"Freakish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... almost each hour, discovered to him some new trait, some unsuspected grace of mind or heart, till, in this glowing girl, so bright, so blithe, so piquant, he had difficulty in recognizing any likeness, save of face and form, to the moody, freakish, melancholy, hysterical, and altogether eerie ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... had been obliterated. The customary height for two-seated observation and bombing planes was between one and two miles, and of single-seated scouts between two and four miles. These altitudes were not the freakish heights occasionally obtained by adventurous fliers; on the contrary they were the customary levels at which the different kinds of duties were carried out. Many men, of course, went far higher. Since then an American, Roland Rohlfs, flying a Curtiss "Wasp" set the unofficial ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... to happen again. Breakfast was eaten first, and then Jack, who had been assisting George examine his motor, discovered the cause of the unfortunate stop, so that the freakish engine was now ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... achievement? Of course he was the Fortunate Youth. Of that there is no gainsaying. He had his beauty, his charm, his temperament, his quick southern intelligence—all his Sicilian heritage—and a freakish chance had favoured him from the day that, vagabond urchin, he attended his first and only Sunday-school treat. But personal gifts and favouring chance are not ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... rest, Solomon was a Chine-ponim, or droll, having that inextinguishable sense of humor which has made the saints of the Jewish Church human, has lit up dry technical Talmudic, discussions with flashes of freakish fun, with pun and jest and merry quibble, and has helped the race to survive (pace Dr. Wallace) by dint of a humorous acquiescence in ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... asked, for although I had been glad to believe that we were faced with a problem which would prove to have a human solution, the revulsion had come, and I should have welcomed the knowledge that some weird, freakish application of natural power might be ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... a spoiled child, Zarah, and dost but abuse the indulgence I entertain for your freakish humour," replied Christian; "thy wits have been disturbed since ever you landed in England, and all for the sake of one who cares for thee no more than for the most worthless object who walks the streets, amongst whom he left you to engage ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... circumstances that set us fairly below the decencies of life. I asked the governor of the house whether he met with any difficulty in keeping peace and order among his inmates; and he informed me that his troubles among the women were incomparably greater than with the men. They were freakish, and apt to be quarrelsome, inclined to plague and pester one another in ways that it was impossible to lay hold of, and to thwart his own authority by the like intangible methods. He said this with the utmost good-nature, and quite won my regard by so placidly ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Only a freakish wisp of hair?— Nay, but its wildest, its most frolic whorl Stands for a slim, enamoured, sweet-fleshed girl! And so, a tangle of dream and charm and fun, Its every crook a promise and a snare, Its every dowle, or genially gadding Or crisply curled, Heartening and madding, Empales ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... and running-heads, should be avoided by the young compositor; there are places where it may be unobjectionable but it will require good judgment and some experience to prevent such lines making the page look freakish or amateurish. ...
— Capitals - A Primer of Information about Capitalization with some - Practical Typographic Hints as to the Use of Capitals • Frederick W. Hamilton
... doubtful. That a person like M. Naudie, simple, though by no means a fool, should be taken in by a very pretty girl falling apparently in love with him—even though, to the general dangers of the situation, are added frank warnings that she has been given to a series of freakish fancies—is not unnatural; that she should soon tire of him, and sooner still of the four step-children, is very natural indeed. But the immediate cause of the final disruption—her taking a new fancy to, and being atheistically converted by, a cousin who, after ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... slim figures of the dancers, with their flashing blue or black eyes, their burning cheeks, their parted lips, their bosoms rising and falling, the scene moving in ever-changing perspective; a sight gay and wonderful as the freakish games ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... unmatched, single, uneven; singular, peculiar, unusual, unique, strange, quaint, extraordinary, queer, eccentric, whimsical, freakish, baroque, fantastic, nondescript, abnormal, bizarre, erratic, unconventional, curious, capricious; extra, remaining, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... was the skin, and there was not one hair, eyelash or eyebrow on the whole head. The closed eyes lay in deep caverns surrounded by a thousand fine wrinkles, which crisscrossed all over his face in every direction. The face and head were freakish—monstrous; and yet, somehow, over it rested an expression of infinite wisdom and calm. He lay bound and still and unconscious, at the mercy of men far below him intellectually, this man from another planet. Clee could not help but compare him to a stoical ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... was lighted from attic to basement, and though it was Christmas Eve, the air was like spring, for nature sometimes turns freakish, and smiles on us when we are expecting the cold shoulder. Here and there, a window was open, for the Derings always did love plenty of air; and so a merry sound of laughter and gay voices was wafted out into the ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... most awful form. Suddenly, a little goat jumped in three bounds to the bench, and smelt at Stephanie, who waked at the sound. She sprang to her feet, but so lightly that the movement did not frighten the freakish animal; then she caught sight of Philippe, and darted away, followed by her four-footed friend, to a hedge of elders; there she uttered the same little cry like a frightened bird, which the two men had heard near the other gate. Then she climbed an acacia, and nestling into ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... little taffeta silk, and Nell said it was cut in a style so disgracefully freakish that she would not let Sally wear it. It was bought at one of those ultra-shops on Fifth Avenue where they have styles for children that ape the frocks ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose
... been impressed by his intellectual agility in matching odd rhymes. In dash and originality his rhymes out-rank even those in Butler's Hudibras and Lowell's Fable for Critics. We find in Pacchiarotto, for instance, many rhymes of the gayest, most freakish, most grotesque character—"monkey, one key," "prelude, hell-hued," "stubborn, cub-born," "was hard, hazard," all occur in a single stanza. An example of exceptional facility in rhyming is found in "Through the Metidja," where, without repetition of words and without forcing of ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... is Venice) hath itself unseated them; whether Petrarch set boiling what Saint Antony could not allay; what it was, how it was, who gave them the wrench, I know not—but the fact is that the people of Padua have been as freakish a race as any in Italy; at the mercy of any head but the aggregate's, pack-mules of a notion, galley-slaves of a whim, driven hither and thither in a herd, like those restless leaves (souls once) ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... nomenclature; and the world falls for the most part, into any names which parties choose to give themselves. Silly people found inferences on this concession; and, as usually happens, they can cite some of their betters. St. Augustine,[47] a freakish arguer, or, to put it in the way of an old writer, lectorem ne multiloquii taedio fastidiat, Punicis quibusdam argutiis recreare solet,[48] asks, with triumph, to what chapel a stranger would be directed, if he inquired the way to the ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... parson's, the clerk's, the camp of dragoons, of hussars, and so on through the whole county. But he paused, and thought it would be hardly expedient to publish his discomfiture in such a way. If Matilda had left the house for any freakish reason he would not care to look for her, and if her deed had a tragic intent she would keep aloof from camp ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... if it gets in his way, or a church steeple when he is flying low; but his greatest dangers are in the clear air itself, where they cannot be detected. He may suddenly drop into a 'hole,' which is really a downward current of air, or he may get a terrific bump when he strikes a rising current. A freakish whim of the winds may unexpectedly take away the air support from under one of the wings, and he will lurch and dip sharply to ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... knew, was always a freakish thing, and apt to rise or fall at any time, according to the amount of ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... freakish, elvish cast came into the child's eyes, while Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and, suddenly,—for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions,—she fancied that she ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to himself; in spite of his assumed indifference, he was embarrassed by the focused stares of Dow and Mac Tavish. He wondered what sudden, devil-may-care whimsy was this that was galloping him away from business and politics and every other sane subject! He was conscious that there was in him a freakish and juvenile hankering ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... so many years of incarceration in a sleeping-room the chest and lungs were delicate; hence the congestion and cause of death. Well, well—let me see—I remember your brother twenty-three years ago when I first came to St. Ignace. A strange, bookish, freakish character, but a gentleman, that goes without saying, Ma'amselle Pauline. And you, just a little black-haired girl, reciting French tragedy in the untidy garden! Ah—ah! I see it clearly—no father, no mother, save old Victoria Archambault, and yet you grew up a handsome young lady, always ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... said Lady Engleton, in speaking of him afterwards to Hadria, "it is strange that his cleverness does not come to the rescue; but so far from that, I think it leads him a wild dance over boggy ground, like some will-o'-the-wisp, but for whose freakish allurements the good man might have trodden a ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... most personally distinguished group. First of them should be named the Provost of Trinity, Dr. Mahaffy, under whose aegis we assembled—a great scholar and a great Irishman. He brought with him an element of independent unregimented political thought—often freakish in expression, but based on a vast knowledge of men and countries. In a more practical sense, Lord MacDonnell and Lord Dunraven were our chief political theorists, devisers by temperament of constitutional machinery. ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... considered as women, not as possible heroines; and supposing she held her own with this husband of hers, which meant, judging by the view of their unfolded characters at present, a certain command of the freakish beast; she, whatever her task, would not be the one set trotting. He came to his opinion through the estimate he had recently formed of Lord Fleetwood, and a study of his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and twenty cents. I consider that I had pretty fair luck for bass fishing. You know how freakish they are about biting. I had made up my mind I'd give them a whirl to-morrow, but now I find it will be impossible. My ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... are almost amusing." Helen looked at her through half-closed lids. "You are quite freakish. I suppose you must be a moral degenerate, or something of the sort." She waited for the insult to sink in, but Dorothy was fairly dazed and bewildered. "Do you want me to call things by their ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... are purged from film, and lo! "Instead of Anster's turnip-bearing vales "I see old fairy land's miraculous show! "Her trees of tinsel kissed by freakish gales, "Her Ouphs that, cloaked in leaf-gold, skim ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... should have twelve months reg'lar hard labour, and see if that wouldn't dummer a little sense into 'n." There was no suggestion, however, of "a woman in the case," to explain this man's ill-treatment of his wife; it appears to have been simply a piece of freakish brutality. ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... opposition, I loved Jimmie, is not hard to guess. He had an odd and freakish humor, and talked more of Indian-fighting, filibustering in gold-bearing regions, and of moving accidents by flood and field, than of crops, live-stock, or bowery dances. He liked me just as did the older men who sent me to the National Convention,—in spite ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... heard, to be put in a great encyclopaedia he was making. He didn't like romance, loved the truth, and wanted to get to the bottom of every thing. He was always trying to make little Fancy more sober, well-behaved, and learned; for she was a freakish, dreamy, yet very lovable and charming child. Aunt Fiction petted her to her heart's content, and might have done her harm, if Uncle Fact had not had a hand in her education; for the lessons of both were necessary to her, as to all ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... deals with pure literature, but he has a large vein of satiric humor that found its best expression in the grotesque irony of "Murder as One of the Fine Arts." In this essay he descants on the greatest crime as though it were an accomplishment, and his freakish wit makes this paper as enjoyable as Charles Lamb's essay on the ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... and nature drove them inward, concentrating, fortifying, intensifying them; to a not wholly normal or healthy brain, freakish and without consecution, adding a stammering tongue which could not speak evenly, and had to do its share, as the brain did, 'by fits.' 'You,' we find Lamb writing ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... neither he nor the man who came out of the doorway to meet him saw the slight figure that crouched against the wall close by the door they had to enter. And if they had seen it, what would they have thought? That the idiot boy was only more freakish than usual, or was waiting about for the dime which was the usual pay for his services. Neither the clouds, nor the trees, nor the surrounding darkness would have whispered that an eager woman's heart beat under that boy's jacket, and that they had better trust the wind in its sweep, ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... Stevenson's collected poems over yonder in the small cabinet. Would that he had given us more! Most of them are the merest playful sallies of a freakish mind. But one should, indeed, be a classic, for it is in my judgment by all odds the best narrative ballad of the last century—that is if I am right in supposing that "The Ancient Mariner" appeared at the very end of ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... had sat down to that table, or because the Fates were unusually freakish that day, it was destined that, beyond the initial glass of whisky, not a man present should partake of Captain Benson's dinner. On deck things had been happening, and just as the host had filled the ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... But they are not hallowed. One may vary them within the limits of good taste, but on the whole it is considerably easier to accept the forms in use and not try to be different. If the function itself is going to be very different from usual then the invitation itself may be as freakish as one likes—it may be written or printed on anything from a postcard to a paper bag. The sole question is one of appropriateness. But there is a distinct danger in trying to be ever so unconventional and all that. One is more apt than not to make a fool of one's self. And then, ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... the scientist continued, that the abnormally high radiation readings were "officially" due to some freakish equipment malfunction and that the objects sighted visually were birds or airplanes. A report to this effect was made to military authorities, but since the conclusion stated that no flying saucers were involved, the report went into some ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... her out on the bank of the canal this evening before bedtime and we'll have a lark," reflected Walker Farr as he toiled in the hot trench. And he stopped quizzing himself as to the whys of this sudden devotion to a freakish notion. He ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... to silent shades, To glist'ning streams, and sunlit glades, Where all that woodland life can give, Renders it bliss indeed, to live. Come, ye who love the shadowy wood, Whate'er your days, whate'er your mood. And join us, freakish knights that be Of grey-goose wing, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... his senses, blunted the keen edge of his emotions; even the care for Quain became a mere dull ache in the back of his perceptions; of physical suffering he was unconscious. He fell a prey to freakish fancies—could stand aside and watch himself, an atom whirling in the mad dance of the tempest, as the snow-flakes whirled, as little potent. He saw himself pitting his puny strength of mind and body against the infinite force of the elements: ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... who had studied at Cambridge, and was said to be a bachelor of divinity. He was indigent, and "looked upon as a very freakish and extravagant man." Dr. King, in a letter to the Hon. Robert Boyle, remarks "that Mr. Coga was about thirty-two years of age; that he spoke Latin well, when he was in company, which he liked, but that his brain was sometimes a little too warm." The experiment ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... he was eccentric. People who are naturally queer or freakish are always hiding things. And I know it's silly of me, but I'm going to ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... I guess you could call it an incantation. I got a picture of a nubile waif, too freakish to fit where she'd been raised. What had her Hegira been like? In what frightful places had she found herself welcome? From her talk, it could have been an Ozark backwater. I didn't want to know what backwoods ...
— Vigorish • Gordon Randall Garrett
... races or to some other cause, there is a singular variety of flesh-tints among the bathers here. I wish my old friend Dr. Bowles could have seen it; we used to be deeply immersed, both of us, in the question of the chromatophores, I observing their freakish behaviour in the epidermis of certain frogs, while he studied their action on the human skin and wrote an excellent little paper on sunburn—a darker problem than it seems ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... With a sudden freakish reversion to the prankishness of a growing boy, Graham pointed his finger at Ruth, who instantly screamed. The girls looking on, laughed, and there was some excuse for their amusement. The spectacle of the sensible Ruth, shrinking and shrieking over nothing more alarming than an agitated ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... gave him a rosary—(his first captors coveted that and took care of it). But also they ate together of fruit, and as both ladies and gallants do strange things at strange times, the lady divided the seeds, and counted them seeking a lucky number or some such freakish quest. And by the rosary, and by his mother, she made him swear that when he had found fortune and a plantation in the new world, he would plant with his own hands the seeds there, and send for the lady to come by ship as chatelaine! Failing the plantation, ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... away in his cheerful, debonair manner and rode off. Troubles sat lightly on his stout heart. His effervescent nature never left him long depressed when Fortune played her freakish tricks upon him. He had lost his commission upon the sale of Iredale's land, but he had secured the better deal of the cattle. Therefore he was satisfied. But Robb was a very persistent man in his seemingly ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... then freakish fortune takes it into her head to smile upon the persevering. What was not to be found last year has become almost common this summer. Without leaving my narrow enclosure, I obtain as many Grasshoppers as I could wish. I hear them rustling ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... Gunderode is of religious grace, Bettine the fulness of instinctive impulse; Gunderode is the ideal, Bettine nature; Gunderode throws herself into the river because the world is all too narrow, Bettine lives and follows out every freakish fancy, till the enchanting child degenerates into an eccentric and undignified old woman. There is a medium somewhere. Philip Sidney found it; others had it ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... she had Wings on her Shoulders and Feet, and was able to transport herself to the most distant Regions in the smallest Space of Time. She was continually varying her Dress, sometimes into the most natural and becoming Habits in the World, and at others into the most wild and freakish Garb that can be imagined. There stood by her a Man full-aged, and of great Gravity, who corrected her Inconsistences, by shewing them in his Mirror, and still flung her affected and unbecoming Ornaments down the Mountain, which fell in the Plain below, and were gathered up and wore with great ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... now would carry him far into the country with some congenial friend, and now keep him dangling about the town from one old book-shop to another, and scraping romantic acquaintance with every dog that passed. His talk, compounded of so much sterling sense and so much freakish humour, and clothed in language so apt, droll, and emphatic, was a perpetual delight to all who knew him before the clouds began to settle on his mind. His use of language was both just and picturesque; and when at the beginning of his illness he began to feel the ebbing of this power, it was strange ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... better sign of Cupid's advance upon the outworks of a girl's heart than reverie. If her fits of musing were a shade too pensive, the experienced eye of the observer descried no cause for discouragement in this feature. Rosa was a spoiled, wayward child, freakish and mischievous, to whom liberty was too dear to be resigned without a sigh. By and by, she would wear her shackles as ornaments, like all other sensible and ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... good old king, who had offered a reward to anyone who could tame and train a fine but unbroken colt, of which he was very fond. The knight agreed to try, and got on slowly but surely, for the colt was a gallant fellow, and soon learned to love his new master, though he was freakish and wild. Every day, when he gave his lessons to this pet of the king's, the knight rode him through the city, and as he rode, he looked everywhere for a certain beautiful face, which he had seen many times in his dreams, but never found. One day, as he went prancing ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... sitting down to dinner with a pleasant party, Coleridge, Reynolds the dramatist, and Sam Bloxam: to-morrow (that is, today), Liston, and Wyat of the Wells, dine with us. May this find you as jolly and freakish as we mean ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... had challenged that tangled profusion of tree and brush to escape going to war and had never been able to find his way down again—a quite just punishment for his cowardice. But time and again this freakish glint of light had been proven to be the reflection of that very camp-fire upon a huge rock lodged up there and held by ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... kept his nag. And then a quarter of an hour later he found himself on the turnpike, trotting along the fresh-water meadows, sniffing the air and the scented brooks. He laughed at himself. His horse plunged, freakish from his long rest in the stable. Suddenly he spurred on and rode furiously over the country roads, as if mad to reach a certain end. A little later, he cantered up the gravelled drive of the Four Corners, his horse wet and trembling, and he with a craving unexplained, a desire ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... of value only in so far as it affects women and men of one's own town through former exchanges of courtesy or hospitality, or for similar causes. Nor does it concern itself with the unconventional, the abnormal. Elopements, clandestine marriages, unusual engagements, freakish parties, and similar extraordinary social and personal news do not come within the sphere of the society editor, but take regular, and usually prominent, places in ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... watch, and as I did so there flashed on me—in that sudden freakish way which the best ideas affect—a new and brilliant idea for the plot of My Tenant. The whole of the third and concluding act spread itself instantaneously before me. I knew then and there why the play had been laid aside. It had waited for this, and it wanted only this. I held ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... necessary at times, Diamond. Hold your temper in check, old man, and don't talk about Northerners and Southerners. There is no North, no South. The time is past. When you came to Yale you were full of freakish notions about the North and the South, but I fancied you had been pretty well cured of that. I see it will ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... Christophe's nature all sorts of disordered elements which eluded Olivier and made him uneasy. He used to have sudden fits of a freakish and terrible humor. For days together he would not speak: or he would break out in diabolically malicious moods and try deliberately to hurt. Sometimes he would disappear altogether and be seen no more for the rest of the day and part of the night. Once he stayed away ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... same; and whether America, Germany, Sweden, Scotland, Wales, or our own peculiar mining districts in England be the locale of such, still may be discovered, under different names indeed, and circumstances, the demons of the mines, the guardians of hidden treasures, the freakish dwarfs and fays, who delight in unexpectedly enriching the poor and virtuous, whilst they delude most miserably all idle and worthless treasure-seekers, &c. Nay, what, we may inquire, are the oriental genii of kings, and lamps, &c., but modifications of one and the same superstition? ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... the gold deposits were freakish and unaccountable. Sometimes the best diggings were a mother lode at the head of a creek. Sometimes they were found fifty feet under clay at the foot of a creek where the dashing waters swerved round some rocky point into a river. Old miners now retired at Yale and Hope say that the most ignorant ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... her once or twice during the preceding days. It was due to her after his long neglect of her, he told himself, and had found improvement in her. But to-night she seemed to take a freakish pleasure in letting him see that there was much of the old Ann still left in her: the frank conceit of her; the amazing self-opinionatedness of her; the waywardness, the wilfulness, the unreasonableness of her; the general uppishness and dictatorialness ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... how he tried to smile, and a freakish change crossed his own countenance. He nodded slightly, and stretched his ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... it not subject to unwonted tests. We suffer according to our powers of endurance, and are tried according to our gifts. Else why are the powers and the gifts given to us by a Providence which never wasteth, nor doeth in freakish negligence. The yoke of love is not weighty enough to bow sufficiently the curving neck. With a love which cannot be satisfied comes the mighty temptation to sin and disgrace. Even into this black chasm our beauties look with steady eye, and meditate the step. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... business is a business which runs smoothly and efficiently when the manager is not managing, and to that other maxim that the highest aim of the competent manager should be to make himself unnecessary. Hence he was perfectly at liberty to be wayward and freakish in his activities from time to time. And this happened to be one of his wayward and freakish mornings. There were, however, few young women in the common room to behold his aberration, for the hour was within two minutes of nine, and at nine o'clock ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... Holland House today, where I was lunching with the Burtons, father. He asked about you, and when I told him you were not so well as usual, he said he would call you up. He wants to tell you about some doctor he discovered in Iowa, who cures everything with massage and hot water. It sounds freakish, but Mr. Lane is a very ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... telegraphers familiar with the wireless alphabet were busy trying to reconcile some of the names received with those of persons who went down on the Titanic. That the body of William T. Stead, the English journalist and author, had been recovered by the Mackay-Bennett, but through a freakish error in wireless transmission the name of another was reported instead, was one of the theories advanced by persons ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... madness for Tusitala? It is a happy circumstance, we say, for a youth, before the multiplying responsibilities of maturity press upon him, to pour out his enthusiasm in an obsession such as that; and when this passion can be shared and doubled and knitted in partnership with an equally freakish, insane, and innocent idiot (such as our generously mad friend Mifflin) admirable adventures are sure to follow. The quest begun on Darby Creek took us later on an all-summer progress among places in England and Scotland ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... on his heel and went; he felt that at last Evadna was looking at him, though he would not turn to make sure. And his instinct told him withal that he must ignore her mood if he would win her from it. With a freakish impulse, he headed straight for the campfire and Miss Georgie, but when he came up to her the look she gave him of understanding, with sympathy to soften it, sent him away again ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... should sigh? And wherefore do I feed when I would fast? And wherefore do I dance when I should pray? And wherefore do I live when I should die? Canst answer that, good Sir? O there are women The world deem mad, or worse, whose life but seems One vile caprice, a freakish thing of whims And restless nothingness; yet if we pierce The soul, may be we'll touch some cause profound For what seems causeless. Early love despised, Or baffled, which is worse; a faith betrayed, For vanity ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... double-seater of fairly safe construction—that is, it was not freakish nor speedy, and was what was usually used in this ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... strange mysterious visions of the soul! Ye wild and freakish gambolings of the spirit, freed from the incubus of matter, and unfettered by the control of reason, of what fantastic caprices are ye the originators 137—what caricatures of the various features of our waking ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... shrill and sudden cry, And, looking up, I saw the antic Puck Grappling with Time, who clutch'd him like a fly, Victim of his own sport,—the jester's luck! He, whilst his fellows grieved, poor wight, had stuck His freakish gauds upon the Ancient's brow, And now his ear, and now his beard, would pluck; Whereas the angry churl had snatched him now, Crying, "Thou ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the impulse was like a mad, freakish intruder, and it frightened him, so that he drew ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... color, the farm house had been painted a bright pink, but now the color had been washed off, as if tears had rolled down the face of some poor old painted lady, smearing her faded cheeks. A fire had evidently been started when the Germans began their retreat, which for some freakish reason had died down after destroying only the rear portion ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... pass as they advanced, descending constantly. At times the granite walls nearly met above them, and then a shaft of moonlight would cast freakish ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... their days in the desolation of Aigues-Mortes, the little fortified, derelict city in the salt marshes of Provence. Although they regarded him with the same unimaginative wonder as a pair of alligators might regard an Argus butterfly, their undoubted but freakish progeny, and although Aristide soared high above their heads in all phases of thought and emotion, the mutual ties remained strong and perdurable. Scarcely a year passed without Aristide struggling somehow south to visit ses vieux, as he affectionately ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... through which the car was grinding its way, had a freakish individuality in sidewalks. Each builder had had his own idea of what the proper street level should be, and had laid his sidewalk accordingly. There were at least six different levels in this one block. The same blunt expression ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... every woman evil, And give up all that's female to the devil. If poor (you say), she drains her husband's purse; If rich, she keeps her priest, or something worse; If highly born, intolerably vain, Vapours and pride by turns possess her brain; Now gaily mad, now sourly splenetic, 90 Freakish when well, and fretful when she's sick: If fair, then chaste she cannot long abide, By pressing youth attack'd on every side; If foul, her wealth the lusty lover lures, Or else her wit some fool-gallant procures, ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... the faculty is freakish, and does not always respond to conscious exertion of thought in the mind of the inquirer. Thus, in Case I. a connection of the person thought of is discerned; in another the mind of a stranger present seems to be read. In another case (not ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... bundles of lances which garlands had bound. * * * * * The moon on the east oriel shone, Through slender shafts of shapely stone, By foliated tracery combined; Thou would'st have thought some fairy's hand 'Twixt poplars straight the osier wand In many a freakish knot had twined; Then framed a spell, when the work was done, And changed the willow-wreaths ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various
... happy choice as Esteban's proxy, for he relieved Norine's anxiety and smothered her apprehensions. When called upon to speak he made a hit by honestly expressing his relief at escaping the further hazards of this war. Prompted by some freakish perversity, and perhaps unduly stimulated by the wine he had drunk, he made open ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... is amphibious. This fish lies in myriads on the mud-banks left uncovered by the ebb of the tide, and moves with great agility on the approach of birds. Nature seems to have made the goby in one of her most freakish moods. It is equally at home in the earth, the air, and the water; and at different times in the day may be observed swimming in the stream, basking upon the surface of the tidal banks, and burrowing deep in ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... was these things that decided him eventually to resign his commission, but of them his letters home make little or no mention. They are full, on the other hand, of descriptions of the beauties of the Island which, curious, odd, freakish and unexpected, held him as did those of no other place. The curious inconsistencies of the Creole nature also interested him, and he spent much of his spare time sketching and studying the people. Two ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... in the cabarets of Montmartre and the cafes chantants of provincial towns. They swarmed like bees—in blue coats and red trousers—upon those enormous troop trains which passed through Gournai and Pontoise, Rouen and Amiens. Rows of them, grinning down under peaks at freakish angles, dangled their legs over as they squatted on the roofs of the wooden trucks. They hung on to the iron ladders of the guards' vans. Sometimes six of them would be installed on the ledge behind the funnel ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... pursued the fugitives to Calais, but in vain. Shelley was now launched on a new life with a new bride, and—a freakish touch—accompanied as before by his bride's sister. The more his life changed, the more it was the same thing—the same plunging without forethought, the same disregard for all that is conventionally deemed necessary. His courage is often praised, and rightly, though we ought not ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... apple blossoms, and yielding ourselves, according to our age, to the influence of the mild night, Margaret was in the high spirits which accompany the expectation of bliss, without the sobering effect of its responsibility. Love itself is very serious, but the overture is full of freakish gayety. And it was all gayety that night. We all constituted ourselves a guard of honor to Miss Forsythe and Margaret when they went to their cottage, and there was a merry leave-taking in the moonlight. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... put the company through half a dozen movements of the manual of arms, next marching the company away in column of fours. The regulars, of course, responded like clockwork. They made a fine appearance as they started off under their freakish second lieutenant. Ere they had gone far Ferrers swung them into column of twos at the ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... the conclusion of the singing vigorously to applaud, would have shared his last possession, his ultimate crust, with that unknown benefactor of mankind. Indeed, though, the heart of Mr. Woods just now was full of loving kindness and capable of any freakish magnanimity. ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... and thought he would think her frightfully stupid; but in spite of this it was all very wonderful—the exquisite moonlit night, the shining sea, the tiny little wavelets swishing on the sand, the cool and freakish wind of night crooning in the stiff grasses on the crest of the dunes, the music sounding faintly and ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... gravely declared on the occasion to have rendered himself, by his assumption of independent power, liable to a capital penalty. Posterity will be inclined to transfer the actual condemnation to the commander-in-chief, whose freakish pique stopped only short of an outrage. But Essex had the fortune or misfortune to have all his errors popularly accounted virtues. In relating this occurrence, for instance, Vere, though he admits the matter was 'grievously aggravated by the most,' ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... Oxford, his mother went to reside there too, to look after her darling. One might have supposed that this would have involved Ruskin in ridicule, but he was petted and indulged by his fellow-undergraduates, who found his charm, his swift wit, his childlike waywardness, his freakish humour irresistible. Then he had a serious illness, and his first taste of misery; he was afraid of death, he hated the constraints of invalid life and the grim interruption to his boundless energies and plans. Then came his ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... childhood Wallace had sometimes reduced her to much this sort of frantic exasperation by his impregnable assumption that she was the white-souled little angel she looked. Sitting here in this very room he had goaded her into committing freakish misdemeanors. ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... for once I proved as decided and quicker than himself; recaptured the spoil, and—having saved this volume—never hazarded a second. With all this, I had never yet been able to arrest in his visits the freakish, friendly, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Nature is strangely freakish in her choice of instruments for noble purposes. Sometimes the delicate spirit of creative genius is housed in a veritable tenement of clay, so that what is within seems ever at war with what is without. At times the antagonism is more dreadful ...
— A Day with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy • George Sampson
... she asked, and in a moment she had left the room. Daniel stared at her as if he feared she had lost her mind. In a few minutes she came back. In the meantime she had put on a cloak that was much too short for her, and beneath which the loud, freakish skirt of her checkered ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... she turned into the garden. The shadows of the ilex-avenue chequered her straw bonnet, her prim black cape, her white skirt. There had been no meddling of freakish hands with her dark hair this morning. It was tightly plaited at the back of her head. Her plain sun-shade, her black kid gloves were neatness itself—middle-class, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... just warned me that the fleet is approaching a freakish asteroid cluster," he announced. "He estimates it to be of this size." Vidac swept his arm over the chart, taking in most of the space directly in front of their path. "To go around it, over it, or under it would mean altering the course of the whole fleet and losing about six days' ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... aims at ease and so the business man sits and loses out on the exercise his body and mind must have, and therefore the great crowd pays tribute to doctors, sanitariums, rest cures, fake tonics, worthless medicines, freakish diet fads, and crazy cults, isms, and discoveries, that claim to bring health by the easy, lazy, sitting, ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... operation for appendicitis, but he will not swill down dirty dopes. His office is high-toned and esthetic. Perhaps that is the main reason why he is so often reluctant to give it up and be cured. He may display morbid fears and fancies that border on lunacy, and he may do some freakish and atrocious things, but for all that he is usually a man of good points and perhaps superior attainments. Our cult is respectable and made up of gentlemen who seldom defile their mouths or stomachs with tobacco, cigarettes, impure words or ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... for the disablement of Russia, the battle against autocracy would have been won by now. As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin brother ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... regretful thought he hail'd in thee Chisholm, his long-lost friend, Mol Pomene! 35 But most of you, soft warblings, I complain! 'Twas ye that from the bee-hive of my brain Did lure the fancies forth, a freakish rout, And witch'd the air with dreams turn'd ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of a single sketch"—I had turned over the leaves and ascertained that there was nothing more in the book—"a single sketch by a wandering American artist who may have done it under hashish, or in the delirium of fever, or simply in order to gratify a freakish imagination. You can't, as a man of science, defend such a position ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Moses, at the very outset of one's career. Mervyn Quentock had chosen the latter and happier manner. In an age when many aspiring young men strive to advertise their wares by imparting to them a freakish imbecility, Quentock turned out work that was characterised by a pleasing delicate restraint, but he contrived to herald his output with a certain fanfare of personal eccentricity, thereby compelling an attention which might otherwise have strayed past his studio. In appearance he was ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... the glittering Irwell meandered, here, through nooks, "o'erhung wi' wildwoods, thickening green;" and there, among lush unshaded pastures; gathering on its way many a mild whispering brook, whose sunlit waters laced the green land with freakish lines of trembling gold. To me this ride is always interesting, so many points of historic interest line the way; but it was doubly delightful on that glorious July morning. And I never saw Fishergate, in Preston, look better than it did then. On my arrival there I called upon the ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... to this:—The story of Tess, in which attention is so urgently directed to the hand of Destiny, is not felt to be inevitable, but freakish. The story of Esther Waters, in which a poor servant-girl is allowed to grapple with her destiny and, after a fashion, to defeat it, is felt (or has been felt by one reader, at any rate) to be absolutely inevitable. To reconcile ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lighted, and literally stuffed with what were well termed 'curiosities of art.' I never before saw such queer carvings, such freakish pottery, such weird and utterly impossible bric-a-brac. At a table sat a flabby looking man with a short sandy beard. One glance told me that he was an habitual drunkard, for he had the sodden look that is unmistakable. But when he ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... of music—I now have a story to tell you of a certain freakish character; and then we are regaled with the musical portrayal of a series of Till's pranks. As an Epilogue, Strauss improvises on this opening theme as much as to say—you have listened to my musical story, now let us indulge in some reflections as to the fate of poor Till, for after all he was ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... with him an object on which to cultivate heavenly patience, and patience, says the Eastern proverb, is the key to content. The spirit of Xantippe seems to have taken possession of Mrs. Shurtleff immediately after her marriage. The freakish disrespect with which she used her meek consort was a heavy cross to bear at a period in New England when clerical dignity was at its highest sensitive point. Her devices for torturing the poor gentleman were inexhaustible. Now she lets his Sabbath ruffs go unstarched; ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... garden because it contains things to eat. I do not mean that a kitchen garden is ugly; a kitchen garden is often very beautiful. The mixture of green and purple on some monstrous cabbage is much subtler and grander than the mere freakish and theatrical splashing of yellow and violet on a pansy. Few of the flowers merely meant for ornament are so ethereal as a potato. A kitchen garden is as beautiful as an orchard; but why is it that the word "orchard" sounds as beautiful as the word "flower-garden," and yet also sounds more ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... forget my first glimpse of him. He strolled into the city room from his little domicile across the hall. A shabby, disreputable, out-at-elbows office coat was worn over his ultra-smart street clothes, and he was puffing at a freakish little pipe in the shape of a miniature automobile. He eyed me a moment from the doorway, a fantastic, elfin little figure. I thought that I had never seen so strange and so ugly a face as that of this little brown Welshman with his lank, black hair and his deep-set, ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... looked. Upon the page of folio, close to an illuminated capital, the black drop had flattened itself. Around the original sphere had been shed splashes of all conceivable shapes-rays, rockets, dotted lines, arrowheads, all the freakish impromptu of chaos. Next, the slope lending its aid, the channels had drained into one, and by this time a black rivulet was crawling downward to the margin. One or two readers near had risen, and now eyed me like examining magistrates. I waited for an outbreak, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... sent her away to school, but she wouldn't stay. She likes her home and she hates rules. She loves animals, and if she were a boy she would practice medicine. Being a woman and having no outlet for her energies, she is freakish. You saw the way ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... inanimate, are watchful and protean. From that silent world legions of grotesques move out of the shadows at a touch of sunlight, and then, when you turn on them in surprise, become thin and vague, either phantoms or smoke, and dissolve. The freakish light shows in little what happens in the long run to man's handiwork, for it accelerates the speed of change till change is fast enough for you to watch a town grow and die. You see that Dockland is unstable, is in flux, alters in ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... skittish. The French are more tolerant of those excesses than the English. It is a digression, but he who would fail can reach his end by not taking himself seriously. If he gives himself no important airs, whether out of a freakish humour, or real humility, depend upon it the public and the critics will take him at something under his own estimate. On the other hand, by copying the gravity of demeanour admired by Mr. Shandy in a celebrated ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... skirts when she swept across the threshold; dust on her snow-white gown—if the writers are to be believed in regard to its hue!—when she sat down in the only chair, and dust in her eyes when she flirted her fan. Fortunate was it for Straws that the Muse is a wayward, freakish gipsy; a straggler in attics; a vagrant of the streets; fortunately for him she is not at all the fine lady she has been depicted! Doubtless she has her own reasons for her vagaries; perhaps because ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... excess by the tongue of his stepmother, too active- minded not to indulge in freakish sports and experiments in life very astounding to commonplace minds, sometimes when in dire distress even helping himself to his unpaid allowance from his father's mails, and always with buoyant high spirits and unfailing drollery ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... from his chestnut crown to the tips of his unspoiled toes. Best of all, it was involuntary, born of no external effort or motive, but simply the outflashing of some wild, delicious thought that was as untrammelled and freakish as the ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of course, expected to take care of Crookhorn,—Kjersti and she both thought she ought to do that; but it had proved to be impossible. Crookhorn had become so freakish that sometimes they almost thought her out of her wits. In the building shared by the sheep and goats she ranged back and forth from wall to wall, knocking against the sheep and the other goats so hard as she went that their ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud
... colleges and halls, in ancient days, When learning, virtue, piety, and truth Were precious, and inculcated with care, There dwelt a sage called Discipline. His head, Not yet by time completely silvered o'er, Bespoke him past the bounds of freakish youth, But strong for service still, and unimpaired. His eye was meek and gentle, and a smile Played on his lips, and in his speech was heard Paternal sweetness, dignity, and love. The occupation ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... it, as women begin most things, without thought and a due weighing of consequences. And now you propose to drop it in the same freakish manner. Isn't ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... the invitation of Mr. Thomas Plunkett of Enniskillen, went to investigate. He got a full account from the farmer of the freakish tricks which were continually being played in the house, and gives a graphic account of what he himself observed: "After the children, except the boy, had gone to bed, Maggie lay down on the bed without undressing, so that her hands and feet could be observed. The ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... Nameless was the only one of the long row that did not buzz with activity all that day, which was one assigned to preparation for the contests of the morrow. All the other aeroplane hives fairly radiated activity. Freakish-looking men hovered about their weird helicopters and lovingly polished brass and tested engines. The reek of gasolene and burning lubricants hung heavily over the field. Reporters darted here and there followed by panting photographers bearing elephantine cameras and bulging boxes ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... nib. They are separated by being passed through revolving gauze drums, the holes in which are the same size and shape as the germs, so that the germs pass through whilst the nib is retained. If a freakish carpenter were to try separating shop-floor sweepings, consisting of a jumble of chunks of wood (nib), shavings (shell) and nails (germ) by sieving through a grid-iron, he would find that not only the nails passed through but also some sawdust and fine shavings. So in the above machine ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... neckerchief came out of the cabin and stared up at the rigging as though out of habit, and yawned. Then he strolled ashore. His cap was on the back of his head, and between his teeth was a new pipe. His face was full of freakish merriment, and he walked with a swing of the hips. As he came up to Pelle he swayed to and fro a few times and then bumped into him. "Oh, excuse me!" he said, touching his cap. "I thought it was a scratching-post, ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo |
