"Inimitably" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... termed shrewd; ironical, and derisive. In fact, his face bore no bad resemblance to that of Mephistopheles, as represented in Retsch's powerful conception and delineation of it in his illustration of Goethe's "Faust," so inimitably translated by ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... meagre-looking growths, allowing as they do the gravelly soil to shew in bald patches of gray shingle through the straggling branches—these contemptible-looking shrubs, like paralysed and withered raspberries, it is which produce the most priceless, and the most inimitably flavoured wines.' The grapes are such mean and pitiful grapes as you would look at with contempt in Covent-Garden Market; and the very value of the soil contributes to its appearance of destitution—a rudely-carved stake ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... coat, dashed here and there with lighter touches, like a stormy sea moonlit. Upon his chest an escutcheon of purest white, and the dome of his head showered, as it were, with a sprinkling of snow. Perfectly compact, utterly lithe, inimitably graceful with his airy-fairy action; a gentleman every inch, you could not help but stare ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... young man of about five-and-twenty, with a considerable stock of impudence, and a very small share of ideas: he was a great favourite, especially with young ladies of from sixteen to twenty-six years of age, both inclusive. He could imitate the French-horn to admiration, sang comic songs most inimitably, and had the most insinuating way of saying impertinent nothings to his doting female admirers. He had acquired, somehow or other, the reputation of being a great wit, and, accordingly, whenever he opened his mouth, everybody who knew ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... unquestionably takes the lead of all the actors that have ever appeared in this country; and is in our judgment preferable, in many parts, to either Kemble or Cooke; far, very far, superior to Holman. His dagger-scene is inimitably fine; but by following Mr. Kemble's idea, he loses much in his return from the scene of murder. Before Mr. Kemble every actor followed the plan of Garrick with more or less success; and from them, viz. Sheridan, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... a while. The count made good progress over the uneven ground and thin grass, as though he were used to the work which he has described so inimitably in "Anna Karenin." (Another reminder of this book is the old nurse of Levin, who still lives on the place, has charge of the dogs because she is fond of animals, and carries her mania to the extent of ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... memory, Alexander L. Holley. One summer Mr. Holley accompanied a party of artists on an excursion to Mt. Katahdin, which, as you know, rises in almost solitary grandeur amid the forests and lakes of Maine. He wrote, in his inimitably happy style, an account of this excursion, which appeared some time after in Scribner's Monthly, elegantly illustrated with views of the scenery. Among other things, Mr. Holley related how he and Mr. Church painted the sketches for a grand picture of Mt. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... sense more subtly social had so been created, and that it quite differed from that often almost complete inward blankness, in respect to any circumjacent, any constituted, order to the exhibition of which our earlier air and our family scene had inimitably treated us. We came more or less to see that our young contemporaries of another world, the trained and admonished, the disciplined and governessed, or in a word the formed, relatively speaking, had been made aware of many things ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... too, demand beauty—always beauty. Am I right, or wrong? Is not any one who refuses to follow in the footsteps left by the ancients of Athens as certain of condemnation as the convicted thief or murderer? But I will not follow the lead of the Athenians, inimitably great though they are in their own way, because I would fain be more than the ancients of Ilissus: ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Cruikshank's sketch of the outraged husband, the finest and stoutest gentleman in Europe, being lowered by means of a crane into a pair of white kid pantaloons suspended between the posts of his bed, was inimitably droll, and clearly disloyal. But disloyalty was fashionable in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... very high up, but looking somewhat more eastward than before, and the plain went on inimitably towards some low vague hills; nor in that direction could any snow be seen in the sky. Then at last I came to the slopes which make a little bank under the mountains, and there, finding a highroad, and oppressed somewhat suddenly by the afternoon heat of those low places, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... push more at the gaming-table. He is exhibited, in the sixth print, venting curses on his folly for having lost his last stake.—This is, upon the whole, perhaps, the best print of the set. The horrid scene it describes, was never more inimitably drawn. The composition is artful, and natural. If the shape of the whole be not quite pleasing, the figures are so well grouped, and with so much ease and variety, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... avoid the peril of unduly republican ecstasies. In making this choice he was in all probability influenced by his reverence for Vergil. He, too, would sing of Rome's rise to greatness, would write a truly national epic on the great theme which Vergil so inimitably foreshadowed in the dying words of the Carthaginian queen, would link the most stirring years of Rome's history with the past, just as Vergil had linked the epic of Rome's founder to the greatness of the years that were to come. Ennius had been before him, but he might well aspire to ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... religion, a steady patriot, something of a statesman, very much indeed of a friend and a lover. And of all this there is ample evidence in his verse. Yet the alchemy of his poetry has passed through the potent alembics of verse and phrase all these rebellious things, and has distilled them into the inimitably fluent and velvet medium which seems to lull some readers to inattention by its very smoothness, and deceive others into a belief in its lack of matter by the very finish and brilliancy of its form. The show passages of the poem which are most generally known—the House of Pride, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... frequently bought things for what they were not; and probable that his own acquisitions went, in his own eyes, through that succession of stages which Charles Lamb (a sort of Cousin Pons in his way too) described inimitably. His pictures, like John Lamb's, were apt to begin as Raphaels, and end as Carlo Marattis. Balzac, too, like Pons, was even more addicted to bric-a-brac than to art proper; and after many vicissitudes, he and Madame Hanska seem to have succeeded in getting together a very considerable, if also ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... a dull frame of mind which implies a meek resignation, a sense of disappointment about life, borne with a mournful patience, a sense of one's sphere having somehow fallen short of one's deserts. This produces the grumpy paterfamilias who drowses over a paper or grumbles over a pipe; such a man is inimitably depicted by Mr. Wells in Marriage. That sort of ugly disillusionment, that publicity of disappointment, that frank disregard of all concerns except one's own, is one of the most hideous features of middle-class life, ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... as the donkey afforded; and to tell the truth this companionship was almost human at times. He learned to love the quaint little beast which shared his food and his trials. 'My lady-friend' he calls her. Modestine was her name; 'she was patient, elegant in form, the color of an ideal mouse and inimitably small.' She gave him trouble, and at times he felt hurt and was distant in manner towards her. Modestine carried the luggage. She may not have known that R. L. Stevenson wrote books, but she knew as by instinct that R. L. Stevenson had never driven a donkey. She wrought her will with him, ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... of this book is to help thoughtful readers of the gospels to discern more clearly the features of him whom those writings inimitably portray. It is avowedly a study rather than a story, and as a companion to the reading of the gospels it seeks to answer some of the questions which are raised by a sympathetic consideration of those ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... standing with his duncoloured camel-hair shawl folded about him, so that his arms were not free and his silvered head looked cut off from his fashionably trousered legs as if by an expanse of desert. He stood, inimitably stork-like, with an expression as if he saw before him a frog ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... flood-gates of a dam. If Meacham had been as good a farmer as a yarn-spinner there would have been no question as to his success, for he had some story to tell about every yearling on the place, and they were inimitably told. It was with great reluctance that Hamilton found himself obliged to head off the man's eloquence and make him stick to hard facts. An inquiry as to the number of eggs sold was somewhat of a puzzle, but the farmer's wife knew the amount of the "trade" she had received at the grocery ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... chamber, to discern an unbidden guest with his eyes bent on mine. The identical MONSIEUR DU MIROIR! Still there he sits and returns my gaze with as much of awe and curiosity as if he, too, had spent a solitary evening in fantastic musings and made me his theme. So inimitably does he counterfeit that I could almost doubt which of us is the visionary form, or whether each be not the other's mystery, and both twin brethren of one fate, in mutually reflected spheres. O friend, canst thou not hear and answer me? Break down the ...
— Monsieur du Miroir (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... (formerly of Berlin); and the only notice Haydn took of their scurrility and abuse was to publish lessons written in imitation of the several styles of his enemies, in which their peculiarities were so closely copied, and their extraneous passages (particularly those of Bach of Hamburgh) so inimitably burlesqued, that they all felt the poignancy of his musical wit, confessed its ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... villanous. Sir Robert Hazlewood is hardly a success. But as to Jock Jabos, a Southern Scot may say that he knows Jock Jabos in the flesh, so persistent is the type of that charioteer. It is partly Scott's good fortune, partly it is his evil luck, to be so inimitably and intimately true in his pictures of Scottish character. This wins the heart of his countrymen, indeed; but the stranger can never know how good Scott really is, any more than a Frenchman can appreciate Falstaff. Thus the alien may be vexed by what he ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... more on all the Bar, and silence reigns through the calico halls of the Humboldt. His bland smile and his dainty plats, his inimitably choice language and his pet tambourine, his woolly corkscrew and his really beautiful music, have, I fear, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... were a freak at once of genius and lavishness. They consisted of the bills of the Valley Bank, extravagantly lapped, and of untold denomination. But the ceiling—how shall I describe it? Did you, indeed, look up inimitably into a Hesperian sky, or was this firmament the creation of the painter's art? Nothing flecked the profound, unsearchable, impassive blue. There brooded the primeval heavens, undimmed by earthly vapors, unfathomed by earthly instruments; forever indescribable ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... upright, in the posture of a person about to start up, both hands upon the rim of the table, and his countenance raised as if, in a sudden terror and agony of death, he had darted a look to God. So inimitably expressive of life was his attitude, that though I knew him to be a frozen body as perished as if he had died with Adam or Noah, I was sensible of a breathless wonder in me that the affrighted start with which he seemed to be rising ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... through his argument, which was a tissue of the clearest, most powerful, and triumphant reasoning. He turned every position of his opponent, and took and dismantled every fortification. But his peroration was inimitably fine. As he went on to depict the horrors consequent upon a muzzled press, there was not a dry eye in the court-house. It was the most perfect triumph of eloquence over the passions of men ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... crowned head in Europe," he said. The great scientist was relating anecdote after anecdote of the people he had known—Charlemagne, Machiavelli, Newman, Dickens, the Shakspeares, father and son. There followed a racy story, inimitably told, of Miss Mitford in her less regenerate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... anything is observable except a study, full of merriment and sarcasm, of the sly, lazy and parasitical class of peasant rogue. This type was not of Ibsen's invention; he found it in those rustic tales, inimitably resumed by Asbjoernson and Moe, in which he shows us that his memory was steeped. Here, too, he found the Boeig, a monster of Norse superstition, vast and cold, slippery and invisible, capable of infinite contraction ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... souls, I suppose, must sometimes read it in the blackguard travesty of a translation. But there is no style so untranslatable; light as a whipped trifle, strong as silk; wordy like a village tale; pat like a general's despatch; with every fault, yet never tedious; with no merit, yet inimitably right. And, once more, to make an end of commendations, what novel is inspired with a more unstained ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the Nature of a Will, which imported, that all my Effects in Amsterdam were left to him, he being my Brother, and demanding it as his due. The Banker had the Deed perus'd by several Persons, it had a great appearance of being Authentick, and my Hand was so inimitably clap'd to it, that when compared with what was certainly known not to be Counterfeit, 'twas impossible to discover the Difference. Now the Banker desired this pretended Brother of mine to have Patience till he had an account from Paris whether or no I was dead, ...
— Memoirs of Major Alexander Ramkins (1718) • Daniel Defoe
... the scarce-believed in—now lay before them and close aboard; and Herrick thought that never in his dreams had he beheld anything more strange and delicate. The beach was excellently white, the continuous barrier of trees inimitably green; the land perhaps ten feet high, the trees thirty more. Every here and there, as the schooner coasted northward, the wood was intermitted; and he could see clear over the inconsiderable strip of land (as a man looks over a wall) to the lagoon within—and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson |
