"Freakish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... day when freakish chance had thrown them together she had had no illusions concerning Felicity's ultimate destiny. It had surprised her not that Felicity was traveling the road, but that she had not long since arrived. She had not learned then ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... coming up with great frequency to the surface to breathe. And when one had once walked down the steps and found one's way into the tank, it was an extremely pleasant one, and quite artistic. It seemed original, too. There was something almost freakish in being answered by the parlourmaid (who was suitably like a fish in manner and profile), "Miss Luscombe is at home, and will you please step downstairs?" when one had rung the bell on the ground floor. ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... close to the window of her room, when the signal came, but first she was not sure, because the sound was as faint as a memory. Moreover, it might have been a freakish whistling in the wind, which rose stronger and stronger. It had piled the thunder-clouds higher and higher, and now and again a heavy drop of rain tapped at her window ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... and as I did so there flashed on me—in that sudden freakish way which the best ideas affect—a new and brilliant idea for the plot of My Tenant. The whole of the third and concluding act spread itself instantaneously before me. I knew then and there why the play had been laid aside. It had waited for this, and it wanted only this. I held the thing ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... From that silent world legions of grotesques move out of the shadows at a touch of sunlight, and then, when you turn on them in surprise, become thin and vague, either phantoms or smoke, and dissolve. The freakish light shows in little what happens in the long run to man's handiwork, for it accelerates the speed of change till change is fast enough for you to watch a town grow and die. You see that Dockland is unstable, is in flux, alters in colours and form. I doubt whether the people below are sensitive ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... of catastrophes was curiously mixed. Perhaps the comedy in it tended to obscure the utter degradation of the ruin she described. But the freakish incongruity of the speech did not strike Hyacinth. He found in it only two notes—pity that such a fate awaited him, and contempt for the man ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... large tract through which it was thought the railroad, then contemplated, would be likely to run. The railroad changed its mind, as all railroads do, and Mr. Jones's speculation was not so profitable as he had anticipated. It happened that among his friends was a wild, freakish fellow, Charley Davis, who undertook to be on the best of terms with everybody, and had succeeded admirably, with the exception of Justice Witherpee, who, he swore, had swindled him outrageously in a business transaction they had together in getting out lumber. What ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Mr. Dill needed time to think this over, for he said nothing more for a long while. Charming Billy half turned once or twice to importune his pack-pony in language humorously querulous, but beyond that he kept silence, wondering what freakish impulse drove Alexander P. Dill to Montana "to raise wild cattle for the Eastern markets." The very simplicity of his purpose and the unsophistication of his outlook were irresistible and came near weaning Charming Billy from considering his ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... of those dark woods, the play of some freakish and deceptive shadow conjuring itself into a human presence, that he had seen.... Who would be out in that lonely wood ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... day, almost each hour, discovered to him some new trait, some unsuspected grace of mind or heart, till, in this glowing girl, so bright, so blithe, so piquant, he had difficulty in recognizing any likeness, save of face and form, to the moody, freakish, melancholy, hysterical, and altogether eerie ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... guardianship of Cambridge, treated the strangers to a real piece of sport—a hop on the washing-green, under her mulberry-tree. It commenced at four o'clock in the afternoon, and ended with dusk and the bats, and a gipsy fire, and roasting groats and potatoes in the hot ashes, in imitation of the freakish oyster supper which Clary ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... His office is high-toned and esthetic. Perhaps that is the main reason why he is so often reluctant to give it up and be cured. He may display morbid fears and fancies that border on lunacy, and he may do some freakish and atrocious things, but for all that he is usually a man of good points and perhaps superior attainments. Our cult is respectable and made up of gentlemen who seldom defile their mouths or stomachs with tobacco, cigarettes, impure words ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... * * * From there on his plan entered the realm of pure hypothesis; except for the broad detail the rest depended on luck and whatever freakish conditions might arise in his favor during the operation. These, too, would be beyond his control and any move to take advantage of them would have to be instinctive, providing he was in any shape ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... of mine, Unlike, but none the less divine; Thy toil adorns, not chides, my play; Nature of sameness is so chary, With such wild whim the freakish fairy Picks ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... qualities, and nature drove them inward, concentrating, fortifying, intensifying them; to a not wholly normal or healthy brain, freakish and without consecution, adding a stammering tongue which could not speak evenly, and had to do its share, as the brain did, 'by fits.' 'You,' we find ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... and the awesome. We are spellbound, not so much by the sublimity or loveliness of the place, but by its absolute uniqueness, its total unlikeness to any other on the face of the globe, its kinship with the few incomparable marvels Nature has given us; creations of her mysterious, freakish, daemonic humour. Strange that a neighbourhood so weird should have exercised only a wholesome influence on the character of the people! As far as we can judge, no franker, cheerier, more straightforward folks are to be found in France, ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... as she turned into the garden. The shadows of the ilex-avenue chequered her straw bonnet, her prim black cape, her white skirt. There had been no meddling of freakish hands with her dark hair this morning. It was tightly plaited at the back of her head. Her plain sun-shade, her black kid gloves were neatness itself—middle-class, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Aigues-Mortes, the little fortified, derelict city in the salt marshes of Provence. Although they regarded him with the same unimaginative wonder as a pair of alligators might regard an Argus butterfly, their undoubted but freakish progeny, and although Aristide soared high above their heads in all phases of thought and emotion, the mutual ties remained strong and perdurable. Scarcely a year passed without Aristide struggling somehow south to visit ses vieux, as he affectionately called them, and whenever Fortune shed a ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... that away back in her childhood Wallace had sometimes reduced her to much this sort of frantic exasperation by his impregnable assumption that she was the white-souled little angel she looked. Sitting here in this very room he had goaded her into committing freakish misdemeanors. ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... wherefore do I smile when I should sigh? And wherefore do I feed when I would fast? And wherefore do I dance when I should pray? And wherefore do I live when I should die? Canst answer that, good Sir? O there are women The world deem mad, or worse, whose life but seems One vile caprice, a freakish thing of whims And restless nothingness; yet if we pierce The soul, may be we'll touch some cause profound For what seems causeless. Early love despised, Or baffled, which is worse; a faith betrayed, For vanity or lucre; chill regards, Where to gain constant ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... that wouldn't dummer a little sense into 'n." There was no suggestion, however, of "a woman in the case," to explain this man's ill-treatment of his wife; it appears to have been simply a piece of freakish brutality. ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... Stevenson's collected poems over yonder in the small cabinet. Would that he had given us more! Most of them are the merest playful sallies of a freakish mind. But one should, indeed, be a classic, for it is in my judgment by all odds the best narrative ballad of the last century—that is if I am right in supposing that "The Ancient Mariner" appeared at the very end of the eighteenth. ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Zarah, and dost but abuse the indulgence I entertain for your freakish humour," replied Christian; "thy wits have been disturbed since ever you landed in England, and all for the sake of one who cares for thee no more than for the most worthless object who walks the streets, amongst whom he ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... low; but his greatest dangers are in the clear air itself, where they cannot be detected. He may suddenly drop into a 'hole,' which is really a downward current of air, or he may get a terrific bump when he strikes a rising current. A freakish whim of the winds may unexpectedly take away the air support from under one of the wings, and he will lurch and dip ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... sun-steeped marsh (at whose mouth is Venice) hath itself unseated them; whether Petrarch set boiling what Saint Antony could not allay; what it was, how it was, who gave them the wrench, I know not—but the fact is that the people of Padua have been as freakish a race as any in Italy; at the mercy of any head but the aggregate's, pack-mules of a notion, galley-slaves of a whim, driven hither and thither in a herd, like those restless leaves (souls once) whose nearer sight first made Dante pitiful. ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... the bridge, where the carriage had come to a stand, the traveler looks along a line of cliffs stretching as far as Tours. Nature in some freakish mood must have raised these barriers of rock, undermined incessantly by the rippling Loire at their feet, for a perpetual wonder for spectators. The village of Vouvray nestles, as it were, among the clefts and crannies of the crags, which begin to describe a bend at the junction of ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... in a bucket. One well-grown young seaman in blue clothes and a white neckerchief came out of the cabin and stared up at the rigging as though out of habit, and yawned. Then he strolled ashore. His cap was on the back of his head, and between his teeth was a new pipe. His face was full of freakish merriment, and he walked with a swing of the hips. As he came up to Pelle he swayed to and fro a few times and then bumped into him. "Oh, excuse me!" he said, touching his cap. "I thought it was a scratching-post, ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... be whimsical and freakish, though it is perhaps most beautiful when there is something of the child about it, something naive and unconventional. There are men, of whom I think that Cardinal Newman was pre-eminently one, who seem to have had the ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... his brazen trumpet. In obedience to the long-looked-for signal, a many-coloured crowd of revellers gushed from the palace and flowed like a glowing wave of merry-making down the steps and into the walks and alleys of the rose garden. All the strange figures that a freakish fancy could suggest leaped and danced and shouted in a rapture of mirth-satyrs and follies, clowns and devils wheeled wildly by, waving torches, clashing cymbals, or screaming at the top of their voices, while sedater spirits, masked and muffled in mantles of ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Sir George, 'to make anybody, who was not in that struggle, understand it. One would have called it simply freakish, if the possible outcome had been less grave. It was a strange fit to seize upon the country, and unfortunately it expressed the view of nearly all the leading statesmen. Cut the painter! You cannot imagine any sensible person of these ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... these things that decided him eventually to resign his commission, but of them his letters home make little or no mention. They are full, on the other hand, of descriptions of the beauties of the Island which, curious, odd, freakish and unexpected, held him as did those of no other place. The curious inconsistencies of the Creole nature also interested him, and he spent much of his spare time sketching and studying the people. Two friendships he ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... to pass as they advanced, descending constantly. At times the granite walls nearly met above them, and then a shaft of moonlight would cast freakish ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... establish their relationship; the other is to be discovered, like the infant Moses, at the very outset of one's career. Mervyn Quentock had chosen the latter and happier manner. In an age when many aspiring young men strive to advertise their wares by imparting to them a freakish imbecility, Quentock turned out work that was characterised by a pleasing delicate restraint, but he contrived to herald his output with a certain fanfare of personal eccentricity, thereby compelling an attention which might otherwise have strayed past his studio. In appearance ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... soda argument was not a good one at all, for no lump of ice cream ever remained long intact where Pee-wee was. Whether it melted or not, it disappeared. And why this freakish little island did not ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... left them calm— Emotion they considered freakish;— He felt with many an inward qualm That he was thoroughly un-beakish; His mood perplexed them; he was half Provocative, half deferential, Too anxious to provoke a laugh, Too vague where ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 8, 1916 • Various
... Histoire d'Israel may almost be called skittish. The French are more tolerant of those excesses than the English. It is a digression, but he who would fail can reach his end by not taking himself seriously. If he gives himself no important airs, whether out of a freakish humour, or real humility, depend upon it the public and the critics will take him at something under his own estimate. On the other hand, by copying the gravity of demeanour admired by Mr. Shandy in a celebrated parochial ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... the tradition than he imparted to his daughter, died peacefully at seventy-two, the accepted Appleyard age for that process, convinced that he, at last, had produced two steady children: he was a little worried about his grandson, young Elliot, who displayed a freakish talent for composing and performing music for the violin, and an unfortunate preference for the society of professional musicians, of which his mother seemed almost culpably tolerant, not to say proud. The arts were ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... then freakish fortune takes it into her head to smile upon the persevering. What was not to be found last year has become almost common this summer. Without leaving my narrow enclosure, I obtain as many Grasshoppers as I could wish. I hear them rustling at night in the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... Isabella, in the same play, says "keeping begins to be as ridiculous as matrimony.... The insolence and expense of their mistresses has almost tired out all but the old and doting part of mankind." It is not inconceivable that in a freakish or embittered moment this singular woman threw herself with malicious joy into an attack on her ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... limit can we set to their achievement? Of course he was the Fortunate Youth. Of that there is no gainsaying. He had his beauty, his charm, his temperament, his quick southern intelligence—all his Sicilian heritage—and a freakish chance had favoured him from the day that, vagabond urchin, he attended his first and only Sunday-school treat. But personal gifts and favouring chance are not everything in ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... hushing half-light mouse the lane Long-winged and lordly. But when those hours wane, Indoors they ponder, scared by the harsh storm Whose pelting saracens on the window swarm, And listen for the mail to clatter past And church clock's deep bay withering on the blast; They feed the fire that flings a freakish light On pictured kings and queens grotesquely bright, Platters and pitchers, faded calendars And ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... are not to be arranged in regular equation. The result from capital employed in the production of any movement of a mental nature is sometimes as tremendous as the cause itself is absurdly minute. When women are in a freakish mood, their usual intuition, either from carelessness or inherent defect, seemingly fails to teach them this, and hence it was that Bathsheba was fated ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... freakish reversion to the prankishness of a growing boy, Graham pointed his finger at Ruth, who instantly screamed. The girls looking on, laughed, and there was some excuse for their amusement. The spectacle of the sensible Ruth, shrinking and shrieking over nothing ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... entering visitor. And behind that screen, through the crack, Israel caught one momentary glimpse of a little bit of by-play between the pretty chambermaid and the stranger. The vivacious nymph appeared to have affectedly run from him on the stairs—doubtless in freakish return for some liberal advances—but had suffered herself to be overtaken at last ere too late; and on the instant Israel caught sight of her, was with an insincere air of rosy resentment, receiving a roguish pinch on the arm, and ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... anemically green; uneven, hacked and ragged; shorn of its emerald beauty. A high fog filtered the late afternoon light to show Mr Barelli's task accomplished and the curious watchers gone. It was no smoothly clipped carpet, yet it was no longer a freakish, exotic thing. Rather forlorn ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... laboratory. Half unconsciously he strolled toward the livery stable where he kept his nag. And then a quarter of an hour later he found himself on the turnpike, trotting along the fresh-water meadows, sniffing the air and the scented brooks. He laughed at himself. His horse plunged, freakish from his long rest in the stable. Suddenly he spurred on and rode furiously over the country roads, as if mad to reach a certain end. A little later, he cantered up the gravelled drive of the Four Corners, his horse wet and trembling, and he with ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... Nature is strangely freakish in her choice of instruments for noble purposes. Sometimes the delicate spirit of creative genius is housed in a veritable tenement of clay, so that what is within seems ever at war with what is without. At times ...
— A Day with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy • George Sampson
... slowly, then, The mother rose, and ever kept her eyes Upon her little child. "You freakish maid," Said she, "now mark me, if I call you one, You shall not scold nor make him ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... What frisky gobblers they have shared in, to be sure! They prance and amble over the pavements as if they had absorbed the very soul of Chanticleer, and fancied themselves once more princes of the barnyard. The most singular and freakish of the turkey's manifestations this, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... reason, I said, for my wife to object to my lodging in the same house with her here, any more than in town, at Mrs. Sinclair's. But were she to make such objection, I would not quit possession since it was not unlikely that the same freakish disorder which brought her to Hampstead, might carry her absolutely out of ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... called on her once or twice during the preceding days. It was due to her after his long neglect of her, he told himself, and had found improvement in her. But to-night she seemed to take a freakish pleasure in letting him see that there was much of the old Ann still left in her: the frank conceit of her; the amazing self-opinionatedness of her; the waywardness, the wilfulness, the unreasonableness of her; the general uppishness and dictatorialness ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... again threw bombs. It arrived at six in the evening. The psychological effect on Paris has been incalculable. Yesterday's Taube went virtually unobserved; it did not seem to need explanation, and its visit could be interpreted as a freakish exploit—the solitary one of its kind. The attack of another Taube today put an entirely different face upon the matter. Nothing better could have been calculated to disquiet the French. They have always considered themselves kings of the air and have felt that, whatever else might ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... fantasy ripened into imagination: he has also kept up the habit of dramatising everything, of playing, half consciously, many parts, of making the world "an unsubstantial fairy place." This turn of mind it is that causes his work occasionally to seem somewhat freakish. Thus, in the fogs and horrors of London, he plays at being an Arabian tale-teller, and his "New Arabian Nights" are a new kind of romanticism—Oriental, freakish, like the work of a changeling. Indeed, this curious genius, springing from a family of Scottish engineers, resembles nothing ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... Winters" says Nancy with dutiful hopelessness. She is only too well acquainted with Mrs. Winters' little lists. "As an artist, as an artist, dear Nancy, especially." Mrs. Winters breathes somewhat heavily, "Things That Should Interest you. Nothing Bizarre, you understand, Nothing Merely Freakish—but some of the Things in New York that I, Personally, ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... on his account,—nay, even to avoid the places to which he came, probably because we thought ourselves too good to stand at a distance, and could make no pretension to obtain a closer intimacy with him. This momentary absurdity, which, however, is nothing rare in presuming and freakish youth, proved, indeed, its own punishment in the sequel; for I have never set eyes on that eminent man, who was most highly ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... with inviting forests in the distance; an oasis of lush green fields that covered miles; mesquite distorted to the size of giant trees and cattle transformed into dinosaurs. The great gray desert took on freakish shapes of erosion. Always, hour after hour beneath a copper sky, they rode in palpitating heat through sand drifts, among the salt bushes and the creosote, into cowbacked hills beyond ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... swiftly close upon the varied scene. Return, O lovely moon! and look from high, All stately riding in thy motled sky, Yet, O thy beams in hasty visits come! As swiftly follow'd by the fleeting gloom. O Night! thy smiles are short, and short thy shade; Thou art a freakish friend, and all unstay'd: Yet from thy varied changes who are free? Full many an honest friend resembles thee. Then let my doubtful footsteps darkling stray, Thy next fair beam will set me on my way: E'en take thy freedom, whether ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... his cheerful, debonair manner and rode off. Troubles sat lightly on his stout heart. His effervescent nature never left him long depressed when Fortune played her freakish tricks upon him. He had lost his commission upon the sale of Iredale's land, but he had secured the better deal of the cattle. Therefore he was satisfied. But Robb was a very persistent man in his seemingly haphazard fashion. He had promised himself an interview with Hervey ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... threw in a few realities, and some beautiful brainless creature would generally be found the nucleus of a crowd, while Clio in spectacles languished in a corner. Winifred Glamorys, however, was reputed to have a tongue that matched her eye; paralleling with whimsies and epigrams its freakish fires and witcheries, and, assuredly, flitting in her white gown through the dark balmy garden, she seemed the very spirit of moonlight, the subtle incarnation ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... players of note the league enjoyed an average season, and a considerable amount of new blood was injected into the game in the persons of players who made good without attracting freakish attention. The rise of the Washington team from seventh to second place brought its youngsters into the limelight prominently, and of these Foster and Moeller were commended highly. Gandil, who ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... stole a look at the small pale face under the sailor hat. It seemed to her that her cousin had somehow grown beautiful in these months of absence. On her arrival in May, Connie's good looks had been a freakish and variable thing, which could be often and easily disputed. She could always make a certain brilliant or bizarre effect, by virtue of her mere slenderness and delicacy, combined with the startling beauty of her eyes and hair. But the touch of sarcasm, of a half-hostile remoteness, ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Tusitala? It is a happy circumstance, we say, for a youth, before the multiplying responsibilities of maturity press upon him, to pour out his enthusiasm in an obsession such as that; and when this passion can be shared and doubled and knitted in partnership with an equally freakish, insane, and innocent idiot (such as our generously mad friend Mifflin) admirable adventures are sure to follow. The quest begun on Darby Creek took us later on an all-summer progress among places in England and Scotland hallowed ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... through half a dozen movements of the manual of arms, next marching the company away in column of fours. The regulars, of course, responded like clockwork. They made a fine appearance as they started off under their freakish second lieutenant. Ere they had gone far Ferrers swung them into column of ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... was gone. In its place a dumb, white look of pain and bewilderment had frozen on her face. Had not that something, akin to anger, which her nature had felt to be emanating from him remained so potently to oppress her, she could almost have thought the thing a joke—some freakish mood of playfulness after all the other moods he had shown. But no such thought was possible. The glitter in his eyes had been unmistakable. Then, ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... parlors and our furniture than by covering them with the scroll work of the wig-age. This is only an apparent contradiction. It is not the Pigtail but the Rococo that we are reviving so industriously, not the academic constraint of rules, but the subjective arbitrariness, the spirit of the original, freakish types. This untrammeled caprice of the Rococo age seems to us as fresh as nature compared with the well planned symmetry of our modern conditions, which no longer permit one to be a real fool, and therefore do not allow any dazzling figures of romance to come to the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... subordinate spirits, to whom were assigned peculiar employments. The chief of these were the Fairies, concerning whom the reader will find a long dissertation, in Volume Second. The Brownie formed a class of beings, distinct in habit and disposition from the freakish and mischievous elves. He was meagre, shaggy, and wild in his appearance. Thus, Cleland, in his satire against the ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... injustice not to say that thou hast profited both in thy exercises and in thy breeding, and hast shown many sparkles of a gentle and manly spirit. Moreover, it were ungenerous, having bred thee up freakish and fiery, to dismiss thee to want or wandering, for showing that very peevishness and impatience of discipline which arose from thy too delicate nurture. Therefore, and for the credit of my own household, I am ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... understand. But neither of us understands Marie-Louise. I sent her away to school, but she wouldn't stay. She likes her home and she hates rules. She loves animals, and if she were a boy she would practice medicine. Being a woman and having no outlet for her energies, she is freakish. You saw the way she was dressed ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... was in the old garden outside, touching the warm tangle of gillyflowers to fire, transmuting the pallor of the narcissus to light itself, making the very shadows more luminous than a winter's shining. The freakish sun, lit this and left that, after its habit, for nowhere is more mysterious alchemy than the mixing of sun and shadow in the spaces of the air. Ishmael's keen eyes could see how a spider's thread, woven from one tall ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... loose, play fantastic tricks; tourner casaque [Fr.]. Adj. capricious; erratic, eccentric, fitful, hysterical; full of whims &c n.; maggoty; inconsistent, fanciful, fantastic, whimsical, crotchety, kinky [U.S.], particular, humorsome^, freakish, skittish, wanton, wayward; contrary; captious; arbitrary; unconformable &c 83; penny wise and pound foolish; fickle &c (irresolute) 605; frivolous, sleeveless, giddy, volatile. Adv. by fits and starts, without rhyme or reason. Phr. nil fuit unquain ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... lighted from attic to basement, and though it was Christmas Eve, the air was like spring, for nature sometimes turns freakish, and smiles on us when we are expecting the cold shoulder. Here and there, a window was open, for the Derings always did love plenty of air; and so a merry sound of laughter and gay voices was wafted out into the night air, and the old ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... things began to happen again. Breakfast was eaten first, and then Jack, who had been assisting George examine his motor, discovered the cause of the unfortunate stop, so that the freakish engine was now ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... Only a freakish wisp of hair?— Nay, but its wildest, its most frolic whorl Stands for a slim, enamoured, sweet-fleshed girl! And so, a tangle of dream and charm and fun, Its every crook a promise and a snare, Its every dowle, or genially gadding Or crisply curled, Heartening and madding, Empales a novel ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... a Chine-ponim, or droll, having that inextinguishable sense of humor which has made the saints of the Jewish Church human, has lit up dry technical Talmudic, discussions with flashes of freakish fun, with pun and jest and merry quibble, and has helped the race to survive (pace Dr. Wallace) by dint of a ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... I heard a shrill and sudden cry, And, looking up, I saw the antic Puck Grappling with Time, who clutch'd him like a fly, Victim of his own sport,—the jester's luck! He, whilst his fellows grieved, poor wight, had stuck His freakish gauds upon the Ancient's brow, And now his ear, and now his beard, would pluck; Whereas the angry churl had snatched him now, Crying, "Thou impish ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... just warned me that the fleet is approaching a freakish asteroid cluster," he announced. "He estimates it to be of this size." Vidac swept his arm over the chart, taking in most of the space directly in front of their path. "To go around it, over it, or under it would mean altering the ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... purpose of carrying on such odd researches was to satisfy a fondness for freakish ingenuity, much less interest was found in the thousands of amusing epitaphs that are penned by writers for comic papers or by wags in general. Fictitious inscriptions lack the charm of authenticity, which in the case of epitaphs is decidedly more desirable than imagination. ...
— Quaint Epitaphs • Various
... rather fastidious Miss Brewster's fancy would be captured only by a gentleman, not by any such homunculus as the mountain dweller. Her interest, perhaps; the man possessed the bizarre attraction of the freakish. But anything else was absurd. And the knight was inclined to attaint his lady for a certain cruelty in the matter; she was being something less than fair to ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... ended abruptly in a wall that rimmed a sunken, green valley, narrowing near where Johnny stood looking down, but broadening farther along, and seeming to extend southward with many twistings and windings. Johnny viewed the place with a passing surprise, familiar though he was with the freakish topography of Arizona. It was the greenness, and the little winding creek, and the huddle of adobe buildings among the cottonwoods that struck him oddly. The creek might be a continuation of Sinkhole Creek, ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... whose storehouses now the English held. They hung their borrowed banqueting-hall with garlands of flowers, upon the long table put great candles of virgin wax, with gold and silver drinking-vessels, and brought to the revel of the night a somewhat towering, wild, and freakish humor. Victory unassuaged was theirs, and for them Fortune had cogged her dice. They had taken the San Jose and sunk the caravels, they had sacked the pearl-towns and Nueva Cordoba, they had gathered laurels for themselves and England. For the fortress, ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... away, plodding along the pavement heavily, huge and portentous. The back of his head bulged above the collar, with no show of neck between. He was comical and pathetic; he seemed too vast in mere flesh to be the sport of a thing so freakish as luck. To think that such a bulk had a weak heart in it—and that deeper still in its recesses there moved and suffered the soul of ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... of him afterwards to Hadria, "it is strange that his cleverness does not come to the rescue; but so far from that, I think it leads him a wild dance over boggy ground, like some will-o'-the-wisp, but for whose freakish allurements the good man might have trodden ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... of the first revolutionary poets. England has settled down; England has become Victorian. The compromise was interesting, it was national and for a long time it was successful: there is still a great deal to be said for it. But it was as freakish and unphilosophic, as arbitrary and untranslatable, as a beggar's patched coat or a child's secret language. Now it is here that Browning had a certain odd advantage over Tennyson; which has, perhaps, somewhat exaggerated his intellectual superiority to him. Browning's ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... first captors coveted that and took care of it). But also they ate together of fruit, and as both ladies and gallants do strange things at strange times, the lady divided the seeds, and counted them seeking a lucky number or some such freakish quest. And by the rosary, and by his mother, she made him swear that when he had found fortune and a plantation in the new world, he would plant with his own hands the seeds there, and send for the lady to come by ship as chatelaine! Failing ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... offer, and yet snap, who would enjoy; Yea, the more eager on't, the more in danger, Be he the master of it, or a stranger. Bush, why dost bear a rose if none must have it. Who dost expose it, yet claw those that crave it? Art become freakish? dost the wanton play, Or doth thy testy ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... strange light broke from the wizard's tomb! Who, like Sir Walter, could draw a mullioned window, with its 'foliaged tracery,' its 'freakish knots,' its pointed and moulded arch, and its dyed and pictured panes? We passed, of late, an hour amid the ruins of Crichton, and scarce knew whether most to admire the fine old castle itself, so worthy of its poet, or the exquisite picture of ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... sat up at the conclusion of the singing vigorously to applaud, would have shared his last possession, his ultimate crust, with that unknown benefactor of mankind. Indeed, though, the heart of Mr. Woods just now was full of loving kindness and capable of any freakish magnanimity. ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... Her freakish humor now first showed itself, her sense of fun in the queer ways that people had, that made her later find delight in brutish servile Katy, in Sally's silly ways and in the badness of Peter and of Rags. She ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... dear and admirable, Bettine only interesting. Gunderode is of religious grace, Bettine the fulness of instinctive impulse; Gunderode is the ideal, Bettine nature; Gunderode throws herself into the river because the world is all too narrow, Bettine lives and follows out every freakish fancy, till the enchanting child degenerates into an eccentric and undignified old woman. There is a medium somewhere. Philip Sidney found it; others had it found for ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... untouchable? If there was no Jack Glover we could afford to wait months. And I'm less troubled about him than I am about the man Jaggs. Father, you will be glad to learn that I am almost afraid of that freakish old man." ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... lighted, and literally stuffed with what were well termed 'curiosities of art.' I never before saw such queer carvings, such freakish pottery, such weird and utterly impossible bric-a-brac. At a table sat a flabby looking man with a short sandy beard. One glance told me that he was an habitual drunkard, for he had the sodden look that is unmistakable. But when he arose and bid me good evening his manner struck me like ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... now and then we saw the pillared end of a verandah or a plaster Neptune ruling a restricted fountain area. Out of the other window stretched the blue Gulf of Genoa all becalmed and smiling, with freakish little points and headlines, and here and there the white blossom of a sail. The Senator counted eighty tunnels—he wants that fact mentioned too—some of them so short that it was like shutting one's eyes for an instant on the olives and ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan |
