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More "Bizarre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fascination and disgust. The flickering torches, the soughing wind, the lapping waves, the old, old words, lent the denunciation a solemnity which transcended the bizarre mouthpiece. She shook off the impression, however, and asked Shelby to ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... most picturesque incident of the "incident." Most envied of all observers of the tournament was an aviator who looked down on a show bizarre even in the annals of aviation. The German planes had been driven to cover, which gave the Briton a fair field. A knightly admiration, perhaps a sense of fellowship not to say sympathy with the old arm of scouting from the new, possessed him; or let it ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... 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, and, notwithstanding ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... black shadows were assembling, like conspirators, in the orchards and under the spreading elms by the roadside, when Edward Lynde came in sight of a large manufacturing town, which presented a sufficiently bizarre appearance at that hour. ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 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 ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... these creatures. It is 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
... glass panes of the skylight I looked down upon a scene so bizarre that my actual environment became blotted out, and I was mentally translated to Cairo—to that quarter of Cairo immediately surrounding the famous Square of the Fountain—to those indescribable streets, wherefrom ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... the same sort as that described, though varying in size and varying also in their lines athwart the house. Those of the ground floor are all uniform in size and position. But those above are irregular both in size and place, and this irregularity gives a bizarre and not unpicturesque appearance to the building. Along the top, on every side, runs a low parapet, which nearly hides the roof, and at the corners are more figures ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... sort of a pirate captain to cause him thus to be presented to my imagination. He walked about flourishing his sword till he met Aunt Deb, to whom, instead of cutting her head off, as I thought he was about to do, he made a profound bow, and then vanished. Many other figures quite as bizarre and unnatural appeared before me. I mention these trivial circumstances to show the state of my mind. I had been so long by myself that I must be pardoned if I appear egotistical. Again all was quiet. I lay for some time, if not unconscious, with ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... length, "it was a curious chance, your taking shelter in that archway just as those two went by. But I don't know that I should call what was written on the paper nonsense; it is bizarre certainly, but I expect it has a meaning for somebody. Just repeat it again, will you? and I will write it down. Perhaps we might find a cipher of some sort, though I hardly ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... difference in sound, they connote different phases of the idea which they contain. For example, the English word "death" has a spiritual sound; whereas the German "der Tod" sounds horrible and grim, and the French "la mort" sounds fearsome and bizarre. In content, these three words are indistinguishable; but in style they differ very widely. Their diversity of connotation is obviously inherent in their sound; and yet, though the difference may be heard at once, it seems inexplicable ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... could give away his own wife 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 and succeeded in imposing upon ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... a six-foot Senior Lieutenant who had been on many an out-of-the-way exploratory trip. Like Brand he was just under thirty and perpetually thirsting for the bizarre in life. He was a walking document of planetary activity. He was still baked a brick red from a trip to Mercury a year before: he had a scar on his forehead, the result of jumping forty feet one day on the moon when he'd meant to ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... woman, whose very beauty was of an unknown order, causing as much inquiry as admiration. A perfect blonde like her brother, she had none of the sweetness and fragility that usually accompanies this complexion. On the contrary, there was something bizarre in her whole appearance, and especially in the peculiar expression of her eye, that awakened the strangest feelings and produced even in the minds of those who saw her engaged in the most ordinary occupations of life an impression of remoteness that ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... denominated frivolous, superficial, artificial, and inconsequential. As a people, we seek to be entertained, but fail to make a nice distinction between entertainment and amusement. War, it is true, has caused us to think more soberly and feel more deeply; but the bizarre, the gaudy, and the superficial still make a strong appeal to us. We are quite happy to wear paste diamonds, provided only that they sparkle. So long have we been substituting the fictitious for the genuine that we have contracted the habit of loose, ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... John Randolph, erratic and bizarre, was not justly entitled to rank among great statesmen. But the characteristics of Congress, as a body, can be brought into better relief in the narrative of his life than in that of any other person of ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... flowers, with squirrel or buck tails in their hats, with long heavy chains of 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 hotels and ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... racing was one of the most popular forms of chance, and it often reverted in bizarre tangents. This, then, is what happened at a golden fiesta during the ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... 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 ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... handkerchief showed clearly about the man's neck. Then a 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
... fluctuations of fortune in fiction—and almost in real life—have ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and opinions—heads with some diverting twist in them—the oddities of authorship please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish of any thing that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing goes down with her, that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common sympathy. She "holds Nature more clever." I can pardon her blindness to the beautiful obliquities of the Religio Medici; but she must apologise to me for certain disrespectful insinuations, which she has been ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... jovial, bade everyone make himself at home. Now and then through his smoked spectacles there stole an ambiguous look which might have given an analyst pause, but the man's bonhomie, quite ecclesiastical, was instantly disarming. Madame was no beauty, but possessed a certain bizarre charm and was always surrounded. She, however, remained silent and did nothing to encourage her voluble admirers. As void of prudery as her husband, she listened impassively, absently, with her thoughts evidently afar, to the ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... talking at a piece of sheet-iron was so new and extraordinary that the normal mind repulsed it. Alike to the laborer and the scientist, it was incomprehensible. It was too freakish, too bizarre, to be used outside of the laboratory and the museum. No one, literally, could understand how it worked; and the only man who offered a clear solution of the mystery was a Boston mechanic, who maintained that there was "a hole through the middle of ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... the St. Ledger soirees, if so glitteringly bizarre as to draw high-browed frowns from the more reserved and staid of the thinning old guard of ancestor-worshipers, nevertheless, were enthusiastically hailed and eagerly attended by the younger set, and played no small part in the insinuation ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... 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 with the superficial strata of human life, but probes into those ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... 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 phalanx and ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... It was wildly bizarre, that scene in my study, with the dignified white-haired Eurasian doctor, palpably laboring against some deathly sickness, sitting there unperturbed, his brilliant, perverted intellect holding him aloof from the ordinary things of life—whilst those who ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... the folding-doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different, as might have been expected from the Prince's love of the bizarre. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To the right and left, in the ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... church, on an island, in a lake"; in the Hebrides it is "in an egg, in the belly of a duck, in the belly of a wether, under a flagstone on the threshold." It is impossible to imagine the human mind independently imagining such bizarre convolutions. They were borrowed from one nation to the other, and till we have reason shown to the contrary, the original lender was a Hindu. I should add that the mere conception of an external soul occurs ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... was like these men. Yet he possessed something which set him apart from them. He looked intensely vital—almost unnaturally vital—when he was surrounded by English people, but he did not look fierce and hungry. One could conceive of him doing something bizarre, but one could not conceive of him doing anything low. There was sometimes a light in his eyes which suggested a moral distinction rarely to be found in those who dwell in and about Brick Lane. His slight, nervous hands, dark in colour, recalled the hands of high-bred ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... between "contemplative solitude and complete giddiness in conditions of primitive innocence." It is hardly to be wondered at that one who exhibited such glaring and unaccountable contrasts of character was considered by some people whimsical (bizarre) and by her husband an idiot. She herself admits the possibility that he may not have been wrong. At any rate, little by little he succeeded in making her feel the superiority of reason and intelligence so thoroughly that for a long time she was quite crushed and stupefied ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... riches does not judge the English, as might be supposed. They are very romantic, with a young, lusty appetite for the bizarre and the marvellous, as their taste in fiction evinces; and they need not be contemned as sordid admirers of money because they wish to know the lengths it can go to with the people who seem to be just now making the most money. ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... were given in eastern 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
... umbrella over her head. Some acrobats played about on horizontal bars. We both sat forward on our narrow bench, elbows on knees and face in hands, saying nothing, practically seeing nothing, aware only of a far off, deep down, infernal pit in which was being played the Orcagnesque prelude to a bizarre tragedy. I, who had gone through the programme before, yet suffered the spell of Auriol's suspense. Long before she had thrown aside the useless veil. In these dim altitudes no one could be recognized from ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... music and fragrance of love, is inconspicuous. The hero, 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 in romances. As we grow acquainted with Thackeray's characters, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... 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
... 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, to disregard this apparition, ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... don’t appreciate the beauty of their own country. This landscape is worthy 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 ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... with mangroves. Those strangest of all trees, that had something tender and idyllic as they stepped out into the ripple with their fresh child-like laurel-line leaves and dangling rods of emerald, that were really the suckers of their banyan-like roots, had grown into an obscene and bizarre maturity, like nightmares striding out in every direction with skeleton feet planted in festering mud, and stretching out horned, clawing hands that seemed to take root as one looked, and to throw out other roots of horror ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... sting of dead furnace-ashes was in his nostrils as he looked at the strange device. The strange cage-like device, the strange jerry-built apparatus was centered in a bizarre instrument panel that seemed to hang from nothing at all. He said, eyeing a bucket-seat for the operator, "It looks like Red Barber's cat-bird ...
— A World Apart • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... 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 the smart ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... 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 ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... precisely what Shakespeare called it, caviare to the general—a special commodity for occasional use—a little advertising will be good for it. Again, the verse that has sprung from the movement is much of it thoroughly interesting. Some of it is as bizarre as the new art of the futurists and the vorticists; some is merely vulgar, some merely affected, some hopelessly obscure; but other poems, without convincing us of their greatness, seem as original and creative as were Browning and Whitman in their day. Probably, like the new painting, the movement ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Her 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 ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... 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
... fell back from her 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
... 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 ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... delicious and turbulent. Now she knew exactly how much she had counted on this visit to Paris as the door through which she would pass into a new and extraordinary romance. She had felt certain that something wonderful, something unconventional, bizarre, perhaps almost maddening, was going to happen to ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... has been carved with lions, sphinxes, serpents, mermaids, griffins, harpies, winged horses, lizards, and knights in armour—all these are elements that might, we fancy, have been developed into a noble national style. As it is, the churches in question are often more bizarre than really beautiful. Their peculiar character, however, is inseparably associated with the long reaches of green plain, the lordly rivers, and the background of blue hills and snowy Alps that constitute the ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... "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 ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... same sort of thing, we may take the description of another object, a curious metal casket brought to Europe by a member of the Punitive Expedition. In design, according to Ling Roth, this casket "is bold and artistic; the high relief of the bizarre face and the zigzag conventionalized serpents and tadpoles being well thrown up by enchasing of the ground work. The proportions are all good, and this is especially the case with an enchasing of the enclosed lines." Ling Roth says that the relief portions ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... write to him at all, when she knew he would be home for dinner, was perfectly ridiculous; but that she should leave it like this—in evidence for chance discovery—struck him as so outrageous that, thinking of it, he experienced suddenly a staggering sense of insecurity, an absurd and bizarre flash of a notion that the house had moved a little under his feet. He tore the envelope open, glanced at the letter, and sat down in a chair ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... 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
... Pasteur found the handle of the door and entered the room. It was a curious place draped, not without taste of a bizarre kind, in vivid colours, wherein purple dominated, and it gave an idea of mingled magnificence and squalor. Some of the furniture was very good, as were one or two of the pictures, though all of it was of an odd and unusual ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... hat—well, even in New York its long aigrette and daring folds had caused women to look around in the streets. She carried in one hand a large bunch of mauve orchids and wore an abundance of chains and coarse, bizarre jewelry. Her face was still pale, and the gray eyes were almost as empty of expression as they had been seven years before. But altogether Adelle was chic and modern, as she felt with satisfaction, of ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... stretching himself luxuriously in the long lounge chair, "the most commonplace life hovers on the edge of the bizarre. But those of us who overstep the border become preposterous in the eyes of those who have never done so. This is not because the unusual is necessarily the untrue, but because writers of fiction have claimed the unusual as their particular province, and in doing ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... 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
... unequalled; and his faults were those rather of a bizarre temper, arising from an eager and irritable nervous habit, than any depravity of disposition. He was devoid of selfishness, which I take to be the basest ingredient in the human composition. He was generous, humane, and noble-minded, when passion ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... Cousin Egbert to the surrounding hills, and repairing to the hut he brought out hot toddies with which we drank success to the new enterprise. For a half-hour, I dare say, we discussed details there in the cold night, not seeing that it was quite preposterously bizarre. Returning to the hut at last, Cousin Egbert declared himself so chilled that he must have another toddy before retiring, and, although I was already feeling myself the equal of any American, I ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... without just reason—contrasting with a modern disfigured etymology which strips vocables of their genealogy and history, is American and ergo admirably progressive. The spurious facetiousness which deals mainly in mere jargon words ill-spelt and worse pronounced; in bizarre contrast of ideas, and in ultra-Rabelaisian exaggeration, is American wit and humour—therefore unsurpassable. The Newspaper Press, that great reflector of nationalities, that prime expression of popular taste, too often of an ecoeurant vulgarity, personal ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... I said rebukingly, "to comment on the way you say 'Well, sir' and 'Indeed, sir?' I take this opportunity of informing you that I object equally strongly to your 'Sir?' pure and simple. The word seems to suggest that in your opinion I have made a statement or mooted a scheme so bizarre that your brain reels at it. In the present instance, there is absolutely nothing to say 'Sir?' about. The plan I have put forward is entirely reasonable and icily logical, and should excite no sirring whatsoever. ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... malice, grows upon you as the influence of the man makes itself felt. I have 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 ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... he gazed on this extraordinary old man, whose dignity was such that even the bizarre melange of colors could not detract from it, that he was beholding a very different type of Arab from any he yet ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... and the States-General vied with each other in generosity to the great champion of protestantism, who was combating the holy league so valiantly, and rarely has a great historical figure presented itself to the world so bizarre of aspect, and under such shifting perplexity of light and shade, as did the Bearnese in the early ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and Moorish. In front of the altar were two praying desks and behind them, for the more important guests, all the luxurious chairs of the studio: white armchairs of the 18th Century, embroidered with pastoral scenes, Greek settles, benches of carved oak and Venetian chairs with high backs, the bizarre confusion of an ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... fragrant with the scent of roses—a room full of mellow tints of brown and gold, athwart which the afternoon sunlight lingered tenderly, picking out here the limpid blue of a bit of old Chinese "blue-and-white," there the warm gleam of polished copper, or here again the bizarre, gem-encrusted image of an Eastern god. All that was rare and beautiful had gone to the making of the room, and rarer and more beautiful than all, in the eyes of the man whose memory now recalled it, had been the woman to whom it had ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... of Miss Day's cocoa, the lanterns were all lit now, and the effect, on fans and pictures and on brilliant bits of color, were grotesque and almost bizarre. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... entomological chorus in "Faust;" and if this goes on much longer, I feel as if I should take to buzzing. Do you know that it is hard upon three o'clock in the morning? I must leave off and go to bed, for I rehearse Constance to-morrow at eleven, and act her to-morrow night. On Friday I act Bizarre in "The Inconstant," and think I shall find it great fun.... ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... his lays of Roland in the Castle of Ferrara. Chivalry, transmuted by the Italian genius into something fanciful and quaint, survived as a frail work of art. The men-at-arms of the Condottieri still glittered in gilded hauberks. Their helmets waved with plumes and bizarre crests. Their surcoats blazed with heraldries; their velvet caps with medals bearing legendary emblems. The pomp and circumstance of feudal war had not yet yielded to the cannon of the Gascon or the Switzer's pike. The fatal age of foreign invasions had not begun for Italy. Within ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... curiously bizarre fate led him? Where was "Wartrace Hall," and who was "Mahsteh Majah"? Who was the winsome little lady who looked as if she might be twenty, and had all the wit and wisdom of the ages at her tongue's end—who had ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... Reader of your magazine, Astounding Stories, I thought I would write and tell you how I appreciate the stories contained in it. I am a heavy Reader and have always had a soft spot for stories unusual and bizarre. Until I happened to see your magazine at a bookshop in Perth, I had to be content with occasional Science Fiction stories by Wells, Burroughs, and a few others which I picked up in my browsing in various bookshops and libraries. Now that I get Astounding Stories regularly, ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... but a languid reception unless roused by something either horrible or sensational, but her bizarre appearance had the effect which the Manager ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... seriousness, polished the Ford that was to carry away the bridal pair. Recently demobilized, he wore the bizarre combination of military and civilian clothes that all over France symbolized the transition from war to peace—black coat encroaching upon stained blue trousers, khaki puttees, evidence of international intimacy and—most brilliant ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... outing there have been woven stories of a glamour which might have come from the fancy of O. Henry and the author of the "Arabian Nights" working in collaboration. The Prince is said to have plunged into the bizarre landscape of the Bowery, which is Whitechapel better lighted, and better dressed with up-to-date cafes, where there are dance halls in which with the fathomless seriousness of the modern, jazz is danced to violins and banjoes and the ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... addition of two more had been promoted to being the living room of an apartment. Her few personal possessions made a timid, tolerated appearance between his gilt Buddhas and pewter jugs. But she herself queened it easily over the bizarre possessions now become hers. Had you seen her of an evening, alert, fragile, golden under the lamp, and had you seen John's vague glance turn from a moongrey row of Korean bowls to her deeper eyes, you would have been convinced not merely that he regarded her as the finest object ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... von Arnim (1781-1831) is by no means so bizarre a figure. Born in Berlin of a noble family, he inherited a peculiar patriotism and his love of culture, and developed these without the eccentricities which characterized his brother-in-law. The main influences of his early years were Goethe and Jena, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... 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 ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... settee," said Holmes, relapsing into his arm-chair, and putting his finger-tips together, as was his custom when in judicial moods. "I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life. You have shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle, and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... and no carnival could have been more bizarre or more successful. The morning was devoted to athletics and the side shows. The pompiers won the tug of war, and the people marveled when Monty duplicated the feats of the strong man in the circus. DeMille was called upon for ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... remarked, "'The glass is unusually high.' 'When I'm hot, it's hot,' commented the Spaniard, lazily, 'and when I'm cold it's cold. What more do I want to know?'" Burton, as we have seen, had for a long time devoted himself particularly to the study of vice and to everything that was bizarre and unnatural: eunuchs, pederasts, hermaphrodites, idiots, Augustus-the-Strongs, monstrosities. During his travels he never drank anything but green tea, and if Le Fanu's ideas [481] in In a Glass Darkly ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... 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 from a small calendar, and a photograph of a ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... rather 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, ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... Switzerland (Linaria alpina), just because it is a biennial. The main dependence, however, must be placed on perennials—the plants that, barring accidents, last indefinitely. These should be mostly species; if horticultural, do not use the bizarre—Darwin tulips, for example, or the Madame Chereau iris. Nor, with rare exceptions, should double flowers be used. A double daffodil looks horribly out of place, while the double white rock cress (Arabis albida) ...
— Making A Rock Garden • Henry Sherman Adams
... from it, to 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
... bizarre inconstance, Mon concur lui saura gre' du bien qu'elle me fait Veut'elle en d'autres lieux marquer sa bienvellance, Je lui remets ses dons sans chagrin, sans regret. Plein d'une vertu plus forte J'epouse la pauvrete' Si pour dot elle m'apporte ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... from all taint of that instrumental Volapk which is so marked in the Young Italian school. His subject invites the use of Oriental intervals, and he employs them with the discretion which is noticeable in "Ada," but not with Verdi's effectiveness. Some of his devices are admirable, others simply bizarre. As a whole the music is monotonous in character and color, but it is dignified and earnest, and for this ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... would mount guard over him for the remaining twelve hours of his stay. Once he was aboard the Pullman he would be out of danger; her responsibility would be over and the whole affair would become a bizarre ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... that most of the assertions about the morals of the Israelites which are to be found in the Erotica Biblon of Mirabeau are either false or pure guesswork. It is a bizarre method of judging the morals of a people, that of taking their legal code and inferring that the people were accustomed to break all the laws which are forbidden by that code. Nevertheless, that is ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... will love. "To love" is the model verb; expressing the archetype of activity. Once you can love grammatically there is a world of things you may do without stumbling. For, strange to say, "to love," which in real life is associated with so much that is bizarre and violent, is always "regular" in grammar, and this without barring accidence of any kind. For ancient and modern tongues tell the same tale—from Hebrew to street-Arabic, from Greek to the elephantine language that was "made in Germany." Not only is ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... attributes of life, and he found in them recompense for 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 ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... Swedish building. Situated on a narrow tongue of triangular shape, the architect has taken the fullest advantage of this original piece of ground. The building gives a very good idea of some of the very best tendencies in the modern art of Europe, without being bizarre, like some recent American attempts, in the most wrongly labeled of all art ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... realized now her extraordinary persistence, the fierce firmness of character that was concealed by her quiet and generally impersonal manner. Certainly she had the temperament of a ruler. He remembered—it seemed to him with a bizarre abruptness—the smile on Dumeny's lips in the Divorce Court when the great case had ended in Mrs. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... "we are, luckily, not in Hyde Park; and I suppose a sleigh can't be too bizarre. Is this the creation of your festive ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... 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 of ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... into the net, with his back wedged firmly against the rim, he adjusted his bizarre "gun" to rest on his knees so that he could sight in the direction that was, to his body's senses, ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... eloquent with admiration, a step from which grace could never be divorced, a voice that spoke in a silver key, and uttered flatteries delicate in thought and poetical in word; even a certain originality of mind, remark, and character, occasionally approaching to the bizarre, yet sometimes also to the elevated, possessed a charm for the imagination of a young and not unenthusiastic female, and contrasted favourably, rather than the reverse, with the dull insipidity of those she ordinarily saw. Nor are we sure that the mystery thrown ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... calculated to bring advantage, and that of the smallest value—it is hard to avoid 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 in her extenuation. And very properly, since the ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... odd 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
... 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 ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... the 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 bunches ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... nails, high up, and tall flowers in vases on brackets, and a life-study in plaster by one of the girls, in a corner of the room. It all had the charm of tasteful design yielding here and there to happy caprice; this mingling of the ordered and the bizarre, expressed the spirit, at once free and submissive, of the place. There had been a great deal of trouble which at times seemed out of all keeping with the end to be gained, but when it was all over, the trouble seemed nothing. The exhibition was the best the Synthesis ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... left the journal on which I had been first 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 sensations and ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Accompts 20th 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 ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Orchid without losing a minute, as there was still a chance of drawing in sight of her before she could leave Key West. Yet I first had a mission to fulfill at the cafe, nor did I confide this at once to him lest he brand me a total wreck. I knew that he was delighted at the prospect of this bizarre chase, however chimeric it might seem to him, for he possessed the faculty of "playing-true" even in the veriest of fairy-tales. So for the moment I let the other matter rest, not realizing at the time that he had read more of it in my face ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... town was content to allow the eccentric owner of the Secret House all the privacy he desired. He might do things which were unheard of, as indeed he did, and Great Bradley, standing aloof, was content to thank God that it was not cast in the same bizarre mould as this wealthy unknown, and took comfort from ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... in time for the last half-hour of his wife's last reception. Her dress, on this occasion, was quite as daring, in its way, as on the other, and original to the point of the bizarre. One of the early Adeles was leaving, but she stopped for a moment and attempted speech. She was the particular Adele with the piercing soprano voice—a voice which had since lowered itself to sing lullabies to ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... The gay 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, ...
— A Bottle of Old Wine • Richard O. Lewis
... 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 and ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... keen insight into "the black thoughts of men," and insistent awareness of the quick passing of all good things, diablerie and mordancy. Strange, then, should be his love passages and strange too, they are at times, ranging from the bizarre delight of "In Kerry" to the triumphing nobility of Deirdre's farewell to Alban. One thinks of Mr. Hardy and one thinks of Donne as one reads ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Carnation (Bizarre Dianthus caryophyllus); Clover (Crimson Trifolium incarnatus); Columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris); Cowslip (Primula veris); Crowflower (Ragged Robin, Lychnis floscuculi); Cuckoo Buds (Butter cups, Ranunculus acris); Daisies (Bellis perennis); Eryngium M. (Sea ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... in the cloister are glazed with a peculiarly charming white glass, which admits plenty of light, but is not transparent. The effect is most restful to the eyes after examining some of the bizarre creations in ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... college, when the outline became so blurred and indeterminate that it had to be subdivided many times, and became only a quality. Amory's secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents—also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was quite irreconcilable ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... marked traits that differentiate it from all other cities, but several have marked likenesses. Cairo differs from all these in having no traits in common with any of them. It stands alone as the most kaleidoscopic of cities, the most bizarre in its mingling of ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... and chaffered with the rest, some dressed in white with black chiffon covering their faces, and others still more bizarre, wore flowered chiffon, one large flower perhaps covering the area of ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... training in large affairs, it 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 Golden Mountain. ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... moment at the door to look back at the bizarre figure behind the counter, leaning on the scarred brown plank just as Cap'n Abe so often did. The amazing difference between the storekeeper's well remembered appearance and that of ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... spats to hat, from walking coat to gloves, everything was perfect of its kind. Only, there was an over-elaboration, so that the ensemble was flamboyant. And the man's manners precisely harmonized with his clothes, whereby the whole effect was emphasized and rendered bizarre. Garson took one amazed look, and then ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... occurred 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 ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... of Anthony's dream, which seemed to her to be after all but a reflection or an echo of earthly things tricked out with some bizarre imagination. Was not this obvious? The house? A vague replica of his own house. The river? Something copied from the Nile, delta and all. The waterfalls? Niagara on a larger scale. The great trees? Doubtless their counterparts grew in America. The brother and the babe—would he ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... 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 ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... 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
... were full of Biblical quaintness, and my estrangement from the language only added to the bizarre effect of its terse grammatical construction. I read a number of the poems, and several of the things in the prose volume. His Hebrew is truly marvelous, and much of the strength and charm of his message is bound ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... flowers, 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; all the solemn ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... outer forms which are the vehicles of beauty. The very language he used was as far remote as possible from "the brutish jargon we inherit." He belonged to the hierarchy of the poets of all ages, and pressed into his service lovely, half-forgotten words which made his poetry seem strange and bizarre to those who were too much immersed in the language and literature of their day. And those subtler minds who instantly perceived its beauty, and saw how his language and his imagery often recalled those of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals, such as Crashaw, too readily perhaps asserted a bond ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... 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 personality ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... us at the wharf laden with our bizarre purchases, and, after bestowing us and them in the boat, he dips his oars and we glide out into the bay. The far-off steamer is wrapped in darkness, the lamps are all extinguished in the staterooms, for it is long ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... 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 ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... of preternatural size and bizarre colors—the college colors at football games, for instance—are in great demand. They are extremely decorative, and their remarkable lasting quality insures their permanent popularity. I have heard that the unexpanded bud can be cooked like cauliflower for the table; but we have ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... back presently, wonderfully lovely in the bizarre Oriental costume, and I wanted her to stand on tiptoe, ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... 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 modest ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... and a soft way of folding that redeemed it somewhat. Its bright poppy colour, its emerald beetle-wings shading to gold, and its glittering fringes that waved like a wheat-field stirred by a breeze, all gave a bizarre sort of "value," as artists say, to my pale yellow hair and dark eyes. I couldn't help seeing that the dreadful dress made my skin pearly white; and I was afraid that, when I had altered the thing, instead of looking like a frump, I should only present the appearance of a rather ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... odd cases, and suddenly wished he were somewhere else. Anywhere else. This one showed sudden signs of developing into something positively bizarre. "I see," he said, ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... opposite qualities, charity, generosity, and religious fervour linked to unbridled lust for blood and an apparently overmastering desire to take life, possesses a character so bizarre, so totally opposed to Hindu ideals, that he would almost of necessity be accounted as something superhuman, monstrous, a saint with the heart of a devil, or a fiend with the soul of a saint. Hence Muhammad in the course of years gathered ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... as, turning to the left, and leaving the broader streets which flank the quay, I began to enter the penetralia of this truly antiquated town? What narrow streets, what overhanging houses, what bizarre, capricious ornaments! What a mixture of modern with ancient art! What fragments, or rather ruins, of old delicately-built Gothic churches! What signs of former and of modern devastation! What fountains, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... century, and ever 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 ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... but the delay, I trust, will be but trifling. Monsieur le Comte will not suppose for a moment that I suspect him; but we have a duty to perform, and I must act as if I did. When I am ordered to search, I search; things are sometimes hid in such bizarre places. I can't say, for instance, ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... all her doubts concerning her vanished, and in their place there came uncertainty as to whether she herself had not been suffering under a delusion that afternoon. Had she really heard the telephone ring and Veronica answer it? Had hearing played some bizarre trick on her? She seemed to be perfectly awake and in her right mind in other respects. The girls had evidently not noticed anything peculiar about her actions when she came out of the house, not even Nyoda, the sharp sighted. Clearly ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... teasing golfers, and back from the teasing golfers to the peaceful writing-room, where in a great, lazy chair by the open window he settled down once more with unwonted morbidness to brood over the grimly bizarre happenings of ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... bell rang and the clatter announced the advent of luncheon, she settled in her chair with a little shiver of happiness, blushing at her capacity for it, and at her acquiescence in the strangest conditions in which she had ever found herself in all her life,—conditions so bizarre, so grotesque, so impossible that there was no use in trying to consider them—alas! no ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... road, looking like a spiritual mother of men and strangely, mysteriously, also like the ancient lure that makes men mad, and she had to fight like a tigress for the mere life of her child. The contrast leaped into the kaleidoscopic disorder he saw now as life like a brilliant, bizarre fragment to make the whole scheme (if the scheme could be even estimated by mortal minds) more disorderly still. But he was tired and he slept. It would be good, he had thought for many weeks now, when he felt himself drifting off, to sleep forever. To-night ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... 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
... said the Secretary, mopping his forehead, "except when you speak. Then I have the bizarre experience of seeing glimpses of teeth, tongue and throat hanging in mid-air. I'd never have believed it if I hadn't witnessed it myself! That paint of yours ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst
... sidewalk a gate stood open; just outside it a man of tall and slender figure, rigged out in a bizarre costume consisting mainly of a flowered dressing-gown and slippers, was waiting in an attitude of singular impassivity; within it, pausing with a foot lifted to the doorstep, bag in hand, her head turned as she looked back, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... curious resemblance to a gigantic hand, the long lean fingers of which were stretched threateningly out as if to grasp the land and drag it back into the lurid sea of blood; altogether a cruel, weird-looking scene, fantastic, unreal, and bizarre as one of Dore's marvellous conceptions. Suddenly on the red waters there appeared a black speck, rising and falling with the restless waves, and ever drawing nearer and nearer to the gloomy cliffs and sandy beach. When within a quarter of a mile of the shore, ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... 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 sudden and tremendous vividness, as in a searchlight or a lightning flash, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... streets. But there were very few people, and under the light of the rare street lanterns, he encountered strange faces of a hue unknown to him, between black and greenish; and raising his head from time to time, he beheld churches of bizarre architecture which were outlined black and vast against the sky. The city was dark and silent, but after having traversed that immense desert, it appeared lively to him. He inquired his way of a priest, speedily found the church and the house, pulled the bell with one trembling hand, and pressed ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... Tropical vegetation 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 ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... establish a new "school" of poetry that should outdo "Imagism" and other cults then in the public eye. These poems, published under the joint authorship of Emanuel Morgan and Anne Knish, created much comment, and in spite of their bizarre features were taken seriously by well-known critics, who were much discomfited when the truth of the matter was known. In 1919 Mr. Bynner published "The Beloved Stranger", a volume of 'vers libre', written in a style that grew out of the "Spectra" experiment, ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... the antiquarian and the historian which they overlook altogether. There is no English book, for instance, like Ruffini's Dizionario Etimologico-Storico delle Strade, Piazze, Borghi e Vicoli della Citta di Roma, to tell one of the origin of the strange and bizarre names of the streets of Rome, many of which involve most interesting historical facts and most romantic associations of the past. There is no English book on the ancient marbles of Rome like Corsi's ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... bulk, huge as that of the grouped pillars in the York Minster. The white of the marble walls, the gold of altars, the colors of painted wooden sculpture form the tones of the place, subdued to one bizarre richness which I may as well leave first as last to the reader's fancy; though, let his fancy riot as it will, it never can picture that gorgeousness. Mass was saying at a side altar as we entered, and ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... 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 ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... 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 and purple mist on those low hills, or "knobs," that ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... 