"Absurd" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be too absurd, certainly. You have heard the proverb— Hold in contempt the innocent words of those Who from their infancy have known no guile:— But trust the treacherous counsels of the man Who makes a very science ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... through the trees. She was quite close. He almost ran. No, it could not be his mother. This was a girl, lithe, tall, swift stepping. His mother had been rather short and stout. Could this girl be his sister Alice? The swift supposition was absurd, because Alice was only about ten, and this girl was grown. She had a grace of motion that struck Pan. He hurried around some trees to intercept her, losing sight of her ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... I had every reason to be proud of the four young men who will control the destinies of the family when I am under the sod. Proud not only of my two dear sons, but of my two dear sons-in-law, who, though one is slight and short, and the other impressive-looking and tall, and though both hold absurd political notions with which I have not the slightest sympathy, have so completely won my heart by their devotion to their wives and generally exemplary behavior, that I cannot choose between them. I was in a jovial mood ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... rationality, of what is known by demonstration. Beyond these limits is the irrational, which, whether it be called the super-rational or the infra-rational or the contra-rational, is all the same thing. Beyond these limits is the absurd of Tertullian, the impossible of the certum est, quia impossibile est. And this absurd can only base itself ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... the year 1418, and the same infatuation existed among the people there as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine. Many who were seized at the sight of those affected, excited attention at first by their confused and absurd behavior, and then by their constantly following the swarms of dancers. These were seen day and night passing through the streets, accompanied by musicians playing on bagpipes, and by innumerable spectators attracted by curiosity, to which were added anxious parents and relations, who ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... oh, uncle! I really cannot read it out—it is too absurd! Is there no way, I wonder, of stopping these reporters from giving their auction-book schedule of one's height, figure, complexion, and all that? Here, Bee—you read it, my dear," said Claudia, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... sin. Her denial of the one personal God—"all is infinite mind, and its infinite manifestations,"— is but a swing of the pendulum from the godless and graceless system of the materialistic philosophy propounded by Darwin and Haeckel and is as absurd and unscriptural (although opposite) as the ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... has "et ce est mout scue chouse"; Pauthier's Text, "mais il est moult cele" The latter seems absurd. I have no doubt that scue is correct, and is an Italianism, saputo having sometimes the sense of prudent or judicious. Thus P. della Valle (II. 26), speaking of Shah Abbas: "Ma noti V.S. i tiri di questo re, saputo insieme e bizzarro," ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... now developed rapidly. The absurd thing happened: Harry Sterling began to take a serious view of his attachment to Mrs. Mortimer. The one thing more absurd, that she should take a serious view of it, had not happened yet, and, indeed, would never happen; ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... preaching from a cathedral pulpit, that chanting should be abandoned in cathedral services. By such an assertion he would have overshot his mark and rendered himself absurd, to the delight of his hearers. He could, however, and did, allude with heavy denunciations to the practice of intoning in parish churches, although the practice was all but unknown in the diocese; and from thence he came round to the undue preponderance ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... portrayal of the old-time Southern colonel, with his absurd grandiloquence, his eccentric garb, his quaint idioms and phrases, his motheaten pride of family, and his really kind heart, fastidious sense of honor, and lovable simplicity, is the best delineation of a character role on the boards to-day. The coat worn by Colonel Calhoun ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... is pretty, and there is something taking in her name. Old people, and very precise people, call her Margaret Boyne. But you do not: it is only plain Madge; it sounds like her, very rapid and mischievous. It would be the most absurd thing in the world for you to like her, for she teases you in innumerable ways: she laughs at your big shoes, (such a sweet little foot as she has!) and she pins strips of paper on your coat-collar; and ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... James!" cried Mortimer, turning a deep and apoplectic red, "if I love him! Hold! I and Dick Dudley, my best friend, who loves the duke, not as much as I (we fought once because he made this absurd claim)—I and Dudley, I tell you, asked each other just now if we should have the strength to again see our James without ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... "she was called to the task by some of the most influential organs of public opinion in France;"—she would not certainly affirm what she knew to be false, and the idea that she did receive a bona fide request of the above purport from such individuals, is too absurd to command belief for a moment. Would any one in his senses, who is "desirous of being represented as he is," put in requisition the pencil of an artist by which he would be ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... happens to a child," continued Harald, excitedly, "then directly to charge those belonging to it with a wilful murder! Can one imagine anything more shameful or more absurd. No, such snakes, at least, shall not hiss about the unhappy lady. And to crush them shall be ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... can scarcely be termed absurd, and yet it is unquestionably groundless. The mysterious 'understanding' of servants, and their wide knowledge of each other's experiences, may be explained upon a perfectly simple and rational theory, and I think we may venture to reject ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Where the latter method is in use, it is noticeable that pupils adopt a uniform tone and measured rhythm, both of which are undesirable. Moreover, especially with young pupils, there is a danger that absurd blunders made by individuals may pass unnoticed, because the teacher has not the opportunity of detecting them. When the passage has been memorized, it should be repeated daily for a time and then repeated at longer intervals, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... round trot. Colonel Philibert, impatient to reach Beaumanoir, spurred on for a while, hardly noticing the absurd figure of his guide, whose legs stuck out like a pair of compasses beneath his tattered gown, his shaking head threatening dislodgment to hat and wig, while his elbows churned at every jolt, making play with the shuffling gait of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... danger of a flareup because Halloway always bore himself with entire politeness yet with a courtesy which did not escape a sort of indulgent patronage; as though the serious thought of rivalry was absurd. ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... down upon Rachel Henderson. When she woke in the morning it was to cleared skies both in her own mind and in the physical world. The nightmare through which she had passed seemed to her now unreal, even a little absurd. Her nerves were quieted by sleep, and she saw plainly what she had to do. That "old, unhappy, far-off thing" lurking in the innermost depth of memory had nothing more to do with her. She would look ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... answered. "Didn't you see me rolling over on the ground laughing at it? Why, Zoega, I never saw any thing so absurd as that in my life; any decent Geyser would have given at least an hour's notice. This miserable little wretch went off half cocked. I was just laughing to think how sick we made ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Mountains; it beyond them appears again here and there and everywhere, within and without the regions of rain. There is nothing like a border of The Desert. The "Grand Desert" and "Petite Desert" of the French, are equally incorrect and absurd. All is Sahara, or waste, uncultivated lands, and oases scattered thick within them, as spots on the ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... them before they did meet? That was the question, and upon its answer it depended whether or no they had another three minutes to live. To think of mercy at the hands of these bloodthirsty brutes, after they had just killed one of their number before their eyes, was absurd. It was true he had been shot in self-defence; but what count would savages take of that, or of the fact that they were but harmless travellers? White people were not very popular with the Matabele just then, as they knew well; also, their murder in this remote place, with not ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... well-to-do professional men, of minor officials, clerks, shopkeepers, our roads leading through the workaday world. Yet quite half our time was taken up in studies utterly useless to us. How I hated them, these youth-tormenting Shades. Homer! how I wished the fishermen had asked him that absurd riddle earlier. Horace! why could not that shipwreck have succeeded: it would have in the case of any one ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... as the world is moral. Shakespeare is all good, Rabelais is all good, Montaigne is all good, not because all the thoughts, the words, the manifestations are so, but because at the core, and permeating all, is an ethic intention—a love which, through mysterious, indirect, subtle, seemingly absurd, often terrible and repulsive, means, seeks to uplift, and never to degrade. It is the spirit in which authorship is pursued, as Augustus Schlegel has said, that makes it either an infamy or a virtue; and the spirit ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... of Red Mick and his prosecution became at once a matter of no moment. How absurd his worry and vexation now seemed. On the other hand, what new complications might arise? All these years the Gordons had lived on the assumption that Mr. Grant would provide for them, without having any promise or agreement from him; and, owing to the old man's violent ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... an example which I quote because it is so absurd. The rooms I live in were owned by a prim old woman who for more than twenty years was my landlady. She and I were great friends, indeed she tended me like a mother, and when I was so ill nursed me as perhaps few mothers would have ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... COURT! The definition is absurd!" said General Hyde, with both scorn and temper. "A court pre-supposes both royalty ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... not in the least eccentric. The child, who is born in the actual presence (result of the usual farcical opening) of a corporal and four fusiliers, is put out to nurse at Saint-Germain in the way they did then, brought home and put out to school, but, in consequence of his mother's absurd spoiling, allowed to learn absolutely nothing, and (though he is not exactly a bad fellow) to get into very bad company. With two of the choicest specimens of this he runs away (having, again by his mother's folly, been trusted with a round sum in gold) at the age ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... consternation. Miss Trinder followed, silent and indomitable, at the heel of the hunt, and the released puppy, who had also harked in, could be heard throwing his tongue in the dusky shrubbery ahead of us. It was all exasperatingly absurd, as things seem to have a habit of being in Ireland. I never felt more like a fool in my life, and the bitterest part of it was that it was all I could do to keep ahead of Bridgie. As for the filly, ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... that the truth or correctness of names can only be ascertained by an appeal to etymology. The truth of names is to be found in the analysis of their elements. But why does he admit etymologies which are absurd, based on Heracleitean fancies, fourfold interpretations of words, impossible unions and separations of syllables ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... that his suspicion was unworthy and absurd. His was no simple choice between his friend's shameful cowardice, and this girl's criminal falsehood. No, Dal was crazy-drunk at the time, and himself cried out in his misery that the worst that they said of him was probably true. And even supposing that this girl was no ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... against loss; but we think there is nothing irrational in the popular belief in the existence of such an understanding, and that nothing has occurred since the middle of June that renders that belief absurd. The contrary belief makes a fool of Napoleon III.,—a character which not even the Emperor's enemies have attributed to him since he became a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... feet. "I am going to make what will seem an absurd request," he said tensely. "I am going to ask you all—the women, I mean—to take your places at the bridge tables. And then—" he paused for an instant, his blue eyes hard: "I want to see the death hand played exactly as it was played while Nita ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... time that an end be put to such absurd and dangerous antics, not abroad only, but at home. In the new order of things now dawning upon Ireland, there can no longer be room for them; and the very name of Orangeman must disappear forever from the vocabulary ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... had been conscious of innumerable lives being lived round him, and loves loved, and he outside, unable to know, to grasp, to gather them; and all the time the sands of his hourglass running out! A most absurd and unreasonable feeling for a man with everything he wanted, with work that he loved, quite enough money, and a wife so good as Sylvia—a feeling that no Englishman of forty-six, in excellent health, ought for a moment to have been troubled with. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... linen-draper at the Key in Cheapside; where there was a company of fine ladies, and we were very civilly treated, and had a very good place to see the pageants, which were many, and I believe good, for such kind of things, but in themselves but poor and absurd. ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... question. It is offering a great deal both on her part and her husband's to take charge of these two, but it would never do. She is almost a child herself,—a bride and beauty under twenty,—excessively admired, very likely to have her head turned. No, it would be too absurd. All her kindness, amiability, desire to make Marian her friend and companion, would only serve ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... that my presence is desired, or that fear of me, the foreigner, has ceased. On the contrary, it signifies that I am more greatly to be feared. The European is not wanted in China, no matter how absurd it may seem to the student of international politics, who sits and devours all the newspaper copy—good, bad and indifferent—which filters through regarding China becoming the El Dorado of the Westerner. He is wanted for no other reason than that of teaching the Chinese to foreignize ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... are mad, absolutely mad," declared the Captain. "I can't understand it. I'm still in my bed when I'm aroused by an insolent loafer who calls himself a walking delegate and tells me his union won't load me until I pay some absurd sum." ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... Miss Houston, whose given name was Agnes, "Frances and I happened to read that remarkable tale that was printed in one of the papers this morning, about a marriage between Rod Duncan and Beatrice. We thought it so absurd: We couldn't resist the temptation to come over to see you, for a few minutes this very evening, and ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... "It is only your absurd infatuation for Phrida Shand that prevents you," she said. "Ah!" she sighed. "How grossly ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... Decorations, as its only Design is to gratify the Senses, and keep up an indolent Attention in the Audience. Common Sense however requires that there should be nothing in the Scenes and Machines which may appear Childish and Absurd. How would the Wits of King Charles's time have laughed to have seen Nicolini exposed to a Tempest in Robes of Ermin, and sailing in an open Boat upon a Sea of Paste-Board? What a Field of Raillery would they have been let into, had they been entertain'd with painted Dragons ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... determination. Nevertheless, finding the enemy so eager and having reflected more maturely, he saw no reason for accepting the chivalrous cartel. As commanderin-chief—for Mayenne willingly conceded the supremacy which it would have been absurd in him to dispute—he accordingly replied that it was his custom to refuse a combat when a refusal seemed advantageous to himself, and to offer battle whenever it suited his purposes to fight. When that ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... for her loss. Then came jealousy of AEnone, who had apparently been able to console him so early. And mingled with all this, there began to press upon her a startling thought—one which she at first contemned as unlikely and absurd—but which, though continually driven away, so obstinately returned and commended itself to her attention with newer plausibility, that at last she began to give bitter and anxious heed to it. What if this constant communication between AEnone and Cleotos were to result in a mutual ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... ancestors; they may have possessed some species of protection from the rain on which they prided themselves as much as we do on our Umbrellas, and regarded the new-fangled invention (as they no doubt termed it) as something exceedingly absurd, coxcombical, and unnecessary; while we, who are in possession of so many life-comforts of which those of the good old times were supremely ignorant—among these we give the Umbrella brevet rank—can afford ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... a poetical work is, ceteris paribus, the measure of its merit, seems undoubtedly, when we thus state it, a proposition sufficiently absurd—yet we are indebted for it to the Quarterly Reviews. Surely there can be nothing in mere size, abstractly considered—there can be nothing in mere bulk, so far as a volume is concerned, which has so continuously elicited admiration ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "Absurd, but serious," he quietly returned. "Doris, I came to-night to ask you. It wouldn't keep any longer. One moment, please. Two things happened yesterday. My father won the big law suit that has been our nightmare for years; and I got a move-up in the office. Never was more shocked in all my ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... [17] In those days the guns that were pointed by the Church against the Dissenters were shotted. The law was a cesspool of iniquity and cruelty. Adam Smith was a new prophet whom few regarded, and commerce was hampered by idiotic impediments, and ruined by still more absurd help, on the ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... a feeling that it was the last time he should ever see him, and his face was gray with suffering as he faced his son for the last time. Harold became not merely unresponsive, he grew harsher of voice each moment. His father's tremulous and repeated words seemed to him foolish and absurd—and also inconsiderate. After he was gone he ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... with figures at the bottom of each page, and told that every month the junior had to add those stereotyped columns. Like all bank beginners, Nelson did not use his brains. Juniors are taught (1) to obey, (2) to work, (3) to ask no foolish questions. No matter how absurd a task appears, perform it without a kick. The happy-go-lucky boys take a chance and ask questions rather than do what seems to be unnecessary work; but Evan was the conscientious kind, the kind that obeys unquestioningly ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... that DA is equal to DB (unless, of course, you've bisected that chord all wrong), and DG is common, and GA is equal to GB—at least according to your absurd theory about G it is, since they must be both radii. Radii indeed! Look at them. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... rule of abstract rights. Under some circumstances it might be requisite to confine the legislative power to a single individual; under others to the hands of a few; and under others to commit it to the whole community. It would be absurd to maintain, on the ground of the natural equality of men, that a horde of ignorant and vicious savages, should be organized as a pure democracy, if experience taught that such a form of government was destructive to themselves and others. These different ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... fortune wrought him woe; 235 But he was ever talking in such sort As you do—far more sadly—he seemed hurt, Even as a man with his peculiar wrong, To hear but of the oppression of the strong, Or those absurd deceits (I think with you 240 In some respects, you know) which carry through The excellent impostors of this earth When they outface detection—he had worth, Poor fellow! but a humorist in his way'— 'Alas, what drove him mad?' 'I cannot say: 245 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... "It is absurd to call me clever," she said. "I have little learning and no accomplishments. I cannot even get on with the crochet work Denah showed me, and I do not know how ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... natural; every day she began to gain a greater command over her tender emotions, and indeed life, practical life, makes possible and comprehensible much which poetical logic and the imagination label—absurd. ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... very good men were against it read literally part of it would be ridiculous and you may take your seats if you please gentlemen of the jury I shall be occupied some time in my charge and I do not care to keep you standing and some of it would be absurd and some of it reads very well." And ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... in its parts. After sketching one day several heads of birds it became a vital matter of interest to me to know the use of the bony process on the head of the hornbill; but on asking a great physiologist, I found that it appeared to him an absurd question, and ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... that might apparently have been written with an eye to the conditions that attended their publication. Which, unless one credits our romancers with much further sight than is commonly supposed to be their portion, is absurd. The thing is a coincidence; and of this there is no more striking example than the story that ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK has prepared for the world this autumn. She calls it The Encounter (ARNOLD), and it is all about the struggle between "the Nietzschean attitude of mind in Germany," as exemplified ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... even murdering, on the other. "Mr. Errol said once," rejoined Miss Carmichael, "that there are two opposite natures, an old man and a new, in all human beings, as well as in those who are converted, and that no contradiction of the kind is too absurd for human nature." "Mistah Ehhol is quite right, my deah Miss Mahjohie, as all expehience attests. Bret Hahte has shewn it from a Califohnian standpoint. I have seen it in times of wanah and of peace, bad ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... sure the private business hours of the Debating Society were some of his happiest moments. His magnificent assumption of wrath on the most absurd grounds; his vast intensity over trivialities; his love for the heat and play of debate, would have made a stranger believe he lived for ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... fine, does not suit anybody, not even yourself. His majesty wished to speak to you, you refused him an interview; why, now that you are face to face, that you are here by a force independent of your will, why do you confine yourself to rigors which I consider useless and absurd? Speak! what the devil! speak, if only ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... old man, with a great white beard, appeared respectable and well-to-do in his black velvet cap and pelisse; his eyes were very bright, and his cheeks hectic with resentment at the annoyance he was undergoing; but that he could help out of the difficulty appeared absurd. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... dishonourable character—a man who preys upon society, and makes easily-deceived people his dupes, Sir; his absurd, his foolish, his wretched dupes, Sir,' said ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... undoubtedly the person referred to in the writing on the potsherd and in his father's letter, in proof of which he advanced Billali's allusions to her age and power. I was by this time too overwhelmed with the whole course of events that I had not even the heart left to dispute a proposition so absurd, so I suggested that we should try to go out and get a bath, of which we ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... Parliament had ever taken notice so seldom of any libellous matter published, or of any breach of privilege committed against him. He might also add, that no person had ever been more the object of the most indiscriminate, and he might say the most absurd and the most unfounded abuse. Nevertheless, in all such cases he had adopted a neutral course, and had left the truth to come out in the natural lapse of events. There was, however, one species of breach of privilege which he had never been disposed to pass unnoticed. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... absurd, however, to attribute the defeat of the suffrage amendment wholly to the liquor dealers, or to the densely ignorant, or to the foreigners. In the wealthiest and most aristocratic wards of San Francisco and Oakland, where there ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... best," the other went on easily, "but it is rather absurd to talk about one's best when you know so little of what ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... on it. He says: 'Some glacialists have ventured to explain the transportation of boulders even in the situation of those now referred to, by imagining that they were transported on ice floes,' etc. He treats this view, and the scratching of rocks by icebergs, as almost absurd...he has finally stirred me up so, that (without you would answer him) I think I will send a paper in opposition to the same Journal. I can thus introduce some old remarks of mine, and some new, and will insist on your capital observations in N. America. It is a bore to stop one's work, but he ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... Hagan. So I went on to Holland with that quick-change artist, and watched him come on board the steamer at Parkeston Quay, dressed as a rather German-looking commercial traveller, eager for war commissions upon smuggled goods. This sounds absurd, but his get-up seemed somehow to suggest the idea. Then I went below. Dawson always kept away from me whenever Hagan might ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... firing back at them. It brought one great leader—Stonewall Jackson—into fame. Above all, it profoundly affected the popular points of view, both North and South. In the South there was undue elation, followed by the absurd belief that one Southerner could beat two Northerners any day and that the North would now back down en masse, as its army had from the Henry Hill. A dangerous slackening of military preparation was ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... well-established fact, that oftentimes the most scientific museum admitted as genuine fragments of the human osteology what in fact belonged to the gigantic brutes of our earth in her earliest stages of development. This mistake would go some way in accounting for the absurd disposition in all generations to view themselves as abridged editions of their forefathers. Added to which, as a separate cause of error, there can be little doubt, that intermingled with the human race there has at most periods of the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... equal pay for equal work in their evidence before the Royal Commission on the Civil Service, and it is gratifying that, in spite of the determined policy of the department to adhere as far as possible to the absurd segregation of the sexes, the two organised bodies of Men and Women Clerks ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... know. I must be truthful with myself—with you. I do know. But it seems so strange, so almost inexplicable, and even rather absurd." ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... of time to Virginia; and yet three months afterward the defeated commander had advanced upon and forced back his victorious adversary. That such should be the result of the year's campaigning seemed absurd to the North. A clamorous appeal was made to the authorities to order another advance; and this general sentiment is said to have been shared by General Meade, who had declared himself bitterly disappointed at missing a battle with Lee in October. A stronger ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... dress. With his thin legs and thin arms he made a grotesque figure, a sinister Don Quixote, and Walker began to make coarse jokes about him. They were acknowledged with little smothered laughs. Mackintosh struggled with his shirt. He knew he looked absurd, but he hated being laughed at. He stood silent ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... drawn. One said that the brightness of the dawn—a fact easily explained by the diurnal motion of the globe—showed him that his soul was immortal. He asserted further that he had, at an earlier period of his life, trailed bright clouds behind him. This was absurd. ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... impatient; An understanding simple and unschool'd: For what we know must be, and is as common As any the most vulgar thing to sense, Why should we, in our peevish opposition, Take it to heart? Fie! 't is a fault to heaven, A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, To reason most absurd; whose common theme Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried, From the first corse, till he that died to-day, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... he wrote, "A Letter containing some Reflections on His Majesty's Declaration for Liberty of Conscience," to warn the Nonconformists of the great mistake into which some were falling. "Was ever anything," he asked afterwards, "more absurd than this conduct of King James and his party, in wheedling the Dissenters; giving them liberty of conscience by his own arbitrary dispensing authority, and his expecting they should be content with their religious liberty ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... Sommerton? Why, what could make you think such a thing? What an absurd idea! You cannot imagine how kind she was to me ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... and good, unless, indeed, it is a matter of principle with them that our social customs are a fetich. But there are innumerable instances where there are obstacles to unions which to overcome would involve hardships and suffering to others, or where absurd laws prevent marriage, and where two persons loving each other, prefer to pay the price of social ostracism to separation. Such as these lose nothing by Society's disapproval, but Society does lose something by persecuting ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... arm around him. "I want to go! I know it sounds crazy, and absurd, and desperate; but I'm sure it isn't! I want you to let me ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... by this system, we were giving the general government full and absolute power to regulate commerce, under which general power it would have a right to restrain, or totally prohibit, the slave trade: it must, therefore, appear to the world absurd and disgraceful to the last degree, that we should except from the exercise of that power, the only branch of commerce which is unjustifiable in its nature, and contrary to the rights of mankind. That, on the contrary, we ought rather to prohibit expressly in our Constitution, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Hayden-Bond's, we'll say, at seven or eight o'clock. It's after midnight now. How long would it take them to find out that between eight and midnight you had not only never been near your mother, but could not prove an alibi of any sort? If you told the truth it would sound absurd. No one in their sober senses would ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... for a moment. The silence in his breast was complete. But he felt a suspicious uneasiness, such as we may experience when we enter an unlighted strange place—the irrational feeling that something may jump upon us in the dark—the absurd ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... terror and compulsion as she did. But she declared that he had never loved her, and was always wanting her to be like ces Anglaises fades, and as to her child, he so tormented her about it, and the ways of his absurd mother and sisters, and so expected her to sacrifice her art and her prospects to the little wretch, that she was ready to strangle it! "Maternal love, bah! she was not going to be like a bird or a beast," she said, with a strange wild glance in her eyes that made Lance shudder, ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was at once too absurd and too grave to be permitted to continue. "Sockless" Jerry Simpson now counseled the Populists to let the decision go to the courts. The judges, to be sure, were Republican; but Simpson, ever resourceful, argued that if they decided against the Populists, the house and senate could ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... generations, and showed by his protruding ribs the general leanness of the land. He moved in an eccentric amble, and when put upon his speed was generally run backward. To this old negro's horse was harnessed a very shaky and absurd wagon, which rattled like approaching dissolution, and each part of it ran without any connection or correspondence with any other part. It had no tail-board, and its shafts were sharp as famine; and into this mimicry of a vehicle the murderer was to be sent ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... Here, all day long, he jolted on the bare boards, distressed by heat and continually reawakened from uneasy slumbers. By the half return ticket in his purse, he was entitled to make the journey on the easy cushions and with the ample space of the first-class; but alas! in his absurd attire, he durst not, for decency, commingle with his equals; and this small annoyance, coming last in such a series of disasters, cut him ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... try my patience a little now and then. Surely it's better that I should save you from making these ridiculous mistakes. Once or twice this week I've heard most absurd remarks of yours repeated. Please remember that it isn't only yourself you—stultify. Politics may be a joke for you; for me it is a serious pursuit. I mustn't have people associating my name with all kinds of nonsensical chatter. I have ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... being absurd," she declared, "and I don't want to be and I don't want you to be. Of course, you can't look at things just as I do. You belong to a very large world. You spend your life destroying obstacles. All my people, you know," she went on, "look upon me as terribly emancipated. ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... slept in hammocks—the favourite resting arrangement of the Brazilian—to my mind the most uncomfortable and absurd fashion of resting, especially in tropical regions. First of all, it is almost an impossibility to assume a perfectly horizontal position for your entire body, except—if you are an expert—diagonally; then there is always a certain amount of swing and ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... little houses under their blue roofs, the little shop-fronts hung with blue, and the smiling little people in their blue costumes. The illusion is only broken by the occasional passing of a tall foreigner, and by divers shop-signs bearing announcements in absurd attempts at English. Nevertheless such discords only serve to emphasise reality; they never materially lessen the fascination of the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... the raft, picking his way from balk to balk, skipping aside now and again as the water rose between them under his weight and overflowed his shoes. To Myra, unaccustomed to be prayed for aloud and by name, the whole performance was absurd and embarrassing. She blushed hotly under the eyes of the other men, and glanced at Clem, expecting him to ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... howled, swayed, rocked back and forth in their chairs, repeating the word "mortifying" over and over to each other—each repetition seeming to make it only more brilliantly absurd. ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Guebre population, taken towards the end of this century, gives an absurd figure. We find no vestige of them anywhere except in Yezd, and in the neighbourhood of Teheran, in Kaschan, Shiraz and Bushire. In 1854, according to the information furnished to the Persian Amelioration Society ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... Glycas, and Manasses, the origin of the Aconoclcasts is imprinted to the caliph Yezid and two Jews, who promised the empire to Leo; and the reproaches of these hostile sectaries are turned into an absurd conspiracy for restoring the purity of the Christian worship, (see Spanheim, Hist. Imag. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... never thought of such a thing," said Vera; "but suppose I did, of course it's an absurd idea, but ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... heart in a grip of ice. Of course it was almost silly to suspect that the cripple could have been forgotten in all the excitement; but anything is liable to happen at a fire, where most people lose their heads, and do things they would call absurd at ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... out the little volume, and presented it humbly with a trembling hand to M. Didot. I told him that I had written these verses, and wished to have them published,—not indeed to bring me fame (I had not that absurd delusion), but in the hope of attracting the notice and good-will of influential literary men; that my poverty would not permit of my going to the expense of printing; and, therefore, I came to submit my work to him, and request him to publish it, should ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... book I prize next to the Bible; Man of the World; Sterne, especially his Sentimental Journey; Macpherson's Ossian, etc.;—these are the glorious models after which I endeavour to form my conduct, and 'tis incongruous—'tis absurd to suppose that the man whose mind glows with sentiments lighted up at their sacred flame—the man whose heart distends with benevolence to all the human race—he "who can soar above this little scene of things"—can he descend to mind the paltry concerns about which the terrae-filial ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... unscrupulous creditors, to say that all debt obligations are obliterated in the United States, and now we commence anew, each possessing all he has at the time free from incumbrance? These propositions are too absurd to be entertained for a moment by thinking or honest people. Yet every delay in preparation for final resumption partakes of this dishonesty, and is only less in degree as the hope is held out that a convenient season will at last arrive for the good work ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... so as to round out the Department of Kansas. To them it was absurd that Fort Smith should be within their jurisdiction and its environs within Steele and Thayer's. The upshot of the quarrel was, the reorganization of the frontier departments on the seventeenth of April which gave Fort Smith and ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... and went out in a kind of trance—it was so unreasonable, so utterly absurd. Why should Indians be watching to shoot down Wunpost when he had always been friendly with them all? And for that matter, why should anyone desire to kill him—that certainly could never lead them to his mine. The men who had come to the ranch were ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge |
