"Perversely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exists of itself is the cause of what exists of another, it follows from this furthermore that he sought to have dominion over others; wherein he also perversely wished ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... moved in, and we haven't furnished all the rooms yet," she said of two empty ones which Bartley perversely ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... and understanding and the like are gifts of the Holy Ghost, according as they are quickened by charity, which "dealeth not perversely" (1 Cor. 13:4). Consequently wisdom and understanding and the like cannot be used to evil purpose, in so far as they are gifts of the Holy Ghost. But, lest they depart from the perfection of charity, they assist one another. This is what Gregory means ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... Judge on May 25th was perversely stupid and malevolent. He began by declaring that he was "absolutely impartial," though his view of the facts had to be corrected again and again by Sir Edward Clarke: he went on to regret that ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... termed the golden age of Texcoco. Its art, poets, and historians became renowned throughout Anahuac, and its collected literature was the centre of historical lore. Indeed, this it was that was so perversely destroyed by the first Archbishop of Mexico, Zumarraga, after the Conquest—an irremediable loss. The prince or emperor was a philosopher and a poet, and he has left some remarkable examples of his philosophical prayers to the "Unknown ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... will," she said perversely, "I know the man's a burglar, or a murderer, or something ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... footsteps. Yet in how entirely contrary a direction has the whole course of events tended! In spite of the honourable intention which involved a frequent absence from his place of commerce, those who journeyed thither with the set purpose of possessing one of his justly-famed opium pipes so perversely regarded the matter that, after two or three fruitless visits, they deliberately turned their footsteps towards the workshop of the inelegant Ming-yo, whose pipes are confessedly greatly inferior to those produced by the person who is now speaking. Nevertheless, the rapacious ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... and held that its appearance was an omen of safety, as everybody who has read the 'Lays of Ancient Rome' must surely remember. The modern name, St. Elmo's fire, is itself a curiously twisted and perversely Christianised reminiscence of the great twin brethren; for St. Elmo is merely a corruption of Helena, made masculine and canonised by the grateful sailors. It was as Helen's brothers that they best knew the Dioscuri in the good old days of the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... relations between life above and life below stairs. Accordingly, Punch sees no reason why Angelina may have a lover in the parlor, whilst Bridget's engagement forbids her to entertain a fond "follower" in the kitchen; and he perversely refuses to see how it can be right for Miss Julia to listen to the soft nonsense of Captain Augustus Fitzroy in the drawing-room, and entirely wrong for Molly, the nursery-maid, to blush at the blunt admiration of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... when he had spread out his manuscript, and seemed half inclined to open fire, as usual, with a little preliminary sarcasm; but his eyes met mine; he saw the anxiety I was suffering; and his natural kindness, perversely as he might strive to hide it, got the better of him. He looked down on his paper; growled out briefly, "No need for a preface; my little bit of writing explains itself; let's go on and have don e with it," and so began to read ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... another year in complete ignorance of the structure of woman's sexual organs and of the intercourse between man and woman. In the meantime I cultivated my fancies of intercourse with animals, often still perversely imagining myself taking the part of the female; and the notion of such relationships gradually became so familiar as to seem possible and desirable. This is especially significant in ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... ideal, into which he would fly out of himself and his finitude, can be nothing but the fulfilment of his own initial idiosyncrasies. Whatever other wills and other glories may exist in heaven lie not within his universe of aspiration. Even his most perversely metaphysical envy can begrudge to others only what he instinctively ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... their ponies forward at top speed but as they drew near Bud's favorite mount, which he had brought with him from Diamond X, the steed perversely kicked up his heels, wheeled about and was away ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... Cook. These two words when united soon became corrupted, and the magnificent sheet of water was designated 'the Cucumber Lake,' while its splendid cataract, known in ancient days by the Indians as the 'Pan-ook,' or 'the River's Leap,' is perversely called by way of variation 'the Cowcumber Falls;' can anything be conceived more vulgar or more vexatious, unless it be their awkward attempt at pronunciation, which converts Epaigwit into 'a pig's wit,' and Pan-ook ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... I do,' said Philip. 'I never supposed you would take my advice "au pied de la lettre",' he had almost added, 'perversely.' ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pledges—was, in her pleasant person, the force that had set them successively in motion. She had MADE his marriage, quite as truly as his papal ancestor had made his family—though he could scarce see what she had made it for unless because she too was perversely romantic. He had neither bribed nor persuaded her, had given her nothing—scarce even till now articulate thanks; so that her profit-to think of it vulgarly—must have all had to ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... and placed as on and in a sounding board. All jollity and banter had ceased. Evidently, he thought, the Little Lady had a way with her and was accepted as a player of parts. And from this he was perversely prepared for disappointment. ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... that the major part of sour-tempered, perversely wrong-headed, and unhappily disposed people, of hot-headed fanatics, victims to one idea, of once noble souls who sink themselves in sensuality, and so go down to death, and of all the sad cases one ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... have got a good Bible to read, And parents so anxious and kind, Shall prove myself vile and ungrateful indeed If I still am perversely inclined. ...
— The Good Resolution • Anonymous
... doom!" This with a little obstinacy and some agility in shifting his ground, makes the fortune of an opponent. While one party is worried in disentangling a meaning, and the other is winding and unwinding about him with another, a word of the kind we have mentioned, carelessly or perversely slipped into an argument, may prolong it for a century or two—as it has happened! Vaugelas, who passed his whole life in the study of words, would not allow that the sense was to determine the meaning of words; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... slight dealings on which he could bestow no thought. This is common with men who have risen from poverty; if they have not become hard and suspicious, they are generally obtuse to the minor indications by which shrewd men of education know the impostor, and they are perversely indulgent to little meannesses in their fellows which they are incapable of committing themselves. In Lincoln this was aggravated by an immense good-nature—as he confessed, he could hardly say "no";—it was an obstinate good-nature, which found a naughty pleasure in refusing ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... was free to leave the detention camp I perversely felt a desire to remain. Now that I was free, the sight of all the other passengers kicking each other's heels and being herded by Tommies gave me a feeling of infinite pleasure. I tried to express this by forcing ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... above all, if we sat down with some propensities toward evil, and walk away with much stronger toward good, in the midst of a world which we never had entered and of which we never had dreamed before—shall we perversely put on again the old man of criticism, and dissemble that we have been conducted by a most beneficent and most potent genius? Nothing proves to me so manifestly in what a pestiferous condition are its lazarettos, as when I observe how little hath been objected against those ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... little fellow that was trying to make himself admired; but when by degrees the Leasowes forced themselves into notice, they took care to defeat the curiosity which they could not suppress by conducting their visitants perversely to inconvenient points of view, and introducing them at the wrong end of a walk to detect a deception; injuries of which Shenstone would heavily complain. Where there is emulation there will be vanity; and where there is ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... their lands, to tend their flocks, to reap their harvests?" In the month of May, 1853, Sir William wrote that "the discovery of gold had turned him topsy-turvy altogether," and he rejoiced that no gold had been discovered in his island. Then the Legislature perversely offered a reward of five thousand pounds to any man who would discover a gold field in Tasmania, but, as a high-toned historian observes, "for many years they were so fortunate as ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... course felt it a point of honour not to make use professionally of my knowledge of them. I had no knowledge—nobody had any. It was humiliating, but I could bear it—they only annoyed me now. At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my confusion—perversely, I confess—by the idea that Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... I agreed. "But even without that—if, as you seem to think, the very desolation of that girlish figure had a sort of perversely seductive charm, making its way through his compassion to his senses (and everything is possible)—then such words could not have ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... vicar did think was that he had never seen a smile transform a face so agreeably. And having begun to smile, Rachel perversely continued it. She walked to the gate with her visitor, talking with irrelevant animation, inviting him to come the following day to help in the "carrying," asking questions about the village and its people, and graciously ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... annoyance, that I had never been less inclined to slumber than I was just then. The fact was that in spite of myself those ghostly tinklings were still worrying me. Were they, or were they not, imaginary? If they were— well, there was an end of it. But if they were not imaginary; if, as I now perversely began to think, they were actual sounds, then it followed, of necessity, that there must be a craft of some sort not very ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... her eternal tongue, For ever most divinely in the wrong. Naked in nothing should a woman be; But veil her very wit with modesty: Let man discover, let not her display, But yield her charms of mind with sweet delay. For pleasure form'd, perversely some believe, To make themselves important, men must grieve. Lesbia the fair, to fire her jealous lord, Pretends, the fop she laughs at, is ador'd. In vain she's proud of secret innocence; The fact she fains ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... "Oh," she observed, perversely choosing to misinterpret the purport of this tactful message, "then I need not wait for him any longer, I suppose. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... not help expressing to Doctor Dummerar her surprise and sorrow, that all which she had done and attempted, to establish peace and unanimity betwixt the contending factions, had been perversely fated to turn out the very reverse of what she had ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... used to delighting in Lydia's understanding of his perversely obscure figures of speech that he turned about, surprised to hear no appreciative comment. She was ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... people. He would dismiss the thought, tell himself he was going down town on some little errand; he even devised what that errand should be—to procure theater tickets. But his brain did not seem quite capable of concentrating itself solely on desirable orchestra chairs; it constantly and perversely reverted to that ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... indeed, a case of necessity should arise, the latter would have a right to act according to his discretion; but it must always be at his peril, if he cannot prove, at least, that it appeared to be absolutely necessary; still more so, if he manifestly breaks through, wilfully or perversely, the very orders which himself received from his superior officer, and is consequently bound to ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... cannot act in opposition to nature, nor offend the ethical sense of the people among whom he dwells, nor despise the leading of destiny without discovering through experience that before the Nemesis of these substantial elements his subjective power can dash itself only to be shattered. If he perversely and persistently rejects all our admonitions, we leave him, as a last resort, to destiny, whose iron rule must educate him, and reveal to him the God ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... which is virtually a pestle and mortar on a large scale. Why we adhere to this form of pulverising machine is that, though somewhat wasteful of power, it is easily understood, its wearing parts are cheaply and expeditiously replaced, and it is so strong that even the most perversely stupid workman cannot easily break it or put it ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... won't care twopence whether I go or stay away, and as they've chosen you to write the report you'll have to write it or it'll be left undone," retorted Ingred perversely. ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... in style, conduct and diction, to those of "the old Arabian Nights," whilst I think "Chavis and Cazotte's Continuation" utterly unworthy of republication, whether in part or "in its entirety." Indeed, I confess the latter version seems to me so curiously and perversely and unutterably bad that I cannot conceive how Cazotte can have perpetrated it and can only regard it as a bad joke on his part. As Caussin de Perceval remarks, it is evident that Shawish (whether from ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... arrangement that she should come to fetch her; it had been out of the question—a stroke in such bad taste as would have put Rose in the wrong. The girl had never dreamed of it, but somehow, suddenly, perversely, she was glad of it now; she even hoped that her grandmother and her aunt were looking ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... hackneyed theme of Schubert's played heavily, that seemed to arouse the composite emotion of anger and hatred, yet of sustained attraction and wild regret she had felt before, but never so poignantly as now. And she lingered, perversely resolved to steep herself in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... professionally of my knowledge of them. I HAD no knowledge—nobody had any. It was humiliating, but I could bear it—they only annoyed me now. At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my confusion—perversely, I allow—by the idea that Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the general intention ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... rounded wholeness of character; and his fellow lawyers called him "perversely honest." Nothing could induce him to take the wrong side of a case, or to continue on that side after learning that it was unjust or hopeless. After giving considerable time to a case in which he had received from a lady a retainer ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... King Harald Graenske (a cousin of King Tryggveson's, and kind of king in some district, by sufferance of the late Hakon's),—this luckless Graenske and the then Russian Sovereign as well, name not worth mentioning, were zealous suitors of Queen Dowager Sigrid, and were perversely slow to accept the negative, which in her heart was inexorable for both, though the expression of it could not be quite so emphatic. By ill-luck for them they came once,—from the far West, Graenske; from the far East, the Russian;—and arrived both ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... great to be explained by the clothes he wore. The very light in his eyes, whenever she contrived to catch him gazing at her, convinced her of what was behind his new restraint; and then, immediately, perversely, she set herself to break it down by those very methods best calculated to strengthen it. More than once that evening Dexter Allison withdrew from the general conversation to watch the play of his daughter's ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... philosophical discovery, which could advance with the march of science. The Holy Father enumerates also in this Encyclical the principal grounds of faith, and exhorts all bishops to oppose with all their zeal and learning those who, alleging progress as their motive, perversely endeavor to destroy religion by subjecting it to every man's individual judgment. He condemns indifference as regards religion, eloquently defends ecclesiastical celibacy, and, mindful that the Church is the teacher of the great as well as of the humble, he enforces the obligations of sovereigns ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... thrive. I think it can be demonstrated, that the true line of intellectual descent in prose lies through Bede (who wrote in Latin, the 'universal language'), and not through the Blickling Homilies, or, AElfric, or the Saxon Chronicle. And I am sure that Freeman is perversely wrong when he laments as a 'great mistake' that the first Christian missionaries from Rome did not teach their converts to pray and give praise in the vernacular. The vernacular being what it was, these men did better ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... are laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and of feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners' fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making of ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... when one evening I went upstairs into my own room to take a peep over Charley's shoulder and see how she was getting on with her copy-book. Writing was a trying business to Charley, who seemed to have no natural power over a pen, but in whose hand every pen appeared to become perversely animated, and to go wrong and crooked, and to stop, and splash, and sidle into corners like a saddle-donkey. It was very odd to see what old letters Charley's young hand had made, they so wrinkled, and shrivelled, and tottering, it so plump ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... elders; and be very kind To rivals; never be perversely blind And angry with your husband, even though he Should prove less faithful than a man might be; Be as courteous to servants as you may, Not puffed with pride in this your happy day: Thus does a maiden grow into a wife; But self-willed women are ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... the Republic thus perversely occupying its energies. It is melancholy to see the great soldier becoming gradually more ardent for battle with Barneveld and Uytenbogaert than with Spinola and Bucquoy, against whom he had won so many imperishable laurels. It is still sadder to see the man who had been selected by Henry IV. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... was Celeste. She was awake; the tender little dream was gone; and bravely she accepted the fact. Never her agile fingers stumbled, and she played remarkably well, from Beethoven, Chopin, Grieg, Rubinstein, MacDowell. And Nora, perversely enough, sang ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... deliberate choosing of a route, with definite centres and points of departure, is unnecessary. But those who believe that the best way to see any country is to walk through it will find that, as a general rule, the book and its chapters are divided, sometimes naturally, sometimes perhaps a little perversely, into the compass of a day's walking. My own plan has been simple enough: it has been to set out in the morning and walk till it was dark, and then take the train back to where I came from. Others will be able to plan far more comprehensive journeys ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... in dancing, which should be wilful yet airily composed, thoughtless yet inducing. Circumspection! —in nothing else hath Mary shown it where she should. 'Tis like this Queen perversely to make a psalm of dancing, and then pirouette with sacred duty. But you have spoken the truth, and I am well content. So get you to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... elegance of Mrs. Woffington, and the latter overborne by the majestic stature and deportment of Barry. The first appearance of Miss Smith last night in lady Macbeth, could not fail to conjure up, perversely to our mental view, the comparative superiority of Mrs. Siddons's person; the effect was strong, but it was momentary; a delicate yet powerful and distinct varied voice, a pure, correct, and exemplary ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... merits without discovering the defects which lessened the favorable appreciation of him by men and women. He dressed neatly, but his morning coat was badly made, and his picturesque felt hat was too old. In short, there seemed to be no good quality about him which was not perversely associated with a drawback of some kind. He was one of those harmless and luckless men, possessed of excellent qualities, who fail nevertheless to achieve popularity in ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... round on the lower step to Kenneth, when he had asked that grave, sweet question of the Lord's, and said perversely,— ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... to my Bodleian reading, and the article on the "Poema del Cid" that I was writing. He confesses, however, that he did his best to draw me—examining the English girl as a new specimen for his psychological collection. As for me, I can only perversely remember a passing phrase of his to the effect that there was too much magenta in the dress of Englishwomen, and too much pepper in the English cuisine. From English cooking—which showed ill in the Oxford of those days—he suffered, indeed, a good deal. Nor, in spite of his ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... depth to which the iron of poverty, debt, judicial and governmental oppression had entered their souls. They had thought little and vaguely, but they had felt much and keenly, and it was evident the man who could voice their feelings, however partially, however perversely, and for his own ends, would be master ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... Perversely blended with that vision of the blooming peach is a glimpse of a pet deer in the kitchen of the same little house, with its head up and its antlers erect, as if he meditated offence. My boy might never have seen him so; he may have ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... allow my sister to be made a widow for life?—a widow, I say, for she is already married to you in spirit, and nothing will ever induce her to untie the knot. You don't know Bella—ah! you needn't smile,—you don't indeed. She is the most perversely obstinate girl I ever met with. Last night, when I mentioned to her that you had been speaking of yourself as a mere wreck, she said in a low, easy-going, meek tone, 'Jeff, I mean to cling to that wreck as long as it will float, and devote my life to repairing ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... matters remained in much the same uncomfortable state. Jack reported obediently to have his finger dressed and refused—with more vigor than courtesy—Warren's offer to release him from picking for that day. Rosemary had a hot argument with Sarah, who perversely upheld Warren's cause, and then quarreled with her brother, who would not admit that Jack ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... the King's Garden Party to the Aylesbury Education Committee and the Oxford Union: to Scotland for Rectorial Campaigns: dinners at the Inner Temple and the Philosophical Society: Detection Club dinners and Mock Trials, at one of which he was Defendant on the charge of "perversely preferring the past to ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... makes short work of Borrow's gypsy learning on its philological side. 'No gypsy,' he says, 'ever uses chal or engro as a separate word, or talks of the dukkering dook or of penning a dukkerin.' 'Borrow's genders are perversely incorrect'; and 'Romany'—a word which can never get out of our language, let philologists say what they will—should have been 'Romani.' '"Haarstraeubend" is the fitting epithet,' says Mr. Sampson, 'which an Oriental scholar, Professor Richard Pischel ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... visit to Chesterton was discussed at Folking. The old man had very strongly taken up his son's side, and was of opinion that the Boltons were not only uncharitable, but perversely ill-conditioned in the view which they took. To his thinking, Crinkett, Adamson, and the woman were greedy, fraudulent scoundrels, who had brought forward this charge solely with the view of extorting money. He declared that ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... it? But he really is not ill, only getting feeble and obstinate. The man is in his dotage. I saw him yesterday, and he refused, most perversely, to sanction the marriage until some facts shall come to his knowledge, of which he is not quite certain at present. I told him the young people would not wait; and he replied, that if I give you my daughter now, I shall do so at my peril; ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... said. "It is the love charm which has worked perversely. Elsa, you are under a spell, poor woman; you do not know the truth. I gave you the philtre in your drinking water, and Foy, the traitor Foy, has reaped its fruits. Dear girl, shake yourself free from this delusion, it is I whom you really love, not ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... a modern, his country, at least, had retained the charm of its ancient beauty. The road was as Norman a highway as one could wish to see. It had the most capricious of natures, turning and perversely twisting among the farms and uplands. The land was ribboned with growing grain, and the June grass was being cut. The farms stood close upon the roadway, as if longing for its companionship; and then, having done ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... unhappy if I did not. And I am—most perversely hoping for happiness. I have told myself that what I saw over John Graham's ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... longing for this very hour to come, now perversely wished to sleep. A belated but beatific drowsiness seized him. He was only half-conscious of the noise that attended the lifting ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... admonition—like much of the excellent admonitions in this world—affected me perversely: it made me more restless than ever. I felt that I could not rest properly until I found out who wanted me to rest, and why. It opened indeed a limitless ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... she must call in Rouen on the way back to London. He had an instinctive mistrust of her desire for the place. But, perversely, she wanted to go there. It was as if she wanted to try its effect ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... the little threads which underlie it; the obtuse or careless reader may easily overlook them, passing on to the end without suspecting the treasures which he has missed; and the foreigner, who does not look for such qualities among a people so perversely practical as Americans, will be apt entirely to ignore their possible existence. Again, if the writers are first-class men, their birth is the most purely American characteristic they possess. Their cast of thought and culture denotes that they belong ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... and important, is fussing his way to the shrubbery, when instinct or real sentiment prompts him to look up at my window; he gives a whimper and a wag, and goes on. I try to persuade myself that he didn't see me, and that he does this, other mornings, when I am not thus perversely bolstered up in rebellion, and peering through blinds at wrong hours. Isn't there something pathetic in the very idea that a dog may have a behind-your-back attachment of that sort?—that every morning he looks up at an ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... lad was but following general instructions. He loved the boy, and so, perversely, worked upon his feelings. "Oh, the other side? Ex-cuse me, chief, for intrudin' on this here resavation. ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... Dale were now to marry Mr Crosbie, anything so perversely cruel as the fate of John Eames would never yet have been told in romance. That was his own idea on the matter as he sat smoking his cigar. I have said that he was proud of his constancy, and yet, in some sort, he was also ashamed of it. He acknowledged the fact of his love, ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... features and slight form of Captain Wybrow, notwithstanding that this young gentleman, as Sir Christopher's nephew and destined heir, had the strongest hereditary claim on the gardener's respect, and was undeniably 'clean-limbed'. But alas! human longings are perversely obstinate; and to the man whose mouth is watering for a peach, it is of no use to offer the largest vegetable marrow. Mr. Gilfil was not sensitive to Mr. Bates's opinion, whereas he was sensitive to the opinion of another person, who by no means ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... said my father (and I do not know whether he spoke perversely or in earnest), "a matter ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... perceptions of it, and not that we were let down at once into a universe composed of external perceptions of matter, that were there beforehand and from all eternity—and in which we, the creatures of a day, are merely allowed to participate by the gracious Power to whom they really appertain? We, perversely philosophising, told ourselves the former of these alternatives; but our better nature, the convictions that we have received from God himself, assure us that the latter of them is the truth. The latter is by far the simpler, as well as by far the sublimer doctrine. But it is not on the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... but Ingram and Lavender proceeded to have a game, the former being content to accept something like thirty in a hundred. It was speedily very clear that Lavender's heart was not in the contest. He kept forgetting which ball he had been playing, missing easy shots, playing a perversely wrong game, and so forth. And yet his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... inexpressibly weary. The reaction after my drenching had set in; I felt a languor which amounted to pain, and an aching and weakness in every limb. I tried to regret the event, but could not; tried to wish it were not such a long walk to Elberthal, and found myself perversely regretting that it ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... but I should like it! What harm could it do? I'm not soluble in water—rain won't melt me away! I think upon the whole I rather prefer being caught in the storm," said Cap, perversely. ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... psychological instant that the wave of self-condemnation suddenly burst upon and submerged the young clergyman. It passed again, leaving him staring fixedly at the pile of books he had taken down from the shelves, and gasping a little, as if for breath. Then the humorous side of the thing, perversely enough, appealed to him, and he grinned feebly to himself at the joke of his having imagined that he could write learnedly about the Chaldeans, or anything else. But, no, it shouldn't remain a joke! His long mobile face grew serious under the new resolve. ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... way to New York, for the Albany kinship, but the limit to our smaller patiences of any northward land-journey. And yet not the young fatigue, I repeat, but the state of easy wonder, is what most comes back: the stops too repeated, but perversely engaging; the heat and the glare too great, but the river, by the window, making reaches and glimpses, so that the great swing of picture and force of light and colour were themselves a constant adventure; the uncles, above ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... financial and otherwise, in building his house. When I look back to the conditions that existed on this bit of Lake-front three years ago—the frog-hollows, tiling, the wasting bluffs, excavation, thirty-five cords of boulders unloaded perversely—the mere enumeration chafes like grit upon surfaces still sore.... I have sadly neglected the study of house-building in this book. It would not do now. The fact is, I don't know how to build a house, but one learns much that one didn't know about men and ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... on the top of Peor, Izz Huett would fain have spoken perversely at such a moment, but the fascination exercised over her rougher nature by Tess's character compelled ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... little book The Open Road. I have a notion that even FitzGerald's most learned executor was but dimly aware of its existence. For my part, at this time of the day, I prefer it to his Omar Khayyam—perversely, no doubt. In the year 1885 or thereabouts Omar, known only to a few, was a wonder and a treasure to last one's lifetime; but I confess that since a club took him up and feasted his memory with field-marshals and other irrelevant persons in the chair, and ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... were passing, away, Francis II stood somewhat low among the mediocrities on whom fell the strokes of destiny. He was a poor replica of Leopold II. Where the father was supple and adroit, the son was perversely obstinate or weakly pliable. In place of foresight and tenacity in the pursuit of essentials, Francis was remarkable for a more than Hapsburg narrowness of view, and he lacked the toughness which had not seldom repaired the blunders of that House. Those counsellors swayed him ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... sounds conceited,' said Mark, 'but the real truth is, that when I hear such kind things said about a work which—which gave me so very little trouble to produce, it makes me a little uncomfortable sometimes, because (you know how perversely things happen sometimes), because I can't help a sort of fear that my next book, to which I really am giving serious labour, may ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... that raised the ire of Byron, who regarded them as an irreverent assault upon his favorite poet, Pope. In the controversy occasioned by the Rev. W. L. Bowles's strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope, Byron perversely asks, "Where is the poetry of which one-half is good? Is it the Aeneid? Is it Milton's? Is it Dryden's? Is it any one's except Pope's and Goldsmith's, of which ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... one aims only at guarding the quality of all one does or says—or rather the very word "aims" is a wrong one; there is no longer any aim or effort, except the effort to feel which way the gentle guiding hand would have us to go; the only sorrow that is possible is when we rather perversely follow our own ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in a silence coincident with dusk. The room slowly lost its sombre color and the sense of the confining walls; it became grey and apparently limitless; as monotonous, Lee Randon thought, as life. He was disturbed by a new feeling: that perversely, trivially, he had spoiled what should have been a priceless afternoon. It would never come back; what a fool he had been to waste in aimless talk any of the few hours which ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... enjoy good conversation, I understand," her husband retorted perversely; and she broke into an appreciative laugh. "Oh, Newland, how ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... Age cannot wither him, nor custom stale his infinite variety. Wonderful, all the same, what perversely bad hits he will persist in making, at times. Does things now and again you'd think a school-girl with a bat would be ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... man, now her husband for always, his hand about hers in sign of perpetual possession and protection? What beneath all was he who had taken with her, thus publicly, the mighty oath of fidelity, "until death us do part"? Each had said it; each believed it; each desired it wholly. Perversely, here in the moment of her deepest feeling, intruded the consciousness of broken contracts, the waste of shattered purposes. Ah, but theirs was different! This absolute oath of fidelity one to the other, each with his own will and ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... stories that have been told about her would fill a book! She was exceedingly plain, rather like a toad, yet, perversely, she was more vain of her looks than of her acting. In the theater she gave herself great airs and graces, and outside it hobnobbed ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... and voluminous array of his writings. Although his earlier plays are in every way superior to his later, there is evidence even in the best of them of the author's infirmity of hand. From the first he shows himself idly or perversely or impotently prone to loosen his hold on character and story alike before his plot can be duly carried out or his conceptions adequately developed. His "pleasant Comedie of 'The Gentle Craft,'" first printed three years before the death of Queen Elizabeth, is one of his ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... be the Russian Admiral's intention, for, on the 4th of February, the fleet, having coaled, weighed and steamed out to sea, leaving only two battleships—the Sevastopol and Peresviet—in the harbour, where they had perversely stuck on the mud and refused to be got afloat again, for the moment at least. The Russians, twenty-six ships strong, inclusive of eleven destroyers, having cleared the roadstead, steamed slowly to the eastward, and ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... still had to himself the small inner room, with its darkening outlook down the rain-streaked prospect of Fifth Avenue. It was all dull and dismal enough, yet a moment earlier his boredom had been perversely tinged by a sense of resentment at the thought that, as things were going, he might in time have to surrender even the despised privilege of boring himself within those particular four walls. It was not that he cared much for the club, but that the remote contingency ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... broken—tall, thin, with a cadaverous face, out of which shone two huge, lusterless eyes. He walked with an angular crawl that reminded one of the emaciated flies one sees at the beginning of winter dragging themselves perversely along as if struggling across ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... a kind to secure the admirable objects indicated above by King James's correspondent. In fact, for hundreds of years, and with the occasional interruptions of humanity or curiosity, the Boeothics were hunted to extinction and perversely disappeared, without, it must be supposed, having attained to the "civill and regular kinde of life" which was to date ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... when the well-disposed in those counties are unable by their influence and example to reclaim the wicked from their fury, and are compelled to associate in their own defence; when the proffered lenity has been perversely misinterpreted into an apprehension that the citizens will march with reluctance; when the opportunity of examining the serious consequences of a treasonable opposition has been employed in propagating principles of anarchy, endeavoring ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... fully convinced that Paul had not incurred any legal penalty, he continued to keep him in confinement, basely expecting to obtain a bribe for his liberation. When disappointed in this hope, he still perversely refused to set him at liberty. Thus, "after two years," when "Porcius Festus came into Felix' room," the ex-Procurator, "willing to shew the Jews a pleasure, left Paul ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... me fully half-way; and if, from their fitting standpoint, they must still 'censure me in their wisdom,' they have previously 'awakened their senses that they may the better judge.' Nor do I apprehend any more charges of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely harsh. Having hitherto done my utmost in the art to which my life is a devotion, I cannot engage to increase the effort; but I conceive that there may be helpful light, as well as reassuring warmth, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... hardly more than a sapling, yet it required upward of half an hour of the most arduous and persistent labour, and several large water blisters appeared on the palms of my hands before it tottered, bent, cracked and finally fell quivering on the earth. In descending it perversely took the wrong direction, narrowly escaping striking me in its fall; indeed, one of its lower limbs ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... horn gun-flints, and bass-wood cucumber seeds, by supplying them with pure unadulterated orthodox Calvinism, fresh from the Saybrook Platform. Nor did he confine his usefulness to beating the "drum ecclesiastic;" during the long winters in the country, he "kept school," as it is somewhat perversely called; whereas, in nine cases out of ten, it is the school that ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... episode of their progress took the form of a veritable unmasking which, perversely enough, only fixed the mask tighter upon Julien Tenney. By way of loosening up his wrist for the open season, Peter Quick Banta had taken advantage of an amiable day to sketch out a composite floral ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Roman governor as to the perfectly innocent meaning of His claim to be the King of Israel, and His silence before the Sanhedrin. That silence is only explicable because they rightly understood the meaning of the claim which they contemptuously and perversely rejected. Jesus Christ knew that His death was the forfeit, as I have said, and yet He locked His lips and said not ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... humiliation! Our fine schemes stood blocked for the want of so vulgar a thing as money; such fate waits often on fine schemes, but surely never more perversely. Yet, I know not why, I was glad that she had none. I was a guinea the better of her; the amount was not large, but it served to keep me still her Providence, and that, I fear, is what man, in his vanity, loves to be in woman's eyes; he struts and plumes himself in the pride ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... an affair of the moment. She had been the dupe, she had thought, of an absurd passion on her own part; but now—how was it now? She did not bring herself to think that she should ever be Lady Lufton. She had still, in some perversely obstinate manner, made up her mind against that result. But yet, nevertheless, it did in some unaccountable manner satisfy her to feel that Lord Lufton had himself come down to Framley and himself told this story. ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... perversely through his head, mixing themselves up with all things and rippling the air about him into their own large waves, bearing now and then upon them, like the insistent iteration of an oratorio chorus, fantastic fragments—"If ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... me of the cow that the man wanted to train so as to consider eating a superfluity—she was coming on admirably, but unfortunately for the full success of the experiment, she perversely died, the very day her owner had ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... with you. I know not any body in this world, out of our own family, in whose company I should be happier; but my papa won't part with me, I think; though I have secured my mamma in my interest; and I know Nancy would be glad of my absence, because the dear, perversely envious, thinks me more valued than she is; and yet, foolish girl, she don't consider, that if her envy be well grounded, I should return with more than double advantages to what I now have, improved ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... Patty, perversely, and then, pulling out half a dozen more sprays, she threw them indiscriminately around, to Cameron, and several of the other ushers who were grouped about. Farnsworth made a slight effort to catch one, but he didn't really try, and the flower fell to the floor ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... knows, hot boxes, besides being perversely incurable, are the sworn enemies of high speed. At forty miles to the hour the journal was smoking again. At forty-five it burst into flames. Once more it was patiently cooled by bucketings of water drawn from the engine tank; after which ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... century which is said to be Christian. I have seen piety and purity only in the images of Fra Angelico, although they are very pretty. The rest, those figures of Virgins and angels, are voluptuous, caressing, and at times perversely ingenuous. What is there religious in those young Magian kings, handsome as women; in that Saint Sebastian, brilliant with youth, who seems merely ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Turgot with unfailing staunchness; a shower of odes, diatribes, dialogues, allegories, dissertations, came from the Patriarch of Ferney to confound and scatter the enemies of the new reforms. But the people were unmoved. If Turgot published an explanation of the high price of grain, they perversely took explanation for gratulation, and thought the Controller preferred to have bread dear. If he put down seditious risings with a strong hand, they insisted that he was in nefarious league with the corn-merchants and the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... are endowed with natural weapons of defense—with horns, with tusks, with hoofs, and talons; but man has to depend on his superior sagacity. In all his encounters with these, his proper enemies, he resorts to stratagem; and when he perversely turns his hostility against his fellow man, he at first continues the ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... dealt with him so strangely? Why had she used him with such cruel caprice? Was ever a man treated so perversely by a woman who loved him? Miss Ludington could only shake her head as he poured out his complaints to her. Ida's contradictory behaviour was as much a puzzle to her as to him, and she deplored it scarcely less. But she insisted that he should not ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... of his doctrine:—"When we say that pleasure is a chief good, we are not speaking of the pleasures of the debauched man, or those which lie in sensual enjoyment, as some think who are ignorant, and who do not entertain our opinions, or else interpret them perversely; but we mean the freedom of the body from pain, and the soul from confusion" ("Epicurus to Menaeceus," in Diogenes Laertius, "Lives," bk. x. ch. xxvii.). The most obvious tendency of this doctrine is to extreme selfishness, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... had been killed by his rivals; and Starkad, after quelling certain rebels, set up Siward as the heir to his father's sovereignty. With him he sojourned a long time; but when he heard—for the rumour spread—that Ingild, the son of Frode (who had been treacherously slain), was perversely minded, and instead of punishing his father's murderers, bestowed upon them kindness and friendship, he was vexed with stinging wrath at so dreadful a crime. And, resenting that a youth of such great parts should have renounced his descent from his glorious father, he hung on his shoulders a mighty ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Corsanico is a never-ending affair. Deep in mire, it meanders perversely about the plain; meanders more than ever, but of necessity, once the foot of the hills is reached. I soon gave it up in favour of the steam-tram to Cammaiore which deposits you at a station whose name I forget, whence you may ascend to Corsanico through a village called, I think, Momio. That route, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... accordingly on the Corso and wandered away to the grass-grown quarters delightfully free even from the possibility of a fellow-countryman. And so having set myself an example I have been keeping Carnival by strolling perversely along the silent circumference of Rome. I have doubtless lost a great deal. The Princess Margaret has occupied a balcony opposite the open space which leads into Via Condotti and, I believe, like the discreet princess she is, has dealt in ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... really so," Chia Lien rejoined, "it will after all do! But there's only one thing; all I was up to last night was simply to have some fun with you, but you obstinately and perversely wouldn't." ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... to entertain hopes for Rachel in that direction, went down to Redman's Farm, and, after his bleak and bitter fashion, rated the young lady for having perversely neglected her opportunities and repulsed that most desirable parti. In this he was intensely in earnest, for the connection would have done wonders for Captain ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... but all his own schemes and projects were unaccountably marred and defeated. If he bought a horse, it was sure to prove spavined or wind-broken. His cows either refused to give down their milk, or, giving it, perversely kicked it over. A fine sow which he had bargained for repaid his partiality by devouring, like Saturn, her own children. By degrees a dark thought forced its way into his mind. Comparing his repeated mischances with the ante-nuptial warnings of his neighbors, he at last ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... nothing can now prevent him from feeling and acting in a particular way, or at least that no effort of his own can hinder it. In the words of the sect which in our own day has most perseveringly inculcated and most perversely misunderstood this great doctrine, his character is formed for him, and not by him; therefore his wishing that it had been formed differently is of no use; he has no power to alter it. But this is a grand error. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... omitted, which I dislike exceedingly; that of deforming the beautiful edifices dedicated to God's service with damask hangings and gold lace on the capitals of all the pillars upon days of gala, so very perversely, that the effect of proportion is lost to the eye, while the church conveys no idea to the mind but of a tattered theatre; and when the frippery decorations fade, nothing can exclude the recollection of an old clothes shop. St. Celso was however left clear from these disgraceful ornaments: ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... so runs the act De Heretico comburendo, "of a certain new sect, damnably thinking of the faith of the sacraments of the church, and of the authority of the same, against the law of God and of the church, usurping the office of preaching, do perversely and maliciously, in divers places within the realm, preach and teach divers new doctrines, and wicked erroneous opinions, contrary to the faith and determination of Holy Church. And of such sect and wicked ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... his hold, and she crossed the room to the door, out of which she went with a set face, and into the highway. Here she began to saunter up and down, perversely pulling her hair into a worse disorder than he had caused, and unfastening several buttons of her gown. It was a fine Sunday morning, dry, clear and frosty, and the bells of Alfredston Church could be heard on the breeze from the north. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... love Edward Benden that way," said Tabitha, perversely misinterpreting her father-in-law's words. "I'll mix him a potion 'll help to cleanse his disorder, you'll see. Bitters be good for sick folks; and he's grievous sick. I met Mall a-coming; she saith he snapped ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... They can in effigy, put every limb out of joint; and you being no anatomist, may only see that you look ill, and know not where you went wrong. All you sitters expect to be flattered, and very little flattery do you bestow. Perversely, you won't even see your own likenesses. Take, for instance, the following scene, which I had from a miniature painter:—A man upwards of forty years of age, had been sitting to him—one of as little pretensions as you can well imagine; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... 't is my will Thou wear this corollary. Nature ever Finding discordant fortune, like all seed Out of its proper climate, thrives but ill. And were the world below content to mark And work on the foundation nature lays, It would not lack supply of excellence. But ye perversely to religion strain Him, who was born to gird on him the sword, And of the fluent phrasemen make your king; Therefore your steps ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... wages than another, he who thought himself injured, as he who is paid less will always think, would be so far from exerting his abilities to attain an equality with his associate, that he would probably never be prevailed on to lay his hand upon the tackling, but would sit sullen, or work perversely, though the ship were labouring in a storm, or sinking ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... for our separation! Pleasant were the weeks we have recently passed together in this ancient and embowered mansion! I had strongly felt the silence and vacancy of the depriving day on which you vanished. How prone are our hearts perversely to quarrel with the friendly coercion of employment at the very instant in which it is clearing the torpid and injurious mists of unavailing melancholy!' Then follows a sprightly attack before which Johnson may have quailed indeed. 'Is the Fe-fa-fum of literature that snuffs afar ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... aware of who Mr. Hardyman really is?" retorted her Ladyship. "Or do you judge of his position by the vocation in life which he has perversely chosen to adopt? I can tell you, if you do, that Alfred Hardyman is the younger son of one of the oldest barons in the English Peerage, and that his mother is related by marriage to the Royal ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... colour at the question, and then hated that—hated to pass for anything so idiotic as woundable. Woundable by Chad's lady, in respect to whom he had come out with such a fund of indifference—was he already at that point? Perversely, none the less, his pause gave a strange air of truth to her supposition; and what was he in fact but disconcerted at having struck her just in the way he had most dreamed of not doing? "I'm not in trouble yet," he at last smiled. "I'm not in ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... rolling the word under his tongue with an accent that was a clue to the psychology of the popular drama; and Granice, perversely, said to himself: "If I could only have struck that note I should have been running in six theatres ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... that if they began dinner like old friends, they seemed gradually to cool into acquaintances; and at the end of the evening—such an evening!—Woodville felt as if they had barely been introduced, or had met, accidentally, in a railway train. Yet he courted these tete-a-tete as one perversely courts a certain kind of suffering. At least, Sir James talked on the only interesting subject, and Woodville was anxious to know everything about his rivals; for, though he believed in Sylvia's affection, he was subject to acute, almost ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... so unwell that I wrote to Frank Beard, from whom I shall doubtless hear to-morrow. I mention it, only in case you should come in his way, for I know how perversely such things fall out. I felt it a little more exertion to read afterwards, and I passed a sleepless night after that again; but otherwise I am in good force and spirits to-day. I may ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... house," as it was variously termed, must not be confounded with the press-room at Newgate, where persons indicted for felony, and perversely refusing to plead, were pressed beneath weights till they complied with that necessary legal formality. From that historic cell the rendezvous press-room differed widely, both in nature and in use. Here the pressed ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... are, of course, incomparably the commonest of all illuminated manuscripts. They vary from loveliness to contemptibility. Perversely, they figure in catalogues, and are lettered on their backs, as Missals; our ancestors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries forgot that a Missal must contain the service of the Mass, and that ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... neighbors thought it would be only a little shower the people of Johnstown were yet more foolish. The railroad officials had repeatedly told them that the dam threatened destruction. They still perversely lulled themselves into a false security. The blow came, when it did, like a flash. It was as if the heavens had fallen in liquid fury upon the earth. It was as if ocean itself had been precipitated into an abyss. The ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... large an assembly; who would, he hoped, shortly adjourn into several apartments, in order to discourse over the robbery, and drink a health to all honest men. But Mrs Tow-wouse, whose misfortune it was commonly to see things a little perversely, began to rail at those who brought the fellow into her house; telling her husband, "They were very likely to thrive who kept a house of entertainment for ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... odds the most elaborately worked out of the series, difficult to play, difficult to grasp in its rather disconnected procession of moods. To me it has a clear ring of exasperation, as if Chopin had lost interest, but perversely determined to finish his idea. As played by Pachmann, we get it in all its peevish, sardonic humors, especially if the audience, or the weather, or the piano seat does not suit the fat little blackbird from Odessa. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... for all things, and I must feel it unworthy of thy womanhood to so perversely jeer and flout at a good man's love, when 't is honestly ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... which made his question seem to himself silly as well as brutal. "You've a great many friends that I don't know. You've a whole past from which I was perversely excluded." ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... the steps to seize upon Amidon as he alighted. That gentleman and Madame le Claire, however, perversely got off at the other end of the car. As they walked down the platform, Florian met his first test, in the salutation of a young woman in a tailor-made gown, who nodded and smiled to him from a smart trap at a short distance from the station, where she seemed to ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... and software from the U.S. still tends to embody the assumption that ASCII is the universal character set and that characters have 7 bits; this is a a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating 'national' character sets produce an evolutionary pressure to use a *smaller* subset common to all ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... individuality to the persons introduced, is still known and remembered in Scotland; whereas in England, civilisation has been so long complete, that our ideas of our ancestors are only to be gleaned from musty records and chronicles, the authors of which seem perversely to have conspired to suppress in their narratives all interesting details, in order to find room for flowers of monkish eloquence, or trite reflections upon morals. To match an English and a Scottish author in the rival task of embodying and ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... the thoughts of a common letter into sane prose.... Ten thousand times I have confessed to you, talking of my talents, my utter inability to remember in any comprehensive way what I have read. I can vehemently applaud, or perversely stickle, at parts; but I cannot grasp at a whole. This infirmity (which is nothing to brag of) may be seen in my two little compositions, the tale and my play, in both which no reader, however partial, can find ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... which deserved it, and therefore it would not be exaggerated. Thus, one might say of Mr. Edmund Burke, He is a very wonderful man. JOHNSON. 'No, Sir, you would not be safe if another man had a mind perversely to contradict. He might answer, "Where is all the wonder? Burke is, to be sure, a man of uncommon abilities, with a great quantity of matter in his mind, and a great fluency of language in his mouth. But we are ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... dear, how can you act thus perversely," said Mrs. Sherman, as she forcibly led her to the door, which had no sooner closed on the petulant child, than she apologized, with much feeling, and seemed greatly mortified at this contre temps of her little girl. ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... not going to be depressed," she cried perversely. "I began a new system by going to that dance, and I mean to stick to it. Clym can sing merrily; why should ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... sound. Oh, miserable chaos of the human world, that such pent up love should be wasted—wasted; that they, too, young and strong and beautiful, alone together, so near, with such glorious happiness within their reach, should yet be so perversely far asunder! ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... is mysteriously garnered and thence dispensed bounteously to all comers? It was useless, as he fretted and chafed at these untoward omissions, to urge in his own behalf that he did not know of the existence of the mill, and that the miller, being an ungenial and choleric man, might have perversely lent himself to resisting his demand for the custody of the young runaway. No, he told himself emphatically, and with good logic, too, the miller's acrimony rose from the fact of a stranger's discovery of the still and the danger of his introduction into its charmed circle. ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... westward, a spirit that gave him no rest until, at the end of many months, he finally dropped anchor in the riotous little harbor of Lame Gulch. This turbulent haven seemed to promise every facility for the shipwreck on which he had so perversely set his heart, and he was content to wait there for whatever storm or collision should bring matters to a crisis. Perhaps the mere steady under-tow would suck him down to destruction. The under-tow ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... the common waters fell As costly wine into his well. He had so sped his wise affairs That he caught Nature in his snares. Early or late, the falling rain Arrived in time to swell his grain; Stream could not so perversely wind But corn of Guy's was there to grind: The siroc found it on its way, To speed his sails, to dry his hay; And the world's sun seemed to rise To drudge all day for Guy the wise. In his rich nurseries, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... is that of virgin-widowhood. If men will perversely marry their infant daughters to small boys, it is sure that a considerable proportion of the boys will die before their marriage is consummated. Thus, annually, thousands of these poor girls, who are in ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... to, and in view of his antecedents, the range of Carlyle's critical appreciation is wonderfully wide. Often perversely unfair to the majority of his English contemporaries, the scales seem to fall from his eyes in dealing with the great figures of other nations. The charity expressed in the saying that we should judge men, not by the number of their faults, but ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... "No one would have suspected him to be a dishonest man, if he had not perversely chosen to assume a style which (as he himself confesses) the world always ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... better for you and for mankind if you had been one of the dullest of Dutch theologians, or the most credulous monk in a Portuguese convent. The riches of the mind, like those of Fortune, may be employed so perversely as to become a nuisance and pest instead of an ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... like this you must have perceived of me in conversation. Ten thousand times I have confessed to you, talking of my talents, my utter inability to remember in any comprehensive way what I read. I can vehemently applaud, or perversely stickle, at parts; but I cannot grasp at a whole. This infirmity (which is nothing to brag of) may be seen in my two little compositions, the tale and my play, in both which no reader, however partial, can find any story. I wrote ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... like the Rendalens, she will devote her life to obliterating in it, or transforming into useful activities, the destructive vigor of the paternal character. Thomas, when he is born, chooses a golden mean between these two extremes, and perversely makes his appearance as a red-haired, gray-eyed infant, in which both a Kurt and a Rendalen might have made comforting observations. He is accordingly permitted to live, and to become the hero of one of the most remarkable novels which has ever ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... man acquainted with these circumstances was staggered, in attempting to associate this eastern wreck of Crusoe with this western island,—but a worse obstacle than that, because a moral one, is this, that, by thus perversely transferring the scene from the Pacific to the Atlantic, De Foe has transferred it from a quiet and sequestered to a populous and troubled sea,—the Fleet Street or Cheapside of the navigating world, the great throughfare ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... matters which required the assent of the people. Thus there was the show and semblance of a democracy, but we shall find that the intention and origin of the constitution were far from democratic. "If the people should opine perversely, the elders and the princes shall dissent." Such was an addition to the Rhetra of Lycurgus. The popular assembly ratified laws, but it could propose none—it could not even alter or amend the decrees that were laid before it. It appears that only the princes, the magistrates, and foreign ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
