"Vagary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... repeats, a month later. The sentimental raptures of a young man about a handsome girl have in themselves too much of the commonplace to justify mention. What is remarkable, and suggests an explanation of the deplorable vagary of his later years, is that his attachment to his wife, even in the days of courtship, elicited no such extravagance of admiration as that into which he freely lapses in his earlier fancies, and yet more ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... prize. She made light of the cause of Rose's displeasure, considering her extremely foolish and straitlaced, "for all young men of any spirit had their little vices, and came out well enough when the wild oats were sowed." So she indulged Charlie in his new vagary, as she had in all his others, and treated him like an ill-used being, which was neither an inspiring nor helpful course on her part. Poor soul! She saw her mistake by and by, and when too late ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... symbols, not geometrical ones. I brought this book forward to the Royal Commission on the British Museum as an instance of the absurdity of attempting a classed catalogue from the titles of books. The title of this book sends it either to theology or geometry: when, in fact, it is a logical vagary. Some of the houses which Jack built were destroyed by the fortune of war in 1745, at Edinburgh: who will say the rebels did no good whatever? I suspect that Jack copied the ideas of J.B. Morinus, "Quod Deus sit," Paris, 1636,[322] 4to, containing ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... you, my august and gentle empress, you will not sacrifice an innocent woman to a momentary jealous vagary!" ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... This absurdity was a mechanical attempt to retrieve his buffoon's reputation, for he was really very much in love, and very serious in his desire to be married in quite the ordinary way. With a rather lack-lustre eye he noticed the amusement of his friends at his last vagary; but when Winifred Ames entered the ballroom a nervous vivacity shook him, as it has shaken ploughmen under similar conditions, and for just a moment he felt ill at ease in the lonely lunacy of his flowered waistcoat ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... Another curious vagary of the war that obtains now is the sudden disappearance of the copper sou or what ranks with our penny. Why it is scarce no one seems to know. The generally accepted explanation is that the copper has flown to the trenches where millions of men are dealing in small sums. But ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... not entered the head of my capricious crony to pay me an unexpected and unannounced visit, had he not arrived precisely at the time at which he came, had he not encountered just the persons he met just where he did meet them, had not his prankishness hatched in him the vagary which led him to give quizzical replies to their questions; had I not, carried away by my elation at my prosperity and fine prospects, been a trifle too ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... the length of the room, hands clasped behind his back, his head bent in thought. When he came back to the fire he stood a little while before Morgan, looking at him with intent directness, like a physician sounding for a baffling vagary which ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... it no further, my dear, then it would indeed be a degrading of words. But there never was a vagary that uplifted the soul, or made the grand words flow from the gates of speech, that had not its counterpart in truth itself. Man can imagine nothing, even in the clouds of the air, that God has not done, or is not doing. Even as that cloudy giant yields, and ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... a vagary of Mr. Shrimplin's that ten reckless years of his life had been spent in the West, the far West, the West of cow-towns and bad men; that for this decade he had flourished on bucking broncos and in gilded bars, the admired ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... how cordially do men prize them, when a woman knows how to render them estimable." I fear ——- will be convinced of this but too late. I am glad to find, however, that the idea so often urged (in vain) by me, is not a mere vagary of my own brain, but is ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... occult and exotic, delights in the aroma of Khalid's cigarettes and Khalid's fancy. And that he might feel at ease, she begins by assuring him that they have met and communed many times ere now, that they have been friends under a preceding and long vanished embodiment. Which vagary Khalid seems to countenance by referring to the infinite power of Allah, in the compass of which nothing is impossible. And with these mystical circumlocutions of ceremony, they plunge into an intimacy which is bordered by the metaphysical on one side, and the physical on the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... "I've called to ask you, doctor, quite privately, a question that troubles me. I've a daughter, Grace, an only daughter, as you may have heard. Well, she's been out in the dew—on Midsummer Eve in particular she went out in thin slippers to watch some vagary of the Hintock maids—and she's got a cough, a distinct hemming and hacking, that makes me uneasy. Now, I have decided to send her away to some seaside place for ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... way, these two romances form a pair, like twins of opposite sexes. This is a literary vagary to which a writer may for once give way, especially as part of a work in which I am endeavoring to depict every form that can serve as ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... her, wrinkling his forehead for a moment, as if he had discovered some new vagary in femininity to puzzle him. Then he resumed his patrol with the slow stride of the master mariner. Hue and Cry raised dim bulk in the harbor jaws, showing no glimmer of light. It was barren, treeless, a lump of land which towns had thrust from them ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... he used to believe, though he would not assert it as a fact, that it made his intellect more keen and active. He only ceased to be a vegetarian in obedience to the remonstrance of his unphilosophical father, who would have easily tolerated what he regarded as a mere vagary had it not involved the danger of giving rise to a calumny. For about this time Tiberius banished from Rome all the followers of strange and foreign religions; and, as fasting was one of the rites practiced in some of them, Seneca's father thought that perhaps his son might ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... too, ma'am. That any man should have had such a vagary as this! But he's dying to come back. I'm sure of it. And when he does come and finds that he's let to come quiet, and that he's asked to say nothing as he don't like, and that you are all smiles to him and kindness,—and then with the baby coming and all,—my belief ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... poverty and aimless toil below. So Ruskin was a man halting between two opinions: the artist in him was forever troubled by the reformer seeking to make the crooked places of life straight and its rough places plain. He made as many mistakes as another man; in his pages you may light upon error or vagary; but you will find nothing to make you doubt his entire sincerity, his desire to speak truth, his passion for helping his ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... own particularly, were such unaccountable beings that a vagary more or less could not more hopelessly perplex his misunderstanding of them. With a "Tut! tut!" of impatience, he took the paper from her and tore it ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... very moment there are thousands who set their feet on this vagary, believing it to be ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... vagary, now became the fire's progress. Terrible in its absolute precision, in its measured advance down the wind, this implacable river of flame rolled down the city. Far ahead of the actual fire itself ran ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... Lucy Ann Hood, wife of Edward P. Hood, and daughter of Ezra Goddard. It is now given to the public without addition or alteration, and with but a slight abridgment. A strange and startling story it certainly is. Perhaps the reader will cast it aside at once as a worthless fiction,—the idle vagary of an excited brain. The compiler, of course, cannot vouch for its truth, but would respectfully invite the attention of the reader to the following testimonials presented by those who have known the narrator. The first is from Edward P. Hood, with whom ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... consist, fire being the true, and night the phenomenal. From such an unsubstantial and delusive basis it would not repay us, even if we had the means of accomplishing it, to give an exposition of his physical system. In many respects it degenerated into a wild vagary; as, for example, when he placed an overruling daemon in the centre of the phenomenal world. Nor need we be detained by his extravagant reproduction of the old doctrine of the generation of animals from miry clay, nor follow ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... that all women could not make all men do what they wanted them to do—against their wills. Perhaps they couldn't. Perhaps they could. There are more ways of coercing them than by brute force. But in any case what has this preposterous vagary ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... water's edge. Here you examined a long sea-weed, and trailed its length after you for a considerable distance. Here the effect of the wide sea struck you suddenly. Here you fronted the ocean, looking at a sail, distant in the sunny blue. Here you looked at some plant on the bank. Here some vagary of mind seems to have bewildered you; for your tracks go round and round, and interchange each other without visible reason. Here you picked up pebbles and skipped them upon the water. Here you wrote names and drew faces with a razor sea-shell ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the day when my socialism grew respectable,—still a vagary of youth, it was held, but romantically respectable. Romance, to the bourgeois mind, was respectable because it was not dangerous. As a "red-shirt," with bombs in all his pockets, I was dangerous. As a youth with nothing more menacing than a few philosophical ideas, Germanic in ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... contour thick, and her face, peering out of the thick veil, is altogether displeasing. One has no right to look for beauty in Donatello's statues of adults: character is what he gives. But neither does one expect this kind of vagary. There is great merit in the plaintive and wistful ugliness of the Zuccone: Here the ugliness is wanton, and therefore inexcusable. The Crivelli tomb and the Baptist in San Giovanni Fiorentino have been already described. There were other products of Donatello's visit to Rome, ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... father. "Under all your cloakings of vagary I observe that you have a foundation of common-sense, just as the giddiest weathercock is bedded on a stone. As for the reward, considered properly it seems to be one upon which ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... Life he turned aside to his last literary vagary—No Abolition of Slavery; or the Universal Empire of Love, 1791. This long-lost brochure has this year been rediscovered, but it will add little interest to his life, as its main tenets had long been known. A writer ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... performing ministerial duties so far, that for more than a year he dispensed entirely with a minister of finance, and divided the functions of that office among three of the clerks: no bad preparation for a national bankruptcy, we must allow—yet the protecting powers viewed this political vagary of his majesty with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... Etchezar, and Gracieuse, with other little girls of her age, had taken seats on the granite benches to look at them. The girls, all pretty; with elegant airs in their pale colored waists cut in accordance with the most recent vagary of the season. And they were laughing, these little girls, they were laughing! They were laughing because they had begun laughing, without knowing why. Nothing, a word of their old Basque tongue, without any appropriateness, by one of them, and there they were ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... But he is very civil to the family. As long as a Palliser represents the borough, Mr. Sprugeon thinks that it does not matter much on which side he may sit. I have had my little vagary, and I don't think that I ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... fall of the race. The thorn is known which pierced the matchless joyousness of Charles Lamb. His family, highly gifted with wit, tenderness of feeling, and mutual love, had a tinge of madness in the blood. At twenty years of age he was himself shut up six weeks in a madhouse, his imagination in a vagary. He was not again affected; but the poison had sunk deeper into the veins of his sister. The shadow of a deed done in the dark ever pursued her. Charles devoted his life to her whose life was an intermittent madness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... creature than Pete Murphy developed what Honey called "a case." It was scarcely a question of development; for with Pete it had been the "thin one" from the beginning. Following an inexplicable masculine vagary, he christened her Clara—and Clara she ultimately became. Among themselves, the men employed other names for her; with them she was not so popular as with Pete. To Ralph she was "the cat"; to Billy, "the ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore |
