"Queerness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Indoors, in still and muggy weather, when one is jammed in a throng for an hour or two, a toga becomes an instrument of torture. Yet togas we must wear at all public functions, and though we rage at the infliction and wonder at the queerness of the fate which has, by mere force of traditional fashion, condemned us to such unconscionable sufferings, yet no one can devise any means of breaking with our hereditary social conventions in attire. Therefore we continue ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... perfectly right," answered MacIan, with his melancholy voice, "in saying that all this has occurred to me. All duellists should behave like gentlemen to each other. But we, by the queerness of our position, are something much more than either duellists or gentlemen. We are, in the oddest and most exact sense of the ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... Nannie; they're twins too. I've told you 'most everything about Fee already. He's awfully cross sometimes, when he isn't well, and, as Nora says, he really orders us about more than Phil does; but somehow we don't mind it, 'cause, with all his queerness, he's the life of the house, and he's got some ways that just make us love him dearly: mamma used to call him her "lovable crank." Nannie is devoted to Felix; they're always together. They're trying to teach themselves the violin, and she reads the same books and studies ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... his head in a state of chronic dishevelment, his harmless little round light-blue eyes, pinkish from late night reading, generally betraying the absence of his vagrant thoughts, and I know not what of goodness, as well as queerness, in his homely features. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... it all, and certainly it was queer. But it wasn't the queerness that after another minute was uppermost. He was in a wondrous silken web, and it ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... solemn black, almost green with age. He inquired my business in a wheezy whisper. I asked if Sir William Hatteras were at home. Informing me that he would find out, he left me to ruminate on the queerness of my position. In five minutes or so he returned, and signed ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... Kildare himself made its grave, and carried the coffin in his arms across the fields to the little pasture burying-lot where lay all the Kildares of Storm. It was a queer funeral; none the less pitiful for its queerness. First Basil with the coffin, the two great hounds gamboling and baying around him in their delight at going for a walk with the family; then Kate, alone and quite tearless; then a dozen wailing, hysterical negroes. Benoix ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... him! She simply discredited the whole story; and, told in Werter Road, like that, the story did sound fantastic; it did come very near to passing belief. She had always noticed a certain queerness in her husband. His sudden gaieties about a tint in the sky or the gesture of a horse in the street, for example, were most uncanny. And he had peculiar absences of mind that she could never account for. She was ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... and I will stick together as long as we live." Ethel looked at him sharply, but he did not notice. "Because," he said, "with all his faults, his queerness and his grouches, Bill has done more than any man living to—well, to keep something alive in me—in my work, I mean—that I want later on—as soon as I've made money enough." She stared ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... verb "to steal," because it always made her brother uncomfortable. For Stevie was delicately honest. Certain simple principles had been instilled into him so anxiously (on account of his "queerness") that the mere names of certain transgressions filled him with horror. He had been always easily impressed by speeches. He was impressed and startled now, and his intelligence ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... in the new season, Headley Richards decided that he had no further use for Desmond. The new play had run its course at the Independent Theatre, a course so brief that Richards had been disappointed. He put down the failure mainly to the queerness of the dresses and the scenery she had designed for him. Desmond's new art was too new; people weren't ready yet for that sort of thing. At the same time he discovered that he was really very much attached to his own wife Ginny, and when Ginny nobly offered ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... her. I thought, What if it was one of my own girls? And I made up my mind that she shouldn't know from anything I said or did that she wasn't just as much at home and just as much in place on my ship as she would be in my house. I suppose what made me feel easier about it, and took the queerness off some, was my having my own girls along last voyage. To be sure, it ain't quite the same thing," said the ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... attention was rewarded; a faint, far-off rustling came to him; somehow it gave him the impression of hesitation, non-assurance, timidity; he was speculating upon the queerness of this impression when there came a faint, momentary glow from the hall—mysterious, phosphorescent, unreal; and then it vanished. Both young men were huddled upon the sofa, which was placed facing the open door. A huge ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... the country people round Oulton were calculated to earn for him a reputation for queerness. "Curiosity is the leading feature of my character" {333c} he confessed, and the East Anglian looks upon curiosity in others with marked suspicion. It was impossible for Borrow to walk far without ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... at her, frowning, as though trying to understand or else to explain this queerness of his father's. Next minute he found himself clasped firmly in her arms. He was very thin and light—much thinner than the Mactavish babies and ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... thought these attacks the result of some physical weakness but finally became accustomed to them and attributed them to his "queerness." ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... the longest ride she had ever taken, and that of itself would have made it unforgettable. Then, too, she was going visiting, and she had never been visiting before. Also, she was leaving Mrs. Hobbs and, for a time at least, that lady could not remind her of her queerness and badness. More than all, she was going on a journey, a real journey, like a grown-up or a person in a story, and her family—David and the dolls—were journeying with her. What the journey might mean to her, or to what sort of place she was going—these ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... not until they lay down and waited for sleep that the boys felt the oddness and queerness of this first night in the open. Bustling round, making the fire, cooking, rigging up their camp, eating supper, fishing—all those things had kept at bay the silence and loneliness which now seemed to settle down upon them like a pall. They ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... caught his breath in a nervous shudder. "It's queer. Everything's queer when one's just come back. One's so changed that he could court his own wife without being recognized. You, too, were out there I should judge by the way you limp. I wonder whether you've got over the queerness yet. I ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... perfect right to say that because it was true. Mary Winchester was just about the queerest girl in college. Everybody thought so. But I shall say no more at present, as her queerness is the subject of the rest of this story. If I told you immediately just how she was queer and all the rest of it, there wouldn't be ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz |
