Night. Will laugh immoderately at feeblest joke uttered by CHANCELLOR; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... was wholly devoid of humour. It was, in fact, devoid of any species of emotion whatever. Yet, oddly enough, the anger died out of Columbine's face as she heard it. She turned to the tablecloth-press and began to ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... have been formed in the lapse of ages, by the mere dropping of water. Pendants hang from the roof, stalagmites grow from the floor like petrified stumps, and pillars and buttresses are disposed as oddly as in the architecture of a dream. Here, we are told to admire a bell, and there, a throne; here, a pulpit, and there, a butcher's shop; here, "the two hearts," and there, a fountain frozen into alabaster; and in every case we assent to the resemblance ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... thick book under his arm, in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. His unassuming figure, short and slight, with its half-gliding, half-tripping motion, gave him a boyish aspect, which contrasted, oddly, but not unpleasantly, with the touch of grey on his hair and whiskers. There was the same contrast— enigmatic and attractive—between the sunburnt brick-red complexion—the hue of the seasoned traveller—and the ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... the human catastrophe. Why did the Creator scatter his sexual attraction so anomalously that it is so rarely reciprocated, each lover pursuing so often another who flies him for a third, as in Midsummer Night's Dream, an imbroglio oddly enough found in a little poem identical in the Greek Moschus and the Hindoo Bhartrihari? Was it blunder or design? Why could he not have made action and reaction equal and opposite, as they are ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... easily that Miss Patch scarcely realized all that was being accomplished. Mrs. Lang insisted on paying the charges for the furniture being carried to Springbrook. Tom Salter saw to the packing of them all and sending them off by train; and then, oddly enough, Miss Grace Barley found that she had business in London, and would be returning to Springbrook on the very day Jessie and Miss Patch were expected there, and ...
— The Story of Jessie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... add up to an appalling total of harm. Henry as a model of renounced ambition is a failure. Read what his Catholic enemies in Bearn said of him, in an address and appeal to the Catholics of France; as now first translated out of its Old French, it has an oddly Jeffersonian ring: ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... you'll be bit when that snake grows up; and it'll serve you right, too," chimed in Charlie Black, who had red hair and freckles oddly at variance ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Oak Hill School • Mabel C. Hawley
... of that same humor that had made him so bitterly mock himself. The Dean's philosophy touching the possibilities of the man who laughs when he is hurt seemed in this stranger about to be justified. Phil felt oddly, too, that the man was in a way experimenting with himself—testing himself as it were—and being altogether a normal human, the cowboy felt strongly inclined to help the experimenter. In this spirit he answered the Dean, while looking ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... and for all her vague abstractions of language, and wide, suffused effects, she possessed yet the skill to present a picture, keenly etched and vividly colored, in the fewest words, when she chose. Not to mention Rose and Bernard, who, oddly enough, are a series of the most exquisite pictures in themselves, bathed in changing and ever-living light, let us take, for instance, Maria Cerinthia walking in the streets of Paris, having worn out her mantilla, and with only a wreath of ivy on her head,—or Clotilda ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... in the most businesslike fashion that he was about to be married to a lady he had met on his trip out to Japan. The dire event was to occur at the American Embassy the following day. From which I judged that my presence at the ceremony was neither expected nor desired. Oddly enough, months afterward, I picked up an English paper in a French inn that contained an announcement of the marriage in the usual advertisement form. The lady was succinctly described as Mrs. Alice ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... the thought is pleasant to me: but for this dear girl, it would be particularly so. I have very few relatives; the nearest I have being, oddly enough, your own country-people, gentlemen. My mother was a native of Boston, where my father, a merchant, married her; and I came very near being a Yankee myself, having been born but a week after my parents landed in England. On my father's side, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... for a long minute. Then she smiled and closed the book again. Oddly enough, both she and Wade had discovered ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... the Convention sounded oddly, as that body had just been discussing a petition from several Parisians who had lately been imprisoned without knowing why or by whom. And the Belfast address of congratulation on the progress of religious liberty was followed by the complaints of two members of the Convention that they had ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... Oddly enough her vision had come partly true; and yet so out of focus that she couldn't see its truth. It was like the sunlight which she knew to be shining somewhere, with a wrong refraction in its rays. The world into which she had been carried was ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... distance from the town; and there is, outside the village, an inn for strangers, for they are not permitted to lodge inside. In front of some houses I remarked either a grass plot or an arrangement of colored sand and shells, sometimes little painted wooden statues, sometimes hedges oddly cut. Even the vessels and broom-handles were painted various colors, and cared for like the remainder of the establishment; the inhabitants carrying their love of cleanliness so far as to compel those who entered to take off their shoes, and replace them with slippers, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... as he disengaged the offending thing sounded oddly to Dennis in the midst of that fearful din that shook the ground and brought the chalk rattling down into the hollow, but it was the first time he had been under fire, and he was yet to learn the absolute disregard of danger which the ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... shall no longer be myself, nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present imperfections (and what I cannot conceive I cannot remember); so that you may just as well give me a new name and face the fact that I am a new person and that the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton. Thus, oddly enough, the conventional belief in the matter comes to this: that if you wish to live for ever you must be wicked enough to be irretrievably damned, since the saved are no longer what they were, and in hell alone do people retain their sinful ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw |
