"Incoherency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sufficient to lead a man into a gallop, requiring two relays, at least, of fresh readers,—we in England—who know him best by his worst book, the book against Priests, &c., which has been most circulated—know him disadvantageously. That book is a rhapsody of incoherence. M. Michelet was light-headed, I believe, when he wrote it: and it is well that his keepers overtook him in time to intercept a second part. But his History of France is quite another thing. A man, in whatsoever craft he sails, cannot stretch away out of sight when he is linked ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... nature of that necessity he stammered himself into utter incoherence. No physical impossibility stood in the way of his whim. Stevie could have managed easily to keep pace with the infirm, dancing horse without getting out of breath. But his sister withheld her consent decisively. "The idea! Whoever heard of such a thing! Run after ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... third of them were written on, and these in an unformed hand which yet was eloquent of much. A paragraph would start with every letter drawn as carefully as in a child's copy-book; would gradually straggle and let its words fall about, as though fainting by the way; and so would tail into incoherence, to be picked up—next day, no doubt—by a new effort, which, after marching for half a dozen lines, in its turn collapsed. There were lacunae, too, when the shaking hand had achieved but a few weak zigzags before it desisted. ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... spite of many obstacles, he was taking the first steps in that direction. An initial difficulty lay in the mental aberrations of the King, whose conduct still caused intense anxiety or annoyance.[682] Scarcely a day passed without a lapse into incoherence or violence. Moreover, his conversation often showed a lack of discrimination, being the same to the Queen, the physicians, or the servants. He made the most capricious changes, turning off the Queen's favourite coachman, and making grooms ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... itself was not real because, in it, Eben's usually calm face was distorted into a demoniac frenzy and his voice quavered and ranted into a high-pitched incoherence. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... the clock by which he had started was fast, and he was home in good time. The circumstance tended to render his story more worthy of credence than it might otherwise have proved. But his evident terror, and the very incoherence of his narrative, told in ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... idea of the puking with which this old diplomatic idiot inspires me in piling up his stupidity on the dung- hill of bourgeoisie! Is it possible to treat philosophy, religion, peoples, liberty, the past and future, history, and natural history, everything and more yet, with an incoherence more inept and more childish! He seems to me as everlasting as ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... Moreover, it was full of superstition and supernaturalism, which he could not abide. He was in his studio after his first perusal, and he turned to an Apollo which he was carving. The god looked at him with such overpowering, balanced sanity, such a contrast to Christian incoherence and the rhapsodies of the letter to the Romans, that he was half ashamed of himself for meddling with it. He opened his Lucretius. Here was order and sequence; he knew where he was; he was at home. Was all this nought, were the accumulated ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... he was always cunning and crafty toward his enemies, he never had a friend that he did not use to his profit. Volatile in his fitful changes toward men and movements, rudderless as he often seemed to be in the incoherence of his ideas and of his policies, there nevertheless burned in his soul throughout life a great flaming, and perhaps redeeming, hatred of tyranny. At times he would lead his little bands into open warfare upon it, dreaming always that the world once in motion would follow him ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... the building, then the accessories, economically and prudently, with a view to adapt each section of the edifice to the support of the section following after it. No sentence demands any less attention than another, nor is there any in which one may not at every step verify the connection or incoherence of the parts.[3221]—The procedure used in arranging a simple sentence also governs that of the period, the paragraph and the series of paragraphs; it forms the style as it forms the syntax. Each small edifice occupies a distinct position, and but one, in the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... very marrow of my bones; words which I would not, dared not believe, had any meaning or method in their madness—but which entered into my own brain, and preyed there like the devouring of a fire. There was a truth in those ravings—a reason in that incoherence—and my cup was ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... more forlorn and persecuted than I now am?" asked the peddler, with that wild incoherence which often crossed his manner. "But I have promised one to save you, and to him I have never yet broken ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... touching his suddenly dampened forehead with his handkerchief, and attempting to set his thoughts in some sort of order. He could not; the incoherence held him speechless, dazed, under the magic of this superb young being instinct with ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... Sir Charles was no better the next day, nor the day after. He brooded for hours at a time, and, when he talked, there was an incoherence in his discourse; above all, he seemed incapable of talking long on any subject without coming back to the fatal one of his childlessness; and, when he did return to this, it was sure to make him either deeply dejected or else violent against ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... of his incoherence she was able to translate, is a question; but in his eyes and voice there was something simpler to divine; and she stood very still while his roused emotions swept her till her heart leaped up and every vein in her ran ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... the populace; the fortress of the Carmine was stormed by the French; and, before the last struggle for life and death commenced in the centre of the city, the leaders of the lazzaroni listened to words of friendship which Championnet addressed to them in their own language, and, with the incoherence of a half-savage race, escorted his soldiers with cries of joy to the Church of St. Januarius, which Championnet promised to respect ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... The earth, the sky, the rocks, the trees, the men and women of Burne-Jones are not those of this world; but they are themselves a world, consistent with itself, and having therefore its own reality. Charged with the beauty and with the strangeness of dreams, it has nothing of a dream's incoherence. Yet it is a dreamer always whose nature penetrates these works, a nature out of sympathy with struggle and strenuous action. Burne-Jones's men and women are dreamers too. It was this which, more than anything ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... and urged him forward to new fields of action and new fields of thought. The temper of his soul assumed almost a revolutionary cast. 'I am a Mosaic Radical,' he exclaimed; and, indeed, in the exaltation of his energies, the incoherence of his conceptions, the democratic urgency of his desires, combined with his awe-inspiring aspect and his venerable age, it was easy enough to trace the mingled qualities of the patriarch, the prophet, and the ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... last night, and the air was impregnated to choking point with smoke and evil exhalations. The noisy times on Saturdays come at 2 p.m., and from ten till closing time. In the afternoon a few labourers fuddle themselves before they go home to dinner, and there is a good deal of slavering incoherence to be heard. From seven to eight in the evening the men drop in, and a vague murmur begins; the murmur grows louder and more confused as time passes, and by ten o'clock our company are in full cry, and all the pipes are in full blast. When I stole quietly in, I thought ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... never was a more beautiful bride. All brides are beautiful, more or less, but this one was more. Isaiah, who had been favored with a peep at the rehearsal on the previous evening, was found later on by Shadrach in the kitchen in a state of ecstatic incoherence. ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... various parts, after a separate literary life, having been put together, perhaps in the eighth century, perhaps later, by an Anglo-Saxon Christian, who added new discrepancies in trying to adapt the old tale to the faith of his day. No need to expatiate on the incoherence of a poem formed of such elements. Its heroes are at once pagan and Christian; they believe in Christ and in Weland; they fight against the monsters of Scandinavian mythology, and see in them the descendants of Cain; historical facts, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... like throwing a match into the powder magazine. It blows up the whole arena. This is exactly what scientific philosophers do when they are driven into a corner and convicted of incoherence. They at once drag in the mind and talk of entities in the mind or out of the mind as the case may be. For natural philosophy everything perceived is in nature. We may not pick and choose. For us the red ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... fight only like a cat, her head as it were turned aside, her fur upon end, stealthily moving paw by paw, always keeping her front to the foe, but seeking for escape—until the pride perilously supporting her temper gave way and she dissolved into incoherence and quivering sobs. ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... man in the county, had lost his mind, and all for the sake of that girl who had managed in some mysterious way to give him the slip. "Gone up in the air!" Poor Rufus. He had gone mad. She managed that night to get an interview in the woodshed with the grief-stricken Pete, and in spite of his incoherence and renewed sobs she learned what had happened. The dwarf believed that his goddess had been kidnapped. It never occurred to his dull brain to connect her disappearance with the letters he had conveyed ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... surprised at the incoherence of what I write. Diverse emotions inflame me; thoughts at times assail me truly worthy of my immortal soul; but at times also I fall into a lamentable state of dejection, and I am reminded of the weak and degenerate characters whose baseness you have painted to me ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... supplied by Mr. Payne to remedy the incoherence of the text. Moslems are bound to see True Believers decently buried and the poor often beg alms for the funeral. Here the tale resembles the opening of Hajji Baba by Mr. Morier, that admirable picture of Persian ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... arose in the prak@rti, and as a result of that a process of unequal aggregation of the gu@nas in varying proportions took place, which brought forth the creation of the manifold. Prak@rti, the state of perfect homogeneity and incoherence of the gu@nas, thus gradually evolved and became more and more determinate, differentiated, heterogeneous, and coherent. The gu@nas are always uniting, separating, and uniting again [Footnote ref 2]. Varying ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... three or four languages, and was successful in most things he undertook, though he seems to have been incapable of remaining constant to anything for long. As a business man he wasted his capital, and even in the execution of his crimes he showed frivolity and incoherence. At Lyons, he hired a carriage, in which he placed the corpse of Gouffre and after driving about the streets with Gabrielle Bompard like a madman, left the body of his victim in a spot near ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... uppermost. The order of our thoughts should be the order of our writing.) Goes he muzzled, or aperto ore? Are his intellects sound, or does he wander a little in his conversation? You cannot be too careful to watch the first symptoms of incoherence. The first illogical snarl he makes, to St. Luke's with him! All the dogs here are going mad, if you believe the overseers; but I protest they seem to me very rational and collected. But nothing is so deceitful as mad people to those who are not used to them. Try him with hot water. If ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the details of this iniquitous tariff would only enrage us to a point of incoherence. Perhaps a short list of some of the things you will have to do without under the new arrangement will ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... mannerisms. These faults and mannerisms he has latterly pushed to greater and greater extremes while neglecting his great gift, each work being more chaotic and fragmentary in composition, more hideous in type, more affected and emptier in execution, until he has produced marvels of mushiness and incoherence hitherto undreamed of and has set up as public monuments fantastically mutilated figures with broken legs or heads knocked off. Now, in his old age, he is producing shoals of drawings the most extraordinary of which few are permitted ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence, an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy, an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... them in such a way as to make them original, and this of itself shows a wonderful faculty of invention and constitutes an inexhaustible source of pleasure. This pleasure is all the more pleasurable because the matter is always presented in a thoroughly workmanlike form. The shapelessness, the incoherence, the necessity for endless annotation and patching together, which mar so many even of the finest Elizabethan plays, have no place in Beaumont and Fletcher. Their dramatic construction is almost narrative in its clear and easy flow, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury |
