"Misfit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... only be touched with a shovel. I have been receiving through the mails for some time past, both from disgusted Northerners and indignant Southerners, a paragraph clipped from its epecine columns where in some mental misfit eager to do the Smart Alex act begs to be informed what right Mrs. Jefferson Davis had "to address a peculiar letter to the Queen Regent of Spain, demanding the release of a party accused of a serious crime," then adds: "If Miss Cisneros is released it will be because she is innocent, and ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... was the one drop of poison in the honey of my cup: that I was wearing an abominable misfit of a drab-coloured suit of homespun more adapted to some village tradesman than to a young cavalier of fashion, for on account of the hue and cry against me I had pocketed my pride and was travelling under an incognito. Nor ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... listening, seeing a shabbily clothed misfit of a boy with a bundle of papers under his arm turning a ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... "damn fool" will include every person in the world, according to some one else. It seemed obvious to me that J. was not meant by nature to be a housewife or any kind of wife. Matrimonially she was a misfit, unless she met some man of a type like herself, though I doubt if any man could have pleased her. I doubt if her over-exacting taste would not rebel against the animal in life itself. For though the animal of life is essentially as fine as the human, ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... as they made their way downstream. At each dip of their paddles a deeper sickness seemed to enter into his heart. Life, after all, he tried to reason, was like a tailored garment. One might have an ideal, and if that ideal became a realization it would be found a misfit for one reason or another. So he told himself, in spite of fill the dreams which had urged him on in the fight for better things. There flooded upon him now the forceful truth of what Ransom had said. His work, as he had begun it, was at ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... doing—to the long, lean, loose, slightly cadaverous gentleman who was a memory, for her, of the period from her twelfth to her seventeenth year. She had got on with him, perversely, much better than her mother had, and the bulging misfit of his duck waistcoat, with his trick of swinging his eye-glass, at the end of an extraordinarily long string, far over the scene, came back to her as positive features of the image of her remoter youth. Her present age—for her later ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... monument of warning against the Ego. Since his time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure. The tailor adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to his patron's wants. The tailor's object, in this volume, is to fit young men, in universities ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... in the proceedings the moving man and his assistant paused in their labors and the former fished out of his misfit clothing a greasy piece of paper which he handed me. I glanced at it under the jet and saw that it ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... cut-away coats and wide-checkered trousers, all fitting "to surprise yourself," and could be quite sure of finding a pair of boots, of whatever size was needed, of the very finest custom hand work,—a misfit, made for a gentleman in New York. A devout man, according to his leanings, could pray from the prayer-book of an impoverished Episcopalian, or sing from the ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... "They began, as every misfit does, to complain about the taxes the government put on their incomes. The government, in my opinion, made an error back then. They wanted to keep people out in the Belt, since the mines on Earth were ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... coffee!" following it with peals of laughter. Or, turning up a saucy face, she would ask, "Shall I tumble out more coffee?" and again the laughter which came as readily at her own misfit attempts at English. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... inspired us with such confidence in his resourcefulness and ability, that we resolved to give him a treat in the plantation dragging round a miniature disc-harrow, a particular brand of agricultural implement known as the "pony dot." Being so, in fact and appearance, it was quite a misfit for Christmas—a mere toy with which a gay young horse might condescend to beguile a few loose hours. It was a charming morning. Birds were vulgarly sportful. Honey-eaters whistled among the trees, scrub-fowl chuckled in the jungle. Christmas, too, was bent on amusing himself, and he ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... had a ring of harshness. "Believe me, I am not accustomed to being ranked with the saints," he said. "How shall I get away from your halo? I warn you, it's a most awful misfit. You'll find it out presently, and make ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... scenes have occurred in suits brought by tailors and dressmakers to recover the price of garments for which their customers have declined to pay on the ground of misfit. Serjeant Ballantine, in his Experiences of a Barrister, relates the case of a tailor in which the defendant was the famous Sir Edwin Landseer. It was tried in the Exchequer Court, before Baron Martin. "The coat was produced," says the serjeant, "and the judge suggested that Sir Edwin ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... the first of these birds she forgot to give him any legs at all, and that he had started off on the wing before she noticed her mistake. Then she picked up the first pair that came to hand and threw them after him. Unfortunately they were a misfit, and, what was, perhaps, still worse, they struck his body in the wrong place. They were so very short and so very far aft that, although he could stand nearly as straight as a man, it was almost impossible for him to move about on them. When he had to ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... his feelings. He really thought him too much of a gentleman for the town, in view of the restrictions with which he must inevitably be hampered. There was something melancholy, to a cultivated mind, about a sensitive, educated man who happened to be off color. Such a person was a sort of social misfit, an odd quantity, educated out of his own class, with no possible hope of entrance into that above it. He felt quite sure that if he had been in Miller's place, he would never have settled in the South—he would have moved to Europe, or ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... going to know that even the best name you could pick wouldn't turn out to be a misfit? About the only Percy I ever knew in real life was a great two-fisted husk who was foreman of a stereotypin' room; and here in the Corrugated Buildin', if you'll come in some night after five, I can show you a wide built scrub lady, with hair redder'n mine and a voice like ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... want to tempt him out of this to a world where he would be a wretched misfit," accused the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... after nine o'clock and in San Francisco's embryo ghetto at McAllister and Fillmore streets they bought a decent-looking misfit suit and a pair of second-hand shoes, to say nothing of a bargain in shirts. A visit to a neighboring barber followed. Storch permitted Fred to enter the shop alone, but he stood ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the life-long need of a vest-pocket dictionary or a spelling-book, I cherish a respect for the method in which I was compelled to spell the English language. It was severe, no doubt. We stood in a class of forty, and lost our places for the misfit of a syllable, a letter, a definition, or even a stumble in elocution. I remember once losing the head of the class for saying: L-u-ux—Lux. It was a terrible blow, and I think of it yet with burning mortification ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... sister; while Faith is usu'lly cross as two sticks unless things go just as she wants them; and Cherry doesn't stand around on corners d'livering tracks and worn-out clo's to the needy poor, like Charity always does in the pictures. But mine is the worst misfit. Still, I'm thankful it isn't any worse. Just s'posing I had Irene for a middle name—that's my favorite, and Olive is Hope's choice—then my 'nitials would have spelled P. I. G. and hers H. O. G.; and the school children ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... I wanted him I think I'd find some way of hurrying him up. Ludovic SPEED! Was there ever such a misfit of a name? Such a name for such a man is a delusion ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... wretched misfit, this union of Conscience and Eben Tollman, but so bent was the woman upon redeeming the hopeless experiment that she sought to brace the doomed and tottering structure with fictitious props. To be an "unimpeachable" wife was ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... with his native superstition, Rusty was nevertheless forced to don the armor—a sad misfit ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... call [v]diffidence about that bear. He slouched along up to me at a steady walk, with the hair and skin on him swinging about as though it was too large for his carcass and he was wearing a misfit. He seemed to look upon me as dinner, and no hurry needful. There was a sort of calm certainty about ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... he looked after the applicant. Then he rose, went to the office door and watched the man making his way through the stone-yards towards the sheds. "Well, boys," he said further, turning to the two men bending over the plans, "that suit ain't exactly a misfit, but it hasn't seen the light of day for a good many years—and it's the same with the man. What in thunder is he doing in the sheds! Did he say anything specially to you before ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... agreed that their first idea had been that the shop was absurdly too big for the young man; their next that the young man was too big for the shop, miles, oh miles too big for it; their final impression being the tragedy of the disproportion, the misfit. Then, sadly, with lowered voices, they admitted that he had one flaw; when the poor fellow got excited, don't you know, he sometimes dropt—no—no, he skipped—his aitches. It didn't happen often, but they felt it terrible that it should happen ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... as a candidate in the approaching election. He was, he said, weary of civic honours. He had had enough. He felt it incumbent on him to step out and make way for others who deserved their turn as well as himself: in future he proposed to confine his whole attention to his Misfit Semi-Ready Establishment which he was happy to state was offering as nobby a line of early fall suiting as was ever seen ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... man who fails because he is a misfit in his particular position, the worthy man who is limited to a small career because the work he does lacks scope for the use of all his ability; the third good man who has been kept down for the reason that his chief is blind to his qualifications for promotion—all three ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... of these people is based on opposite and contradictory arguments shows that it is not the result of clear thinking. On the one side it is vehemently asserted that the coloured man is a physiological misfit, a sort of hybrid unfit for the society of either white or black and an alleged relative sterility of his kind is advanced as proof of this assertion. On the other side it is said, with equal vehemence, that the coloured people are mongrels, ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... courtiers came to woo her, she never had a beau, Her misfit face precluded such things as that, you know,— She was nobody's darling, no feller's solid girl, And poets never called her an uncut Texas pearl. Her only two companions was those two flea-bit mules, And these she but regarded as animated tools To plod along the furrows in patience up and down And ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... tall and thin, and his study was so low and square, that the one in the other seemed a misfit. ...
— The Brown Study • Grace S. Richmond
... "But I'm growing in that direction. . . . Don't waste yourself on Stevens—I beg pardon, Spenser. You're bigger than that. He's a small man with large dreams—a hopeless misfit. Small dreams for small men; large dreams for—" he ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... "sad." It is a pity to employ unbelief; he does not know how to make a smile. When he tries it is a misfit. If the disciples had believed Jesus, they would have been dancing for joy, for they would have been round the tomb to see Him rise. We have lost that picture, because no one believed the Lord enough to expect His words to ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... it had been a much completer thing, but that the circumstances had broken down in a sort of decadence, and now there was nothing left of it but that scraping in the door-lock, like somebody trying to turn a misfit key. I used to throw things at his door, and once I tried a cold-water douche from the pitcher, when he was very hard to waken; but that was rather brutal, and after a while I used to let him roar himself awake; he would always do it, if ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... that the benevolent fiend sat up all night to baulk me. She was at my bedside with a candle long ere day, roused me, laid out for me a damnable misfit of clothes, and bade me pack my own (which were wholly unsuited to the journey) in a bundle. Sore grudging, I arrayed myself in a suit of some country fabric, as delicate as sackcloth and about as becoming as a ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and every one else who was poor, was an object of contempt to me—a misfit, a weakling, a ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... bridegroom muttered, "is fresh from Nature's hands; her boudoir is not cluttered with strings and pins and bands; she does not paint her features, or wear rings on her paws; she's one of Nature's creatures, and lives by Nature's laws. Her foot, she does not force it into a misfit shoe; nor does she wear a corset to squeeze her frame in two. That frame has got upon it no clothes she does not need; she wears no bughouse bonnet that makes man's bosom bleed. This maid, this weaker vessel, has movements swift and free, and she ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... struck on the uniform, of course. A girl like that couldn't care for a misfit like Prescott. Well, he won't be in the uniform much longer. I won't lose sight of Miss Bentley. I'll find her again when Prescott is out of ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... rank held in Northern prisons, and were able after a short vacation, of which we stood in need, to return to our Regiments, then serving with the Army of the Potomac on the Peninsula. We had lost so much weight that our clothes were all a misfit and ...
— Ball's Bluff - An Episode and its Consequences to some of us • Charles Lawrence Peirson
... are not the only places which are inhabited by the sub-normal and the misfit. The hardest and most disagreeable and most poorly paid labor is largely done by this class of people. Very few people of superior intelligence and education do manual labor and the more disagreeable the manual labor, the ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... Spanish functionaries could persuade themselves to be, in running down—or walking down—these outlaws. It is said that the detectives were especially amusing. They would go about in such obvious disguises, with misfit wigs, window-glass spectacles, and the costumes of priests or notaries, that a robber could barely keep his countenance when he met them in the street. The thief always escaped, either through the incompetence of the officers, or by sharing ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... proprietor wa'n't responsible for overcoats. The Boss tried to tell her how there wa'n't any grand larceny intended, but it was no go. She had her suspicions of the crowd, so they just had to let her sit there draped in black. And at that she wa'n't any misfit. ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... change in Mr. Micawber, which sat tightly on him, as if his new duties were a misfit, I felt I had no right to be offended. My telling him so, appeared to relieve him; and he shook hands ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... a round of calls made, the Green Imp came for Bob and Mrs. Lessing. They met him, hand in hand, the little figure in its voluminous misfit clothes looking quaint, enough beside the perfect outlines of his companion's attire. But ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... speech. The boy had none of the half-stupid stolidity of the country-bred, and yet lacked something of the garrulity of the cute street lad. His voice too was a surprise. The broad vowels seemed acquired and uncertain and jarred on the hearer with a sense of misfit. ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... was taken up with the account of her doings in Paris. She had met all the nicest and naughtiest people. She had been courted and flattered. An artist in a slouch hat, baggy corduroy breeches, floppy tie and general 1830 misfit had made love to her on the top of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... quite a misfit, and Suhinie's worst came to the top, and we speedily moved her back again ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... torrent that brawls through the little city under pretty bridges within walls of solid masonry, they found themselves in almost the only vehicle on a brilliant promenade thronged with a cosmopolitan world. Germans in every manner of misfit; Polish Jews in long black gabardines, with tight corkscrew curls on their temples under their black velvet derbys; Austrian officers in tight corsets; Greek priests in flowing robes and brimless high hats; Russians in caftans and Cossacks in Astrakhan caps, accented the more ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... with layers of misfit clothing out of the store, while many of them wore several hats, and others had extra pairs of ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... I feel," he responded, lighting a pipe. "You do have a nice gang of them round. There's Candish, for instance. He looks like an advertisement for a misfit tailor, and he's fairly putrid ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... my case,' said the stranger sadly. 'However much they may misfit me, they do not misfit ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... street in the guise of an officer, and so make off. But now—with his fingers on the bolts—misgivings assailed him. He was physically not much like any policeman he had ever seen; and the blue tunic with its brass buttons was a wretched misfit on his slight body. He doubted whether his disguise would pass unchallenged—doubted so strongly that he doubled suddenly to the back door, flung it open, and threw himself out into the black strangeness ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... and our souls were well content. But my wife had delirious visions, which she affirmed were sane and reasonable, of her husband's coming yet into his own, and indulged every now and then in savage and delicious little declarations of the great misfit, which misfit was in my being the minister of a little church which afforded a little salary and provoked ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... no inheritance but a predisposition to baldness and a bitter hatred of rum; with no personal property but a misfit suspender and a stone-bruise, began a life history which has never ceased to be a warning to people who ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... Stopping over night at Angola I proceed to Buffalo next morning, catching the first glimpse of that important " seaport of the lakes," where, fifteen miles across the bay, the wagon-road is almost licked by the swashing waves; and entering the city over a " misfit" plank-road, off which I am almost upset by the most audaciously indifferent woman in the world. A market woman homeward bound with her empty truck-wagon, recognizes my road-rights to the extent of barely room to squeeze past between her wagon and the ditch; and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... to the attic with a lantern and dragged from obscurity two frightful misfit suits of the first bicycle cuff-on-the-pants period, that were ripening in the camphor chest for future missionary purposes, announcing that these, together with some flannel shirts, would be his summer outfit, while this morning I went into town and did battle at a sale of substantial, dollar ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... but her features, although tolerably regular in their shape, had a mean, pinched look, as if they had been made too small for her face. This defect was peculiarly noticeable in her mouth, which was an obvious misfit for the set of teeth it contained. She smiled as she courtesied to Mr. Robert Audley, and her smile, which laid bare the greater part of this set of square, hungry-looking teeth, by no means added to the ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... itself in many instances to the unit division of work. The first consequence of this plan will be a reduction of failures for the pupil in those subjects whose continued pursuit would mean increased failure. The second consequence may be to relieve teachers of hopeless cases of misfit in any subject, for if the pupils no longer have intolerable subjects imposed on them the teachers will come to demand only tolerable work in the subjects of their choice. The third consequence will probably be to encourage pupils ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... victim, still smiling. "But I should be—a misfit. And I haven't a story worth telling. I'm no Scherezade. I'm very grateful for your interest, madam, but my best way of showing it is to stay where I am—and where ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... In the process, moral character may be shaped and strengthened; but it will not be transformed if it is dross in the first place. That is something which every combat leader has learned in his tour under fire; the man of whom nobody speaks good, who is regarded as a social misfit, unliked and unliking, of his comrades, will usually desert them under pressure. There are others who have the right look but will be just as quick to quit, and look to themselves, in a crisis; underneath, they are made of ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... Kraybo," he said after a moment, "that one single Misfit ship got close enough to do us some damage. It has endangered the life of the Naipor and the lives of her crewmen. You were on the board in that quadrant of the ship, and you let it get in too close. The records show that you ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... at her. She had crowded her strong, lithe frame into a brown tweed suit, a world too narrow for her, and she was laughing heartily at herself and had come in to show him the misfit. ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... misfit Venturi timor ipse mali: fortissimus ille est, Qui promptus metuenda pati, si cominus instent, Et ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... one of the most helpless men I have ever seen in practical life. He seemed to be unable to think and reason for himself. He could quote a page of John Locke, but somehow the page didn't supply the one sentence needed for the occasion. The man was a misfit on earth. He was liable to put the gravy in his coffee and the gasoline in the fire. He seemed never to have digested any of the things in his memory. Since I have grown up I always think of that man as ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... become acutely conscious of a misfit somewhere in our experience, the actual study done to right it varies indefinitely with the individual. The savage follows a hit-and-miss method of investigation, and really makes his advances by happy guesses rather than by close application. ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... it is to cast mortals into the holes that most misfit them) sometimes, when she has got them there, takes pity, and contemptuously lifts them. Pet was in a hole of hardship, such as his dear mamma never could have dreamed of, and such as his nurture and constitution made trebly disastrous for him. He had taken a chill from ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... delirious rapidity: "Who gave you a drawing-room suite? Who gave you a nice house? Who let you call it Granville?" But he knew. Nobody, indeed, knew better than Ranny how tight a squeeze it was; and what a horrible misfit for Granville. ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... Mr. Simeon Geltfin, had once upon a time been proprietor of the Ne Plus Ultra Misfit Clothing Parlors at Utica, New York, a place where secondhand habiliments, scoured and ironed, dangled luringly in show windows bearing such enticing labels as "Tailor's Sample—Nobby—$9.80," "Bargain—Take Me Home For $5.60," and "These ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... naturally solicitous to make a favorable impression. He had for some time been intending to procure a new suit, but hesitated on account of the expense. Now with a new position in prospect, and a liberal salary he no longer delayed, but purchased a neat black suit—a misfit—for seventeen dollars, and a few small articles of which he ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger
... hert to hurt mine, I wad think aboot it, mem; but gien it hurtit a' three o' 's, and did guid to nane, it wad be a misfit a'thegither. I'll du naething till I'm doonricht sure it's the pairt ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... you so and long to have you happy here with me, who am not a Pritchard either. No doubt your family rubbed that fact in sufficiently, so you didn't expect me to be. To tell the truth, I could never abide the Pritchards. I was such a misfit when I visited Aunt Ellen's years ago, that I rather dreaded your coming, though I did feel that being so young you might not be inveterate, and that we might manage to hit ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... any issue, and downed any number of foes in the fighting. To Mrs. Brenton, she was as dear as any daughter, dear as the daughter that she meant one day to be. Besides, who was he, a self-help student temporarily excused from waiting upon table and attired in a misfit evening coat hired from a ghetto tailor: who was he to criticise the flowers and frills of Catie? If she had had the chances which had come to him, if she could have gone to Smith, for instance, or Bryn Mawr, she would ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... of misfit somehow. I never knew why then. I lack an instinct all other fellows seem to have to hang together and boost each other along. School seemed like such a silly affair to me; I wouldn't learn. In ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... overlooking the town, and watched the Jam-wagon crawl down the hill to his cabin. Poor fellow! How drawn and white was his face, and his long, clean frame—how gaunt and weary! I felt sorry for him. What would become of him? He was a splendid "misfit." If he only had another chance! Somehow I believed in him, and fervently I hoped he would have that ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... not know why the east wind aggravates life to unhealthy people. It made Mr. Polly's teeth seem loose in his head, and his skin feel like a misfit, and his hair a ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... the rags department," said he. "I've kind of always liked to rig out swell when I could. You know how I hate cheap things, Moll. This suit set me back sixty-five. Anything in the wearing apparel line has got to be just so, or it's to the misfit parlors for it, for mine. If I work I won't have so much coin to hand over to the little man with ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... cotton shrouds, but congress, the ministry, and the "West Point of Honduras," the superintendent of which was a native youth who had spent a year or two at Chapultepec. Against it lean barefooted, anemic "soldiers" in misfit overalls, armed with musket and bayonet that overtop them in height. The main post-office of the republic is an ancient adobe hovel, in the cobwebbed recesses of which squat a few stupid fellows waiting for the mule-back mail-train ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... me that I was a misfit. Nature had cast me for the part of a soldier of fortune, and instead I was giving my services to help a big corporation escape the payment of damages for accidents caused by its cars. I had turned my back on the romance of life. Well, it was ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... same black lace. You would have had a scruple of conscience as to really disliking the face, but you deliberately let yourself go in detesting the bonnet. So with dresses, especially such as had any little misfit about them. For you it had always existed, and there was no promise of its ceasing. You seemed to have been aware of it for years. By the way, there would be less cheap reproving of little girls for desiring new clothes if the censors ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... to chafe at Lady Grove, fretted by a chance jest he had overheard at a dinner. "This house, George," he said. "It's a misfit. There's no elbow-room in it; it's choked with old memories. And I can't stand all these ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... a misfit at home on Zan because he was not contented with the humdrum and monotonous life of a member of a space-pirate community. Piracy was a matter of dangerous take-offs in cranky rocket-ships, to be followed by weeks or months ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... boys like Graham were pouring out their young lives like wine, that Clayton Spencer was seeing Graham with a new vision. He turned and glanced back into the drawing-room, where Graham, in the center of that misfit group and not quite himself, was stooping over Marion Hayden. They would have to face that, of course, the woman urge in the boy. Until now his escapades had been boyish ones, a few debts frankly revealed and as frankly regretted, some college mischiefs, a ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... establishes that he wrote the treatise in the year 1645, he being then in the twenty-third year of his age—whence it follows that the date of his birth was most probably 1622, and the history with which he is invested by Miss Vaughan is again a misfit; it is putting man's garments on a boy. Furthermore, there is not one item in her statements concerning the "Open Entrance" which is not directly and provably false. It was not printed, as she indicates, under the supervision of the author; it was not printed from the original ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... you, just as you would a coat or hat. A 16 pound canoe may fit me exactly, but would be a bad misfit for a man of 180 pounds. And don't neglect the auxiliary paddle, or "pudding stick," as my friends call it. The notion may be new to most canoeists, but will be found exceedingly handy and useful. It is simply a little ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... and spun him around. "You'll tell me one thing right now, little feller! What's so funny about hiding my uniform so I'll get bawled out again by Old Fuss Budget for wearing this misfit?" ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... creature, that Nikhil! He feels the danger threatening his home, and yet why does he not turn me out? I know, he is waiting for Bimal to give him the cue. If Bimal tells him that their mating has been a misfit, he will bow his head and admit that it may have been a blunder! He has not the strength of mind to understand that to acknowledge a mistake is the greatest of all mistakes. He is a typical example of how ideas make for weakness. I have not seen another like him—so whimsical a product of ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... restore, the fine silky bloom of his youth; and something worth even more, though that was a loss he was not yet ready to admit. Worst of all, she had him convinced that he was a failure, a weakling and misfit, a sort of green fool who had asked for the moon and been properly punished for his temerity. And that was a skein even fairies would find hard ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... Seuss book "If I Ran the Zoo" (1950). (The spellings 'nurd' and 'gnurd' also used to be current at MIT.) How it developed its mainstream meaning is unclear, but sense 1 seems to have entered mass culture in the early 1970s (there are reports that in the mid-1960s it meant roughly "annoying misfit" without ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... misfit in her present environment. Born at Longwood Plantation on Waccamaw in 1837, all she knows is the easy, quiet life of the country. And the busy, bustling 'RACE PATH' near which her Grandson lives with whom she ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... spare brass proved to be of the wrong pattern; a Pullman, instead of a P. S-W. standard. Olson was a trained mechanic and a man of resources, and he chipped and filed and scraped at the misfit brass until he made it serve. But when he climbed again to the cab of his engine, and Ford swung up to the steps of the car, the white headlight eye of an east-bound freight, left at a siding a full hour's ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... Another misfit of the grotesque crowds was Picard, foolishly trying to discover what 'twas all about, gazing soulful-eyed into hoodlum "mugs" that gave him the merry "ha! ha!" or sickened him with the likeness of the First Murderer. But "crime," ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... disappointed in me?" she queried. "Dad said you would be, but I laughed at him. Pity if our ready-made friendship turned out a misfit! I think you're no end! Dad said I'd got to copy you; it'll take me all my time, I expect. Things are ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... arrest in Edstrom's cabin. But he declined MacKellar's offer to lend him a business-suit; the old Scotchman's clothes would not fit him, he knew, and it would be better to make his appeal as a real miner than as a misfit gentleman. ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair |
