"Ironic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... real condition with a marvellous instinct, or learns it with curious skill. The London tradesman is one of the keenest judges of human nature extant; and if a tradesman, how much more a bailiff? In reply to the ironic question, "What's a hundred and fifty pounds to you?" Walker, collecting himself, answers, "It is an infamous imposition, and I owe the money no more than you do; but, nevertheless, I shall instruct my lawyers to pay it in the course of the morning: under protest, ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to multiply these instances. Our own knowledge supplies them by the score. Our personal lives are full of them. God's Will, God's Love, God's Mercy, become strangely ironic forces, grim beyond any open enmity. They remind us of the "love," the "pity," the "mercy," in which the orthodox sent the heretic to the hangman or the stake, destroying the body to save ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... was rich and varied, and it was an ironic caprice which made him refuse to write in that language. I doubt, though, whether he would have composed with ease in any tongue, for he found it hard to concentrate, and his small stock of verse was ...
— The Garden of Bright Waters - One Hundred and Twenty Asiatic Love Poems • Translated by Edward Powys Mathers
... the Tertasse Gate, and the Monnaye. The Porte Neuve is cut off, and at our mercy; it will be taken when we give the signal. Beyond it four thousand men are waiting to enter. We hold Geneva in our grip at last—at last!" And in an accent half tragic, half ironic, he declaimed:— ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... irritated him, and he cultivated their society and that of women only in so far as they were essential to his deeper understanding of life. His code was noblesse oblige and he privately damned it as a superstition foisted upon him by his ancestors. He was sentimental and ironic, passionate and indifferent, frank and subtle, proud and democratic, with a warm capacity for friendship and none whatever for intimacy, a hard worker with a strong taste for loafing— in the open country, book in hand. He prided himself upon his iron will and turned uneasily ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... Guy. They talked of the dead to her, which Kate never did; it being a relation in which Kate could but mutely listen. She couldn't indeed too often say to herself that if that was what marriage did to you——! It may easily be guessed, therefore, that the ironic light of such reserves fell straight across the field of Marian's warning. "I don't quite see," she answered, "where, in particular, it strikes you that my danger lies. I'm not conscious, I assure you, of the least 'disposition' to throw ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... surnamed Marmet the Etruscan. Neither he nor any one else knew a word of that language, the last vestige of which is lost. Schmoll said continually to Marmet: 'You do not know Etruscan, my dear colleague; that is the reason why you are an honorable savant and a fair-minded man.' Piqued by his ironic praise, Marmet thought of learning a little Etruscan. He read to his colleague a memoir on the part played by flexions in the ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... Gladstone, once more chancellor of the exchequer, again produced a budget. Semi-ironic cheers met his semi-ironic expression of an expectation that he would be asked the question: what had become of the calculations of 1853? The succession duty proved a woeful disappointment, and instead of producing two million pounds, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... walked down the street, lost in the midst of the crowds hurrying about me. It was all over, gone like one of those old dreams of my childhood. I could never forget it—never forget Selda—but it was gone. It had never existed. It had been cruel of Melbourne, cruel and ironic, to put Selda in the dream. But perhaps he had never realized that it would ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... rank, is no fantasy, but a quite common occurrence, and indeed to some extent an inevitable one, because the English are extremely particular in selecting their butlers, whilst they do not select their barons at all, taking them as the accident of birth sends them. The consequences include much ironic comedy. For instance, we have in England a curious belief in first rate people, meaning all the people we do not know; and this consoles us for the undeniable secondrateness of the people we do know, besides saving the credit of aristocracy as an institution. ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... rumor man appeared in the door of the smoking-room he was welcomed with ironic cheers. But he was not discouraged. He would go outside and stand in the rain while he hatched a new rumor, and then, in great excitement, dash back to share it. War levels all ranks, and the passengers gathered in the smoking-room playing solitaire, sipping muddy Turkish coffee, ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... neighbourhood. It seemed as though the demon builder of the fantastic town, sporting with man's architectural ideals before his appearance on the earth, had hewn the red and yellow rocks above the Dourbie into the ironic semblance of feudal towers ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... next step is to become a small power itself. England exhibited this symptom of decadence very badly in the war with the Transvaal; but America exhibited it worse in the war with Spain. There was exhibited more sharply and absurdly than anywhere else the ironic contrast between the very careless choice of a strong line and the very careful choice of a weak enemy. America added to all her other late Roman or Byzantine elements the element of the Caracallan ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Pan had silken cords to draw him. He had always averted his eyes from the god—that is to say, within reason. Yet now Daniel, on perhaps a couple of fine mornings a week, in full Square, with Fan sitting behind on the cold stones, and Mr. Critchlow ironic at his door in a long white apron, would entertain Samuel Povey for half an hour with Pan's most intimate lore, and Samuel Povey would not blench. He would, on the contrary, stand up to Daniel like ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... Food they had none, for no purpose was to be served by mitigating their last agonies. No shelter either, for the sight of buildings might delay the final phase. But high above the doomed there floated the flag of the Federation, on a lofty pole, a touch of ironic sentimentality that had commended itself to some ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... writing, he looked from the stone face to the face of flesh with fascinated repulsion—the man and the "familiar" were so ghastly alike. Then he suddenly understood that this was a quaint double jest of the eccentric physician's—his grim fling at his lack of physical charm, his ironic jeer at ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... father to be a Roundhead, as had every good Liberal of that day. What was to be done about it? He took the Lays and rewrote them in an excellent imitation of Aytoun, but on the opposite side. In view of his own later developments such a line as "Drive the trembling Papists backwards" has an ironic humour. But one wonders what Aytoun himself would have made of a small boy who took his rhythm and sometimes his very words, turned his hero into a traitor ("false Montrose") and his traitor Argyll into a hero! I have ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... a smile on his lips as he saw them fade into the yawning gulf of moonlit distance,—going in different directions toward their ranches—an ironic smile, softened by ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... they wouldn't take my word for my blameless past. They told me to keep my story for trial when they took me over to the court. Meanwhile they gave me a free lodging in their pen. Miss Arundel—" Hilliard dropped his ironic tone and spoke in a low, tense voice of child-like horror. His face stiffened and paled. "That was awful. To be locked in. Not to be able to get fresh breath in your lungs. Not to be able to go where you please, when you please. I can't tell you what it's like ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... was making up, not only for others but for herself, a sham person who did not exist. That Nan found infinitely oppressive. So did Pamela, but Pamela was more tolerant and sympathetic and less ill-tempered than Nan, and observed the ways of others with quiet, ironic humour, saying nothing unkind. Pamela, when she didn't like a way of talking—when Rosalind, for instance, was being malicious or indecent or both—would skilfully carry the talk somewhere else. She could be a rapid and good talker, and could tell story after story, lightly and coolly, till ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... hulk, so heavy and uncontesting that its foundering seemed at hand. The waters poured back and forth at her waist, as though holding her body captive for the assaults of the active seas which came over her broken bulwarks, and plunged ruthlessly about. There was something ironic in the indifference of her defenceless body to these unending attacks. It mocked this white and raging post-mortem brutality, and gave her a dignity that was cold and superior to all the eternal powers could now do. She pitched helplessly head first into a ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... Dordess had already been apprised of Evan's coming. Evan had only to look at him to know that. The ironic smile of the man of the world was on his lips, in his eyes the resentful hatred of a youth for his successful rival. The package of bonds was already done up and waiting, it appeared. With scarcely a glance at Corinna's note, which Evan offered ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... to stand confessed as poesy; and many a reader may prefer these first flights before Daudet set his Pegasus to toil in the mill of realism. The "Pope's Mule," for instance, is not this a marvel of blended humor and fantasy? And the "Elixir of Father Gaucher," what could be more naively ironic? Like a true Southerner, Daudet delights in girding at the Church; and these tales bristle with jibes at ecclesiastical dignitaries; but his stroke is never malignant and there is no barb to his shaft nor ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... doubtless his own fault, and yet this finding of himself alone at forty was hardly what he had intended. There was something actually comic about it. That for which he had striven had been secured, but for what? Success unshared is of all things ironic, and soon not even General would be here to greet him when the day's work was done. He blew out a thin thread of smoke and followed its curvings with half-shut eyes. He had made money, made it honestly, and it had brought him that which it brought others, ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... the smoking-room. He himself mixed the cocktails. He talked to me. We discovered that we had mutual acquaintances. Never shall I forget that face, that ironic and distant look, that sad and melodious voice. Ah! Colonel, gentlemen, I don't know what they may say at the Geographic Office, or in the posts of the Soudan.... There can be nothing in it but a horrible suspicion. Such a man, capable of such a ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... more briskly, but he refused to accommodate himself to her pace. The undercurrent of resentment in his soul gathered force. He must justify his boast to his brother, for one thing; and for another, his face smarted from her mother's light, ironic whip. ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... really, though. He memorized the energy-mass equation in an attempt to justify his new status in life, but he hasn't the remotest notion of what it means. It's ironic in a way that Pfleugersville should have been discovered by someone with an IQ ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
... Schlegels than to Novalis, with his life-and-death consecrations. His absurd play-within-a-play, Puss in Boots (1797), is delicious in its bizarre ragout of satirical extravaganzas, where the naive and the ironic lie side by side, and where the pompous seriousness of certain ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... ironic bark. "Very logical," he said; "but how often does logic have anything to do with the organization of social groups and governments? You're not thinking. Put yourself in founder Giroldi's place. Imagine that you have glimpsed the great idea of the Twenties and ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... phase of human evolution that does not please him. I mean the critic who drags his victim back to Aristotle or Matthew Arnold and slays him on a text whose application Aristotle or Arnold would have been the first to deny. I mean the teacher who by ironic thrust and visible contempt destroys the faith of youth in the literary present without imparting more than a pallid interest in the past. I mean the essayist who in 1911 described Masefield as an unsound ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... difficult to read at the best of times, and undecipherable in hard pencil on thin paper, handed the letter over to the faithful Bakkus, who read it aloud with a running commentary of ironic humour. This Andrew did ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... and shivering a bit with fear of the man, she stopped short, midway down the ramp to the "lower level," and momentarily contemplated throwing herself upon his mercy and crawling out of it all with whatever grace she might; but his ironic and skeptical smile provoked her ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... sure she had given him no hint—at the part Paula was playing in their domestic drama. It had come pat upon what he had told her of the lives her father had plucked from the hand of death, the ironic, "he saved others, himself he can not save," hanging unspoken in ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... about the jongleurs; and one of not the least amusing[134] deals with the half-clumsy, half-satiric boasts of two members of the order, who misquote the titles of their repertoire, make by accident or intention ironic comments on its contents, and in short do not magnify their office in a very ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... had been the most admired Shylock of his century. His specialty was the performance of character parts, often dialect roles, either broadly comic or cruel and ironic. The central figure of this, his best comedy, is such a part. It combines those features that the author could portray so effectively, the broad dialect, the callous selfishness, the hypocrisy, the passionate resistance ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... Ellen, "I'll never feel sure that Caleb Barter is dead. We should have gone out that morning when he forgot to take his whip and we thought the vengeful apes had slain him. We should have proved it to our own satisfaction. It would be an ironic jest, characteristic of Barter, to allow us to ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... In ironic response to the pleas of the Regulators, the Governor of North Carolina summoned a force of one thousand militia men and led them into the western settlements. At the end of the day, May 16, 1771, two hundred and fifty ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... limbo of meditation, showed himself extremely gracious to him. Renouard guessed in him a man whom an incurable habit of investigation and analysis had made gentle and indulgent; inapt for action, and more sensitive to the thoughts than to the events of existence. Withal not crushed, sub-ironic without a trace of acidity, and with a simple manner which put people at ease quickly. They had a long conversation on the terrace commanding an extended view of ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... she had laid down and turned it. His eyes examined the title page. Their pathos lightened and softened; it became compassion; they smiled at her with a little pitiful smile, half tender, half ironic, as if they said, "Poor Gwenda, is that ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... books is exclusively ironic. Never does the writer overtly state that he seeks to drag down a system which he hates by laughter. In Emmanuel Burden, that extraordinary book, the severity of the method is extreme, almost overwhelming. The author supposes himself to be writing a biography especially designed ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... and more gentle; but Lady Mary had qualities all her own. She had powers of observation and the gift of description, which qualities are especially to be remarked in the letters she wrote when abroad with her husband on his Mission to the Porte. She had an ironic wit which gave point to the many society scandals she narrated, a happy knack of gossip, and a style so easy as to ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... prince of the Senate is invested with the tribunitian power. M. Anatole France is something of a Socialist; and in that respect he seems to depart from his sceptical philosophy. But as an illustrious statesman, now no more, a great prince too, with an ironic mind and a literary gift, has sarcastically remarked in one of his public speeches: "We are all Socialists now." And in the sense in which it may be said that we all in Europe are Christians that is true enough. To many of us Socialism is merely an emotion. ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... creeping with bent head into the tobacco smoke. His clear, cold, critical eyes roved about looking for a seat. He paid no attention to the armless man, who jestingly shouted an ironic remark to him. With cool politeness he seated himself at the greatest possible distance from Stoss, drew a pouch of tobacco from his pocket, and filled a short Dutch pipe. Frederick's immediate thought was, ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... in his highly-colored prose. And yet, although the finest of his novels, The Crock of Gold (1912), contains more wild phantasy and quaint imagery than all his volumes of verse, his Insurrections (1909) and The Hill of Vision (1912) reveal a rebellious spirit that is at once hotly ironic and coolly whimsical. ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... advantage as a source of life and experience, but to the enjoyment on its own side of a sort of illustrational virtue or glory. This appearance of universal assimilation—often indeed by incalculable ironic reactions which were of the very essence of the restless young intelligence rejoicing in its gaiety—made each part of his rich consciousness, so rapidly acquired, cling, as it were, to the company of all the other parts, so as at once neither to miss any touch of the luck (one keeps coming ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... and looked at her sister. She thought Gudrun so CHARMING, so infinitely charming, in her softness and her fine, exquisite richness of texture and delicacy of line. There was a certain playfulness about her too, such a piquancy or ironic suggestion, such an untouched reserve. Ursula admired her with all ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... considerable height. The parrot looked at Hermione coldly, with round, observant eyes whose pupils kept contracting and expanding with a monotonous regularity. She felt as if it had a soul that was frigidly ironic. Its pertinacious glance chilled and repelled her, and she fancied it was reflected in the faces of the ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... a growing seriousness and acerbity. Partly the change was owing to disappointment: life had not become so highly cultured, literature had not prospered so much, nor displayed so broad a diffusion of intelligence and taste, as had been expected. Pope's Dunciad, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and ironic satire on the state of literature under "Augustus" (George II, the "snuffy old drone from the German hive"), brilliantly express this indignation with the intellectual and literary ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... huddled shoulder to shoulder in the cramping quarters. An ironic picture came to me of the crowding masses of Quabos stuffed into the protection of the outer cave, waiting the outcome of the fight being waged by their warriors. Here were we in a similar circumstance, waiting for the battle to be decided. Though there was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... forget the Christmas I spent out in Nebraska," Mr. Lamson was saying. He was probably the most travelled man in town. Every time he told a story, he went a little farther West. (Harry Squires disconcerted him on one occasion by asking in his most ironic manner if he didn't think it would be a good idea to settle in California when he got there, and Mr. Lamson, after thinking it over, stopped his subscription to The Banner.) "Yes sir; that was a terrible winter. I don't know as I ever told you about ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... omen, wasn't it? Five minutes she and Mr. Canning had talked, over so-called horses' necks provided by his sedate host, and before the end of that time she had perceived an interest dawning in the young man's somewhat ironic eyes. With the usual of his sex one could have counted pretty definitely on the thing's being followed up. However, Mr. Canning, the difficult, had merely saluted her fascinatingly, and retired to re-maroon himself in the rural villa of his kinsmen, the Allison Paynes, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... short tale; on the other hand it was invaded by a flood of sentiment. An irritated and irritating sensuality could accommodate itself either to sentiment or to philosophy. Voltaire's tales are, in narrative form, criticisms of belief or opinion which scintillate with ironic wit. His disciple, Marmontel, would "render virtue amiable" in his Contes Moraux (1761), and cure the ravage of passion with a canary's song. His more ambitious Belisaire seems to a modern reader a masterpiece in the genre ennuyeux. His ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... groaning inwardly, and unable to deny this chronometry, felt that an ironic Providence was punishing him for his attentions ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... of reality, and yet in speech of the simplest, become in spirit the sheer quality of loveliness. For, in these unobtrusive pages, there is nothing shunned which makes the spectacle of life parade its dark and painful, its ironic and cynical burdens, as well as those images with happy and exquisite aspects. With a broader and deeper background of experience and environment, which by some divine special privilege belongs to the poetic imagination, it is easier to set apart and contrast these opposing words ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... been!" and a thin ironic smile hovered on his lips— "And you carried it off well! But—the poor child!—what an ordeal for her! You can hardly have felt it so keenly, being seasoned to hypocrisy for so many years!" Her eyes flashed up at him indignantly. He raised his hand ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... can describe the uproar which arose: the anguish of the Gorgonites—the shrieks, jeers, cheers, ironic cries of "Swipes!" etc., which proceeded from the less genteel but ...
— The Bedford-Row Conspiracy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... couple of blood-brothers," assented Maggard with an ironic flash in his eyes, "an' now Blood-brother Bas, go over ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... is a singular mixture. It is half-ironic gaiety and half-melancholy. But it has not the depressing sadness of the Russian Quarter. Its temper is more akin to that of the Irish colony that has settled around Southwark and Bermondsey. There is sadness, but no ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... would detect had convinced her that Everard's interest in Rhoda was awakening a serious response; and this discovery, though it could not surprise her, caused an obscure pang which she attributed to impersonal regret, to mere natural misgiving. For some days she thought of Rhoda in an ironic, half-mocking spirit. Then came Bella's suicide, and the conversation in which Rhoda exhibited a seeming heartlessness, the result, undoubtedly, of grave emotional disturbance. To her own astonishment, Mary was ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... seemed possible to her in her simple reasoning, was to prevent such catastrophes for the future. It was not that pity was misplaced when shipwreck came, nor that charity ever failed. She understood, without being conscious of it, the ironic severity of Jesus, who would have no sudden pity and heart-searching on account of His poor. He had come into the world for righteousness and for judgment, and the judgment and righteousness both declared, not at the time of disaster ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... friend, and whose chief attraction lay in his great vivacity and animated features, he had led a wild and dissipated life in which play, drink, passionate love affairs, and constant and prompt duelling had rung the changes. Ceremonious politeness, an ironic and pedantic coldness, which testified to bold self-confidence, combined with a very hot temper, formed the chief characteristics of this personage and natures akin to his. Degelow's wildness and passion were lent a curious diabolical charm by the ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... fond of them. And when the wonderful view (mentioned in Baedeker—'fatiguing but repaying')—was disclosed to him after the effort of the climb, he had doubtless felt the existence of some great, dignified principle crowning the chaotic strivings, the petty precipices, and ironic little dark chasms of life. This was as near to religion, perhaps, as his practical ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... would be summed up in the remembrance that he was the old man who bankrupted himself to save his son from the gallows. He knew that this very house, which remained as the last refuge, was mortgaged again as when his father and mother had come into it before he was born. The ironic ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... comic "embarras". That the persians the heathens worshipped as gods existed, and that they were men and women false and powerful, Saxo plainly believes. He has not Snorre's appreciation of the humorous side of the mythology. He is ironic and scornful, but without the kindly, naive ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... roughly. When I got here, the only light burning was in Simon's study—otherwise the house was in darkness, which seemed to me an ironic commentary on my foolish gesture! The study light went out almost immediately, but I lingered on. I sat down on a fallen log in the deep shadow of those trees—there, to the right of the path—and began to think ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... much surprise has been expressed that Chopin should have chosen such a modest and apparently inappropriate name for them as "studies." Now, I have a theory on this subject: I believe it was partly an ironic intention which induced Chopin to call some of his most inspired pieces "studies." Pianists have always been too much in the habit of looking at their art from purely technical or mechanical points of view. They looked for mere five-finger ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... humour discovered a certain ironic aspect in his position as the dictator of this famous New England magazine. The fact that his manner was impatiently energetic and somewhat startling to the placid atmosphere of Park Street was not the thing ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... a good deal more gesticulation than usual, and throughout his speech the ironic smile on Sweeny's face was a masterpiece of ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... a popular bill, too," Mr. Schemer was saying, with a smile of ironic appreciation at the thought of demagogues advocating it. "We should have one of Lawler's friends ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... glee-fully attentive audience. Many of his sallies I lost; those I caught were excellent. His trick was often to begin by taking some one urbanely and caressingly by the chin and complimenting him on the intelligenza della sua fisionomia. I kept near him as long as I could; for he struck me as a real ironic artist, cherishing a disinterested, and yet at the same time a motived and a moral, passion for the grotesque. I should have liked, however—if indeed I shouldn't have feared—to see him the next morning, or when he unmasked that night over his hard-earned supper in a smoky trattoria. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the Wellanders next heard of her, she was the wife of a well-to-do retired merchant, to whom she had borne three children while she was merely a servant and his first wife still lived. Keith had often overheard his parents speak of Agda's phenomenal rise with ironic smiles, but he didn't care for anything except her continued inclination ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... now to me. "They are here, Jac Hallen. Almost here. And I am at their mercy." His tone was ironic; then it hardened into grimness. He was addressing me, but I knew it was ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... stigmatised pictorially in the plate known to collectors as the "large Masquerade Ticket." As verse this performance is worthless, and it is not very forcibly on the side of good manners; but the ironic dedication has a certain touch of Fielding's later fashion. Two other poetical pieces, afterwards included in the Miscellanies of 1743, also bear the date of 1728. One is A Description of U—n G— (alias New Hog's ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... above, a rickety phonograph was at work; and somewhere below, a piano was being mauled; and somewhere else a ukelele was being thumped and a doleful singer was snarling "The Beach at Waikiki." This racket was their only epithalamium. It was more like the "chivaree" with which ironic crowds tormented bridal couples ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... way, old fellow—lean hard on my arm," died away by insensible degrees, a stray beam of the setting sun fell upon and illuminated behind them in the little plateau, an expressive and colossal bust, with great brow beneath long swept-back hair, and powerful and ironic lip—the bust of ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... can do?" he demanded, looking down at her with something grimly ironic in his eyes. She steadied ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... the man, with ironic emphasis. "That is good counsel, seeing there isn't enough lard in the house for the frying of an egg; yes, and no ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... a failure; he stood for nothing in the world of achievement; for all the difference that his going made, he might never have been born. Then a thought as startling as the tangible appearance of some ironic, grinning imp flashed to his mind. Who was he, Bruce Burt, to criticise his partner, Slim? What more had he accomplished? How much more difference would his own death make in anybody's life? His mother's labored words came back with painful distinctness: "I've ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... was his force? An ironic question. The man groveled because he was powerless to resist, and (line 10) because resistance might bring even ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... for being a little college has passed. We must take our place as one of the important colleges—I make bold to say one of the important universities—of the Middle West. But we have to enlarge before we can grow. (answering HOLDEN's smile) Yes, it is ironic, but that's the way of it. It was a nice thing to open the anniversary with fifty thousand from the steel works—but fifty thousand dollars—nowadays—to an institution? (waves the fifty thousand aside) They'll do more later, I think, when they see us coming into our ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... Mills commented with ironic emphasis. "He'll be broke in a week and the first camp that pays his fare out will get him. There's no fool like a logger. Strong in the back and weak in ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... in her momentary silence a hint of acceptance of it as a practical contribution to their problem, and there were indeed several lights in which it could be considered. Mrs. Brook, on a quick survey, selected the ironic. "I see, I see. I might by the same law arrange somehow that Lady Fanny should find herself in love with Edward. That would 'prove' HER purity. And you could be quite at ease," she laughed—"he wouldn't ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... flickering up on her white face must be distorting her swollen features and exaggerating the dark rings about her eyes. She snatched up the paper, her reassurance dissolving under his pitiless gaze, in which she seemed to read the grim perception of her state, and the ironic recollection of the day when, in that very room, he had offered to compel Harney to marry her. His look seemed to say that he knew she had taken the paper to write to her lover, who had left her as he had warned ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... I'se believe ye kindly meant it: I sud be laith to think ye hinted Ironic satire, sidelins sklented On my poor Musie; Tho' in sic phraisin terms ye've penn'd it, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... years, it is true, actor and actress have been treated increasingly as human beings, less as puppets who walk about on the stage. This volume contains two stories illustrating the statement: "The Urge," by Maryland Allen, which marshalls the grimly ironic reasons for the success of the heroine who is the most famous comedienne of her day; "Fifty-Two Weeks for Florette," which touches with a pathos that gave the story instant recognition the lives of vaudeville ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry, such as writing a criticism, making a speech, studying the law."[9] These innocent looking definitions are probably not without an ironic sting. It requires no great stretch of the imagination, for example, to catch in Hazlitt's eye a sly wink at Lamb or a disdainful glance toward Leigh Hunt as he gives the reader his idea of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... may as well explain that I came by the silencer several years ago, when I was on the bench. A notorious Chicago gunman, on trial for murder here, and acquitted by a feeble-minded jury, made me a present of the very silencer he had used in killing his victim—an ironic gesture, a gesture of supreme insolence, but an entirely safe gesture, since he well knew that a man once acquitted of a crime cannot again be placed in ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... interest so long in anything as in this war," said a woman who sat beside me at dinner when I was home from the front in the winter of 1915-16. Since then I have wondered if my reply, "Admirable mental concentration!" was not ironic at the expense of manners and philosophy. In view of the thousands who were dying in battle every day, her remark seemed as heartless as it was superficial and in keeping with the riotous joy of living ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... to be observed in that part of the world. I felt he had reasons for holding off from a direct profession of literary faith, a full consistency or sincerity, and therefore dealt instead with certain social topics, treating them with extraordinary humour and with a due play of that power of ironic evocation in which his books abound. He had a deal to say about London as London appears to the observer who has the courage of some of his conclusions during the high-pressure time—from April to July—of its gregarious life. He flashed his faculty of playing with the caught image and liberating ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... An ironic stare, followed by an incredulous smile from Jake; dead silence and immobility on ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... careless twist of his head, around, to speak to the woman behind him. The light above struck blind on the glass in one eye, but the other danced with a genial, a mad scintillation. The light of it caught like contagion, and touched the merest glancer at him with the spark of its warm, ironic mirth. The question which naturally rose to Flora's lips—"Who in the world is that?"—she checked; why, she didn't ask herself. She only felt as she followed Clara, trailing away across the floor, that the interest of the evening which had promised so well, beginning ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... of which all possible solutions are equally unsatisfactory and undesirable. The playwright cannot too soon make sure that he has not strayed into such a no-thoroughfare. Whether an end be comic or tragic, romantic or ironic, happy or disastrous, it should satisfy something within us—our sense of truth, or of beauty, or of sublimity, or of justice, or of humour, or, at the least or lowest, our cynical sense of the baseness of human nature, and the vanity ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... see," said Mrs. Brindley with an ironic sadness which she indulged openly because there was no danger of ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... see you? Why should you have thought that?" There was a trace of ironic amusement ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... air is solid with dust, increased every moment as G.S. waggons, each drawn by a team of maddened mules, enter the yard at a hand gallop, scattering all in their path. The atmosphere is one of strenuous profanity, most uncongenial to the unhappy infantry. At last the officer in charge—ironic phrase—determines that time is up and raises a feeble outcry amid the din. Fortunately the sheep know their shepherd, and will hear his voice. The men fall in and he listens to complaints and soothes the indignant. One man laid his tunic down and a mule ate a great bit out ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... are light-minded, casual, and good-hearted. Their great labour over, and their sacrifices buried, they have come out this day to celebrate the occasion with hilarious and ironic gaiety. They have won the Greatest of Wars, so they ride in motor-lorries and make delirious noises with comic instruments. Their heroic thoughts are blattering through penny trumpets. They have accomplished what had been declared impossible, and now ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... everything which was not of the city returning upon her irresistibly. But it chanced that she caught Juliet's eyes, unconsciously wearing such an expression of solicitude to see her friend complaisant in this matter which meant so much, that Judith hurriedly followed her ironic question with the more kindly supplement: "But doubtless I should have plenty, and ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... his best when he unchained his fancy. His musical grotesques are a survival from the Hoffmann period, but written so as to throw an ironic light upon the artistic tendencies of our time. Need I add that he did not care for the vaporous tonal experiments of Debussy and the new school! But then he was an indifferent ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... what he had misinterpreted so flatteringly to himself. But what did it matter? How like ironic fate, to pierce him with a chance shaft when all the shafts she had aimed ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... the livery of circumstance And hangs obsequious on its suzerain's eye. For who rules now? The twilight-flitting monk, Or I, that took the morning like an Alp? He held his own, I let mine slip from me, The birthright that no sovereign can restore; And so ironic Time beholds us now Master and slave—he lord of half the earth, I ousted ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... puff of ironic disappointment escaped his pursed-up lips. For at one glance he could see that it held no mystery. The only mystery about it all was that he had been theatrical enough to imagine it could prove anything that was not ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... faith in the human race," Archie agreed, reflecting that if she had known that upstairs in the amiable Mr. Saulsbury's room reposed fifty thousand dollars of stolen money her confidence in the exclusiveness of the Cornford Inn would have been somewhat shaken. But the ironic humor of the whole thing overmastered his sense of guilt and he managed to hold the table for a little while without the Governor's assistance as he talked of the French chateaux with honest knowledge. The Seebrooks had motored through the chateau country the year ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... the stage. The four of us sat as solemn as statues—I don't think one of us smiled. It was during the second Act that I suddenly laughed. I don't know that anything very comic was happening on the stage, but I was aware, with a kind of ironic subconsciousness, that some of the superior spirits in their superior Heaven must be deriving a great deal of fun from our situation. There was Vera thinking, I suppose, of nothing but Lawrence, and Lawrence thinking of nothing but Vera, and Nina thinking of nothing but Lawrence, and the audience ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... discovery are most wondrous—yet who will dare to say they take precedence over the wondrous ways of the stomach? And the ways are ironic; is it not conceivable that the two should align in devious fruition? For Gral found answer, not in his groping hands, but ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... expression of her curiosity and not doubtful or ironic challenge of an educated woman to a man of the forest. But as a ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... his heart out with uncertainty as to the fate of his sweetheart. The Lord James chafed at the compulsory confinement and at the consistent ill success which had pursued them. But Malise, unwearied of limb and ironic of mood as ever, fished upon the tidal flats for brown-spotted flounders and at the rocky points for white fish, often remaining at his task till far into the night. He constructed snares with a mechanical ingenuity in advance ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... leaving the two favorites and the three second choices to bring up the rear. The Heathflower thing was immediately in front of them. She had moved so soberly, plodding with low head and sleepy eyes, the watchers had given her an ironic cheer, mingled with cat calls. All the others had got a welcome more or less enthusiastic, but it was only when Aramis, even-money favorite, came through the paddock gate that the crowd ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... life's energies, it is the bridge to every eternity which is not merely a spectral condition of earth disembowelled of its lusts. For sex holds the substance of the image. But we must remember with Heine that Aristophanes is the God of this ironic earth, and that all argument is apparently vitiated from the start by the simple fact that Wagner and a rooster are given an analogous method of making love. And therefore it seems impeccable logic to say that all ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... sure! Quite so!" agreed the lawyer, with ironic heartiness. "Oh, quite." And proceeded to take all Madison Square into his confidence, addressing it from the window. "Here's a young man, sole proprietor of a priceless collection of family heirlooms,— diamonds, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... phrase) and he was also a man of some not inconsiderable learning. Yet neither his natural wit nor his acquired endowments appear to have taught him that of all the gods that rule the destinies of mankind there is none more ironic and malicious than that same Dan Cupid in whose honour, as it were, he was now burning the incense of that pipe of his. The ancients knew that innocent-seeming boy for a cruel, impish knave, and they mistrusted him. Sir Oliver either did not know or did ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... abruptly for Europe, and every once in a while she did something quite uncanonical; enjoying wickedly the consternation she caused among the serenely regulated, and betraying to the keen eyes of the New Yorker an ironic appreciation of the immense wealth which enabled her to do as she chose, answerable to no one. Her husband was uxorious and she had no children. She had seemed to Price more restless than usual of late and showing unmistakable ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... gongs: /n./ A standard elaborated form of {bells and whistles}; typically said with a pronounced and ironic ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... latest of his works and exhume his half-buried experiments in rhyme, assonance and polyphony. This part of the paper will examine Jurgen and call attention to the distorted sonnet printed as a prose soliloquy on page 97 of that exquisite and ironic volume. It will pass to the subsequent Figures of Earth and, after showing how the greater gravity of this volume is accompanied by a greater profusion of poetry per se it will unravel the scheme of Cabell's ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... qua mind; the rowdy Philistine Adolescens Leo, Esq.; Dr. Russell, of the Times, mounting his war-horse; the tale of how Lord Lumpington and the Rev. Esau Hittall got their degrees at Oxford; and many another ironic thrust which made the reader laugh 'while the hair was yet brown on his head,' may well make him laugh still, 'though his scalp is almost hairless, and his figure's grown convex.' Since 1871 we have learnt the answer to the sombre lesson, 'What is it ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... a certain order of architecture, otherwise known as the Normal American. Most of the public buildings of the United States are of the Ramshackle order, though some of our earlier architects preferred the Ironic. Recent additions to the White House in Washington are Theo-Doric, the ecclesiastic order of the Dorians. They are exceedingly fine and cost ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... from the Belgrade Press. If every organ of this Press were filled with a permanent sense of high responsibility, and if Mr. Fisher had made inquiries as to the existence in Belgrade of humorous and ironic writers, one is still rather at a loss to understand why these miscellaneous cuttings were placed before the League, which could scarcely be expected to treat them as evidence. The delegate added that he did not think a single nation ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... with grating finality. The hourly call was sounded by a guard, who, unseen by them, paced the main entrance to the inclosure: "All's Well." It sounded six times from invisible lips. Terry pondered its ironic message to those who heard it from within those steel and concrete dormitories: "All's Well," sounding to those who had crime on their souls, and had left, somewhere, mothers, wives, children ... sweethearts.... It ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... silence in any way embarrassed the new comer, who, standing erect on his sturdy legs and feeling quite at home, carefully examined the new picture with his bloodshot eyes. Without any ceremony, he passed judgment upon it in one phrase—half ironic, half affectionate: 'Well, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensees?" He articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. "And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years," he went on, shewing that contempt for the things of this world which some men of the world like to affect, "we should read that ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... awake. The door of the Morfe drawing-room opened into Mamma's old bedroom at Five Elms, and when she came to the foot of the bed she saw her father standing there. He looked at her with a mocking, ironic animosity, so that she knew he was ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... they, in payment of their debt to Fate, ought to occupy the time that is on their hands by becoming ornamental, and increasing the world's store of beauty. In a sense, certainly, they are ornamental. It is a strange fact, and an ironic, that they spend quite five times the annual amount that was spent by their grandmothers on personal adornment. If they can afford it, well and good: let us have no sumptuary law. But plenty of pretty dresses will not suffice. Pretty manners are needed ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... God's; that St. Peter was crucified sooner than obey Nero—and the Prior cried out for silence; and that he could not hear his Christian King likened to the heathen emperor. Monk after monk would rise; one following his Prior, and disclaiming personal learning and responsibility; another with ironic deference saying that a man's soul was his own, and that not even a Religious Superior could release from the biddings of conscience; another would balance himself between the parties, declaring that the distinction of duties was insoluble; ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... publisher Gosselin handed him a letter with a foreign postmark. His correspondent, a lady, who had read, she said, and admired his Scenes of Private Life, reproached him with losing, in the Shagreen Skin, the delicacy of sentiment contained in these earlier novels, and begged him to forsake his ironic, sceptical manner and revert to the higher manifestations of his talent. There was no signature to this communication; and the writer, who subscribed herself "The Stranger," begged him to abstain from any attempt to discover who she ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... to me it was as if some ironic hand had touched an electric button, and all my fatuous phrases had leapt ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... ironic triumph: "You see, when I do say it you can't make anything out of it." After this he turned for a time all ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... of see-saw of dissonant disapprobation. The stalls alone sat in solemn, wondering silence, not unmixed with apprehension. And suddenly the curtain began to descend, whereupon the uproar ceased abruptly in favour of a mighty spontaneous outbreak of cheering, unmistakably ironic. ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... passed me on the other side of the street with a wave of the hand and an ironic smile. The younger brother, the one they had married to an elderly shrew, he, on the strength of an older friendship and as if paying a debt of gratitude, took the liberty to utter a word ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... he knew nothing of weapons. They'd have to judge from the gadgets the children had brought. When the public-relations men asked briskly from what other planet or solar system the spaceship had come, and when a search-ship might be expected, looking for the children, he was ironic. He suggested that the children might give that information if asked in the proper language. He didn't know it. But the two physicists were men whose names he knew and respected. They listened to what he said. They'd look at the devices from the ship and then come back ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... T'an Ch'un and Hsi Ch'un interposed with an ironic laugh, "what's the use of the hurry-scurry you're in the whole day long! Even when you're having your meals, or your tea, you're in ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... rules laid down in drawing-books—why is she brought into such fatal juxtaposition with this other severe and classical-looking and statuesque lady! To be merely a foil? Much obliged, Mr. Sherwin! The offended belle expressing angry and ironic gratitude sweeps from the painter's studio, gathering her rustling skirts together that they may not be soiled by the least contact with the canvases and plaster casts, and other art-paraphernalia and rubbish ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... a different note which is sometimes heard. In Alexander Smith's Life Drama, it is ostensibly ironic. The ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... of the United States were treated to an ironic sight. Here was a man who only eight years before had been shown up in Congress as an arch plunderer; a man who had bought his railroads largely with his looted millions; a man who, if the laws had been drafted and executed justly, would ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... island of Ransay. He received me quite politely and hospitably, but with every moment that passed I grew more acutely conscious of something deterrent behind his courtesy. A sense of a strong personality in the background, not actually hostile as yet, but ironic and critical, set me instinctively and instantly on guard. Not that I actually suspected the man; but to take him straightway into my confidence was simply impossible. A man of another temperament might have done so—and quite possibly have been right; but his effect on me ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... the fugitives, and a roar of ironic mirth broke from his lips, resounding high above the strident rasping of the beetle-legs, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... forward across its monotonous horizons; their mouths are flanked with those two deep lines of patience and of sorrow which you may note to-day in all the ghettoes of Europe; their smile, when they smile, is restrained by a sort of ironic strength in the muscles of the face. Their eyes are more bright than should be eyes of happy men; they are, as it were, inured to sterility; there is nothing in them of that repose which we Westerners acquire from a continual contemplation of deep pastures and of innumerable ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... that he aimed at standing well with the world and being one with it honourably: holding to his principles of course: but a disposition that way had been perceived, and the vision of him in open rebellion because of his shy catching at the thread of an alliance with the decorous world, carved an ironic line ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... tone took on a tinge of ironic resentment, "when they learn the broad character of the credentials that I shall give you in order that you may meet the crowned heads of Europe, will say that I am again lowering the dignity of my office. But I consider, Mr. Edestone, that I am, in reality, giving more dignity to my office ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... and the public of course set him down for a rustic. "What ought I to do?" he demands. "Shall I put on my next title-page, 'Late Fellow of Oriel, etc.'? or am I always to abide under this ironic cloak of rusticity?" To be sure, on consideration (if the public ever found time to consider), the language and feeling of the poems were penetrated with scholarship. He entered his countrymen's hearts; but he also could, and did, stand outside and observe them with affectionate, comprehending ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fairly tall man, with a big head, big features, and a beard. His characteristic expression denoted benevolence based on an ironic realisation of the humanity of human nature. He was forty-six years of age and looked it. He had been for more than twenty years at the Treasury, in which organism he had now attained a certain importance. He was a Companion of the Bath. He exulted in the fact that the Order of the ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... little dealer. Nobody. Jew, of course." Mr. Oxford's way of saying 'Jew' was ineffably ironic. Priam knew that, being a Jew, the dealer could not be his frame-maker, who was a pure-bred Yorkshireman from Ravensthorpe. Mr. Oxford continued, "I sold that picture and guaranteed it ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... loaf in Dawson are superior to style, For the man who wears a coat and vest is apt to cause a smile; While he who sports suspenders or a belt would be a butt, And cause ironic comment, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... been taught him; he had learnt it so thoroughly that he had grown to test everything by that standard; it was his father's disloyalty to that creed that had roused the son's anger—and now, behold, the son was sinning more than the father! It was truly ironic that, three days after his attacking a member of the family for betraying the family, he himself should be guilty of far greater betrayal! How topsy-turvy the world seemed, and what was ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... the exoticism of the Neo-Russians—yet he is indeed no empty reflection of these men, for he has his own bold, fantastic style and has been a daring experimenter in freedom of harmony and structure. One finds a power of ironic brilliance and of unexpected harmonic transformations certainly new in modern literature. Ravel[302] is one of the most versatile and prolific of all the younger Frenchmen having composed significant works ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... fairly well, as one man knows another, but I find that there have been certain limits to my knowledge. How extraordinary it is! This inner world of our own lives which we keep closely to ourselves! I have a friend, yes, a very good friend, a very dear friend,"—the ironic insistence upon this word gave Prosper the shock of a repeated blow,—"and I fancy, in the ignorance of my conceit, that this friend's life is sufficiently open to my understanding. I see him leave college, I see him go out on various adventures. I share with him, by letters and confidences, ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt |
