"Incongruous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the minds of men are sometimes fatally infected with this disease, either through unhappy prepossession, or some of the other causes above-mentioned, yet I am unwilling to believe that there is in nature so monstrously incongruous a being as a female infidel. The least reflection on the temper, the character, and the education of women, makes the mind revolt with horror from an idea so ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... reverse of the continual smile that discredits all expression). But when this happy glance passed from Mordecai to rest on Mirah, it acted like a little too much sunshine, and made her change her attitude. She had knelt under an impulse with which any personal embarrassment was incongruous, and especially any thoughts about how Mrs. Grandcourt might stand to this new aspect of things—thoughts which made her color under Deronda's glance, and rise to take her seat again in her usual posture of crossed hands and feet, with the effort to look as quiet as ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... upon. Her cheeks were thin and hollow, her eyes a little too prominent, some hidden expression which seemed at times to flit from one to the other of her features suggested a sensuality which was a little incongruous with her somewhat angular figure and generally cold demeanour. But that she was a woman of courage ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... full of spectators, and one and all did not fail to remark Judy's wedding present. A bride in white from top to toe—a lovely bride in the tenderest bloom of youth, to carry a bouquet of strong dark green and crimson—had anything so incongruous ever been seen before? But Hilda held the flowers tightly, and Judy's hungry heart ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... feet from the road. The only object that met Cass's eye was a man's stiff, tall hat, lying emptily and vacantly in the grass. It was new, shiny, and of modish shape. But it was so incongruous, so perkily smart, and yet so feeble and helpless lying there, so ghastly ludicrous in its very appropriateness and incapacity to adjust itself to the surrounding landscape, that it affected him with something more than a sense of its grotesqueness, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... can be used to hammer a point home. In this way, a truth or a lesson has a better chance of adhering because it is identified with some definite image. Simply to illuminate this point, it is noted that the jests which best stick in the memory are those which are associated with some incongruous situation. To relate a pertinent anecdote, to provide an apt quotation from some well-known authority and to draw upon our own rich battle history for illustrative materials are but a few of the means of ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... the humble homes of thousands of donors, would have made their gifts impossible. When we remember how many offerings, numbering tens of thousands, were, like the widow's mites, very small in themselves, yet, relatively to ability, very large, it will be seen how incongruous it would have been to use the gifts, saved only by limiting even the wants of the givers, to buy for the orphans what the donors could not and would not ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... to Kirkham a changed creature. Her hopefulness had rallied to the front. Her mind was filled with blithe anticipations founded on that dear little naughty boy and his incongruous cupboard of playthings in ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... to Perry that it wasn't much more incongruous for the emperor to cruise in a canoe, than it was for the prime minister to attempt to build ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... purely American. Artemus Ward could get laughs out of nothing, by mixing the absurd and the unexpected, and then backing the combination with a solemn face and earnest manner. For instance, he was fond of such incongruous statements as: "I once knew a man in New Zealand who hadn't a tooth in his head," here he would pause for some time, look reminiscent, and continue: "and yet he could beat a base-drum better than any man I ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... the 15th century, but is in a good state of preservation. The theatre is part of what was formerly the "Chapel of St. John," used by the Templars. The porch over the doorway was erected in the 13th century, and is of the Transition style, utterly incongruous to the use now made of it; but this kind of sacrilege is unhappily now becoming of common occurrence! Leaving the theatre, in a short space we were in the "Place des Thermes," where the New Casino is being built among the shrubs on the right. The "Grand Etablissement," which occupies ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... brogue, you know," said she, looking round with an affectation of shyness, which was most incongruous on her melancholy visage; it was just like a death's head trying to grin, I thought to myself;—and then, she commenced, in a thin, quavering voice, the lay of the departed earl, ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... and I kept looking for what was not there. He was well-born, but his life on the ranch for so many years had dulled his appreciation of those finer, innate qualities which every wife craves—he had forgotten how to be the gentleman. Don't think that I expected the impossible, or anything incongruous to the life we were leading; but there are little attentions, thoughtful considerations and other things in a husband's relation to his wife, trivial perhaps in themselves, which the wife expects ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... research lies in the fact that the Grail legend consists of a congeries of widely differing elements—elements which at first sight appear hopelessly incongruous, if not completely contradictory, yet at the same time are present to an extent, and in a form, which no honest critic ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... go to see the play of the Fall of Man (Der Suendenfall). The subject is treated after the manner of Hans Sachs, but with this difference, that the simple-minded old Nuremberger saw nothing incongruous in making Cain and Abel say their catechism, and Cain go away from the examination to fight with the low boys in the street; whereas the author of Der Suendenfall is advisedly irreverent. Another proof, if one were wanted, that he was ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... firm, his lips compressed, and he would not look at her. But she was still incredulous. Civility such as his and violence such as he suggested were incongruous. She took refuge from her terror in ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... before he even entered the park, so proud and prominent was its position, on the richly- wooded steep of a considerable eminence. It was a castellated building, immense and magnificent, in a faulty and incongruous style of architecture, indeed, but compensating in some degree for these deficiencies of external taste and beauty by the splendour and accommodation of its exterior, and which a Gothic castle, raised according to the strict rules ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... his powers of perception seemed to be quickened: he was vividly alive to the incongruous, half-marine, half-backwoods character of the warehouses and commercial buildings; to the hull of a stranded ship already built into a block of rude tenements; to the dark stockaded wall of a house framed ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... to consume a precious hour or more in showing her the noble church, the cloisters, the chapter-house, the monks' parlor, and the rest of the stone records of a quiet monastic life, he realized to the full how utterly incongruous were the enthusiastic trippers with their surroundings. The car threaded their ranks gingerly, and was soon running free along the tree-shaded ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... the vestibule and the company burst into an incongruous babble. Dorn listened to their voices, again firm and self-sufficient, chattering formalities. He watched Rachel adjusting her hat with over-eager gestures. Her eyes were avoiding him. She seemed breathless, her head squirming under the necessity ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... Journal des Debats and the Humanite have many followers who rarely read them. And, above all else, he should have seen that the Americans, who had not signed the Treaty of London, would decline to lend themselves to the enforcement of an antiquated pact which was so grievously incongruous with Justice, to say nothing of the Fourteen Points of Mr. Wilson. But Sonnino threw all these considerations to the winds. He should have reconciled himself to the fact that his London Treaty, if for no other reason than that it was a secret one, belonged to a different age and ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... together, with a patch of assonance or a momentary jingle of alliteration. To understand how constant is this preoccupation of good writers, even where its results are least obtrusive, it is only necessary to turn to the bad. There, indeed, you will find cacophony supreme, the rattle of incongruous consonants only relieved by the jaw-breaking hiatus, and whole phrases not to be articulated by the powers ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... English—Mr. Douglas Campbell would say Dutch, but even so the stock is the same. Though thus somewhat gorged with food not wholly to its taste, our political digestion has contrived so far to master the incongruous mass of materials it has been unable to reject; and if assimilation has been at times imperfect, our political constitution and spirit remain English in essential features. Imbued with like ideals of liberty, of law, of right, certainly ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... the playhouse was ringing in my head, and I began to wonder why he did not train a rose-bush against its wall, and a moment after I felt that it was well that he did not—a rose-bush could only seem incongruous facing that waste hill. We passed into the house, and seeing the priest's study lined with books, I said, "Reading is his distraction," and I looked forward to a pleasant talk about books when we had finished ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... traveller, of all thou saw'st afar? On every tree hangs boredom, ripening to its fall, Didst gather it, thou smoking yon thy sad cigar, Black, casting an incongruous shadow on ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... forced, or rather was attempted to be forced, upon Scotland; Prynne lost his ears; and Bishop Williams was fined eighteen thousand pounds and ordered to be imprisoned during the King's pleasure. Hence the striking, if incongruous, introduction of "The pilot of the Galilean lake," to bewail, in the character of a shepherd, the drowned swain in conjunction with Triton, Hippotades, and Camus. "The author," wrote Milton afterwards, "by occasion, foretells the ruin of the corrupted clergy, then in their height." It was ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... down and drew it from the incongruous modern case and from its scabbard. Ha! What did it say but "Honour!" What was its message but "Do the right thing. Death is nothing—Honour is everything. Be worthy of your Name, your ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... various forms of Christianity prevalent in our Empire or to understand how the English Church can be one body, when some sections of it are hardly distinguishable from Roman Catholicism and others from non-conformist sects. In the same way Chinese religion offers startling combinations of incongruous rites and doctrines: the attitude of the laity and of the government to the different churches is not to be defined in ordinary European terms and yet if one examines the practice of Europe, it will often throw light on the oddities ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... them in the skies, and will never die again. Other tribes of natives give an account of a serpent of immense size, and inhabiting high rocky mountains, which, they say, produced creation by a blow of his tail. But their ideas and descriptions are too incongruous and unintelligible to deduce any definite or connected story ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... him, like the slave in the chariot, to check the current of his highest thought. The glow of his fancy fades with the suddenness of a southern sunset. His best inspirations are spoilt by the interruption of incongruous commonplace. He had none of the guardian delicacy of taste, or the thirst after completeness, which mark the consummate artist. He is more nearly a dwarf Shakespeare than a giant Popo. This defect ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... including Clare, were done in the other day, and they put up a biscuit tin, with their names pierced in with nail holes, to mark the spot. This war is the quaintest, most incongruous show. ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... meagre frame. It was secretive, miserly. A black stock covered a withered collar. A dingy silk tile was tightly packed over a rusted black wig. Boots hid their tops under the skirts of his coat, and the coat in turn was partly concealed under a black shawl. But there was one incongruous item. Boots, coat, hat and all were crusted with brine. He had evidently passed through salty spray, had braved the deep, this shrinking old man in frayed black. Just now his eyes, normally moist and avaricious, were parched dry by fear, as though a flame had passed ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... for the hope of better things that breathed through the cheap sensation of the best of them. But it was a hope that had been deferred a good many years. His manner was better than his matter; indeed, an incongruous polish was said by the literary to prevent Langholm from being a first favorite either with the great public or the little critics. As a maker of plots, however, he still had humble points; and Rachel assured him that she had burnt her candle all ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... the picture had a most incongruous appearance. He blushed as he stood on the refuge. It seemed to him that the mere incongruity of the spectacle must inevitably attract crowds, gradually blocking the street, and that when some individual not absolutely a fool in art, had perceived the quality of the picture—well, then the trouble ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... that may be drawn from this portion of history is one not unconnected with the present occasion. From causes to which I need not give a name, there is gradually creeping into our otherwise prosperous state the incongruous and undermining influence of caste. One of the local manifestations of this unrepublican sentiment is, that while 800 children, chiefly of foreign parents, are educated and taught trades at the ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... unintentionally amusing as he is in telling his own love episode in "The Fairy-Tale of My Life." However, no man can unite the advantages of adult age and childhood, and we all feel that there is something incongruous in a child's ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... full extent of weakness revealed. In such a case, much depended on the personality of the man who moved the amendment, and Mr. Agar-Robartes was one of the most whimsically incongruous figures in the Government ranks. Twentieth-century Liberalism wears a somewhat drab and serious aspect, but this ultra-fashionable example of gilded youth would have been in his place among the votaries of Charles James Fox. The climax of his incongruity ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... Queerly shaped rooms jutted out in many quarters; odd stairs climbed up in several directions; towers and turrets were added to the roof; passages, some narrow, some broad, connected the new buildings with the old. The whole made an incongruous and yet beautiful effect, the new rooms possessing the advantages and comforts which modern builders put into their houses, and the older part of the house the quaint devices and thick, wainscoted ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... first meets Maria Louise, of Savoy, at Villefranche, 153; makes herself acceptable to the young Queen, 153; her wrath and stupefaction at the French dishes being upset, 159; installed definitively as camerara-mayor at Madrid, 160; onerous and incongruous duties of the post, 162; her policy of keeping to herself sole access to the King and Queen, 163; sacrifices her dignity to her power and influence, 163; by familiarising the Queen with politics, she penetrates every ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... nowadays ride their bicycles, instead of going out to service as their mothers and grandmothers did before them, and dress themselves ridiculously out of keeping with their position and surroundings. It seems very incongruous to see such girls living in indolence in country villages, while the daughters of their parson, as frequently happens in large families, turn out ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... for you," he stated, smiling, "but I want to ask you to overlook anything that may seem incongruous, for the musician ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... great artificial beauty in cities—as for instance the ancient structure that spans the Tiber just below the tomb of Hadrian, or among modern works the spider web engineering feat of Brooklyn bridge—but if in the wilderness we run across them, there is something incongruous about them, and they disturb. Strange to say, there is the exception of high-flung trellis-viaducts bridging the chasm of mountain canyons. Maybe it is exactly on account of their unpretentious, plain utility; or is it that they reconcile by ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... an agent; and this, by the preposition by, is made an adjunct to a passive verb. Even the participial noun of this form, though it actually drops the distinction of voice, is awkward and apparently incongruous in ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... any more of the medical Bart. than that, when he sends for the other to attend his wife, he calls him generally "doctor," and seldom Sir James: or that the military Bart. does not much like the naval Bart.? and do not all these incongruous Barts. shudder at the bare idea of been seen on the same side of the street with a gin-spinning, Patent-British-Genuine-Foreign-Cognac Brandy-making Bart.? and do not each and every one of these ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... Sheila, and again Sheila, and still again Sheila. But, do you know, either you exaggerated or I failed to understand your descriptions; for the Sheila I came to construct out of your talk is a most incongruous and incomprehensible creature. First, Sheila knows about stone and lime and building; and then I suppose her to be a practical young woman, who is a sort of overseer to her father. But Sheila, again, is romantic and mysterious, and believes in visions and dreams; and then I take her to be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... transhipment of stores from the Agrippina and Bahama had perforce been conducted. Everything, in fact, was in the wildest confusion. The ship herself was dirty and unsettled, and her decks below lumbered in all directions with all manner of incongruous articles. No one was berthed or messed, nothing arranged or secured. Spare shot-boxes, sea-chests, and heavy articles of baggage or cabin furniture were fetching away to the destruction of crockery and other brittle ware, and the no small danger of limbs. ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... to plot a raid on Danfield's Vesper Club! Why, the nurse-maids have hardly got the children all in for supper and bed. It's incongruous. Well, I must go over to the laboratory and get some things ready to put in that van with the men. Meet me about half-past seven, Walter, up in the room, all togged up. We'll dine at the Cafe Riviera to-night in style. And, by the way, you're quite a man about town—you must know someone ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... horror arose on all sides. The prince grew pale as death; he gazed into Gania's eyes with a strange, wild, reproachful look; his lips trembled and vainly endeavoured to form some words; then his mouth twisted into an incongruous smile. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a dim thing to-day. And he who descends into the crypt of that Cathedral which Manning never lived to see, will observe, in the quiet niche with the sepulchral monument, that the dust lies thick on the strange, the incongruous, the almost impossible object which, with its elaborations of dependent tassels, hangs down from the dim vault like some forlorn and ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... which is committed to such apparently incongruous lips reiterates a former message by 'a man of God.' Eli was a kindly, and, in his way, good man, but wanting in firmness, and acquiescent in evil, partly, perhaps, from lack of moral courage and partly ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... extraordinary thing was to find the wapiti there at all. It seemed as incongruous as the first automobile that I saw upon the Gobi Desert, for in every other part of the world the animal is a resident of the park-like openings in the forests. Here not a twig or bush was in sight, only the rolling, grass-covered uplands. Undoubtedly these mountains had been wooded many years ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... of sarcasm and irony, with a keenness of application and effect rarely equalled. But, in all candour, it may be added, that just as a profusion of figures and metaphors sometimes tempted this great orator into incongruous images and coarse analogies, so his passion for irony was occasionally too intense. Hence, there are occasions where his pungency is embittered into acrimony, strength degenerates into vulgarism, and the vehemence of satire is infuriated ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... Portuguese feitico, a talisman or amulet, applied by the Portuguese to various material objects regarded by the negroes of the west coast with more or less of religious reverence. These objects may be held sacred in some degree for a number of incongruous reasons. They may be tokens, or may be of value in sympathetic magic, or merely odd, and therefore probably endowed with unknown mystic qualities. Or they may have been pointed out in a dream, or met in a lucky hour and associated with good fortune, ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... the mistake of grouping animals that would never meet in natural circumstances or furnish them with incongruous surroundings. ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... if I should lay my garden out into four squares, the combination of squares, central circles and straight main paths would look incongruous. So I shall cut the central points of the four square beds off by swinging circles. Have patience and you will see, for the general plan is in my mind just as it ought to be in the mind of any person who ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... myself. I love Le Gardeur; and what I love I do not mean to lose!" added she, with an inconsequence that fitted ill with her resolution regarding the Intendant. But Angelique was one who reconciled to herself all professions, however opposite or however incongruous. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... themselves; and grow, wondrously, from amid the incongruous ever-fluctuating chaos of the Actual: this is what World-History, if it teach any thing, has to teach us, How they grow; and, after long stormy growth, bloom out mature, supreme; then quickly (for the blossom is brief) fall ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... turban bobbed about among the rocks, with the large white face of the Nonconformist minister smiling from beneath it. He had a thick lance with which to support his injured leg, and this murderous crutch combined with his peaceful appearance to give him a most incongruous aspect,—as of a sheep which has suddenly developed claws. Behind him were two negroes with a basket ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... though highly personal account of the whaler's life, and to that end had assembled a mass of information upon the sperm whale to add to his own memories. Very literally the story begins as an autobiography; even the elemental figure of the cannibal, Queequeg, with his incongruous idol and harpoon in a New Bedford lodging house, does not warn of what is to come. But even before the Pequod leaves sane Nantucket an undercurrent begins to sweep through the narrative. This brooding ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... served many purposes—cathedral close, market and custom house, and even at times as bear-garden or zoo. To my thinking, the outside of the cathedral is far more attractive than the inside, which suffers from over-decoration in the incongruous style peculiar to Continental churches. I shall not conduct you personally round the Church ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... the Boer burgher was none the less incongruous than the physical appearance of the majority of them, although no expensive uniform and trappings could have been of more practical value. The men of the Pretoria and Johannesburg commandos had the unique honor of going to the war in uniforms specially made for the purpose, ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... moonlight the grass seemed tipped with hoar frost. Most of the beeches were already bare, but the shoots, clustering round them, like children at their mother's skirts, still retained their leaves red and brown. Among the pines these leaves were as incongruous as a wedding-dress at a funeral. Gavin was standing on grass, but there were patches of heather within sight, and broom, and the leaf of the blaeberry. Where the beeches had drawn up the earth with them as they grew, their roots ran this way ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... continued, I chanced to glance up, and there was old Lindon peeping at us from his hiding-place behind the screen. The look of amazed perplexity which was on his big red face struck me with such a keen sense of the incongruous that it was all I could do to keep from laughter Apparently the sight of us did nothing to lighten the fog which was in his brain, for he stammered out, in what was possibly intended for ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... The whole incongruous covering of the east end of the choir shown on p. 77 was then removed, and the change effected was most striking. It was evident that long before the introduction of the Grecian screen in 1717, the original arrangement had been disturbed by the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... as he was by incalculable riches—sweetbreads seemed incongruous just then; the transition of ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... was uttered with a wise, benevolent smile. He repeated twenty times over 'We noblemen,' 'I as a noble'; obviously he did not remember that our grandfather was a peasant, and our father a soldier. Even our surname Tchimsha-Himalaisky, in reality so incongruous, seemed to him now melodious, distinguished, and ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... who in waking has had the confused memory of a dream in which events have been so mingled and mixed as to present no uniform narrative, but only a mass of strange and incongruous occurrences, without object or connexion, may form some notion of the state of restless excitement my brain suffered from, as the many and conflicting ideas my late adventures suggested, presented themselves to my ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... Blackmore's objection to a mixing of genres. If satire should be barred from heroic poetry, the reverse, for some critics, was also true, and Pope should not have used epic allusions and devices in The Dunciad. Edward Ward, for one, thought the poem an incongruous mixture "against all rule."[13] Pope's violation of "rule" seemed almost a desecration of epic to Thomas Cooke; of the mock-heroic games in Book II of The Dunciad, he complained that "to imitate ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... mingling with the eager snarling and fretting of the cat, made the most dismal and incongruous duet I had ever listened to. For some moments they stood thus threatening and defying each other; but at length, lashing itself up to the proper pitch of fury, the fisher jumped at his antagonist with distended jaws, to seize hold of the long, slender throat. ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... and wide. In England also the puppet play was extremely popular. The drama had moved from the church to the market-place, and much of the Elizabethan drama appeared in this quaint form, played by wooden figures upon diminutive boards. To the modern mind nothing could be more incongruous than the idea of a solemn drama forced to assume a guise so grotesque and childish; but, according to Jusserand, much of the stage-work was extremely ghastly, and no doubt it impressed the multitude. There is even a story of some actors who had gone too far, and into the midst of whose play the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... with the air of genial gaiety that Carlyle had found so incongruous to his conception of a blind man, "you have a mystery somewhere about you! I know it ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... asaniparabhan (which I adopt) is better than the Bengal reading asaniswanan, for in connection with yamadanda immediately preceding the latter would be incongruous, if not unmeaning. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the Woods, July 2d, 1882.-If I do it at all I must delay no longer. Incongruous and full of skips and jumps as is that huddle of diary-jottings, war-memoranda of 1862-'65, Nature-notes of 1877-'81, with Western and Canadian observations afterwards, all bundled up and tied by a big string, the resolution and indeed mandate comes to me this ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... some remote distance there floated to him a sound strangely incongruous here in the early stillness, a subdued screech or scream, a wild, clamorous, shrieking noise which for the life of him ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... collection for the support of superannuated ministers. The three young men who had feared I would become a burden were especially active in the matter of this collection; and, as they had no sense of humor, it did not seem incongruous to them to use my ordination as a means of raising money for men who had already become burdens ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... Lower Shangani River in December, 1893, fighting gallantly to the last against an overwhelming force of Matabili. The monument stands on an eminence surrounded by the broken wall of some ancient stronghold. It has been wisely placed far enough from the great ruin not to form an incongruous element in the view of the latter, and it was an imaginative thought to commemorate, at a spot in this new land which bears witness to a race of prehistoric conquerors, the most striking incident in the ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... of prettiness about the girl, and aside from her incongruous garments she was not unattractive—when her face was revealed. Mr. Hammond's interest increased. He approached the spot where the girl had been left ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... were in entire conformity to the primeval rusticity of his surroundings. Judge, then, of the reasonable surprise which the observer might feel at discovering that the object in the boy's hand was nothing less incongruous than a pair of binocular glasses, an exquisitely finished example of the highest art of the optician. One of the eye-piece lenses had been lost or broken, for, as the youth raised the glasses to sweep again the distant sea-line, he covered the left-hand cylinder with ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... who had wandered there that morning; for, as he raised his eyes with an agreeable deliberation, they alighted on the figure of a girl, in whom he was struck to recognise the third of the incongruous fugitives. She had run there, seemingly, blindfold; the wall had checked her career; and being entirely wearied, she had sunk upon the ground beside the garden railings, soiling her dress among the summer dust. Each saw the other in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had fallen steadily throughout the still night, so that when a cold, upper wind cleared the sky gloriously in the morning the incongruous Indiana town shone in a white harmony—roof, ledge, and earth as evenly covered as by moonlight. There was no thaw; only where the line of factories followed the big bend of the frozen river, their ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... for several seconds he could not move or take advantage of the circumstance, the hand with its cruel weapon was withdrawn around the curtain and a woman began to laugh, softly at first, and then with a little hysterical sob thrusting its way through that incongruous note of mirth. ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... her gloved hand, she bore no resemblance to a pupil; in her pretty gown of dotted muslin with bows of blue ribbon on the skirt and corsage, and a cluster of roses in her belt, she was as inconsistent and incongruous to the others as a fashion-plate would have been in the dry and dog-eared pages before them. Yet she carried it off with a demure mingling of the naivete of youth and the aplomb of a woman, and as she swept down the narrow aisle, ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... incongruous are the moralising discourses of which Bussy's ghost is made the spokesman. It does not seem to have occurred to Chapman that vindications of divine justice, suitable on the lips of the elder Hamlet, ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... composed of the most dissimilar things, the most unforeseen, the most contradictory, the most incongruous; it is merciless, without sequence or connection, full of inexplicable, illogical, and contradictory catastrophes, such as can only be classed as miscellaneous facts. This is why the artist, having chosen his subject, can only select such characteristic details as are of use ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... taken as sufficient to establish the inexpediency of publishing The Certain Hour. For that "people will not buy a volume of short stories" is notorious to all publishers. To offset the axiom there are no doubt incongruous phenomena—ranging from the continued popularity of the Bible to the present general esteem of Mr. Kipling, and embracing the rather unaccountable vogue of "O. Henry";—but, none the less, the superstition ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... one morning from my Golden Bed to find a stranger quietly smoking a cigarette on my paepae. Against the jungle background he was a strangely incongruous figure; a Frenchman, small, thin, meticulously neat in garments of faded blue denim and shining high boots. His blue eyes twinkled above a carefully trimmed beard, and as he rose to meet me, I observed that the fingers on the cigarette were ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... this picture could not be placed to advantage in the grand gallery at the Tuileries. But he soon changed his mind when he reflected that most of the figures were represented in naturalibus, which would appear incongruous in an apartment used for grand diplomatic receptions, and in which the ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... narrative, which shall comprehend this period of social disorganization, must be ascribed entirely to the skill and luminous disposition of the historian. It is in this sublime Gothic architecture of his work, in which the boundless range, the infinite variety, the, at first sight, incongruous gorgeousness of the separate parts, nevertheless are all subordinate to one main and predominant idea, that Gibbon is unrivalled. We cannot but admire the manner in which he masses his materials, and arranges his facts in successive groups, not according to ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... order to convey anything like an adequate idea of their meaning. Even eye-witnesses found it almost impossible, to believe the truth of what they heard and saw; and some have described the whole circle of life and manners there to have been more like to the wild, incongruous whirl of a pantomime than to the facts of ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... century. Admitting, however, such to be the fact, I do not see how it will materially help those who favor the opinion; for the building is far from being, as commonly happens in great churches, a medley of incongruous parts; but it is upon one fixed plan; and, as it was begun, so it was ended.—The exterior of the extremity of the south transept is a still more complete example of the early pointed style than the west front: this style, which was the most chaste, and, if I may ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... weather, when we found him shifting pack on a steep trail, that I observed certain of his belongings done up in green canvas bags, the veritable "green bag" of English novels. It seemed so incongruous a reminder in this untenanted West that I dropped down beside the trail overlooking the vast dim valley, to hear about the green canvas. He had gotten it, he said, in London years before, and that was the first I had known of his ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... proud of—one is that Doctor Gunther has approved of my fishes, and the other is that I can paddle an Ogowe canoe. Pace, style, steering and all, "All same for one" as if I were an Ogowe African. A strange, incongruous pair of things: but I often wonder what are the things other people are really most proud of; it would be a quaint and ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... harmonize. If I felt it borne in upon me that I must be a profane fellow to prove my manliness, I would choose another diet than spoon victuals to nourish my formidable zest for naughtiness. Rare beef or wild game would be less incongruous. There are times when a man may be excused for using objectionable language. Stress of righteous indignation, seasons of personal conflict with hansom cabmen, large-headed street car conductors, ubiquitous, never-dying ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... is true, yet in no way incongruous with what we can imagine Pippa to have thought, if not, certainly, in such lovely diction to have been able to express. Thenceforward, until the episodical lines on the Martagon lily, the child and her creator are one. There comes the ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... he would like to stay over at the Fairbanks home until the next day, and was made duly welcome. He amazed and amused Ralph by showing him his "detective outfit," as he called it. It was an incongruous mass, stored away in a flat leather case that he secreted in a great pocket made inside his coat—a wig, false whiskers, a pair of goggles, and a lot of other "secret service" paraphernalia, suggested to Zeph by reading some cheap and ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... Europe had been visiting his friend Dr. Hamilton of Ballybrosna. His curiosity now was roused by Dan's evident eagerness to acquire materials for the drawing of diagrams, the pursuit striking him as so strangely incongruous with the aspect of the brown-faced stalwart ragged youth, that he stepped inside when the place was empty to make inquiries on the subject. The post-master's information was to the effect that "the O'Beirnes above at the forge had ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... the later dynasties was that which has been called the Book of the Dead by modern writers. We must not conceive {77} of it as a bound up whole, like our Bible; but rather as an incongruous accumulation of charms and formulae, parts of which were taken at discretion by various scribes according to local or individual tastes. No single papyrus contains even the greater part of it, and the choice made among the heterogeneous material is infinitely ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... therefore, found him in a favorite suit of baggy, wrinkled linen and with a week's stubble of beard upon his chin. He was so plainly an outdoor man that the air of erudition lent him by the pair of gold-rimmed spectacles owlishly perched upon his sunburned nose was strangely incongruous. ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... nature, perhaps itself borrowed from a higher-class code of taste, sometimes expresses itself in unexpected ways under the guidance of this canon of pecuniary beauty, and leads to results that may seem incongruous to an unreflecting beholder. The well-accepted practice of planting trees in the treeless areas of this country, for instance, has been carried over as an item of honorific expenditure into the heavily wooded areas; so that it is by no means unusual for a village ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... So incongruous did the peculiar sounds appear, that all stared in amazement. Then when they beheld Frontier Samson standing near the door, their faces broadened into knowing grins, followed by ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... wine-cellars,—was a horn of plenty, the pristine glory of which had also departed. This invitation often excited the stranger's laughter; but the Rochellais themselves never laughed at it, for to them it represented a familiar object, which, however incongruous or ridiculous, is always dear to the human heart. At night a green lantern was attached to the horn. At the left of the building was a walled court pierced by a gate which gave entrance to the stables. For not only the jolly mariners found ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... some points of view, the story of Spes and Thorstein Dromund (of which more anon) must be considered; yet whoever added it to the tale did so with some skill considering its incongruous and superfluous nature, for he takes care that Grettir shall not be forgotten amidst all the plots and success of the lovers; and, whether it be accidental or not, there is to our minds something touching in the contrast between the rude life and tragic end ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... distinct, equally ghastly—a man's shape—a young man's. It was in the dress of the last century, or rather in a likeness of such dress (for both the male shape and the female, though defined, were evidently unsubstantial, impalpable—simulacra —phantasms); and there was something incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful, in the contrast between the elaborate finery, the courtly precision of that old-fashioned garb; with its ruffles and lace and buckles, and the corpse-like aspect and ghost-like ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... commission empowered him to impress idlers and vagabonds as material for his colony,—an ominous provision of which he largely availed himself. His company was strangely incongruous. The best and the meanest of France were crowded together in his two ships. Here were thieves and ruffians dragged on board by force; and here were many volunteers of condition and character, with Baron de Poutrincourt and the indefatigable Champlain. Here, too, were Catholic ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... underlying principles of the institution of the leisure class as already formulated. The basis of that institution, as well as of the anthropomorphic cults associated with it in the cultural development, is the habit of invidious comparison; and this habit is incongruous with the exercise of the aptitudes now in question. The substantial canons of the leisure-class scheme of life are a conspicuous waste of time and substance and a withdrawal from the industrial process; while the particular ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... the center for a ball, are among the novelties. Sandwiches in the shape of a wheel and a saddle might easily be cut. Bicycle lanterns, which resemble glowworms, should furnish decoration. If possible, a bicycle tea should be given out of doors, where outing costumes would not be incongruous. ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... desires to pass along the platform. For a distance of about one hundred feet to the railroad signal tower are piled barrels of flour, boxes of provisions, and supplies of all descriptions. Under the shed of the station an incongruous collection of clothing is being arranged to allow of convenient distribution. While they waited for the signal to commence operations, a guard entered into conversation with a woman in the line. She was evidently telling a story of distress, for the guard looked about ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... scientific probability, and so directly at variance with natural laws, that it loses in interest in a direct ratio with the violence it does to our feelings. Nor is the mode of conveyance imagined by Voltaire less incongruous than that of Swift. When Micromegas, ah inhabitant of Sirius, whose adventures were evidently suggested by those of Gulliver, accompanied by an inhabitant of Saturn, leaves the latter planet, they are, in the first place, made to leap upon the Ring of Saturn, which they find tolerably flat, ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... a wry wistfulness, was only comic in its incongruous coat of grease. But I was under no temptation to smile. I had to confine my mind pretty closely to the general principle, and rather studiously to ignore the particular instance, before I could bring myself to answer the almost infantile inquiry in ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... there; baseball, which is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century. One cannot realize it, the place and the fact are so incongruous; it is like interrupting a funeral with a circus. Why, there's no legitimate point of contact, no possible kinship between base-ball" and the Sandwich Islands; base-ball is all fact, the Islands are all sentiment. In base-ball you've got to do everything just ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... enough by this incongruous suggestion, but naturally I accepted: you couldn't refuse such an invitation from a man who, you suspected, intended to have such a matter out with you on the open sea. We started immediately, and ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... continue to die and should remain as white clothed ghosts in heaven forever they would be an incongruous environment and abiding scandal to the immortality of the Son of God Himself. A living, immortal man shining in a glorified human body surrounded by bodiless souls forever! What a contradiction that would be, what a scandal, indeed. ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... the money flies with a speed for which, one fancies, Daudet could have found little justification this side of Timon of Athens. In the description of the Caisse Territoriale given by Passajon this note is relieved by a delicate irony, but seems still somewhat incongruous. One turns more willingly to the description of Jansoulet's sitting down to play ecarte with Mora, to the story of how he gorged himself with the duke's putative mushrooms, and to similar episodes and touches. In the matter of effective and ironically turned situations few novels can compare ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet |
