"Farrago" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... farrago of unrelated memories continued to rise vocal on Skipper's lips to the heave of his body and the beat of his arms, while Jerry, crouched against the side of the bunk mourned and mourned his grief and inability to be of help. All that was occurring was beyond him. He ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... came a farrago of Chinese, so like the voice of Ah Moy, that again, though for the last time, Michael sought about ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... white, and all my enemies are there before me. I rush amongst them with this stick only and I strike, and I strike, and I strike until the walls are red and the ceiling is red and the floor is red. Ah! I shall have my turn one day." I wired all this meaningless farrago to the Daily News that night, but with much more nonsense to the same effect, and on the following day it was all duly printed. I mention this little fact for a reason. In M. Anatole France's novel, L'Anneau d'Amethyste, which appeared much later than the account ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... the one cheque seems to surpass the other in value, the result of presenting both to the bankers may show that the more modest cheque is worth its full five pounds, whereas the other is only so much waste paper. The description of Paradise may be a glittering farrago; the description of the landscape may be full of sweet rural images: the one having a glare of gaslight and Vauxhall splendour; the other having ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... completeness and directness. Our author, in a letter to his cousin, Henry Antrobus, quotes the eminent Brough as styling it not only the most authoritative little book on its topic, certainly the most interesting one; hit the only volume on the subject "which is not a confusing and puerile farrago of nonsense— troublesome to look into and unsatisfactory to acquire." Certainly our ancient enthusiasts record can be learned and used systematically, exactly as is the case with such excellent and approved systems of chiromancy as Mr. Heron-Allen's and others. It may ...
— The Square of Sevens - An Authoritative Method of Cartomancy with a Prefatory Note • E. Irenaeus Stevenson
... system of national blocks in sinister dispersal, devouring or devoured, has its apostles and advocates. But the theorists, the men of spurious knowledge, will in vain have heaped up their farrago of quibbles and arguments, their fallacies drawn from so-called precedents or from so-called economic and ethnic necessity; for the simple, brutal and magnificent cry of life renders useless the efforts they make to galvanize ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... Maufrigneuse chose to assume; he was chained and padlocked from the first hour in her company, bound captive by that girlish sash, and caught by the curls twined round fairy fingers. Far corrupted the boy was already, but he really believed in that farrago of maidenliness and muslin, in sweet looks as much studied as an Act of Parliament. And if the one man, who is in duty bound to believe in feminine fibs, is deceived by them, ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... even if I were sure it were true! What you did, while engaged in the serious teaching of history, was to indulge in a farrago of nonsense, obvious as such to any child, and damage not only your own standing with your class but the standing of Blanley College as well. Doctor Chalmers, if this were the first incident of the kind it would be bad enough, but it isn't. ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... he closed the article, but Dr. Heidenhoff certainly was. Never had such a sad sense of the misery of her condition been borne in upon him, as when he reflected that it had been able to make such a farrago of nonsense seem actually creditable to her. Overcome with poignant sympathy, and in serious perplexity how best he could deal with her excited condition, he slipped out of the house and walked for an hour about the streets. Returning, ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... Hunt, with Introduction by A. Lang, 2 vols. 8vo, 1884. It is curious that so biting and carping a critic, who will condescend to notice a misprint in another's book, should lay himself open to general animadversion by such a rambling farrago of half-digested knowledge as that which composes Mr. Andrew ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... now to the most important period of my existence—the period that has modelled my character, and influenced every action of my life—without which, this detail of my actions would have been as a tale that hath been told—a monotonous farrago—an uninteresting harangue—in short, a thing of nothing. Whereas, lo! it must now be a relation of great and terrible actions, done in the might, and by the commission ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... Manderson's death, a clumsy lie. I tried to imagine myself telling such a story to the counsel for my defence. I could see the face with which he would listen to it; I could read in the lines of it his thought, that to put forward such an impudent farrago would mean merely the disappearance of any chance there might be of a ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... performed four or five times and I remember noticing the wonderful attraction that it had for minds of a certain class (and no very limited class), while for others it was just such an unintelligible farrago of wearisome 'Zeug' as Dante's Paradiso and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... inveigled Joan of Arc into signing this farrago of blasphemous nonsense, her judges, it seems, added fraud to their crime by reading to the prisoner a different recantation from that to which they had forced her to sign her mark. The one she marked contained only six lines, and it did not take longer ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... is none of this plant they should be fed barley or some other grain. When the farrago season is on, feed that to them, but in the same manner as I have described in respect of endive. While they are setting they may be fed ground barley soaked in water. The goslings may be fed for the first two days on barley cake (pollenta) or raw barley, and for the next three days fresh water ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... ideas as to the properties of metals and the geometrical relations of the regular solids. Above all, his reasoning was penetrated by the supposed astrological influences of the stars and their significant relation to human fate. Under the influence of such a farrago of notions, Kepler resolved to make all sorts of trials in his search for the connection between the distance of a planet from the sun and the time in which the revolution of that ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... need never twice speak to him; does not want explanations, translations, limitations, as Professor Godwin does when you make an assertion: up to anything, down to everything—whatever sapit hominem. A perfect man. All this farrago, which must perplex you to read, and has put me to a little trouble to select, only proves how impossible it is to describe a pleasant hand. You must see Rickman to know him, for he is a species in one. A new class. An exotic, any slip of which I am proud to put in my garden-pot. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... leaves shall, in this hot summer, spring and grow forth afresh, out of this new and young temper of the body: and all the whole face and shew shall be young again and flourishing," pp. 119, 120. With such a farrago of sublime nonsense were our worthy forefathers called upon to be enlightened and amused! But I lose sight of Ashmole's book-purchases. That he gave away, as well as received, curious volumes, is authenticated by his gift of "five ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... fixed her wondering eyes on Doria. Her mother and I wondered even more than Susan, for we had more reason. Of what manuscript, in heaven's name, were these the printed proofs? Was it possible that I had been mistaken and that Jaffery, in the assiduity of love, had made coherence out of Adrian's farrago of despair? ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... theism, polytheism, and spiritualism. It is, under one aspect, mere pessimism; under another, pure philanthropy; under another, monastic communion; under another, high morality; under another, a variety of materialistic philosophy; under another, simple demonology; under another, a mere farrago of superstitions, including necromancy, witchcraft, idolatry, and fetishism. In some form or other it may be held with almost any religion, and embraces something from almost ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... inner life of the race perhaps as long as their laws and language had; and your Celt runs by nature to religion, or even to religiosity,—ultra-religion. Is it likely that, while he kept his laws and language, he let his religion go? And when it was not an arbitrary farrago of dogmas, like some we might mention; but a philosophy of the soul so vivid that he counted death little more to fuss about than ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the ceiling of the parlor, he began to address them, if indeed it were they whom he addressed, and not some phantom audience of Princes, Marshals, Admirals, or trembling sheep-like re emits. It was difficult to hear the words, hopeless to make out the sense. It was a farrago of nonsense, part of his own inventing, part (as it seemed) wild and confused reminiscences of the published speeches of the man he aped, all strung together on some invisible thread of insane reasoning, delivered with a mad vehemence and ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... as vacant a stare as that of a peasant whom one has addressed in Hebrew. "What farrago of words is this? I ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... species—by simply observing that their habits are altogether unlike. The ursus arctos is a tree-climbing wood bear: the Barren Ground species is not. The former prefers a vegetable diet—the latter likes better fish, flesh, and insects—though he will also fill his stomach with a farrago of vegetable matters. ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... the weak farrago of those men Who fabricate such visionary schemes, As if the night-mare rode upon their pen, And trouble'd all their ink ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... than with medicine. He worked hard at Greek, and as the result of his studies published somewhat prematurely a treatise, De Immortalitate Animorum, a collection of extracts from Greek writers which Julius Caesar Scaliger with justice calls a confused farrago of other men's learning.[76] He published also about this period the treatise on Judicial Astrology, and the Essay De Consolatione, the only one of his books which has been found worthy of an English translation.[77] In 1541 he became Rector of the College of Physicians, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... Was she dreaming or had her brain given way? Or was this really Messer Blondel the austere Syndic, this man standing before her, shaking in his limbs as he poured forth this strange farrago of remedia and scholars and princes and the rest? Or if she were not mad was he mad? Or could there be truth, any truth, any fact in the medley? His clammy face, his trembling hands, answered for his belief in it. But could ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... connected with another, at right angles, (if I remember well) which receives the more valuable works of the fifteenth century—the number of which latter, alone, are said to amount to nearly twenty thousand. In such a farrago, there must necessarily be an abundance of trash. These, however, are how under a strict assortment, or classification; and I think that I saw not fewer than half a dozen assistants, under the direction of M. Bernhard, hard at work in the execution ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... applying the talents and resources of the mind to all that mixed mass of human affairs, which, though not included under the head of any regular art, science, or profession, falls under the cognisance of the writer, and "comes home to the business and bosoms of men." Quicquid agunt homines nostri farrago libelli, is the general motto of this department of literature. It does not treat of minerals or fossils, of the virtues of plants, or the influence of planets; it does not meddle with forms of belief or ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... from whatever cause, the S.S. contemptuously flung back the gift, as proceeding from an Arian whose religion was "unsavoury," at the same time hurling at the giver a number of texts conveying epithets of an offensive character. Bramah replied to the farrago of nonsense, which he characterised as "unmannerly, absurd, and illiterate that it must have been composed when the writer was intoxicated, mad, or under the influence of Lucifer," and he threatened that unless Huntington apologised for his gratuitous insults, he (Bramah) would assuredly expose ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... this scion of the Incas. No consideration short of our duty to the public, could have induced us to wade through such a labyrinth of absurdity in quest of information. It is astonishing how the honest knight could have patience to translate 1019 closely printed folio pages of such a farrago; and on closing the work of the Inca for ever, we heartily joined in the concluding pious thanksgiving of the translator, Praised be God. This enormous literary production of the Inca Garcilasso, is most regularly divided and subdivided into parts, books, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... sat there without being visible to all who were in the company. No man told the tale of his own feelings so plainly as he did. And Mrs. Houghton, though declaring herself to be ignorant of the figure, had described the dance as a farrago of polkas, waltzes, and galops, so that the thing might be supposed to be a fast rapturous whirl from the beginning to the end. And his wife was going through this indecent exhibition at Mrs. Montacute Jones' ball with Captain de Baron after ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... My Reminiscences as a Cowboy, 1930. A blatant farrago of lies, included in this list because of its supreme worthlessness. However, some judges might regard the debilitated and puerile lying in The Autobiography of Frank Tarbeaux, as told to Donald H. Clarke, New York, ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... consecrated? Has a bishop no unholy thoughts? Can pride, lust, avarice, and ambition, can all the sins of the decalogue be consecrated? Are some thoughts consecrated and some not? By whom or how is the selection made? What strange farrago of impossibilities have these holy dealers in occult divinity jumbled together? Can the God of reason ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... obtained a wide circulation in the beginning of the present century, due much more to its foundation on a notorious scandal than to its own literary merit. "Modern Chivalry; or the Adventures of Captain Farrago and Teague O'Reagan, his Servant"—a poor imitation of "Don Quixote"—as a satire directed against the Democratic party by H.H. Brackenridge. R.H. Dana's "Tom Thornton" and "Paul Felton" have little claim to attention beyond the excitement of their ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... respiration continue to be stimulated into action, and the other internal senses of hunger, thirst, and lust, are not only occasionally excited in our sleep, but their irritative motions are succeeded by their usual sensations, and make a part of the farrago of our dreams. These sensations of the want of air, of hunger, thirst, and lust, in our dreams, contribute to prove, that the nerves of the external senses are also alive and excitable in our sleep; but as the stimuli of external objects are either ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... and plunging with his whole fund of youthfulness into their sports and interests. And all the while he was himself maturing—not in character or body, for these remained young—but in the stocked mind, in the tolerant knowledge of life and man, in pious acceptance of the universe. Here is a farrago for a chapter; here is a world of interests and activities, human, artistic, social, scientific, at each of which he sprang with impetuous pleasure, on each of which he squandered energy, the arrow drawn to the head, the whole intensity of his spirit bent, for the moment, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a queer boiling of ideas in my mind; ideas difficult to clothe with words, and composed of I know not what farrago of occultism, mysticism, and Oriental magic; but at last I managed to simmer them down ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... moments this strangely assorted trio reached the apartment in which the Sepoy had but a short time before disported himself, so to speak, with such waspish reprisal, and delivered such a farrago of ridicule and cynicism upon the defenseless head of the silent figure ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... the tyranny of language, indeed! Here is a farrago of myths and symbols. "There is a faculty—we may call it the devotional or religious faculty—there are geniuses in the region in which man ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... book at my side was not the Koran, though it might have been, for the strange farrago ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... seize the actual, and his power of dealing with material such as the elder Dumas would have delighted in with a restraint and a logic the younger Dumas would have admired. Plot and counter-plot, bravery, treachery, death,—these are elements for a romanticist farrago; and in Daudet's hands they are woven into a tapestry almost as stiff as life itself. The stuff is romantic enough, but the treatment is unhesitatingly realistic; and "Kings in Exile," better than any other novel of Daudet's, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... virtue of their native force and freshness; hardly more than two; for we need not count in this category the records of events, such as Winthrop's Journal, or Prince's Annals, or even that quaint, garrulous, conceited farrago of pedantry and piety, of fact and gossip, Mather's "Magnalia." The two real American books were a "Treatise on the Will," and "Poor Richard's Almanack." Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin were the only considerable names in American literature in all that period ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... Lockhart's farrago we cannot find out the first thing we want to know,—whether Scott worked after his week-day custom, on the Sunday morning. But, I gather, not; at all events his household and his cattle rested (L. iii. 108). I imagine he walked out into his woods, or read quietly in his study. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... ill. No, I am doing him and the public the greatest possible service. Just when he is going to leave us, when the writing-box is packed, I will step up to him, and tell him the truth. I will show him what a farrago of nonsense he has collected as materials for his quarto; and convince him at once how utterly unfit he is to write a book, at least a book on Irish affairs. Won't this be deserving well of my country and ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... like a lamb to the slaughter. Well, not being powerful enough to throw him overboard when I realized the state of the case, I did the next best thing. I became cloyingly sweet to him. I smiled upon him: I listened to his farrago of nonsense about the chemical components of his various notable inventions, as if a girl attends a ball to study chemistry! Before half an hour had passed the infant had come to the conclusion that here was the ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... Reb Shemuel. "A Jew who has the Law from Sinai, the Law that will never be changed, to whom God has given a sensible religion and common-sense, how can such a person believe in the farrago of nonsense that makes up the worship of the Christians! No Jew has ever apostatized except to fill his purse or his stomach or to avoid persecution. 'Getting grace' they call it in English; but with poor Jews it is always grace after meals. Look at the Crypto-Jews, the Marranos, who ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... 'I've been readin' this farrago, and the less that's said about it the better. I obsairve that the main part of it's devoted to the exaggerated satire of your neighbours. That's a spirit I'm sorry to notice in ye, and I regret to see that ye're already looking sulky at rebuke. The vairse,' pursued ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... all this farrago of nonsense there is of course no foundation of truth; Robison was a well-known savant who lived sane and respected to the end of his days. On his death Watt wrote of him: "He was a man of the clearest head and the most science ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... had as good as stolen that money himself, taking it out to the great open spaces to spend in a bar-room. Baird's serious effort had turned out to be a wild, inconsequent farrago of the most ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... man in Paul Lessingham's position have with the eccentric being who had established himself in such an unsatisfactory dwelling-place? Mr Holt's story I had only dimly understood,—it struck me that it would require a deal of understanding. It was more like a farrago of nonsense, an outcome of delirium, than a plain statement of solid facts. To tell the truth, Sydney had taken it more seriously than I expected. He seemed to see something in it which I emphatically did not. What was double Dutch to me, seemed clear as print to him. So far as I could judge, ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... belief, that Dee's heart glowed with delight. He set about consulting his crystal forthwith, and on the 2d of December, 1581, the spirits appeared, and held a very extraordinary discourse with Kelly, which Dee took down in writing. The curious reader may see this farrago of nonsense among the Harleian Mss. in the British Museum. The later consultations were published in a folio volume, in 1659, by Dr. Meric Casaubon, under the title of A true and faithful Relation of what passed between Dr. John Dee and some ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Magazine for these anecdotes, I had not overlooked their having appeared in Pylades and Corinna, but had not then the latter book at hand to include it in the reference. DR. MAITLAND considers Pylades and Corinna "a farrago of low rubbish, utterly beneath criticism." Is not this rather too severe and sweeping a character? Unquestionably the poetry is but so-so, and of the poem the greater part might have been dispensed with; but, like all Curll's collections, it contains some matter of interest and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... writing in a book, guarded by a Bramah, some profound reflections on "First Impressions." She never lost the key nor forgot to lock this volume—a saving clause of common-sense protecting a farrago of nonsence. ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... cobweb in the bush; actions, not in themselves of any mighty purport, but made for the pencil: the feast of Pan, Peona's isle, the 'slabbed margin of a well,' the chase of the butterfly, the nymph, Glaucus, Cybele, Sleep on his couch, a farrago of unconnected beauties. But I divagate; and all this sits in the bosom of ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it may be urged in defence of Horace that this unity is not necessary, because the very word satura signifies a dish plentifully stored with all variety of fruits and grains. Yet Juvenal, who calls his poems a farrago (which is a word of the same signification with satura), has chosen to follow the same method of Persius and not of Horace; and Boileau, whose example alone is a sufficient authority, has wholly confined himself in all his satires to this unity of design. That variety which is not to ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... accomplice, butt, and scapegoat, on all occasions of danger. It is needless to describe the play—a witless performance enough, of which the joke was Macaire's exaggerated style of conversation, a farrago of all sorts of high-flown sentiments such as the French love to indulge in—contrasted with his actions, which were philosophically unscrupulous, and his appearance, which was most picturesquely sordid. The play had been acted, we believe, and forgotten, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Tenpence would clear the amount between us. However, things may yet prove better:— Meantime, what awful length of letter! And how, while heaping thus with gibes The Pegasus of modern scribes, My own small hobby of farrago Hath beat the pace ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al |