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 ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... of mopping, scrubbing, and polishing, which is eternally going forward in a foreign inn amply testified there was nothing which I could adopt in my present naked and forlorn condition, save the bizarre and ridiculous dress of the postillion, and I need not say the thought of so doing presented nothing agreeable. I looked from the narrow window out upon the tiled roof, but without any prospect of being heard if I called ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... window, with the dripping trees and the slanting rain behind him, was the bizarre, the astounding figure of a gnomelike negro in a terra-cotta robe fastened about the waist with a girdle made of a twisted black shawl with the most beautiful Persian border and fringe. A striped silk scarf ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... leave soon after. Johnny Dromore! Bizarre guardian for that child! Queer life she must have of it, in that bachelor's den, surrounded by Ruff's Guides! What would become of her? Caught up by some young spark about town; married to him, no doubt—her father would see to the thoroughness of that, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... individualism of style, frequently reaching the extreme of eccentricity. The results have therefore been, as might be expected, extremely varied in merit, ranging from the most refined and reserved in style to the most harshly bizarre and extravagant. As a rule, they have been most successful in small and semi-decorative objects—jewelry, silverware, vases, and small furniture; and one most desirable feature of the movement has been the stimulus it has given (especially in France and England), to the organization and activity ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... in a single glance; with a second he sought the cause of the accident, and identified it with a figure so outre and bizarre that he momentarily and excusably questioned ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 he liked it or not, he was part of the thing which in its entirety meant high-kicking ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... successively take possession of the public. Early typography; early poetry and 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
... was a boy, 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 Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... The music was bizarre; the girl's voice bewitching; and though the song was of the Beliny, it had been made into brief couplets, ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... 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, because they lend themselves to ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... archetype of activity. Once you can love grammatically there is a world of things you may do without stumbling. For, strange to say, "to love," which in real life is associated with so much that is bizarre and violent, is always "regular" in grammar, and this without barring accidence of any kind. For ancient and modern tongues tell the same tale—from Hebrew to street-Arabic, from Greek to the elephantine ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... of amusement. Whether he was beloved by his people is doubtful; it is certain that the courtiers had little esteem and less love for their prince. For this reason, they had given him the surname of King Bizarre, the only title by which he is known in history, as is seen in the Great Chronicles of the Kingdoms and Principalities of the World Which Have Never Existed, a learned masterpiece which has immortalized the erudition ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... 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 essential to the style, developed its crude rudiments into the choice ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... 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
... bamboo lances with red and white pennons in their white-gauntleted right hands—lined the approach. Inside, the splendid ballroom, ablaze with electric lights, was crowded with gaily-dressed figures in costumes beautiful or bizarre. The good-looking, middle-aged baron who was the King's representative in the Bombay Presidency was standing, dressed as Charles II., beside his plain but pleasant-featured wife in the garb of Amy Robsart, ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... two little girls, aged five and three, who had a marked likeness to Sasha. For dinner they had milk-soup, cold veal, and chocolate. It was insipid and not good; but the table was splendid, with gold forks, bottles of Soyer, and cayenne pepper, an extraordinary bizarre cruet-stand, ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... on the front page a story must be rather unusual. A perusal of our daily rags will convince the most skeptical that the sensational, the unusual, the bizarre are what appeal most to the men who make the newspapers. The unusual thing about our deal lies in the fact that this is the first time in the history of Australia or the United States that the former country has exported wheat into the ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... truly novel and imposing character. But how shall I convey to you an idea of what I experienced, as, turning to the left, and leaving the broader streets which flank the quay, I began to enter the penetralia of this truly antiquated town? What narrow streets, what overhanging houses, what bizarre, capricious ornaments! What a mixture of modern with ancient art! What fragments, or rather ruins, of old delicately-built Gothic churches! What signs of former and of modern devastation! What fountains, gutters, groups of never-ceasing men, women, and children, all gay, all occupied, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Persian words, and the sharp or guttural exclamations of the big-voiced, giant fellows, all heavily armed, who belonged to the bewildering tribes that dwelt among the mountains beyond. Occasionally came a broken bit of French or German; but they strayed in, lost and bizarre, as fragments from some distant ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... man "l'enthousiaste s'enivre, pour l'ainsi dire, de son propre vin, il se persuade que la cause de ses passions est la cause de Dieu (p. 72), mais quelque violent qu'ait pu tre l'enthousiasme de S. Paul, il sentait trs bien que la doctrine qu'il prchait devait paratre bizarre et insense ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... Egotism has 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 ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... been wonderful, extraordinarily comforting and reassuring, and nowhere more so than in the vestibule of No. 59. The tone in which he had said to Louisa, "Take Mrs. Cannon's handbag, Louisa," had been a marvel of ease. Louisa had incontestably blenched, for the bizarre Sarah, who conserved in Brighton the inmost spirit of the Five Towns, had thought fit to tell the servants nothing whatever. But the trained veteran in Louisa had instantly recovered, and she had replied "Yes, sir," with a simplicity which proved her to be the equal of George Cannon.... The worst ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... to-night he had heard nothing from her. It was a strange compact that he had entered into—so strange that it could never have known, could never know a parallel—unique, dangerous, bizarre, it was all that and more. It had begun really through his connection with his father's business—the business of manufacturing safes that should defy the cleverest criminals—when his brains, turned into that ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... and bizarre, was not justly entitled to rank among great statesmen. But the characteristics of Congress, as a body, can be brought into better relief in the narrative of his life than in that of any other person of his day. These ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... Entertainment" I set myself the task of 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, if at all, merely as one might ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... Princess," perhaps, Mr. Tennyson rises higher still. The idyllic manner alternates with the satiric, the pathetic, even the sublime, by such imperceptible gradations, and continual delicate variations of key, that the harmonious medley of his style becomes the fit outward expression of the bizarre and yet harmonious fairyland in which his fancy ranges. In this work, too, Mr. Tennyson shows himself more than ever the poet of the day. In it more than ever the old is interpenetrated with the new—the domestic and scientific with the ideal and sentimental. He ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... had the same attraction for me that amorous cruelty was just then beginning to exercise on my imagination. My mind secretly embraced the fearful sweetness of the newly discovered sensation, surrounding the performance of the function with all sorts of atrocious and bizarre inventions. For a time my intellect hung back from accepting this as the central and most fiery secret of the male attraction; but shortly afterward, when out walking with my father, I saw him perform the same act; I was overwhelmed with ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... grunted the uncle. 'He has asked the Administration to be sent there,' said the other, 'with the idea of showing what he could do; and I was instructed accordingly. Look at the influence that man must have. Is it not frightful?' They both agreed it was frightful, then made several bizarre remarks: 'Make rain and fine weather—one man—the Council—by the nose'—bits of absurd sentences that got the better of my drowsiness, so that I had pretty near the whole of my wits about me when the uncle said, 'The climate may do away with this difficulty for you. Is he alone there?' 'Yes,' ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... which follows. Abraham appears with Isaac, Moses with the serpent, Joseph and Mary, the Magi, and the flight into Egypt. Then come incidents from the life of Jesus, and the great tragedy of its close. The Host and its attendant priests conclude the procession. It is all very primitive and bizarre, but behind it there is a note of reality by which one cannot but be moved. For the figures concealed beneath the black hoods and dragging along the heavy wooden crosses are not actors; they are men and women who have come, many of them, ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... blood in her and the heritage compounded of many races, Jees Uck developed a wonderful young beauty. Bizarre, perhaps, it was, and Oriental enough to puzzle any passing ethnologist. A lithe and slender grace characterized her. Beyond a quickened lilt to the imagination, the contribution of the Celt was in no wise apparent. It might possibly have put the warm blood ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... story the windows are of the same sort as that described, though varying in size and varying also in their lines athwart the house. Those of the ground floor are all uniform in size and position. But those above are irregular both in size and place, and this irregularity gives a bizarre and not unpicturesque appearance to the building. Along the top, on every side, runs a low parapet, which nearly hides the roof, and at the corners are more figures ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... the Netherlands were especially rich and monumental. Those of Italy and Flanders are often of great magnificence and of real artistic skill, though like all other furniture their style was often grievously debased, and their details incongruous and bizarre. Flanders and Burgundy were, indeed, their lands of adoption, and Antwerp added to its renown as a metropolis of art by developing consummate skill in their manufacture and adornment. The cost and importance of the finer types have ensured ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... behind them, for the more important guests, all the luxurious chairs of the studio: white armchairs of the 18th Century, embroidered with pastoral scenes, Greek settles, benches of carved oak and Venetian chairs with high backs, the bizarre confusion of an ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the Blaneys 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
... ballad on the subject has been spoken of as a "naif and horrible" production, in which one will find "a bizarre mixture of Druidic practice and Christian superstition." It describes Heloise as a sorceress of ferocious and sanguinary temper. Thus can legend magnify and distort human failing! As its presentation is important in the study of Breton folk-lore, I give a very free translation of this ballad, in ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... in Natal. Kopje succeeds kopje, all steep, and many precipitous, yet not the bare, stony cairns of the transmontane regions, but moist green masses of verdure, seldom parched even in the dry season, and in the wet, glistening with a thousand cascades; not severely conical or rectangular, like the bizarre eminences which cover Cape Colony with the models of a school of geometry, but nobly outlined. Many of the foothills, it is true, are mere heaps of rock and stone; but even these are rarely such naked and uncompromising piles as are found on the ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... few days, the family went on to Bizarre, a large estate on both sides of the Appomattox, and here Mrs. Tucker and her sons spent the remainder of the year, while her husband joined General Greene's army, and afterward, ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... Thorwaldsen, like a winter's wave, that this big, brusk, bizarre woman before him was Maria Louisa, the second wife of Napoleon. He knew her history: wedded at nineteen to Napoleon—the mother of L'Aiglon at twenty—married again in unbecoming haste to Count Niepperg Nobody, with whom she had been on very ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... hero, 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 in romances. As we grow acquainted with Thackeray's ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Continental night life which sets towards Cairo in the season, Russian dukes and German millionaires, Viennese actresses and French singers and ladies of no avowed profession, gamblers, idlers, diplomats, drifters, vivid flashes of color in the bizarre, ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... 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 at the expense of all visible shore, sometimes striding out upon stilt-like ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... at a distance of only six miles. The mountain crests 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 at times ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne
... follow the definition of imagination or invention, in that materials recalled from different contexts are put together into combinations and rearrangements never before experienced. The combinations are often bizarre and incongruous. ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... mischief, her mouth engaged to make amends by smiles and seductive words, more sweet than honey, because their flavor would never clog upon him who tasted thereof. Her attire was striking—it would have been bizarre upon any other lady in the room, but it enhanced the small stranger's beauty. A black robe—India silk or silk grenadine, or some other light and lustrous material—was bespangled with butterflies, gilded, green, and crimson, the many folds of the skirt ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... Following in the steps of a griping, miserly sire, he had risen to his present station by oppression and chicanery; by crushing the weak and cajoling the strong. And he was prepared to maintain his ground by means as vile and a hand as hard. But he loved; and—strange anomaly, bizarre exception, call it what you will—somewhere in the depths of his earthly nature a spark of good survived, and fired him with so pure an ardour that at the least hint of disrespect to his mistress, at a thought of injury to her, ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... they thought the bizarre figure was old Gurlone, from the size. For the man was clad in a black, shiny suit, and over his head was a flapping hood of the same material in which were large eyeholes of green glass. Behind this strange form came a larger one, armed also with ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... that you should think of something bizarre to be included in the festivities of tonight. The Prince and myself do not seem able to ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... without losing a minute, as there was still a chance of drawing in sight of her before she could leave Key West. Yet I first had a mission to fulfill at the cafe, nor did I confide this at once to him lest he brand me a total wreck. I knew that he was delighted at the prospect of this bizarre chase, however chimeric it might seem to him, for he possessed the faculty of "playing-true" even in the veriest of fairy-tales. So for the moment I let the other matter rest, not realizing at the time that he had read more of it in my face than ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... mermaids, griffins, harpies, winged horses, lizards, and knights in armour—all these are elements that might, we fancy, have been developed into a noble national style. As it is, the churches in question are often more bizarre than really beautiful. Their peculiar character, however, is inseparably associated with the long reaches of green plain, the lordly rivers, and the background of blue hills and snowy Alps that constitute the charm ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... 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 arm, ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... During these somewhat bizarre speeches and the actions that accompany them, Frank Hamersley—for it is he—stands staring in silent wonder. What sees he before him? Two huge, fierce-looking dogs, a horse oddly caparisoned, a young girl, scarce a woman, strangely and picturesquely garbed. What has he heard? ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... Renoir, at the severe restraint of Chavannes, at the poetic mystery of Carriere, their lips were hushed as they tiptoed into the Salle Cezanne. Sacred ground, indeed, we trod as we gazed and wondered before these crude, violent, sincere, ugly, and bizarre canvases. Here was the very hub of the Independents' universe. Here the results of a hard-labouring painter, without taste, without the faculty of selection, without vision, culture—one is tempted to add, intellect—who ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... silver ware, and the carriages of Brewster are generally admired. Carriages are, however, such a matter of fashion that an exhibit of that kind cannot suit all nations, and what one considers graceful is to another strange and bizarre. There is no question of the fine quality, however: of course a nation with elm for hubs and ash for spokes wonders at American temerity in making wheels so light, and the casual observer thinks our roads must be better than the European to justify them. As one English ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... of axioms and 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
... as her brother had engaged, "went along" too, and "ran the whole thing" from start to finish. Abner, with a secret interest compounded half of attraction, half of repulsion, promised himself a careful study of this "new type"—a type so bizarre, so artificial, and in all probability ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... The talent that is robust 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 us ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... relapsing into his arm-chair, and putting his finger-tips together, as was his custom when in judicial moods. "I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life. You have shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle, and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many of ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... cases are recorded. Nearly every medical museum has preserved specimens of dermoid cysts, and almost all physicians are well acquainted with their occurrence. The curious formations and contents and the bizarre shapes are of great variety. Graves mentions a dermoid cyst containing the left side of a human face, an eye, a molar tooth, and various bones. Dermoid cysts are found also in regions of the body quite remote from the ovary. The so-called "orbital wens" are ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... of moral disaster. What he was afraid of in the coming 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 ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... ladies, thin men, sword-swallowers, wild men of Borneo, and armless wonders, many of them well in their cups, all of them excited and happy and dazzled by the flow of light and color round them, and by the familiar faces, strangely unfamiliar under bizarre wigs and barbaric paint. The voluptuous chords of the wedding march done in blasphemous syncopation issued in a delirious blend from the trombones and ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... legs, so that altogether you may imagine I presented a terrifying appearance. Of this, however, I soon grew quite oblivious—a fact which I afterwards had occasion bitterly to regret. It were, indeed, well for me that I had on subsequent occasions realised better the bizarre nature of my appearance, for had I done so I would probably have reached civilisation years ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... you 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 ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... 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 Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... it. "Assez long temps," says he, "Madame Lambercier s'entint la menace, et cette menace d'un châtiment tout nouveau pour moi me semblait très effrayante, mais après l'exécution, je la trouvai moins terrible l'épreuve que l'attente ne l'avait été, et ce qu'il y a de plus bizarre est qui ce châtiment m'affectionna davantage d'elle qui me l'avoit imposé. Il fallait même toute la vérité de cette affection et toute ma douceur naturelle pour m'empêcher de chercher le retour du même traitement en le méritant, car j'avais trouvé dans la douleur, dans la honte ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... bienveillance pour 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 ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... outline became so blurred and indeterminate that it had to be subdivided many times, and became only a quality. Amory's secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents—also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was quite irreconcilable ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... at length, "it was a curious chance, your taking shelter in that archway just as those two went by. But I don't know that I should call what was written on the paper nonsense; it is bizarre certainly, but I expect it has a meaning for somebody. Just repeat it again, will you? and I will write it down. Perhaps we might find a cipher of some sort, though I hardly think ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... division of the Fifth Cavalry was reinforced by Major Frank North and three companies of the celebrated Pawnee scouts. These became the most interesting and amusing objects in camp, partly on account of their race, but mainly because of the bizarre dress fashions they affected. My brother, in his autobiography, describes the appearance presented by these scouts during a review of the ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... almost bizarre now to think that there was a time when even one person in the world had not heard "Mother's Knee"; but it came fresh to Archie one afternoon some weeks after the episode of Washy, in his suite at the Hotel ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... pictures by roasting brown paper over a candle. In precisely the same spirit of fruitless vivacity, he made himself to a very considerable extent a technical expert in painting, a technical expert in sculpture, a technical expert in music. In his old age, he shows traces of being so bizarre a thing as an abstract police detective, writing at length in letters and diaries his views of certain criminal cases in an Italian town. Indeed, his own Ring and the Book is merely a sublime detective story. He was in a hundred ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... occasion, Jeeves," I said rebukingly, "to comment on the way you say 'Well, sir' and 'Indeed, sir?' I take this opportunity of informing you that I object equally strongly to your 'Sir?' pure and simple. The word seems to suggest that in your opinion I have made a statement or mooted a scheme so bizarre that your brain reels at it. In the present instance, there is absolutely nothing to say 'Sir?' about. The plan I have put forward is entirely reasonable and icily logical, and should excite no sirring whatsoever. Or don't you ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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
... 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 ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... Norway it is "in an egg, in a duck, in a well, in a church, on an island, in a lake"; in the Hebrides it is "in an egg, in the belly of a duck, in the belly of a wether, under a flagstone on the threshold." It is impossible to imagine the human mind independently imagining such bizarre convolutions. They were borrowed from one nation to the other, and till we have reason shown to the contrary, the original lender was a Hindu. I should add that the mere conception of an external soul ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... chorus in "Faust;" and if this goes on much longer, I feel as if I should take to buzzing. Do you know that it is hard upon three o'clock in the morning? I must leave off and go to bed, for I rehearse Constance to-morrow at eleven, and act her to-morrow night. On Friday I act Bizarre in "The Inconstant," and think I shall find it great fun.... ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... The island and his romantic shelter were all very pretty for the first few months, when the sun shone, the trees were green, and the island customs exercised over his soul the charm of a bizarre novelty; but bad weather had come, the solitude was intolerable, and the life of the rustics was revealed to him in all the crudity of their barbarous passions. These peasants, dressed in blue velveteen, ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... woman, but, compared with her mates, she seemed of elfin slimness; she was shapely in a supple, long-limbed way. There was something a little exotic about her. Her green and gold plumage gave her a touch of the fantastic and the bizarre. Prevailingly, she arrayed herself in flowers that ran all the shades from cream and lemon to yellow and orange. She was like a parrot among more ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... a rather 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 can be made with low bookshelves filled with works of standard authors and leaving room ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... 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 in her extenuation. And ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... 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. But it seems to have mattered little who ...
— The Coming of the Ice • G. Peyton Wertenbaker
... sawhorse, and a midget who labored with might and main to cut through a never-ending stint of twigs. I chose to keep my image to the last, and did not move or look around, until there came the slightest of tugs at my knee, and into view clambered one of those beings who are so beautiful and bizarre that one almost thinks they should not be. My second singer was a beetle—an awkward, enormous, serious, brilliant beetle, with six-inch antennae and great wing covers, which combined the hues of the royal robes of Queen Thi, tempered by thousands ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... of Scandiano had began to chaunt his lays of Roland in the Castle of Ferrara. Chivalry, transmuted by the Italian genius into something fanciful and quaint, survived as a frail work of art. The men-at-arms of the Condottieri still glittered in gilded hauberks. Their helmets waved with plumes and bizarre crests. Their surcoats blazed with heraldries; their velvet caps with medals bearing legendary emblems. The pomp and circumstance of feudal war had not yet yielded to the cannon of the Gascon or the Switzer's ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... and Marcello Capecce, a young man 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 by her husband's infidelities, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... that the most bizarre incident I saw during the bombardment of the outer forts was the flight of the women inmates of a madhouse at Duffel. There were three hundred women in the institution, many of them violently insane, and the nuns in charge, assisted by soldiers, ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... 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 ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... even on week days." All educationists are utterly dogmatic and authoritarian. You cannot have free education; for if you left a child free you would not educate him at all. Is there, then, no distinction or difference between the most hide-bound conventionalists and the most brilliant and bizarre innovators? Is there no difference between the heaviest heavy father and the most reckless and speculative maiden aunt? Yes; there is. The difference is that the heavy father, in his heavy way, is a democrat. He does not urge a thing merely because to his fancy it should be done; but, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... The tea-shop, the music, the indefinable odour of women all seemed bizarre after her communion with the Most High. She made ready ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... 'I 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
... ring on a framework of steel, was the thermic inductor which had played the disintegrating Ray upon the Atlas Mountains and the great cannon of Von Heckmann. The whole affair resembled nothing which he had ever conceived of either in the air, the earth, or the waters under the earth, the bizarre invention of a superhuman mind. It seemed as firmly anchored and as immovable as the Eiffel Tower, and yet Bennie knew that the thing could lift itself into the air and sail off like a ball of thistledown before a breeze. He knew that it could do it, for he had seen ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... matter is harsh and eccentric to precisely the same degree as his style is harsh and eccentric. Carlyle was harsh and eccentric. His behaviour was frequently ridiculous, if it were not abominable. His judgments were often extremely bizarre. When you read one of Carlyle's fierce diatribes, you say to yourself: "This is splendid. The man's enthusiasm for justice and truth is glorious." But you also say: "He is a little unjust and a little untruthful. ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... all, and at another time he might have thought it wiser not to accede to her request; but he was in the mood in which the most extraordinary incidents seem possible, and scarcely anything could have seemed to him too bizarre to happen. He felt curiously impatient of the ordinary conventionalities of civilized life. Since this miraculous thing had come to pass—that he, Caspar Brooke, a respectable, sane, healthy-minded man of middle-age, could be accused ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... love-making, and bizarre. To Grio, even to men more delicate and more finely wrought, it might have seemed no love-making at all. But the wood-smoke that perfumed the air, sweetened it, the firelight wrapped it about, the pots and pans and simple things of life, amid which it passed, hallowed it. ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... Nevertheless I personally have no use for it. To me 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 ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... 20th 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 of silver, and sometimes of precious stones [as ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... now her extraordinary persistence, the fierce firmness of character that was concealed by her quiet and generally impersonal manner. Certainly she had the temperament of a ruler. He remembered—it seemed to him with a bizarre abruptness—the smile on Dumeny's lips in the Divorce Court when the great case had ended in ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... 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 at another place that he "had ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... was rubbing his hands and chuckling as he added this bizarre incident to his collection of ...
— The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... most essential of them, were giving way, and being replaced by a general "do as you please." Anyone could see that the power of women like Mrs. Devon, who represented the old regime, and were dignified and austere and exclusive, was yielding before the onslaught of new people, who were bizarre and fantastic and promiscuous and loud. And the younger sets cared no more about anyone—nor about anything under heaven, save to have a good time in their own harum-scarum ways. In the old days one always ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... 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 Lutherans in Carolina ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... at all, when she knew he would be home for dinner, was perfectly ridiculous; but that she should leave it like this—in evidence for chance discovery—struck him as so outrageous that, thinking of it, he experienced suddenly a staggering sense of insecurity, an absurd and bizarre flash of a notion that the house had moved a little under his feet. He tore the envelope open, glanced at the letter, and sat down ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... the 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 ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... Blaesus Agellus, the best horse-master about Reate. He had watched till he thought he knew all the young stallion's tricks. No kicking, rearing or bucking could unseat him and the beast tried several unusual and bizarre contortions. Blaesus stuck on. Then the horse-dealer seemed to give a signal, as the horse cantered tamely round ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... 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 ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... women with illegitimate children, some of them dependent upon public support. It will be seen that in some respects the panic bore a likeness to those that had preceded. The spirits, which took extraordinary and bizarre forms, were the offspring of the same perverted imaginations, but they had assumed new shapes. Ursley Kemp kept a white lamb, a little gray cat, a black cat, and a black toad. There were spirits of every sort, "two little thyngs like horses, one white, ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... will be noted that the above responses are partly true and partly false. The error they contain renders them unacceptable. Most of the failures are due to misstatements as to size, shape, or color, but occasionally one meets a bizarre answer. ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... 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
... struck into the brooding peace a shrill note of challenging incongruity. The little sparkling patch of light and colour that was Monte Carlo proclaimed that it was there for some extraordinary and powerful purpose, that its bizarre beauty was dedicated to exceptional uses; and it occurred to Mary that the temple of Chance must after all diverge from every rule of architecture in order to stamp its meaning on the mind. The feverish decorations began to express to her the fever of gambling, and even to create a desire ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... 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, to the influence of which he was very susceptible, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... letters, that the world-renowned Magician of Madagascar would give a magical soiree at the Town Hall in the evening. Tickets, fifteen cents; children under twelve years, ten cents. The posters, furthermore, attracted attention by a large figure of the professor, dressed in bizarre style, performing one ...
— Facing the World • Horatio Alger
... has composed little, and that little is done on simple lines, but the simplicity is deep, and the harmonies, without being bizarre, are wonderfully mellow. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... often obsolete in England without just reason—contrasting with a modern disfigured etymology which strips vocables of their genealogy and history, is American and ergo admirably progressive. The spurious facetiousness which deals mainly in mere jargon words ill-spelt and worse pronounced; in bizarre contrast of ideas, and in ultra-Rabelaisian exaggeration, is American wit and humour—therefore unsurpassable. The Newspaper Press, that great reflector of nationalities, that prime expression of popular ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... medium through which they can be communicated 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, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... Bagley, the 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
... out so little, the last few years, that I ought not, perhaps, to criticise. Lady Cynthia, however, seems to me to belong to the extreme section of the younger generation, the section who have a sort of craze for the unusual, whose taste in art and living is distorted and bizarre. You know what I mean, don't you—black drawing-rooms, futurist wall-papers, opium dens and a cocaine box! It's to some extent affectation, of course, but it's a folly that ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that were clustered to form a rough funnel. Their inner surfaces 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
... and wasps, as do some Lepidoptera; and objects the most bizarre and unexpected are simulated, such as dung and drops of dew. Some insects, called bamboo and walking-stick insects, have a most remarkable resemblance to pieces of bamboo, to twigs and branches. Of these latter insects Mr. Wallace ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... clearly distinguished thus by certain aestheticians (and among them, De Sanctis), as also in discussions relating to concrete art: they have held fancy, not imagination, to be the special faculty of the poet and the artist. Not only does a new and bizarre combination of images, which is vulgarly called invention, not constitute the artist, but ne fait rien a l'affaire, as Alceste remarked with reference to the length of time expended upon writing a sonnet. Great artists have often ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... 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
... in the wake of the conductor, and I fain must gather my own belongings before following. The Big Tent, she said? I had not misunderstood; and I puzzled over the address, which impinged as rather bizarre, whether ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... vein of opinion; that other, constituent but contending, person, in his complex nature. "The relation of thought to action," he writes, "filled my mind on waking, and I found myself carried towards a bizarre formula, which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it. Action is but coarsened thought." That is but an ingenious metaphysical point, as he goes on to show. But, including in "action" that ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... moment of confidence the "illuminist," himself with locks so carefully arranged, and seemingly so full of affectations, almost like one of those light women there, dropped a veil as it were, and appeared, though still permitting the play of a certain element of theatrical interest in his bizarre tenets, to be ready to explain and defend his position reasonably. For a moment his fantastic foppishness and his pretensions to ideal [87] vision seemed to fall into some intelligible congruity with ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... in the thralls of some hateful nightmare, the girl crouched against her horse, her face so still and white and ghastly that it might well have been some clever sculptor's bizarre conception of "Horror" done in marble. Only her eyes seemed to live. Wide, dilated, glittering with an unnatural light, they shifted constantly, following the progress of those ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... commented the Spaniard, lazily, 'and when I'm cold it's cold. What more do I want to know?'" Burton, as we have seen, had for a long time devoted himself particularly to the study of vice and to everything that was bizarre and unnatural: eunuchs, pederasts, hermaphrodites, idiots, Augustus-the-Strongs, monstrosities. During his travels he never drank anything but green tea, and if Le Fanu's ideas [481] in In a Glass Darkly ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... But to Larry, suddenly, occurred a gleam of hope. That strange sense of unseen presences! It was bizarre, of course, but doesn't a drowning person catch at straws? And Lord knows they were drowning, if ever ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... these and other equally bizarre products of the "great laboratory," we must mention the sect of the Napoleonites, some few members of which were still to be found recently in Southern Russia. William Hepworth Dixon, who visited the country in 1870, ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... 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 transform ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... sound of his voice, and, turning suddenly, became aware of their presence. In an instant a swift change came over her face. Its sadness vanished instantly, and as her eyes flashing fiercely fixed themselves upon Ainley, a look of scorn came on her face intensifying its bizarre beauty. She took a step forward as if she would speak to the white man, then apparently changed her mind, and swinging abruptly on her heel, re-entered the tent. Helen Yardely glanced swiftly at her companion, and surprised a look of something very like consternation ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... Peak stands out clear from ocean to summit, looking every inch and more of its 12,080 ft.; and this is said by the Canary fishermen to be a certain sign of rain, or fine weather, or a gale of wind; but whenever and however it may be seen, soft and dream-like in the sunshine, or melodramatic and bizarre in the moonlight, it is one of the most beautiful things the eye of ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... dispel the suspicion. At least the petted and rather fastidious Miss Brewster's fancy would be captured only by a gentleman, not by any such homunculus as the mountain dweller. Her interest, perhaps; the man possessed the bizarre attraction of the freakish. But anything else was absurd. And the knight was inclined to attaint his lady for a certain cruelty in the matter; she was being something less than ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... pirate captain to cause him thus to be presented to my imagination. He walked about flourishing his sword till he met Aunt Deb, to whom, instead of cutting her head off, as I thought he was about to do, he made a profound bow, and then vanished. Many other figures quite as bizarre and unnatural appeared before me. I mention these trivial circumstances to show the state of my mind. I had been so long by myself that I must be pardoned if I appear egotistical. Again all was quiet. I lay for ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... east and west of this central group of eight palaces are 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
... 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 ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... God! I am going to write down at last what has happened to me. But how can I? How dare I? The thing is so bizarre, so inexplicable, so ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... 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.' 'My friend,' I said, 'I ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... the "Virgin of Copacabana," this vivid spectacle, the most celebrated fair in all South America, has its origin in the dim past. It comes after the maize is harvested and corresponds to our Thanksgiving festival. The scene is laid in the plaza in front of a large, bizarre church. During the first ten days in August there are gathered here thousands of the mountain folk from far and near. Everything dear to the heart of the Aymara Indian is offered for sale, including quantities of his favorite ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... most picturesque, not to say bizarre, punishment was for buzzing lips. Many of us, studying hard to get our lessons, were very likely to make sounds with our lips, and in the silence of that schoolroom the least little lisp was sure to reach the ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... the distant portions of the universe, we find a chaos of opinion regarding the structure and formation of the earth. Guesses were not wanting to explain the formation of the world, it is true, but, with one or two exceptions, these are bizarre indeed. One theory supposed the earth to have been at first a solid mass of ice, which became animated only after a comet had dashed against it. Other theories conceived the original globe as a mass of water, over which floated vapors containing ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... 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 a telling command ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... trifle bizarre, I suppose. But what beautiful eyes! And her figure! I declare that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the student of the abnormal and psychology has broadened its investigations to include all these conditions. That is to say, the border-land phenomena of consciousness as stressed and manifested in the more bizarre cults have really supplied the material upon which the new psychology has been working, and the psychologist to-day is seriously trying to explain a good many things which his predecessors, with their hard and fast analyses of the mind and its ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... 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
... chiefly of an amiable character, about himself from the daily and weekly press; he was a figure in literary circles; he had actually declined two invitations to be interviewed; and yet he knew no more of literary circles than Sarah did. His position struck him as curious, bizarre, and cruel. He sometimes felt that the history of the last few months was a dream from which he would probably wake up by falling heavily out of bed, so unreal did the events seem. One day, when he was at his wits' end, he saw in a newspaper an advertisement of a book ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... solemnity could make such a statement other than bizarre. What a strange condition to be in. Very likely one of the parents only was dead? But no; it couldn't be, since Fyne had said just before that "there was really no one" to communicate with. No one! And then remembering ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... at the wharf laden with our bizarre purchases, and, after bestowing us and them in the boat, he dips his oars and we glide out into the bay. The far-off steamer is wrapped in darkness, the lamps are all extinguished in the staterooms, for it is long past eleven, ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... 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 ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... out Seniha's rooms, facing on the street, and contributing several bizarre anecdotes of the palace life. But Billy was not to be diverted, and went over the plans again and again, before the diminished number of lights and the hoverings of the attendant Arabs recalled the lateness of the hour to ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... this unbalanced kind is indeed a sort of living sacrifice or victim of self-vivisection, out of whose demonic discoveries—bizarre and fantastic though they may seem to the lower sanity of the mob—the true rhythmic vision of the immortals is ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... Church of the Servi in Florence, after the design and model of Leon Batista; and pulling down a square chapel, old, not very large, and painted in the ancient manner, which stood at the head of the church, he built the said tribune in the bizarre and difficult form of a round temple surrounded by nine chapels, all curving in a round arch, and each within in the shape of a niche. Now, since the arches of the said chapels rest on the pilasters in front, the result is that the stone dressings of the arches, inclining towards the wall, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... convey as distinct a notion of character as his bust exhibited at the Triennial of 1883. Many of the sculptors' anonymous heads, so to speak, are hardly less remarkable. Long after the sharp edge of one's interest in the striking pose of his "Harlequin" and the fine movement and bizarre features of his "Genius" has worn away, their curious spiritual interest, the individual cachet of their character, will sustain them. And so integrally true is this of all the productions of M. Saint-Marceaux's talent, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... the poet's feelings during the 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 tells ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... so much of the airy spirit of young love. I can think of no one else who could write such 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 a corpse from attic to cellar of a country house. ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... only be Penelope. The effect of the shining stone and painted arches is of extraordinary brilliance and completeness—the completeness of an unrivalled collection. But there is somewhere something bizarre; perhaps it is the setting. Marble demands marble neighbours, and the setting of these exotic treasures is the simple beauty of English parkland. The little church fits better with the great trees and the green grass. The building is nothing; the interior has the grace and the light ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles. Amid the action and reaction of so dense a swarm of humanity, every possible combination of events may be expected to take place, and many a little problem will be presented which may be striking and bizarre without being criminal. We have already had ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... eye always eloquent with admiration, a step from which grace could never be divorced, a voice that spoke in a silver key, and uttered flatteries delicate in thought and poetical in word; even a certain originality of mind, remark, and character, occasionally approaching to the bizarre, yet sometimes also to the elevated, possessed a charm for the imagination of a young and not unenthusiastic female, and contrasted favourably, rather than the reverse, with the dull insipidity of those she ordinarily saw. Nor are we sure that the mystery thrown about him, irksome ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... unconscious of powers, some part of whose magic is recognized by all mankind, from the school-boy to the philosopher, that he merely sat by and saw them go without the least notion what they were about? Was he an inspired idiot, votre bizarre Shakespeare? a vast, irregular genius? a simple rustic, warbling his native wood-notes wild, in other words, insensible to the benefits of culture? When attempts have been made at various times to prove that this singular and seemingly contradictory creature, not one, but ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... gives but a languid reception unless roused by something either horrible or sensational, but her bizarre appearance had the effect which the ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
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