"Perversely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... No. 3, shows how closely the composer studied his Bach. It is by all odds the most elaborately worked out of the series, difficult to play, difficult to grasp in its rather disconnected procession of moods. To me it has a clear ring of exasperation, as if Chopin had lost interest, but perversely determined to finish his idea. As played by Pachmann, we get it in all its peevish, sardonic humors, especially if the audience, or the weather, or the piano seat does not suit the fat little blackbird from Odessa. Op. 63, No. 3, ends this list of mazurkas in C-sharp minor. In it Chopin ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... and I remained for another year in complete ignorance of the structure of woman's sexual organs and of the intercourse between man and woman. In the meantime I cultivated my fancies of intercourse with animals, often still perversely imagining myself taking the part of the female; and the notion of such relationships gradually became so familiar as to seem possible and desirable. This is especially significant in view of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the article on the "Poema del Cid" that I was writing. He confesses, however, that he did his best to draw me—examining the English girl as a new specimen for his psychological collection. As for me, I can only perversely remember a passing phrase of his to the effect that there was too much magenta in the dress of Englishwomen, and too much pepper in the English cuisine. From English cooking—which showed ill in the Oxford of those days—he suffered, indeed, a good deal. Nor, in spite of his great literary ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... be really so," Chia Lien rejoined, "it will after all do! But there's only one thing; all I was up to last night was simply to have some fun with you, but you obstinately and perversely wouldn't." ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... next to Talten, not far from thence, at the Season of the Royal Diversions: Here he preached to Cairbre, and Conall, the two Brothers of King Leogin; the former received him with great Indignity, and perversely shut his Ears against his Doctrine; but Conall believed, and was baptized, and gave St. Patrick a Place ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... much of the excellent admonitions in this world—affected me perversely: it made me more restless than ever. I felt that I could not rest properly until I found out who wanted me to rest, and why. It opened indeed a limitless ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... cannot act in opposition to nature, nor offend the ethical sense of the people among whom he dwells, nor despise the leading of destiny without discovering through experience that before the Nemesis of these substantial elements his subjective power can dash itself only to be shattered. If he perversely and persistently rejects all our admonitions, we leave him, as a last resort, to destiny, whose iron rule must educate him, and reveal to him the ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... used to delighting in Lydia's understanding of his perversely obscure figures of speech that he turned about, surprised to hear no appreciative comment. She was ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... smiled perversely and took up his paper again. "I wonder how it will look to people here if you go off and ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... sin against Thee (for there is no man that sinneth not) and Thou be angry with them and deliver them to be carried away captive into the land of the enemy, far or near, if they then bethink themselves and make supplication to Thee, saying, We have sinned and have done perversely and are guilty, and so return unto Thee with all their heart and all their soul in the land of the enemies which led them away captive, and pray unto Thee toward their land which Thou gavest unto their fathers, ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... Seward was in the next room, as Dr. Van Helsing said he would be, so that I might have called him. I tried to sleep, but I could not. Then there came to me the old fear of sleep, and I determined to keep awake. Perversely sleep would try to come then when I did not want it. So, as I feared to be alone, I opened my door and called out, "Is there anybody there?" There was no answer. I was afraid to wake mother, and so closed my door again. ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... course, but still something in particular. Outside the family nothing was suspected. Lawrence Newt was simply one of those incomprehensibly pleasant, eccentric, benevolent men, whose mercantile credit was as good as Jacob Van Boozenberg's, but who perversely went his own way. One of these ways led to all kinds of poor people's houses; and it was upon a visit to the widow of the clergyman to whom Boniface Newt had given eight dollars for writing a tract entitled "Indiscriminate Almsgiving a Crime," that Lawrence ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... Johnson, "the inhabitants of Hagley affected to tell their acquaintance of the little fellow that was trying to make himself admired; but when by degrees the Leasowes forced themselves into notice, they took care to defeat the curiosity which they could not suppress, by conducting their visitants perversely to inconvenient points of view, and introducing them at the wrong end of a walk to detect a deception; injuries of which Shenstone would heavily complain." Mr. Graves, the zealous friend of Shenstone, indignantly denies that any of the Lyttelton family had evinced so ungenerous a feeling ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... hold, and she crossed the room to the door, out of which she went with a set face, and into the highway. Here she began to saunter up and down, perversely pulling her hair into a worse disorder than he had caused, and unfastening several buttons of her gown. It was a fine Sunday morning, dry, clear and frosty, and the bells of Alfredston Church could be heard on the breeze from the north. People were going ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... not help expressing to Doctor Dummerar her surprise and sorrow, that all which she had done and attempted, to establish peace and unanimity betwixt the contending factions, had been perversely fated to turn out the very reverse of what she ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... general you had stirred and shaken me up more than you knew. Socrates outranks Pyrrho, and I am open to conviction. Possibly I have been too sweeping; I don't wish to dogmatize. It may be that I have lived alone too long, shut up in a narrow space, where light could enter only through my perversely colored glasses. At any rate, your coming was like opening a door and letting in a wholesome breeze. Have I offended you? I thought I was past asking favors from my kind: but do let me ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... put the sham deck-hand into his proper place as an impersonal unit of a class with which society is at war, he perversely refused to surrender his individuality. At the end of every fresh effort she was confronted by the inexorable summing-up: in a world of phantoms there were only two real persons; a man who had sinned, and a woman who was about to ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... adroitly. Perversely Bud declined to become confidential, and Honey Krause changed the ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... wide enough for us both? Why haunt each other? what have you to gain from me? Can the thoughts that my sight recalls to you be brighter, or more peaceful, than those which start upon me, when I gaze on you? Does not a ghastly air, a charnel breath, hover about us both? Why perversely incur a torture it is so easy to avoid? Leave me—leave these scenes. All earth spreads before you—choose your pursuits, and your resting place elsewhere, but grudge me not ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... see!" Perversely, she caught up the field glasses from the table, drew them from their case, and, letting down the upper window sash with a slam, focused the glasses upon the river. "He usually crosses right at the mouth of the coulee—" She swung the glasses slowly about. ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... Coming of Christ considered as a doctrine, as a truth or a motive, is not intensely practical and all-compelling to Christian devotion and service, is either blindly and excuselessly ignorant of the Word of God or brutally and perversely guilty of denying a truth that flashes like lightning from one end of the Bible to the other and illuminates every hortative passage in ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... colorless drinks with bobbing sliced limes, purplish sloe gin and sirupy cordials. Bernard's face was dark and there was a splash of champagne on his dinner shirt. Louise was uncertainly humming a fragment of popular song. The table was littered with empty plates and glasses. Perversely it made August think of Emmy, his wife, and acute dread touched him at the mockery ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... a never-ending affair. Deep in mire, it meanders perversely about the plain; meanders more than ever, but of necessity, once the foot of the hills is reached. I soon gave it up in favour of the steam-tram to Cammaiore which deposits you at a station whose name I forget, whence ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... was all right up to a certain point, and, according to another, all wrong. This man here held a brief for beans, especially the succulent baked bean; that man yonder served solemn warning upon me that if perversely I persisted to continue to eat baked beans the fat globules would form so fast I would have the sensation that a little boy was inside of me somewhere blowing bubbles. The writer didn't exactly say this, but it was the inference I ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... be a mature decorum in opening and closing of volumes, that they may neither be unclasped with precipitous haste, nor thrown aside after inspection without being duly closed; for it is necessary that a book should be much more carefully preserved than a shoe. But school folks are in general perversely educated, and, if not restrained by the rule of their superiors, are puffed up with infinite absurdities; they act with petulance, swell with presumption, judge of everything with certainty, and ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... forcible than that which strikes with two or three words, sometimes with single words; very seldom with more than two or three, and among these various clauses there is occasionally inserted a rhythmical period. And Hegesias, who perversely avoided this usage, while seeking to imitate Lysias, who is almost a second Demosthenes, dividing his sentences into little bits, was more like a dancer than an orator. And he, indeed, errs not less in his sentences than in his ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... him so strangely? Why had she used him with such cruel caprice? Was ever a man treated so perversely by a woman who loved him? Miss Ludington could only shake her head as he poured out his complaints to her. Ida's contradictory behaviour was as much a puzzle to her as to him, and she deplored it scarcely less. But she insisted that he should not trouble the girl by demanding ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... know it sounds conceited,' said Mark, 'but the real truth is, that when I hear such kind things said about a work which—which gave me so very little trouble to produce, it makes me a little uncomfortable sometimes, because (you know how perversely things happen sometimes), because I can't help a sort of fear that my next book, to which I really am giving serious labour, may ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... other, when two American ladies, coming up very tardily, endeavoured to prove their rights. The ladies were without other companions, and were not fluent with their French, but were clearly entitled to their seats. They were told that the conveyance was all coupe, but perversely would not believe the statement. The official shrugged his shoulders and signified that his ultimatum had been pronounced. What can an official do in such circumstances, when more coupe passengers are sent to him than the coupes at his command will hold? "But we have paid ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... divine her. You know she has acted perversely in the past. I used to think she might have some affair of which we knew nothing—something silly and romantic. But if she had any such thing I'm sure it was ended, and she'd have jumped at this chance a year ago. You know yourself she was ready ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... height and shape, leading into one another by irregular portals, but all rough and rude, as though there might have been an original plan, from which, while the general arrangement is kept, every separate stroke perversely diverged. ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... danger of being destroyed, because its exposition of them may be declared unsound and unfair, even when it represents them most faithfully and defends them most successfully. The most devoted efforts of its conductors are liable to be misconstrued, and perversely turned either against the Church or against the Review itself; its best works are infected with the suspicion with which it is regarded, and its merits become almost more perilous than ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... be perversely frivolous about the most exclusive metropolitan society in the world. But Uncle Peter was a crabbed old man, lingering past his generation, and the young people made generous ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... will return," said the king perversely. And Suffolk, knowing his wilfulness, and that all remonstrance would prove fruitless, retraced his steps with him. They had not proceeded far when they perceived a female figure at the bottom of the ascent, just where the path ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... never troubled themselves about such things. I think it was a far better life when men were heathens; and now I want my food, and no nonsense.' The good-wife answered: 'I am sure you will come to sorrow to-day if you act thus perversely'. ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... Lenitives of Pain: No Sounds alas would touch th' impervious Ear, Though dancing Mountains witness'd Orpheus near; Nor Lute nor Lyre his feeble Pow'rs attend, Nor sweeter Musick of a virtuous Friend, But everlasting Dictates croud his Tongue, Perversely grave, or positively wrong. The still returning Tale, and ling'ring Jest, Perplex the fawning Niece and pamper'd Guest, While growing Hopes scarce awe the gath'ring Sneer, And scarce a Legacy can bribe to hear; The watchful Guests ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... of music came to an end the relief was so great that he felt slightly dizzy, as if a chasm of silence had yawned at his feet. When he raised his eyes, the audience, most perversely, was exhibiting signs of animation and interest in their faces, and the women in white muslin dresses were coming down in pairs from the platform into the body of Schomberg's "concert-hall." They dispersed themselves all over the place. The male creature with the hooked nose and purple-black ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... himself colour at the question, and then hated that—hated to pass for anything so idiotic as woundable. Woundable by Chad's lady, in respect to whom he had come out with such a fund of indifference—was he already at that point? Perversely, none the less, his pause gave a strange air of truth to her supposition; and what was he in fact but disconcerted at having struck her just in the way he had most dreamed of not doing? "I'm not in trouble yet," he at last smiled. "I'm not in ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... attachments to foster! There was glory! Not that Albinia fulfilled her mission to a great extent; shamefacedness always restrained her, and she had not Emily's gift for making opportunities. Indeed, when she did her best, so perversely bashful were the parties, that the wrong pairs resorted together, the two who could talk being driven into conversation by the silence ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... two long letters, my dear Etherington, with equal surprise and interest; for what I knew of your Scottish adventures before, was by no means sufficient to prepare me for a statement so perversely complicated. The Ignis Fatuus which, you say, governed your father, seems to have ruled the fortunes of your whole house, there is so much eccentricity in all that you have told me. But n'importe, Etherington, you were my friend—you held ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... pout itself away. She debated much as to whether she should take Godfrey into her confidence; she would have done so without hesitation if he hadn't disappointed her. He was so little what she might have expected, and so perversely preoccupied that she could explain it only by the high pressure at which he was living, his anxiety about his "exam." He was in a fidget, in a fever, putting on a spurt to come in first; sceptical moreover about his success and cynical about everything else. He appeared to agree to the ...
— The Marriages • Henry James
... would be only a little shower the people of Johnstown were yet more foolish. The railroad officials had repeatedly told them that the dam threatened destruction. They still perversely lulled themselves into a false security. The blow came, when it did, like a flash. It was as if the heavens had fallen in liquid fury upon the earth. It was as if ocean itself had been precipitated into an abyss. The slow ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... its being obtainable on these terms—its remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water pipes, and other vulgar necessities—were exactly those pleading in its favor with two romantic Americans perversely in search of the economic drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition, with unusual ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... scenes are laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners' fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... his life. What a sad and dark and endless void lay between that past and the present! He had no right even to dream of a beautiful woman like Ray Longstreth. That conviction, however, did not dispel her; indeed, it seemed perversely to make her grow more fascinating. Duane grew conscious of a strange, unaccountable hunger, a something that was like ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... along the velvet lawns. Nature's most delicate and final birth, Mankind perfected shall possess the earth. But ah, not yet! For still the Giants' race, Huge, though diminish'd, tramps the Earth's fair face; Gross and repulsive, yet perversely proud, Men of their imperfections boast aloud. Vain of their bulk, of all they still retain Of giant ugliness absurdly vain; At all that's small they point their stupid scorn And, monsters, think themselves ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... other dead friend in a way like this; to his wife's memory he had given only the sacred silence, the impassioned hymn, the wealth of poetry inspired by her spirit but not addressed to her. This poem, also, was written "once, and only once, and for one only." La Saisiaz recalls to us, perversely perhaps, poems of his in which no personal sorrow beats. The glory of the dawn and the mountain-peak—Saleve with its outlook over the snowy splendour of Mont Blanc—instils itself here into the mourner's mood, as, long before, a like scene had animated the young disciples of the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... establish upon constitutional grounds the monstrous phantom of justice they called government, was met by his hearty indignation. He says, 'With the artfulness of a deity and the presumption of a fiend, our own Constitution is perversely claimed by the Democracy as the aegis for the establishment of a slave autocracy ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... also because we moderns forget that there is a female point of view. The woman's wisdom stands partly, not only for a wholesome hesitation about punishment, but even for a wholesome hesitation about absolute rules. There was something feminine and perversely true in that phrase of Wilde's, that people should not be treated as the rule, but all of them as exceptions. Made by a man the remark was a little effeminate; for Wilde did lack the masculine power of dogma ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... try the soothing strain, [bb]Diffuse the tuneful lenitives of pain: No sounds, alas! would touch th' impervious ear, Though dancing mountains witness'd Orpheus near; Nor lute nor lyre his feeble pow'rs attend, Nor sweeter musick of a virtuous friend; But everlasting dictates crowd his tongue, Perversely grave, or positively wrong. The still returning tale, and ling'ring jest, Perplex the fawning niece and pamper'd guest, While growing hopes scarce awe the gath'ring sneer, And scarce a legacy can bribe to hear; The watchful guests still hint the last offence; The ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... kinship, but the limit to our smaller patiences of any northward land-journey. And yet not the young fatigue, I repeat, but the state of easy wonder, is what most comes back: the stops too repeated, but perversely engaging; the heat and the glare too great, but the river, by the window, making reaches and glimpses, so that the great swing of picture and force of light and colour were themselves a constant adventure; the uncles, above all, too pre-eminent, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... peace! Through the dark postern of time long elapsed Led softly, by the stillness of the night,— Led like a murderer (and such it proves!) Strays (wretched rover!) o'er the pleasing past,— In quest of wretchedness, perversely strays; And finds all desert now; and meets the ghosts Of my ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... as he had permitted himself this qualification of the unfortunate persons she so perversely cherished, he repented of his roughness—and partly because he expected a flash from her. But it was one of her finest sides that she sometimes flashed with a mere mild glow. "I don't see why you don't ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... things cobblestones, or what?" continued Putnam perversely, indicating the border which quaintly encircled the little mound. "As I live," he exclaimed, "they are door-knobs!" and he poked one of them out of the ground with the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... the tall, strong girl "little Alice," and so she seemed to him. He could not, without direct effort, think of her as a magnificently maturing woman. She had always been his spoiled pet child, perversely set against the Holy Church, ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... must call in Rouen on the way back to London. He had an instinctive mistrust of her desire for the place. But, perversely, she wanted to go there. It was as if she wanted to try its effect ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... it rains; but the mind—precluded by circumstances from positive personal assurance of such fact, and able only to arrive at truth from exterior evidence—is in a fitter state for belief of the fact from being already made aware that it was probable. Let it not then be inferred, somewhat perversely, that because antecedent probabilities are the staple of our present argument, the theme itself, Religion, rests upon hypotheses so slender: it rests not at all upon such straws as probabilities, but on posterior evidence far more firm. What we now attempt is not to prop the ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... that Marion Kent was living out, perversely, this poor side of her—making a mistake? Losing, perhaps, ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... not intimated that I am sorry I took the boy in," remarked the doctor, not perversely, but with steadfast kindness. "If our own little boy had lived, and had done this thing accidentally, would I have been sorry he had ever been born? Or if little Ted had grown to be thirteen, and you and I had died in the wilderness ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... can fashion to love Edward Benden that way," said Tabitha, perversely misinterpreting her father-in-law's words. "I'll mix him a potion 'll help to cleanse his disorder, you'll see. Bitters be good for sick folks; and he's grievous sick. I met Mall a-coming; she saith he snapped ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... lost his family, his money and his health. He was, in short, a man completely broken—tall, thin, with a cadaverous face, out of which shone two huge, lusterless eyes. He walked with an angular crawl that reminded one of the emaciated flies one sees at the beginning of winter dragging themselves perversely along as if struggling across an illimitable ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... Pothier's imagination fell into a vision over a consideration of his favorite text—that of the great sheet, wherein was all manner of flesh and fowl good for food, but the tongue of the old notary would trip at the name of Peter, and perversely say, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... "No one would have suspected him to be a dishonest man, if he had not perversely chosen to assume a style which (as he himself confesses) the ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... physical uneasiness, pains which would not quite declare themselves, restless fidgetings of his limbs, vague depression of spirit. Konrad Karl and Madame quarrelled openly and bitterly. His revilings stung her. Her own ill-temper left her raw. She fled to her room and locked herself into it. The King, perversely persistent, went after her. He could be heard scolding her through the closed door at one moment, begging pathetically for admittance at another. Gorman wandered restlessly from room to room. He opened windows, panting for air, and closed them with a curse when the hot blast ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... misfortune is it to have made such a use of such talents! It would have been better for you and for mankind if you had been one of the dullest of Dutch theologians, or the most credulous monk in a Portuguese convent. The riches of the mind, like those of Fortune, may be employed so perversely as to become a nuisance and pest instead of an ornament and support ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... making the Greeks hasten for safety in all directions. He was off ; he could no more return to retract his devious idiocy than he could make his horse fly to Athens. What was done was done. He could not mend it. And he felt like a man that had broken his own heart; perversely, childishly, stupidly broken his own heart. He was sure that Marjory was lost to him. No man could be degraded so publicly and resent it so crudely and still retain a Marjory. In his abasement from his defeat at the hands of Nora Black he had performed every imaginable block-headish act and ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... bells, across the rear of the vegetable garden, where they were set in the fall to make strong plants before being put in their permanent places—or rather their season's places, for these lovely flowers are perversely biennials, and at least seven times every spring I vow I will never bother with them again, and then make an even larger sowing when their stately stalks and sky-blue bells are abloom in summer! Tenderly you lift the pine boughs from them on a balmy April day (it ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... arrangement that she should come to fetch her; it had been out of the question—a stroke in such bad taste as would have put Rose in the wrong. The girl had never dreamed of it, but somehow, suddenly, perversely, she was glad of it now; she even hoped that her grandmother and her ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... who have got a good Bible to read, And parents so anxious and kind, Shall prove myself vile and ungrateful indeed If I still am perversely inclined. ...
— The Good Resolution • Anonymous
... him perversely. He smiled—but it was closer to a leer—and lunged into his cabin. What he said to Sheila was no joke. He really did have a splitting headache. It had come on suddenly and it was like no headache he had ever known. It pulsed ...
— A Place in the Sun • C.H. Thames
... it," he said. "It is the love charm which has worked perversely. Elsa, you are under a spell, poor woman; you do not know the truth. I gave you the philtre in your drinking water, and Foy, the traitor Foy, has reaped its fruits. Dear girl, shake yourself free from this delusion, it is ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... Being, had analyzed and unified all things from everlasting to everlasting, yet here was an isolated force—a woman's will—that stood obstinately between him and happiness. He seemed to visualize it, behind her serious face, perversely mocking. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Italy this instinct for divination was nowhere so strongly and so perversely developed into a mechanical system as in Etruria, and it is highly probable that this development contributed largely to the rapid political and moral decay of the Etruscan people. The narrow aristocratic constitution of the Etruscan cities, worked by a kind of priestly ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... quality of all one does or says—or rather the very word "aims" is a wrong one; there is no longer any aim or effort, except the effort to feel which way the gentle guiding hand would have us to go; the only sorrow that is possible is when we rather perversely follow our own will ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... how it had been one of her childish superstitions always "to wish at the new moon." How often, her desire seeming perversely to lift itself towards things unattainable, had she framed one sole wish that she might be beautiful ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the "Jolly Susan" were becoming uneasy. Would Miss Ashwell overlook the bluebells in Five A's bouquet? Nancy held up the flowers for Miss Ashwell to choose, and rather ostentatiously turned the bluebells towards her, but she perversely chose Olivia's pansies. Five o'clock had rung and the maids were crossing the lawn with trays of the inevitable cake and lemonade. The crew felt desperate. Perhaps it was a case of telepathy, for, with her hand hovering over Marjorie's hollyhocks, Miss Ashwell ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... Cook. These two words when united soon became corrupted, and the magnificent sheet of water was designated 'the Cucumber Lake,' while its splendid cataract, known in ancient days by the Indians as the 'Pan-ook,' or 'the River's Leap,' is perversely called by way of variation 'the Cowcumber Falls;' can anything be conceived more vulgar or more vexatious, unless it be their awkward attempt at pronunciation, which converts Epaigwit into 'a pig's wit,' and ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... with London? The men on leave, when they meet each other, always ask that question without hope, in the seclusion of their confidence and special knowledge. They feel perversely they would sooner be amid the hated filth and smells of the battle-ground than at home. Out there, though possibly mischance may suddenly extinguish the day for them, they will be with those who understand, with ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... Patty, perversely, and then, pulling out half a dozen more sprays, she threw them indiscriminately around, to Cameron, and several of the other ushers who were grouped about. Farnsworth made a slight effort to catch one, but he didn't really try, and the flower fell ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... appeared after a round of alarmed inquiry, Kenny perversely chose to be truthful about it, insisted that it was not accidental and refused to be sorry. Afterward he admitted to Garry, it was difficult to believe that one spontaneous ebullition of a nature not untemperamental could provoke so much discussion, frivolous and otherwise. The thing ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... more than once how little I have known of my own family,—that I have known indeed nothing. My mother has seemed to me to be perversely determined not to tell me all that which I will acknowledge I have thought that I ought to know. But with equal perversity I have refrained from asking questions on a subject of which I think I should have been told everything without questioning. And I am a man not curious by nature as to ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... art can interpret. Dualism, with the harsh asceticism which belongs to it, has given way to a brighter and more hopeful philosophy; men's outlook upon the world is more intelligent, more trustful, and more genial; only for those who perversely seek to impose the ethics of selfish individualism upon a world which obeys no such law, science has in reserve a blacker pessimism than ever brooded over ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... said Philip. 'I never supposed you would take my advice "au pied de la lettre",' he had almost added, 'perversely.' ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... unreasonable prejudice against western men and women, western towns and prairies, and, in short, everything western, down to western politics and western politicians, whom she perversely asserted to be tue lowest ot all western products, there was still some common sense in Sybil's idea. When that inevitable hour ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... our fellow-creatures, is, it seems, merely an accidental circumstance, which the mind has not the least regard to. These are the absurdities which even men of capacity run into when they have occasion to belie their nature, and will perversely disclaim that image of God which was originally stamped upon it, the traces of which, however faint, are plainly discernible upon the mind ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... wisdom of women, knew that the best-behaved china is perversely given to leaping without warning out of the hands of any boy, to his utter consternation, and she patted him on ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple
... standpoint, they must still 'censure me in their wisdom,' they have previously 'awakened their senses that they may the better judge.' Nor do I apprehend any more charges of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely harsh. Having hitherto done my utmost in the art to which my life is a devotion, I cannot engage to increase the effort; but I conceive that there may be helpful light, as well as reassuring warmth, in the attention and sympathy I gratefully ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... his character, that nothing can now prevent him from feeling and acting in a particular way, or at least that no effort of his own can hinder it. In the words of the sect which in our own day has most perseveringly inculcated and most perversely misunderstood this great doctrine, his character is formed for him, and not by him; therefore his wishing that it had been formed differently is of no use; he has no power to alter it. But this is a grand ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... there's a time for all things, and I must feel it unworthy of thy womanhood to so perversely jeer and flout at a good man's love, when ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... loved by man and brute alike that a big man of her own town, whose body, big as it was, was yet too small for his heart and from whose brain things went off at queer angles, always christened her perversely as—"The Blight." ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... mind of any man acquainted with these circumstances was staggered, in attempting to associate this eastern wreck of Crusoe with this western island,—but a worse obstacle than that, because a moral one, is this, that, by thus perversely transferring the scene from the Pacific to the Atlantic, De Foe has transferred it from a quiet and sequestered to a populous and troubled sea,—the Fleet Street or Cheapside of the navigating world, the great throughfare of nations,—and thus has prejudiced the moral ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... blankness of mind in the sunlight. Presently he shivered slightly. He leaned his elbows on his knees and his forehead in his hands and sat still. Alexander! He felt no hot straining toward meeting, toward fighting, Alexander. Perversely enough, after a year of impatient, contemptuous thought in that direction, he had lately felt liking and an ancient strong respect returning like a tide that was due. And he could not meet Alexander ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... Provence, a language as distinct as Spanish or Italian. It is French, with merely a dialectical difference from "French of Paris." But the Normans, in this resembling the Gascons, have no special objection to a final consonant, and most vulgarly and perversely still sound divers s's and t's which the politer tongue of the capital dooms to an ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... within and without by such desperately prosaic and inartistic surroundings?" mused Van Berg. "It glistens like a lost jewel in an ash-barrel; or, more correctly, it is like an exquisite flower that nature has perversely made the outcome of a rank and poisonous vine. Of course the flower is poisonous also, and as soon as its first delicate bloom is over, will grow as rank and repulsive as the vine that bears it. Like produces like; and with such parentage, what hope is there ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... haste to get to bed, Charlie fumbled at the latch an unusually long time before he succeeded in opening the door. And finally, when it did swing open, his coat, without any apparent provocation, perversely slipped from his arm and fell to the floor. Charlie found it necessary, before he put it across his arm again, to ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... minced asparagus fried in oil was concocted in accordance with his prescription. It was ingenious, but I preferred her dish of barbel from the Tarn, notwithstanding the multitudinous bones which this fish perversely carries in its body, to choke the enemy, although nothing could be more absurd than such ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... husband for always, his hand about hers in sign of perpetual possession and protection? What beneath all was he who had taken with her, thus publicly, the mighty oath of fidelity, "until death us do part"? Each had said it; each believed it; each desired it wholly. Perversely, here in the moment of her deepest feeling, intruded the consciousness of broken contracts, the waste of shattered purposes. Ah, but theirs was different! This absolute oath of fidelity one to the other, each with his own will and his own desire,—this irredeemable ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... foolish when it was useless, to be too curious. It was puzzling, to be sure, to watch the movements of the Boers, or rather their lack of movement. That they saw the signals and knew what to expect went without saying. And yet they perversely showed no signs of running away. On the contrary, they kept improving their defences and generally indicating that they had come to stay. We liked the hardihood of this attitude; but were on the whole inclined to pity the poor beggars. Defiance, in the circumstances, could only mean ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... governor as to the perfectly innocent meaning of His claim to be the King of Israel, and His silence before the Sanhedrin. That silence is only explicable because they rightly understood the meaning of the claim which they contemptuously and perversely rejected. Jesus Christ knew that His death was the forfeit, as I have said, and yet He locked His lips and said ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... minds with careless freedom. With this problem Washington was obliged suddenly to deal, both in ill success and good success, as well as in many attempts which came to nothing. Let us see how he solved it at the very outset, when everything went most perversely wrong. ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... school. What strikes me is the sensuality of that art of the fifteenth century which is said to be Christian. I have seen piety and purity only in the images of Fra Angelico, although they are very pretty. The rest, those figures of Virgins and angels, are voluptuous, caressing, and at times perversely ingenuous. What is there religious in those young Magian kings, handsome as women; in that Saint Sebastian, brilliant with youth, who seems merely the dolorous ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... them, but it did not affect their love. The jealousy was a part of their general discontent—a jealousy that would grow more intense as each remained frustrate and unhappy. Neither understood the forces at work within herself; each saw these perversely illustrated in the other's faults. In each case the cause of unhappiness was unsatisfied love, unsatisfied craving for love. It was more acute in Emmy's case, because she was older and because the love she needed was under her eyes being wasted upon ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... and of returning of her own free will was dismissed at once as hopeless. She had seen enough in her short glimpse of the Arabs' tactics when they had passed her to know that she was dealing with a finished horseman on a perfectly trained horse, and that her idea could never succeed. But, perversely, she felt that to that particular Arab following her she would never give in. She would ride till she dropped, or the ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... sun would rise, at his back, for he knew that El Obeid lay due west of his present position. It was true that he had a compass attached to his watch chain, but for some unknown cause the thing had struck work a fortnight back, and now the black half, which ought always to have turned to the north, perversely remained where you choose to place it. But, after all, the sun in the morning and evening, and the polar star at night, will put you somewhere in the right direction, when you ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... legal ownership, personified, meeting lawless beauty, incarnate. His dignity demanded impassivity during this embassy designed to link their offspring, who, if she had behaved herself, would have been brother and sister. That wretched tune, "The Wild, Wild Women," kept running in his head, perversely, for tunes did not run there as a rule. Passing the poplars in front of the house, he thought: 'How they've grown; I had them planted!' A maid ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... say what you will," she said perversely, "I know the man's a burglar, or a murderer, ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... his rivals; and Starkad, after quelling certain rebels, set up Siward as the heir to his father's sovereignty. With him he sojourned a long time; but when he heard—for the rumour spread—that Ingild, the son of Frode (who had been treacherously slain), was perversely minded, and instead of punishing his father's murderers, bestowed upon them kindness and friendship, he was vexed with stinging wrath at so dreadful a crime. And, resenting that a youth of such great parts should have renounced his descent from his glorious father, he hung on his shoulders ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... at the ground, the heavy mattock apparently invested with a malicious life of its own, twisting perversely, heavily lop-sided in his hands, thought that this did not sound like a polite thing to say to a lady. And yet the way Vincent said it made it sound like a compliment, somehow. No, not that; but as though it were awfully important to him what Mrs. Crittenden ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... grief to Tooni, who could not understand it; but Sonny Sahib perversely refused to talk in his own tongue. She did all she could to help him. When he was a year old she cut an almond in two, and gave half to Sonny Sahib and half to the green parrot that swung all day ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the whole of this transaction, therefore, we, the committee for Norfolk Borough, do give it as our unanimous opinion, that the said John Brown, has wilfully and perversely violated the Continental Association to which he had with his own hand subscribed obedience, and that, agreeable to the eleventh article, we are bound forthwith to publish the truth of the case, to the end that all such foes to the rights of British America may be publicly known and universally contemned ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... upon. And the Young England League to which they had all subscribed so handsomely—where were its funds? Was it safe to leave them at the disposal of so unprincipled a fellow? Then germs of stories crept in from the studios and the stage and grew perversely in the overheated atmosphere. Paul's reputation began to assume a pretty colour. On the other hand, there were those who, while deploring the deception, were impressed by the tragedy and by Paul's attitude. He had his defenders. Among the latter ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... felt that she would die or lose her senses outright, if torn away from this last consolation. How she used to blush and lighten up when those letters came! How she used to trip away with a beating heart, so that she might read unseen! If they were cold, yet how perversely this fond little soul interpreted them into warmth. If they were short or selfish, what excuses she ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and you make me as jealous as possible!' she exclaimed perversely. 'I know you will never speak to any third person of me so warmly as you do to ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... soul, though her lips tight set betrayed no sound. Oh, miserable chaos of the human world, that such pent up love should be wasted—wasted; that they, too, young and strong and beautiful, alone together, so near, with such glorious happiness within their reach, should yet be so perversely ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... enough, you could get in," she said perversely, with an alluring coquetry in her mien. "The ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... sentences!—written so innocently and interpreted so perversely! And yet the fierce and blind bewilderment with which Phoebe read or misread them was natural enough. She never doubted for a moment but that the bad woman who wrote them meant to offer herself to John. She was separated from her husband, John had said, declaring of course that it was ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... did not care to hear about Rosie's flowers just then, and rather perversely, as Graeme thought, reverted to the falling away of their old intimacy with the Ruthvens, and to wonder at its cause; and there was something in her tone that made Mrs Snow turn grave, astonished eyes upon her, and helped Graeme to answer very quietly ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... reflect, or Shelley not to sing. His instrument is a trumpet of challenge; and he lived, as he appropriately died, in the progress of an unaccomplished campaign. His work is neither perfect architecture nor fine mosaic; but, like that of his intellectual ancestors, the elder Elizabethans whom he perversely maligned, it is all animated by the spirit of ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... consulting his wife or at her suggestion resulted favorably enough; but all his own schemes and projects were unaccountably marred and defeated. If he bought a horse, it was sure to prove spavined or wind-broken. His cows either refused to give down their milk, or, giving it, perversely kicked it over. A fine sow which he had bargained for repaid his partiality by devouring, like Saturn, her own children. By degrees a dark thought forced its way into his mind. Comparing his repeated mischances with the ante-nuptial warnings of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the steps to seize upon Amidon as he alighted. That gentleman and Madame le Claire, however, perversely got off at the other end of the car. As they walked down the platform, Florian met his first test, in the salutation of a young woman in a tailor-made gown, who nodded and smiled to him from a smart trap at a short distance from the station, where she seemed to ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... it," said Rosa, perversely. "Parents, in this age, do not make a custom of locking up refractory daughters in nunneries or garrets until they consent to wed Baron Buncombe or my Lord Nozoo, but there are, nevertheless, compulsory ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... kindled in their eyes, and their cheeks glowed with indignation at the wrongs that threatened them; they were no longer disposed to act upon the principles of fatality, as they had perversely understood them; and they argued at once like reasonable and free beings, whose actions were in their choice, and who had no doubt but that their actions would produce adequate effects. They recollected that OMAR had, in the reign of Solyman, often rescued them from such oppression, as ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... to come, Felix trembled." [137:1] His apprehensions, however, soon passed away, and though he was fully convinced that Paul had not incurred any legal penalty, he continued to keep him in confinement, basely expecting to obtain a bribe for his liberation. When disappointed in this hope, he still perversely refused to set him at liberty. Thus, "after two years," when "Porcius Festus came into Felix' room," the ex-Procurator, "willing to shew the Jews a pleasure, left ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... sympathy between them; there was not even any interest which could take the place of sympathy. Elizabeth did not really care whether Denas was offended or not, but she had a conscience, and it urged her to be kind and just. And she did try to obey the order, but when orders perversely go against inclination they do not obtain a ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... jealousy, as it had been the shadow of his love, presented him with the complement, with the converse of that new smile with which she had greeted him that very evening,—with which, now, perversely, she was mocking Swann while she tendered her love to another —of that lowering of her head, but lowered now to fall on other lips, and (but bestowed upon a stranger) of all the marks of affection that she had shewn to him. And all these voluptuous memories ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust |
