"Incongruity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hatred, jealousy, sensual passion. It would be strange indeed if their worshippers were not like unto them. The conduct of the Homeric heroes was, however, better than their creed. And there is this strange incongruity and inconsistency in the conduct of the Homeric gods,—they punish mortals for crimes of which they themselves are guilty, and reward virtues in men which they do not themselves always practise. "They punish with especial severity social ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes. The jaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings. The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd journalistic realism to what he tells us. From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... and in that difference lay the secret of Lincoln's failure. He was keen enough to grasp the difference, to perceive the clue to his failure. In a thousand ways, large and small, the difference came home to him. It may all be symbolized by a closing detail of his stay. An odd bit of incongruity was the inclusion of his name in the list of managers of the Inaugural Ball of 1849. Nothing of the sort had hitherto entered into his experience. As Mrs. Lincoln was not with him he joined "a small party of mutual friends" who attended the ball ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... him an esquire mounted on ass-back; but no instance occurred to his memory." We can see the whole scene at a glance, the stolid unconsciousness of Sancho and the perplexity of his master, upon whose perception the incongruity has just forced itself. This is Sancho's mission throughout the book; he is an unconscious Mephistopheles, always unwittingly making mockery of his master's aspirations, always exposing the fallacy of his ideas by some unintentional ad ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... musing instant to the incongruity of rejoicing over a freedom gained by ceasing to be master and ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... marriage was to be accompanied by a diversion of that merry imp of incongruity always with him—as Shakespeare's most stately heroes are attended by a comic servant. He married Miss Mary Todd, of Kentucky, at Springfield, at the age of thirty-three. It was the first wedding performed with all the ceremonial ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... Whence comes this incongruity? It lies in the nature of industrial competition and the commercial crises which arise from them. In the present unregulated production and distribution of the means of subsistence, which is carried ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... "Incongruity! Think what it means for a girl to have been taught to connect the idea of something low and evil with that which nevertheless is to lie at the foundation of all her after life. That is what it amounts to, and people complain ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... judicious Sterne himself (acute enough in matters of this kind), had perceived that now was the time to publish a series of sermons by the very unclerical lion of the day. There would—they, no doubt, thought—be an undeniable piquancy, a distinct flavour of semi-scandalous incongruity in listening to the Word of Life from the lips of this loose-tongued droll; and the more staid and serious the sermon, the more effective the contrast. There need not have been much trouble in finding the kind ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... of a crowd which pressed upon him so that many must have come into bodily contact with him, he knew that some one had touched him with special intent. No perplexity arises from the difference between the accounts, for there is only difference, not incongruity: the two tell more than the one; it is from the nature of the added circumstances that it springs, for those circumstances necessarily involve inquiries of the most difficult nature. Nor can I in the least pretend to have satisfied myself concerning them. In the first ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... almost comic in its incongruity with what actually is. The mere thought of these protagonists of the century working in harmony to one great purpose, without distrust of each other's motives, and with no necessity for anyone's dodging political foul play, summons the smile of irony. Mutual trust was never so much a suggestion ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... their executors, administrators and assigns, to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever;" then, undeniably, I am mad, and can no longer discriminate between a man and a beast. But, in that case, away with the horrible incongruity of giving them oral instruction, of teaching them the catechism, of recognising them as suitably qualified to be members of Christian churches, of extending to them the ordinance of baptism, and admitting them to the communion table, and enumerating ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... station; and the undergraduates who were waiting there, gay figures in tweed or flannel, moved to the margin of the platform and gazed idly up the line. Young and careless, in the glow of the afternoon sunshine, they struck a sharp note of incongruity with the worn boards they stood on, with the fading signals and grey eternal walls of that antique station, which, familiar to them and insignificant, does yet whisper to the tourist the last enchantments ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... be anything of incongruity or humorous contrast between Jonas and his married neighbors, it must be remembered that, under the circumstances of a growing country, there was not. In a land where many men live alone in shacks and do their own work, and where any woman's husband must be able to go forth with a frying-pan ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... one word from Dick, Amaryllis had given her credence and trust to the Lizard, she yet felt that he suited so ill with any English surroundings that his incongruity would show up any boggled stitch in their two disguises. So, while she nibbled the biscuit which Dick had taken from the paper in his pocket and ordered her to eat, and listened to the unintelligible valedictory advice which Pepe was ladling ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... vermin. The men carried short bows and arrows, one of them, who appeared to be the chief, having a lynx's skin for a quiver. A few had fishing tackle, but the bystanders said that they lived almost entirely upon grasshoppers. They were a most impressive incongruity in the midst of the tokens ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... the right kind of life and no other must be put into the short-story hopper. Nothing which cannot be told rapidly must be dropped in, lest it clog the smoothly spinning wheels. If it is a story of slowly developing incongruity in married life, the action must be speeded beyond probability, like a film in the moving pictures, before it is ready to be made into a short story. If it is a tale of disillusionment on a prairie farm, with the world and life flattening out together, some sharp climax must be provided ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... longest list would be no nearer to an exhaustive analysis than the shortest. It is not a specious completeness, but a sense of infinity that can never be completed,—greater intensity, not greater extension,—that distinguishes modern landscape-art. Hence there is no incongruity in the seeming license that it takes with the firm order of Nature. It is in no spirit of levity or profanity that the substantial distinctions of things are thus disregarded,—that all absolute rank is denied, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... be inferred that nothing occurred to disturb the security of Gashwiler. When the door closed upon Mr. Wiles, he indited a note which, with a costly but exceedingly distasteful bouquet,—rearranged by his own fat fingers, and discord and incongruity visible in every combination of color,—he sent off by a special messenger. Then he proceeded to make his toilet,—an operation rarely graceful or picturesque in our sex, and an insult to the spectator when obesity is superadded. When he had put on a clean shirt, of which there was grossly too much, ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... secrets of his experience; and it often happens, even among our contemporaries, that we are altogether baffled. The Englishman and the Italian may understand each other's speech, but the language of each other's ideas has still to be learnt. Our long failures in Ireland have risen from a radical incongruity of character which has divided the Celt from the Saxon. And again, in the same country, the Catholic will be a mystery to the Protestant, and the Protestant to the Catholic. Their intellects have been shaped in opposite moulds; they are like instruments which cannot be played in concert. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... been new to Queen Elizabeth to hear herself called "a weik instrument," and it is doubtful whether the first offence would be much softened by such an address. Neither was Elizabeth a person to be amused by the incongruity or impressed by the uncompromising boldness of the Reformer to whom the language of apology was so hard. Policy, however, has little to do with personal offences, although to some readers, as we confess ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... that the contrast was less marked and that, anyway, his own little girl "was not so very pretty." I do not know that I commonly dwelt much upon my personal appearance, save as it thrust itself as an incongruity into my father's life, and in spite of unending evidence to the contrary, there were even black moments when I allowed myself to speculate as to whether he might not share the feeling. Happily, however, this specter was laid before it had time to grow into a morbid familiar ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... really, if I could take root anywhere, I know not but it could as well be here as in another place. It would only be a kind of despair, however, that would ever make me dream of finding a home in Italy; a sense that I had lost my country through absence or incongruity, and that earth is not an abiding-place. I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State; neither can you seize ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... baby, I am showing off to myself; why am I ashamed? Foo! how people shove! that fat man—a German he must be—who pushed against me, does he know whom he pushed? There's a peasant woman with a baby, begging. It's curious that she thinks me happier than she is. I might give her something, for the incongruity of it. Here's a five copeck piece left in my pocket, where did I get it? Here, here... ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... by the accepted systems as it is possible for a creed to be. She never tried to force them upon any one else; possibly she did not believe in them herself sufficiently to wish to do so; but like her queer gowns and her dyed red hair her creed suited Mrs. Ogilvie. There was a congruous incongruity about her which set many people puzzling to find out her real character. Pompous persons and snobs detested her. Stupid or vapid people saw nothing in her, or saw merely that she dyed her hair and was dressed by Paquin. Narrow-minded people disapproved of her, and clever people considered ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... glistening wings. The sudden poignant contrast between light, space, freedom, and the wounded bleeding bird in the mud, is of the very essence of tragedy. But something like that is always happening in comedy. There is the same element of incongruity, without the tragic consequence. It is only the humorist who sees things truly because he sees both the greatness and the littleness of mortals; but even he may not know whether to laugh or to cry at what ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... and the strange incongruity between the senses and the mind in these poor fellows! The day had ripened its beauty; beneath a purple heaven shone, sparkled, and laughed a blue sea, in whose waves the tropical sun seemed to have fused his beams; and beneath that fair, sinless, peaceful sky, wafted by a balmy ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... singleness of heart which was not ashamed to own its love, but rather gloried in the public exhibition of a faith in the worthiness of its object, and a constancy, which never wavered to the hour of his death.[14] The pitifulness of it is to see the incongruity between such faith, such devotion, and the ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... which bore the unmistakable stamp of a British occupation; but nothing can be effected in the arrangement of such a town without an unlimited purse and a despotic power. It is almost as hopeless as London in the incongruity of architecture, and the individual indulgence of independent taste, which absolutely dismays a stranger. The beautiful Gothic cathedral of the Venetians has been converted into a mosque by the conquerors, and two exceedingly ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... forwards twenty or more years the date at which Hengist and Horsa landed on our shores.[200] But whether Hengist and Horsa arrived in A.D. 449, or, as seems more probable, about A.D. 428, if we suppose them in either case to have been born about A.D. 400, we shall find no incongruity, but the reverse, in the idea that their grandfather Vetta was the leader of a Saxon force thirty-six years previously. Hengist was in all probability past the middle period of life when he came to the Court of Vortigern, as he is generally represented ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... privileges of citizenship. We are willing that he should be a soldier, carry a gun, and fire a bullet at the enemy; but are we willing that he should march up to the ballot-box, and fire a peaceful ballot against the same enemy? Strange incongruity! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... on contemporary theories may to some appear a merit, to others a blemish. To make the dying John refute Strauss or Renan, handling their propositions with admirable dialectical skill, is certainly, on the face of it, somewhat hazardous. But I can see no real incongruity in imputing to the seer of Patmos a prophetic insight into the future, no real inconsequence in imagining the opponent of Cerinthus spending his last breath in the defence of Christian truth against a foreseen scepticism. ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... that in his case the fault was a necessary fault and went with a power which permitted him to achieve the sympathy which he did achieve. He talks of the "Celt" and the "Saxon," and ascribes what he calls "our failures in Ireland" to the "incongruity of character" between these two imaginaries. He takes it for granted that "we are something which divides us from mediaeval Christianity by an impassable gulf." When he speaks of asceticism he must quote "the hair shirt of Thomas a Becket." If he is speaking of Oxford undergraduates one has "pleasant ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... might afford congenial shade to the successor of its founder, seemed to impart meanness and vulgarity to the tapering verdure of his plantations, his modern trees—his pert poplars and mean larches—his sycamores and planes. Even the incongruity between his solid new paling and the decayed and sun-bleached wood of the venerable fence to which it adjoined, with its hoary beard of silvery lichen, was an eyesore to him. Every passer-by might note the limit and circumscription ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... and one ten years of age, found Cheon by far the most entertaining incongruity at the dinner, and when dinner was over—after we had settled down on the various chairs and stumps that had been carried out to the verandah again—they ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... Irishman, without suspecting the necessity of this operose process, arrives at the solution of the problem by some short cut of his own, as he clearly evinces by the propriety of his metaphor. To be sure, there seems some incongruity in his throwing this lump of a two year old calf at his adversary. No arm but that of Milo could be strong enough for such a feat. Upon recollection, however, bold as this figure may seem, there are precedents for ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... after dragging days of uncertainty, came to Rudolph like a sea-breeze to a stoker. To escape and survive,—the bare experience seemed to him at first an act of merit, the deed of a veteran. The interim had been packed with incongruity. There had been a dinner with Kempner, solemn, full of patriotism and philosophy; a drunken dinner at Teppich's; another, and a worse, at Nesbit's; and the banquet of a native merchant, which began at four o'clock on melon-seeds, tea, ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... is obtrusiveness and exaggeration. By obtrusiveness I mean a style of speech and manners that attracts attention and remark; by exaggeration I mean the too constant use of the superlative in conversation, and a certain incongruity and inappropriateness of expression which is very offensive to the cultivated taste. Such expressions as "perfectly awful," "perfectly beautiful," "too lovely for anything," "hateful," "horrible," may constantly ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... the average Englishman's mauvaise honte—though be it thankfully acknowledged that, in the case of the younger generation, the experiences of the war have largely contributed towards rubbing it off. Mallory appeared serenely unconscious of any incongruity in the fact of a man whose clothes breathed Savile Row and whose linen was immaculate as only that of the Londoner—determinedly emergent from the grime of the city—ever is, pottering about in the tiny kitchen, and brooding over the ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... "ora" (second and third bars), thus: "last—hour," is impracticable. It would be out of the question to destroy the musical phrase by breathing after the word "ora," in the third bar. If the text is phrased when spoken as it is when sung, the incongruity is at once apparent. The published score gives a pause [fermata symbol] after the word "ora:" "ultima ora [fermata symbol] del nostro amor." This phrasing is good and effective, especially if the artist changes at once to the sombre quality ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... "He's got that rooster in his throat," he said solemnly. The rooster was nearly life-size, but the incongruity of this suggestion did not strike him. Judith hastily rose from her chair ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... bricks," repeated Von Barwig, who evidently enjoyed the incongruity of the combination. Then noticing that Ryan was standing he said with a smile, "Brother artist, be seated!" Pinac and Fico roared with laughter. Mr. Ryan sat down, mumbling to himself that that sort of sarcasm didn't go with him; he was a workman, not an artist. Von Barwig apologised ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... The incongruity of the Lutheran doctrine of justification becomes fully apparent from the consequences which it involves, to wit: (1) all Christians without distinction would possess exactly the same degree of sanctity and justice; (2) justification once obtained ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... and needles, and the little bell of which he had spoken. On my trusting that he would excuse the remark that he had been well educated, and (I hoped I might say without offence) perhaps educated above that station, he observed that instances of slight incongruity in such wise would rarely be found wanting among large bodies of men; that he had heard it was so in workhouses, in the police force, even in that last desperate resource, the army; and that he knew it was so, more or less, in any great railway staff. ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... assonances, alliteration, rhyme and return. "Metrical verse," says Miss Lowell in the Preface to Can Grande's Castle, "has one set of laws, cadenced verse another; 'polyphonic prose' can go from one to the other in the same poem with no sense of incongruity.... I finally decided to base my form upon the long, flowing cadence of oratorical prose. The variations permitted to this cadence enable the poet to change the more readily into those of vers libre, or even to take the regular beat of metre, should such a marked time seem advisable.... Rhyme ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... wretched. The monstrous incongruity of her surroundings oppressed her. The orchestra dashed into a rollicking melody, which set her foot tapping in spite of herself. At a near-by table somebody was shouting with laughter. Two waiters at a service-stand were close enough for her to catch snatches of their talk. They were arguing ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... a drawer which held what was left of her father's clothes without any feeling of incongruity. There were four shirts of checked oxford shirting, two pairs of long stockings, a corduroy jacket, and his best suit of black serge bound with braid round the coat. There was a revolver, too, a clasp knife, a unused church-warden, ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... showed that he knew what they were about until Mr. Moak, of Watertown, took a brush, made of cauliflower preserved in mustard, and shaded the lines of the war map on Mr. Chapin's trousers, which Mr. Butterfield had drawn in the jam. Then his artistic eye took in the incongruity of the colors, and he gasped ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... be wondered at, as with every two steps he prostrated himself full length on the ground before the little altar he carried with him. With this primitive mountain world his act was in weird harmony, but there was an incongruity almost stunning in the sight of a Hindu carrying out a similar vow in one of the crowded business streets of Europeanized Calcutta. I nearly stepped on him as I came out one day from the ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... mind than their own imperfections, and the imperfection of language allowed them to see: I mean the disposition to explain away the articles of the Church on the pretext of their inconsistency with right reason;—when in fact it was only an incongruity with a wrong understanding, the faculty which St. Paul calls [Greek: phronaema sarkos], the rules of which having been all abstracted from objects of sense, (finite in time and space,) are logically applicable to objects of the sense alone. This I have elsewhere called ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... three above mentioned defy classification, because they are not composed by any scientific method. Their authors pass from physiological sensualism to moralism, from imitation of nature to finalism, and to transcendental mysticism, without consciousness of the incongruity of their theses, at ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... Durant and his hostess on each other's mercy during dinner, a circumstance that seemed greatly to entertain Mrs. Fazakerly. Probably a deep acquaintance with Coton Manor made her feel a delightful incongruity in Durant's appearance there, since, as her gaze so frankly intimated, she found him interesting. He was roused from a fit of more than usual abstraction to find her little gray eyes twinkling at him across the soup. Mrs. Fazakerly, for purposes ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... it was, Westminster Abbey in the season was an eyesore to him. The Dean and Choir in their white surplices passed muster, but the congregation in its black frock-coats and Paris hats gave him the same sense of incongruity as would a banquet of barefooted friars in the dining- hall of the Cannon ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... absolute quiet called up such kind old associations in his mind that he went on ruminating them for a long, long time. As he turned from the window he felt he had never seen anything more complete of its sort. The one feature that struck him with a sense of incongruity was a small Irish yew, thin and black, which stood out like an outpost of the shrubbery, through which the maze was approached. That, he thought, might as well be away: the wonder was that anyone should have thought it would look well in ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... the schoolmaster, came to the spring while she was there, and they spoke together, because they were great friends, these two. He was unchanged, the same strong gray man, with the ruddy face. He was not unhappy here despite the seeming incongruity of his presence. The wilderness appealed to him too in a way, he was the intellectual leader of the colony and almost everything that his nature called for met with ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... forest monster—a tree rudely snapped asunder by wind or lightning, about 40 feet from the ground, and stripped of every branch, so that it looked like a broken column; on its top sat a great vulture in the well-known attitude of its kind, as motionless as rock, and apparently meditating on the incongruity of a noisy, vulgar bit of machinery, with its train of cars, invading such a nook ...
— A start in life • C. F. Dowsett
... amicably, each recognizing the rights of the other, and both willing to give in upon occasion in order to make the service as a whole work out more smoothly. Many humorous stories are told, the point of which is based upon the absolute incongruity of the various parts of the church service. The writer remembers most vividly an incident that occurred during the first year of the Great War, in the church in which he was at that time the choirmaster. The choir ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... academy of compliments. The master himself, suiting the action to the word, occasionally started up, and making some pas, as an illustrative example, with his heels flying in the air, was certainly in a state of signal incongruity with his aspect, which, when seated, was that of a steady-looking banker's ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... incongruity of the writer and his work confronted her intriguingly. A Charteris writes In Old Lichfield; a Cockney drug-clerk writes The Eve of St. Agnes; a genteel printer evolves a Lovelace; and a cutpurse pens the Ballad of Dead Ladies in a ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... and occasioned the lawsuit to be dropped; for we found it a mighty, inconvanient matter to fight it out both ways; by the same a-token that I think it a proof of stultity to go to law at all at all, as long as a person is able to take it into his own management. For the only incongruity in the matter is this: that, in the one case, a set of lawyers have the law in their hands, and, in the other, that you have it in your own; that's the only difference, and 'tis easy ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... box in the Hull-House alley. The little Italian girl who thus won the scepter took it very gravely as the just reward of hard labor, and we were all so absorbed in the desire for clean and tidy streets that we were wholly oblivious to the incongruity of thus selecting "the queen ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... was informed by her father and by herself that she did not intend ever to return to him. It is useless to enter into the controversy as to the cause of this separation. In the light of the latest revelations, the better opinion seems to be that it was a hopeless incongruity that might have been predicted from the characters of the two. It seems that Lady Byron was not quite so amiable as she was supposed to be, and in her later years she was subject to hallucinations. Byron, it must be admitted, was an impossible husband for any woman, most of all ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... solid food. On such food mankind has lived for an immense period of time. It is true that there are several theoretical advantages in cooked vegetable foods; but unfortunately there is a want of conformity with our digestive organs. If a flesh diet is taken, the incongruity is greater. Concentrated food causes constipation. An active man, leading an out-of-door life, can take unsuitable food with little or no apparent inconvenience, the movements of his body favouring intestinal ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... not understand the incongruity between an English peer and a Yankee—female, I cannot help you. I suppose it is because you have been brought up within the limited society of a small colony. If so, it is not your fault. But I had hoped you had been in Europe ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... and still more important element of incongruity—another reason why the nomination was foreign to the whole theory of the political experiment of 1872. The indispensable condition attaching to the Liberal plan was its endorsement by the Democracy. This demanded the selection of a candidate ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... said. By the inflections of his tones the others knew that some incongruity of the situation had aroused Macker's sense of humor. "Why don't we give the creature an entirely new body? We could replace the flesh and viscera, as well as the cartilaginous structure, with our own type substance. It would probably be an indestructible being as far as its own world is ...
— Vital Ingredient • Charles V. De Vet
... East Tennessee, and the lion spoke the old familiar mountain dialect so easily recognizable in this locality. Even a lapsus linguae, "you uns." was unmistakable amidst the high-flown periods. Although the ventriloquism was appreciated, the incongruity of this countrified jargon, held in great contempt by the townfolks, discounted Emperor's majesty and he was ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... details of character is well shown in the speech already referred to; which is the utterance of a man philosophizing most unphilosophically; as if the Academy should betake itself to the stump, and this too without any sense of the incongruity. Plutarch has a short passage which served as a hint, not indeed for the matter, but for the style of that speech. "They do note," says he, "in some of his epistles that he counterfeited that brief compendious manner of speech of the Lacedaemonians. As, when the ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... was preaching to a congregation of shopkeepers, traders, and artisans, and his appeal to arms seemed to fall flatly on the trading mind; whilst the old incongruity between the building and the dress of the nineteenth century, was as remarkable as it is in Westminster Abbey; and the contrast between the unchivalrous aspect of the speaker, and the tone of his language, ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... night when sorrow may come to the brightest without causing any great sense of incongruity: when, with impressible persons, love becomes solicitousness, hope sinks to misgiving, and faith to hope: when the exercise of memory does not stir feelings of regret at opportunities for ambition that have been passed by, and anticipation does not ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... and saw my plain calfskin shoes. I smiled but soon grew sober as I thought that the incongruity between gown and shoes was no greater than that between the gown and the girl—the girl who was reared to wear plain clothes and be honest and unpretentious. But honesty—that is the rock to which I cling now. I am going to be honest with myself and have my ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... seemed surprisingly dignified and self-possessed, I fancied, for a girl in her position. A princess could not have looked and bowed more royally. There was not a shadow of embarrassment in her manner, in spite of the incongruity of her surroundings. You had much better leave her alone, Marian. In all probability she would resent any condescension on your part. What wonderful, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a strange and startling incongruity observable in this enclosure. At the foot of the grave where rest the remains of the venerable Aaron Burr, first president of the College of New Jersey, stands a tall white marble monument of modern form and appearance, so ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... hesitated. The delay of the Canadian, who had so repeatedly urged the necessity for expedition while in the fort, had, to say the least of it, an appearance of incongruity. Still it was evident, if disposed to harm them, he had full opportunity to do so without much risk of effectual opposition from themselves. Under all circumstances, therefore, it was advisable rather to appear to confide implicitly ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... blame for this implacable hostility is easily determined. Materialism, in dealing with mental phenomena, begins by setting chronology at defiance; but between idealism and the phenomena of matter there is no such aboriginal incongruity. From principles common to every form of idealism a theory is deducible which, while frankly acknowledging the reality of matter, may, with perfect consistency, maintain that reality to be mental—although mental in the sense of being, not a perception by, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... gruesome—true! Not in the trenches—true, too! Where all is satire, no incongruity seems out of place. Life plays in and out with death; they intermingle; they look each other in the face and say: "I know you. We dwell together. Let us smile when we may, at what we may, to hide the character ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... ought to be by what ought not to be, when complete it reminds you of the perfect image, by showing you the distorted and imperfect image. Of this art we possess in the present generation one prolific master. Mr. Browning is an artist working by incongruity. Possibly hardly one of his most considerable efforts can be found which is not great because of its odd mixture. He puts together things which no one else would have put together, and produces on our minds a result which no one else would have ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... So far, discussion may find favour. In my own experience I have found it very absorbent of claret. But I do not think it otherwise an incongruity after dinner, provided it be carried on, as our disquisitions have always been, with frankness and good humour. Consider how much instruction has been conveyed to us in the form of conversations at banquet, by Plato and Xenophon and Plutarch. I read nothing with more pleasure ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... looked at her. She had fairly fallen in love with this new cousin of hers; her beauty, and gracious ways, her foreign accent, and now her experiences of nuns and convents had come like a revelation to the little English girl in her downright, everyday life. With a comical incongruity, she could compare her in her own mind to nothing but an enchanted princess in some fairy tale; and she stood gazing first at her and then at the glass, where soft wavy brown hair and red ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... they are compelled to acknowledge its excellence from its own point of view—its colouring true to nature, though not to their own type—its unveiled forms decorous, though not conforming to their own standard of decorum. Might they not still, and justly, tax it on its own ground with some flaw or incongruity, which proved the artist to have been human? And may not a stranger, judging you in the same way, recognize in you one part of peccant humanity, poet 'three parts divine' though ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... "The Gods of Our Fathers" is the leading feature and, though not of perfect perspicuity nor faultless unity, is none the less noteworthy as a sincere expression of Pantheism. Mr. Cole keenly feels the incongruity of our devotion to Semitic theological ideals, when as a matter of fact we are descended from Aryan polytheists, and his personification of the Grecian deities in the men of today is a pleasing and ingenious conception. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... incapable of understanding that there was anything incongruous in a young lady of her position, education and refinement busying herself with the curing of fish and the cost of lime? He had himself marked the incongruity long ago, when Ingram had been telling him of the remote and beautiful maiden whose only notions of the world had been derived from literature—who was more familiar with the magic land in which Endymion wandered than with any other—and that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... by the street surveyor, no matter how irregular and independent their design and structure. Happily, the few scrub-oaks and low bushes which formed the scant vegetation of this vast sand dune offered no obstacle and suggested no incongruity. Beside the house before which Mr. Bly now stood, a prolific Madeira vine, quickened by the six months' sunshine, had alone survived the displacement of its foundations, and in its untrimmed luxuriance half hid the upper veranda from ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... self-originated impulse, and not, as in the case of the prophets of old, from obedience to a 'prophetic call.' 'The Word of the Lord came to' them; His Messianic consciousness needed no external stimulus to kindle it into flame. What did He mean by seeking baptism? John recognised the incongruity of His submitting to a rite which professed repentance and promised cleansing. It does not follow that John recognised His Messianic character, but only that he knew His blameless life. The remonstrance ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... any prose style which he could hope to frame. And with the dialogue in verse, it was impossible to have the lyric parts in any sort of prose, simply because the reader would then have felt an intolerable incongruity. These parts have therefore been turned into such familiar lyric measures as seemed at once possible and not unsuitable. And where this method was found impracticable, as sometimes in the Commoi, blank metres have again been used,—with such liberties as seemed appropriate to the special ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... his own name, the verdict that had blackened his repute, the sentence that had hurled him from his native sphere; or that, as her reason had insensibly matured, she herself, reflecting on all the mystery that surrounded him—his incognitos, his hidings, the incongruity between his social grade and his education or bearing, and his repeated acknowledgments that there were charges against him which compelled him to concealment, and from which he could not be cleared on earth; that she, reflecting on ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... imbrices and bombi, (as they were at Alexandria, and afterwards at the Neapolitan and Roman theatres,) that they could not protect themselves from dying in the very moment of their birth,—laying together all these considerations, we see the incongruity of any audience, so constituted, to any purpose less evanescent than ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... digger, or the pioneer, in vocations which have been the life-work of the latter. O, the wearisome nonsense of this kind which is remorselessly thrust upon a docile public! And what an opportunity for some novelist, in his rabid pursuit of originality, to merely reverse the incongruity—picturing a semi-barbarian, lassoed full-grown, and launched into polished society, there to excel the fastidious idlers of drawing-room and tennis-court in their own line! This miracle would be more reasonable than its antithesis. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... with her. But even on these occasions she defied what she called "coddling." Once I found her suffering from a cold, on a very chilly day, without a fire, and I expostulated. She replied, with a sort of incongruity very characteristic of her, "Oh! none of your hot bottles for me!" In her last hours of consciousness she battled with the doctor's insistence that she must have a fire in her bedroom, and her children had to conceal the flame behind screens because she threatened to get out ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... 'High-class Jams;' and behold, inserted between the Soap and the Jam—'God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoso believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.' Nancy perused the passage without perception of incongruity, without emotion of any kind. Her religion had long since fallen to pieces, and universal defilement of Scriptural phrase by the associations of the market-place had in this respect blunted ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... Incongruity as an element of fun was always an idea uppermost in the mind of the Western humorist. I am not aware that the notes of any of his lectures, except those of his Mormon experience, have been preserved, and I have some doubts if any one of his lectures, except the Mormon one, was ever ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... was a very earnest but ill-directed effort made to have her body buried in Westminster Abbey. Huxley, being close to the Dean, serving with him on several municipal boards, was importuned by Spencer to use his influence toward the desired end. Huxley saw the incongruity of the situation, and in a letter that reveals the logical mind and the direct, literary, Huxley quality, he placed his gentle veto on the proposition and thus saved the "enemy" the mortification of having ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... modern drawing-room we sometimes see a young lady dancing in a heavy Balmoral boot which is only fitted for the bogs and heather of a Scotch tramp. The presence of a short dress in a drawing-room, or of a long train in the street, is part of the general incongruity ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... not by my father's occupation. They teased and admired me by turns for learning the footnotes in the Latin grammar by heart; they never reproached me for my ignorance of the latest comic opera. And it was more than good breeding that made them seem unaware of the incongruity of my presence. It was a generous appreciation of what it meant for a girl from the slums to be in the Latin School, on the way to college. If our intimacy ended on the steps of the school-house, it was more my fault than theirs. Most of the girls were democratic enough ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... swimming in the Adriatic, far out beyond the line of bathers, shouting and splashing; in the shallows. There, under a dazzling sky, with a strong wind blowing, and whitecaps careering about, he came face to face with the subject of his speculations. The incongruity of catechising a man of his ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... mountain. In one of Memling's paintings, "St. Ursula and the Maidens," which, when I saw it, was in Bruges, the lady is represented twice as tall as the full grown girls whom she envelops in her protecting cloak; yet, despite the unnaturalness, we do not experience any incongruity; for it is rational to our feeling. Intensity of any sort is another property which creates dominance—loudness of sound in music; concentration of light in painting, as in Rembrandt; stress in rhythm; depth and scope of ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... the incongruity of his position, of being a passenger, though secretly and surreptitiously, of the car containing those embarked on a mission so closely concerning himself. Instead of fleeing from them he was actually courting their ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... came supper, and the evening closed with hot cockles and blind-hoodman—the latter being blindman's buff. And among all the company, to none but John and Isoult Avery did it ever occur that in these occupations there was the least incongruity with the Sabbath day. For they only were Gospellers; and at that time the Gospellers alone remembered to keep it holy. Rome strikes her pen through the third and fourth commandments, if less notoriously, yet quite as really, ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... The incongruity of this interruption was almost as great as a shout of laughter at a funeral, and Leigh experienced ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... theatres; and such were the horror and disgust with which it impressed me, so grossly did it outrage all the best feelings of my nature, that even the angelic voice, and perfect science of Mrs. Billington, lost half their charms, or rather increased my aversion to the piece by an additional sense of incongruity. Then I learned the immense difference between reading and seeing a play;—and no wonder, indeed; for who has not passed over with his eye a hundred passages without offence, which he yet could not have ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... room, striving to penetrate the meaning which it vaguely conveyed to her—an indescribable air of scrupulous neatness and cleanliness, a sense of virginal dulness. But suddenly a startling sense of the incongruity came upon her, that she, the opera-singer, Owen Asher's mistress, should be admitted into a convent, should be received, the honoured guest of holy women. And she got up, leaving the two priests to discuss ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... tolerable voices, but by trained vocalists, was taking its place. The people of New York were not quite so sophisticated as they are to-day, and possibly were dowered with a larger degree of sincerity. Many of them were willing to admit the incongruity of behavior at which Addison made merry when he predicted that the time would come when the descendants of the English people of his day would be curious to know "why their forefathers used to sit together ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... rest of his dress consisted of the plaid and philabeg. Duncan superintended a district which was partly Highland, partly Lowland, and therefore might be supposed to combine their national habits, in order to show his impartiality to Trojan or Tyrian. The incongruity, however, had a whimsical and ludicrous effect, as it made his head and body look as if belonging to different individuals; or, as some one said who had seen the executions of the insurgent prisoners in 1715, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... The rooms all felt dry. They had wide, open fireplaces in which stood fire dogs of brass or iron; in some of them still remained half-burned or charred logs, and the dead ashes of long years ago. The ladies remarked that, amidst all this abundance of wealth, there was a certain incongruity in the arrangement of the contents of every room. In one they found silk draperies from India, a divan from Turkey, an Italian settee in the finest Florentine carving; beside it a massive English table ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... The little incongruity made us both laugh, but it was only for the instant. The tender mood of the evening, and all that we had said, sustained the quiet and almost grave undertone of our conference. My own quite unconscious act of rising from the grave ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... to inhere in blood which has been associated with many goods and great power. She will still be her husband's chattel, as she was her father's chattel before her purchase, but she is at the same time of her father's gentle blood; and hence there is a moral incongruity in her occupying herself with the debasing employments of her fellow-servants. However completely she may be subject to her master, and however inferior to the male members of the social stratum in which her birth has placed her, the principle that gentility ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... Rough, too, were the vehicles traversing it; the oddly assorted teams, mules, donkeys and Mongolian ponies, went unclipped and ungroomed; the drivers went unwashed. Loathsome beggars sat in the gilded doorways of the fur-shops, the incongruity of their rags against the background of barbaric splendour evidently appealing to none of the passers-by who hurried about their business in a cloud ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon |
