Incongruous Quotes

Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. "I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary--he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived.

Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us. ~ Benjamin Carter Hett

What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

These human eyes seemed weak to me at first," said Eskar, still staring away from me, scratching her short black hair. "They detect fewer colors and have terrible resolution, but they see things dragon eyes cannot. They can see beyond surfaces. I don't understand how that's possible, but it happened incrementally as I traveled with Orma: I began to see the inside of him. His questioning and gentle nature. His conviction. I'd glimpse it in something as incongruous as his hand holding a teacup, or his eyes when he spoke of you. ~ Rachel Hartman

By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But the dead, thought Lily, encountering some obstacle in her design which made her pause and ponder, stepping back a foot or so, oh the dead! she murmured, one pitied them, one brushed them aside, one had even a little contempt for them. They are at our mercy. rs Ramsay has faded and gone, she thought. We can over-ride her wished, improve away her limited, old-fashioned ideas. She recedes further and further from us. Mockingly, she seemed to see her there at the end of the corridor of years saying, of all kind of incongruous things, "Marry, marry!" [...] Some winey smell mixed with it and intoxicated her, for she felt again her own headlong desire to throw herself off the cliff and be drowned looking for a pearl brooch on a beach. ~ Virginia Woolf

As the prospect gradually revealed itself and disclosed the scene over which the wind had wandered in the dark, like my memory over my life, I had a pleasure in discovering the unknown objects that had been around me in my sleep. At first they were faintly discernible in the mist, and above them the later stars still glimmered. That pale interval over, the picture began to enlarge and fill up so fast that at every new peep I could have found enough to look at for an hour. Imperceptibly my candles became the only incongruous part of the morning, the dark places in my room all melted away, and the day shone bright upon a cheerful landscape, prominent in which the old Abbey Church, with its massive tower, threw a softer train of shadow on the view than seemed compatible with its rugged character. ~ Charles Dickens

A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness ... Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden. ~ Thomas Mann

A beach is not only a sweep of sand, but shells of sea creatures, the sea glass, the seaweed, the incongruous objects washed up by the ocean. ~ Henry Grunwald

You're holding a challenge in a fencing club?"

"Yes. Is there something wrong with that?" He pulled on his black pants and the heavy silk green shirt I loved for him to wear because the material seemed to caress hisskin.

No, it's just kind of an incongruous place to hold something so serious as a challenge, isn't it?"

He finished with his shoes, grabbed another towel, and shook it out for me. I made sure Pal still had his back to me, hurrying out of the pool to clasp the towel around me.

"It is no less incongruous than holding a challenge in a bar."

I smiled. "Yes, but my challenge to you wasn't serious. I hope you'll notice that I'm not freaking out about this at all. I haven't even asked you how good you are with asword."

"I noticed." His mouth burned on mine for a moment, his fire being shared between us as his tongue twined around mine in a fiery - albeit brief - dance. "You are learning to have faith in me as is proper between a mateand her wyvern."

"No, I am learning to ask around. Pal told me earlier today that Dmitri had picked swords and that you were pleased because you were some sort of master swordsman a few centuries ago. You'd better not have forgotten anything."

Pal peeked at me out of the corner of his eye, his grin not too obvious. Drake pinched my bare behind as punishment for my saucy tone. "I never forget. Istvan will drive you when you are ready. The challenge is not f ~ Katie MacAlister

Through football, the incongruous became congruous. ~ Amy Lawrence

If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together - that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then were they dissociated? ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn't look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked up a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn't think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again. ~ Celeste Ng

The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self- education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

People want incongruous, impossible things. ~ Kristin Cashore

The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure. ~ Anais Nin

Comedy is the kindly contemplation of the incongruous. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Music creates order out of chaos; for rythem imposes unianimity upon the divergent, melody imposes contuniuty upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous. ~ Yehudi Menuhin

She once said, 'I'm really a little prudish, which people may think incongruous'. I take a prudish point of view on certain films, books, and trends. Then, I pull myself up short and ask myself how Gypsy Rose Lee could possibly be this way.I thought that quote was so telling, a key insight into the way she so carefully separated who she was from her meticulous creation. ~ Karen Abbott

So she hadn't completely lost her sense of propriety -- and for some reason he was glad of that. Yet even as he looked at her, there was that mischievous sparkle in her eyes again despite her protest.
A sparkle. An odd light as incongruous as her red hair.
No, he was imagining things. But where was the expected admonishment on propriety, the lecture on proper restraint? Just when he thought he understood the lady, knew how to knot up her corset strings and keep her at sixes and sevens, she'd turned the tide on him.
What had she said? You are not a man easily understood.
Perhaps she understood him better than he'd given her credit for. ~ Elizabeth Boyle

This Henry lived in Edinburgh, making him inaccessible and giving her something to do on the weekends - 'Oh, just flying up to Scotland, Henry's taking me fishing,' which is the kind of thing she imagined people doing in Scotland - she always thought of the Queen Mother, incongruous in mackintosh and waders, standing in the middle of a shallow brown river (somewhere on the outskirts of Brigadoon, no doubt) and casting a line for trout. ~ Kate Atkinson

Martians – they were all Martians. But they were ashamed of it, and so they tried to conceal it. They had determined, once and for all, that their monstrous disproportions were, in reality, true proportion, and their inconceivable ugliness was beauty. They were strangers on this planet, but they refused to admit it. They played at being perfectly at home. He caught a glimpse of his own reflection in a shop window. He was no different. Identical, exactly the same likeness as that of the monsters. He belonged to their species, but for some unknown reason he had been banished from their company. They had no confidence in him. All they wanted from him was obedience to their incongruous rules and their ridiculous laws. Ridiculous only to him, because he could never fathom their intricacy and their subtlety. ~ Roland Topor

It seems delightfully incongruous,' he wrote from Armentie'res, 'that there should be good shops and fine buildings and comfortable beds less than half an hour's walk from the trenches ~ Vera Brittain

The difference between the butch and the queen is rooted in the system of male supremacy. Gay male camp is based not simply on the incongruous juxtaposition of femininity and maleness, but also on the reordering of particular power relationships inherent in our society's version of masculinity and femininity. The most obvious cause for the minimum development of camp among lesbians was that masculinity was not and still isn't as incongruous as femininity in twentieth century American culture and therefore not as easily used as a basis for humor. Concomitantly although individual women might be able to sexually objectify a man, women has a group did not have the social power to objectify men in general. Therefore, such objectification could never be the basis for a genre of humor with wide appeal. But why didn't camp develop and thrive within the lesbian community itself? Because the structures of oppression were such that lesbians never really escaped from male supremacy. In lesbians' actual struggles in the bars or out on the streets, authority was always male. For queens to confront male authority was a confrontation between two men, on some level equals. The queen was playing with male privilege, which was his by birthright. For women to confront male authority is to break all traditional training and roles. Without a solid organization of all women, this requires taking on a male identity, beating men at their own game. Passive resistance or the fist is most appropriate f ~ Joan Nestle

He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand ... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject ... There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind. ~ Ayn Rand

It was incongruous at Coombargana. In a great city such things happen now and then, where people are too strained and hurried to pay much attention to the griefs of others, but in a small rural community like ours, led by wise and tolerant people such as my father and mother, staffed by good types culled and weeded out over the years, such secret, catastrophic griefs do not occur. Troubles at Coombargana had always been small troubles in my lifetime. ~ Nevil Shute

It is a year and eight months since I last looked at these notes of mine. I do so now only because, being overwhelmed with depression, I wish to distract my mind by reading them through at random. I left them off at the point where I was just going to Homburg. My God, with what a light heart (comparatively speaking) did I write the concluding lines! - though it may be not so much with a light heart, as with a measure of self-confidence and unquenchable hope. At that time had I any doubts of myself? Yet behold me now. Scarcely a year and a half have passed, yet I am in a worse position than the meanest beggar. But what is a beggar? A fig for beggary! I have ruined myself - that is all. Nor is there anything with which I can compare myself; there is no moral which it would be of any use for you to read to me. At the present moment nothing could well be more incongruous than a moral. Oh, you self-satisfied persons who, in your unctuous pride, are forever ready to mouth your maxims - if only you knew how fully I myself comprehend the sordidness of my present state, you would not trouble to wag your tongues at me! What could you say to me that I do not already know? Well, wherein lies my difficulty? It lies in the fact that by a single turn of a roulette wheel everything for me, has become changed. Yet, had things befallen otherwise, these moralists would have been among the first (yes, I feel persuaded of it) to approach me with friendly jests and congratulations. Yes, they would ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To estimate the value of Newton's discoveries, or the delight communicated by Shakespeare and Milton, by the price at which their works have sold, would be but a poor measure of the degree in which they have elevated and enchanted their country; nor would it be less grovelling and incongruous to estimate the benefit which the country has derived from the Revolution of 1688, by the pay of the soldiers, and all other payments concerned in effecting it. ~ Thomas Malthus

I laugh at weird times - at good and bad things alike. I laugh simply when things are incongruous. It's not necessarily a judgment - as it is noticing the oddity of something. ~ Eugene Mirman

His father had always said, Son, the most important thing in life is to make a contribution. Who would have thought Kittridge's contribution would be video-blogging from the front lines of the apocalypse? ~ Justin Cronin

The beautiful must be incongruous. ~ Julien Torma

Owen was so tiny, we loved to pick him up; in truth, we couldn't resist picking him up. We thought it was a miracle: how little he weighed. This was also incongruous because Owen came from a family in the granite business. The Meany Granite Quarry was a big place, the equipment for blasting and cutting the granite slabs was heavy and dangerous-looking; granite itself is such a rough, substantial rock. But the only aura of the granite quarry that clung to Owen was the granular dust, the gray powder that sprang off his clothes whenever we lifted him up. He was the color of a gravestone; light was both absorbed and reflected by his skin, as with a pearl, so that he appeared translucent at times - especially at his temples, where his blue veins showed through his skin (as though, in addition to his extraordinary size, there were other evidence that he was born too soon). ~ John Irving

But a man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Brandon: How does the character fit into the story, how will people expect them to fit into the story, and how, therefore, can I make them incongruous for those expectations? I'm looking for incongruity. Ask yourself why this character cannot fill the role in the plot that they are expected to fulfill. Ask yourself who would be perfect for this role. I'm not going to use that person. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Winter came to an end, and spring arrived, in its fully glory. I remember looking at the blooming trees and flowers and thinking of how incongruous is the beauty of nature against the ugliness of man. ~ Henry Orenstein

The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

History deals with situations and figures not imaginary but real. It demands therefore a combination of qualities unnecessary to the poet or writer of romance - glacial judgment coupled with fervent sympathy. The poet may be an uninspired illiterate, the romance-writer an uninspired hack. Under no circumstances can either of them be accused of wrongdoing or deceiving the public, however incongruous their efforts. They write well or badly, and there the matter ends. The historian, who fails in his duty, deceives the reader and wrongs the dead. ~ Norman Douglas

It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

I'm glad I'm not a woman trying to impress the opposite sex, Luke grunted. Kate shot him a quizzical look. Luke responded with one of his incongruous grins. ~ Maggie Brendan

How such Ideals do realize themselves; and grow, wondrously, from amid the incongruous ever-fluctuating chaos of the Actual: this is what World-History, if it teach any thing, has to teach us, How they grow; and, after long stormy growth, bloom out mature, supreme; then quickly (for the blossom is brief) fall into decay; sorrowfully dwindle; and crumble down, or rush down, noisily or noiselessly disappearing. The blossom is so brief; as of some centennial Cactus-flower, which after a century of waiting shines out for hours! ~ Thomas Carlyle

All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests. ~ George Washington

There seems to be an unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments. How can a soul be a merchant? What relation to an immortal being have the price of linseed, the brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid? The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous. ~ Walter Bagehot

We are all short sighted, and very often see but one side of a matter; our views are not extended to all that has a connection with it. From this defect I think no man is free. We see but in part, and we know but in part, and therefore it is no wonder we conclude not right from our partial views. This might instruct the proudest esteemer of his own parts, how useful it is to talk and consult with others, even such as come short of him in capacity, quickness and penetration: for since no one sees all, and we generally have different prospects of the same thing, according to our different, as I may say, positions to it, it is not incongruous to think nor beneath any man to try, whether another may not have notions of things which have escaped him, and which his reason would make use of if they came into his mind. ~ John Locke

Destiny has a constant passion for the incongruous. ~ Booth Tarkington

Oh, how our good knight reveled in this speech, and more than ever when he came to think of the name that he should give his lady! As the story goes, there was a very good=looking farm girl who lived near by, with whom he had once been smitten, although it is generally believed that she never knew or suspected it. Her name was Aldonza Lorenzo, and it seemed to him that she was the one upon whom he should bestow the title of mistress of his thoughts. For her he wished a name that should not be incongruous with his own and that would convey the suggestion of a princess or a great lady; and, accordingly, he resolved to call her "Dulcinea del Toboso," she being a native of that place. A musical name to his ears, out of the ordinary and significant, like the others he had chosen for himself and his appurtenances. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

The union of opposites, in so far as they are really complementary, always results in the most perfect harmony; and the seemingly incongruous is often the most natural. ~ Stefan Zweig

It is the incongruous thing in my entire life, this isolation ... My work requires it - but I myself have no need or use for it - Perhaps once on a time I found isolation imperative - I think all chrysalides do - all embryos go for the underside of the leaf in the time of body-change preparing for the final reassertion -resurrection - the establishment of the entity. But now I've come up tot the outside of my casements. ~ Marsden Hartley

A great philosopher has stated that the worst evil of poverty is, that it makes folks ridiculous; by which, I hope, he only means that, as in the above case, it places them in incongruous positions. ~ James Payn

The entire Jesus concept, that human sacrifice should be the substratum of a moral religion of love, strikes me as incongruous. God condemned us and Jesus saved us, and they are actually the same being? Christianity is the idea that you are so abhorrent that God had to kill himself. He had to embody the human form and send himself on a bizarre suicide mission just to revoke the disgustingness of the humans he created. I balk at suggestions that these ideas dictate to the concepts of morality and love. ~ Trevor Treharne

In the perception of the incongruous stimuli, the recognition process is temporarily thwarted and exhibits characteristics which are generally not observable in the recognition of more conventional stimuli. ~ Jerome Bruner

The problem is that after two centuries of conflict about just who was wanted in the Australian nation the term 'Australia' both includes and excludes. There are still people for whom 'Australian' means predominatly Anglo-Celtic white people whose parents were born here before 'New Australians' came as migrants after the Second World War. A common alternative to 'white people' (who from an Aboriginal perspective might be more genially called 'whitefellas') is 'Europeans'. This makes an incongruous appeal to history. Politically the colonisers were British, but they includes people of many nationalities. It's an odd usage, as when you see a sign in a national park telling you 'Europeans' brought the invasive weeds and pests. They brought the sign and the concept of a park too, and 'they', in a complex sense, are 'us'. ~ Nicholas Jose

The very concept of trying to 'teach' a lover things feels patronising, incongruous and plain sinister. If we truly loved someone, there could be no talk of wanting him or her to change. Romanticism is clear on this score: true love should involve an acceptance of a partner's whole being. It is this fundamental commitment to benevolence that makes the early months of love so moving. Within the new relationship, our vulnerabilities are treated with generosity. Our shyness, awkwardness and confusion endear (as they did when we were children) rather than generate sarcasm or complain; the trickier sides of us are interpreted solely through the filter of compassion.
From these moments, a beautiful yet challenging, and even reckless, conviction develops: that to be properly loved must always mean being endorsed for all that one is. ~ Alain De Botton

The tourist debauches the great monuments of antiquity, a comic figure, always inapt in his comments, incongruous in his appearance; ... avarice and deceit attack him at every step; the shops that he patronizes are full of forgeries ... But we need feel no scruple or twinge of uncertainty; 'we' are travelers and cosmopolitans; the tourist is the other fellow. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Fuchsia took three paces forward in the first of the attics and then paused a moment to re-tie a string above her knee. Over her head vague rafters loomed and while she straightened her-self she noticed them and unconsciously loved them. This was the lumber room. Though very long and lofty it looked relatively smaller than it was, for the fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing, from the great organ to the lost and painted head of a broken toy lion that must one day have been the plaything of one of Fuchsia's ancestors, spread from every wall until only an avenue was left to the adjacent room. This high, narrow avenue wound down the centre of the first attic before suddenly turning at a sharp angle to the right. The fact that this room was filled with lumber did not mean that she ignored it and used it only as a place of transit. Oh no, for it was here that many long afternoons had been spent as she crawled deep into the recesses and found for herself many a strange cavern among the incongruous relics of the past. She knew of ways through the centre of what appeared to be hills of furniture, boxes, musical instruments and toys, kites, pictures, bamboo armour and helmets, flags and relics of every kind, as an Indian knows his green and secret trail. Within reach of her hand the hide and head of a skinned baboon hung dustily over a broken drum that rose above the dim ranges of this attic medley. Huge and impregnable they looked in the warm still half-light, but Fuchsi ~ Mervyn Peake

What? We feel aesthetic pleasure at a sonata by Beethoven and not at one with the same style and charm if it comes from one of our own contemporaries? Isn't that the height of hypocrisy? So then the sensation of beauty is not spontaneous, spurred by our sensibility, but instead is cerebral, conditioned by our knowing a date?
No way around it: historical consciousness is so thoroughly inherent in our perception of art that this anachronism (a Beethoven piece written today) would be spontaneously (that is, without the least hypocrisy) felt to be ridiculous, false, incongruous, even monstrous. Our feeling for continuity is so strong that it enters into the perception of any work of art. ~ Milan Kundera

A chaplain is the minister of the Prince of Peace serving the host of the God of War
Mars. As such, he is as incongruous as a musket would be on the altar at Christmas. Why, then, is he there? Because he indirectly subserves the purpose attested by the cannon; because too he lends the sanction of the religion of the meek to that which practically is the abrogation of everything but brute Force. ~ Herman Melville

She's like an island
Made of rock, with one lone tree at the top
Of the only mountain. She's like the sole
Incongruous goat tethered to the tree,
Smiling almost as you approach, scraping
The ground with its horns, and then--
Lickety split--lurching hard, daring
The rope to snap. ~ Tracy K. Smith

I hate textbooks. I hate how they shoehorn even the most incongruous words – like 'cup' and 'bookcase,' or 'pencil' and 'ashtray' – onto the same page, and then call it 'vocabulary.' In a conversation, the language is always fluid, moving, and you have to move with it. You walk and talk and see where the words come from, and where they should go. It was in this way that I learned to count like a Viking. ~ Daniel Tammet

The ordinary man cannot imagine this Providence in any other form but that of a greatly exalted father, for only such a one could understand the needs of the sons of men, or be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that to one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is even more humiliating to discover what a large number of those alive today, who must see that this religion is not tenable, yet try to defend it inch by inch, as if with a series of pitiable rearguard actions. ~ Sigmund Freud

I seemed to be leading a very incongruous life from the point of view of the definition of the community I was in. ~ Frederick Lenz

For we human beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed to the clatter of the incongruous; it is a tune to which we can go to sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it wakes us up like the pang of a perfect chord. ~ G.K. Chesterton

It seemed rather incongruous that in a society of super sophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners. ~ Erma Bombeck

Why is Nana's house so messy?', she asked after an incongruous moment. Vicky smiled. Ah, well you see, your Nana is a very special lady. She's really quite magical, you know. And when she looks at the world, she sees it in a very special way, like it's a party bag or a toy shop, and she likes to keep bits of it, and she feels sad when she throws things away. ~ Lisa Jewell

Vida Winter's appearance was not calculated for concealment. She was an ancient queen, sorceress or goddess. Her stiff figure rose regally out of a profusion of fat purple and red cushions. Draped around her shoulders, the folds of the turquoise-and-green cloth that had cloaked her body did not soften the rigidity of her frame. Her bright copper hair had been arranged into an elaborate confection of twists, curls and coils. Her face, as intricately lined as a map, was powdered white and finished with bold scarlet lipstick. In her lap, her hands were a cluster of rubies, emeralds and white, bony knuckles; only her nails, unvarnished, cut short and square like my own, struck an incongruous tone. ~ Diane Setterfield

In another Nabokov novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Sebastian's brother discovers two seemingly incongruous pictures in his dead brother's library: a pretty, curly-haired child playing with a dog and a Chinese man in the act of being beheaded. The two pictures remind us of the close relation between banality and brutality. ~ Azar Nafisi

Crossing my arms over my chest, I said, a little too heartily, "So this is the library." There certainly couldn't be any doubt on that score; never had a room so resembled popular preconception. The walls were paneled in rich, dark wood, although the finish had worn off the edges in spots, where books had scraped against the wood in passing one too many times. A whimsical iron staircase curved to the balcony, the steps narrowing into pie-shaped wedges that promised a broken neck to the unwary. I tilted my head back, dizzied by the sheer number of books, row upon row, more than the most devoted bibliophile could hope to consume in a lifetime of reading.

In one corner, a pile of crumbling paperbacks - James Bond, I noticed, squinting sideways, in splashy seventies covers - struck a slightly incongruous note. I spotted a moldering pile of Country Life cheek by jowl with a complete set of Trevelyan's History of England in the original Victorian bindings. The air was rich with the smell of decaying paper and old leather bindings. Downstairs, where I stood with Colin, the shelves made way for four tall windows, two to the east and two to the north, all hung with rich red draperies checked with blue, in the obverse of the red-flecked blue carpet. On the west wall, the bookshelves surrendered pride of place to a massive fireplace, topped with a carved hood to make Ivanhoe proud, and large enough to roast a serf. In short, the library was a Gothic fantasy. ~ Lauren Willig

Having the Mass in one's native language is no guarantee that a person will understand the mystery of the Mass. On the contrary, if the vesture of the ceremony is too familiar, the participants too easily thinks he has mastered what it's all about. The familiar becomes the routine, the routine becomes ignored. Our own language is a comfort zone that insulates us form the shock of the Gospel, the scandal of the Cross, the lure of the unknown. I would rather have a huge dose of foreignness, of music that is not current, words that are strange, language that is archaic, hieratic gestures that are grandly incongruous to a democratic society. A person thrown into this situation knows at least that he is dealing with something utterly different and possibly far deeper than his day-to-day occupations. ~ Peter Kwasniewski

We live thetime that a match flickers; we pop the corkof a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake? ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

With such global events looming over us like mountains, nay, like entire mountain ranges, it may seem incongruous and inappropriate to recall that the primary key to our being or non-being resides in each individual human heart, in the heart's preference for specific good or evil. Yet this remains true even today, and it is, in fact, the most reliable key we have. The social theories that promised so much have demonstrated their bankruptcy, leaving us at a dead end. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There's not a lot of towns that I can go to and take family - too many incongruous knocks on doors - "Hello, honey. Have you missed me?" ~ Robert Plant

Against the background of this luminous and sparkling stage Bond stood in the sunshine and felt his mission to be incongruous and remote and his dark profession an affront to his fellow actors. ~ Ian Fleming

time to time, someone will tell me something so patently unbelievable that I manage not to understand the words as they're spoken. This usually leads to my blathering something incredibly insensitive or incongruous which makes me look like a tremendous jackass. This was one of those moments. ~ J.P. Sloan

It was as though the Gods had dropped something - a comb, a hairpin, a needle - and it had fallen down to earth; unimaginably huge and incomprehensibly magnificent, made of celestial materials by a divine craftsman, too big and too beautiful to have any place in our world, utterly incongruous, a numbing statement of the difference between Them and us - Excuse me. It was an impressive sight. ~ K.J. Parker

I love when people wear flowers in their own way, like when I see someone wearing a floral dress with brogues and a jacket. It's incongruous. ~ Erdem Moralioglu

People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh.
[Afterword] ~ Michael Chabon

Tsz-lu said to the Master, "As the prince of Wei, sir, has been waiting for you to act for him in his government, what is it your intention to take in hand first?"

"One thing of necessity," he answered "the rectification of terms."

"That!" exclaimed Tsz-lu. "How far away you are, sir! Why such rectification?"

"What a rustic you are, Tsz-lu!" rejoined the Master. "A gentleman would be a little reserved and reticent in matters which he does not understand. If terms be incorrect, language will be incongruous; and if language be incongruous, deeds will be imperfect. So, again, when deeds are imperfect, propriety and harmony cannot prevail, and when this is the case laws relating to crime will fail in their aim; and if these last so fail, the people will not know where to set hand or foot. Hence, a man of superior mind, certain first of his terms, is fitted to speak; and being certain of what he says can proceed upon it. In the language of such a person there is nothing heedlessly irregular and that is the sum of the matter. ~ Confucius

GENERAL RAGINSKY: Mr. President, in order to exhaust fully the presentation of evidence in regard to the subject-matter of my report, I ask your permission to examine witness Josif Abgarovitch Orbeli - Tatiana dropped the cup of tea she was drinking, and it fell on the tile floor and broke, and Tatiana fell on the floor, too, on her knees, and began to pick up the pieces, every moment or so emitting cries of such distress that Vikki, who was nearby, jumped up, backed away and said in a stunned voice, "What's wrong with you?" Tatiana waved her off with one hand, her other hand holding a ceramic shard which covered her mouth as she continued to listen to the bare echo that was the radio broadcast as it ceaselessly continued. A crash on the road, but the radio still plays music, still transmits sounds no matter how incongruous it is that the ear can somehow hear, that the brain can somehow listen - ~ Paullina Simons

Nirvana is something that cannot be known here. I know it seems incongruous, but it is only incongruous from the perspective of the dialectical consciousness of division, of time and space ~ Frederick Lenz

She had imagined that the presence of of what she thought of as clever people would bring about some subtle change in the usual small talk. The sentences would be like bright jugglers' balls, spinning through the air and being deftly caught and thrown up again. But she saw now that conversation could also be compared to a series of incongruous objects, scrubbing-brushes, dish-cloths, knives, being flung or hurtling rather than spinning, which were sometimes not caught a all but fell to the ground with resounding thuds. ~ Barbara Pym

Until such time as one has put to oneself a certain number of questions about an author, and has answered them, be it only to oneself alone and under one's breath, one cannot be sure of having grasped him completely, even though the questions may seem quite foreign to the nature of his writings: What were his religious ideas? How did the spectacle of nature affect him? How did he behave in the matter of women, of money? Was he rich, poor; what was his diet, his daily routine? What was his vice or his weakness? None of the answers to these questions is irrelevant. Even so, the answers tend to be surprising. However brilliant, however wise the work, it seems that the lives of artists can be relied upon to exhibit an extraordinary, incongruous range of turmoil, misery, and stupidity. ~ Alain De Botton

But centaurs never existed; there could never be So to speak a double nature in a single body Or a double body composed of incongruous parts With a consequent disparity in the faculties. The stupidest person ought to be convinced of that. ~ Lucretius

Human life is an incongruous combination of tragedy and comedy. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Reverence is a good thing, and part of its value is that the more we revere a man, the more sharply are we struck by anything in him (and there is always much) that is incongruous with his greatness. ~ Max Beerbohm

Amid the gray, an incongruous band of daytime blue asserts itself. To the west, a pink sun already begins its descent. The effect is of three isolated aspects, distinct phases of the day. All of it, strewn across the horizon, is contained in his vision. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief. ~ John Dos Passos

He looked as incongruous as a rose in a bowl of brussels sprouts. ~ Christopher Bram

Incongruous that he laughed. And then realized that there ~ Diana Gabaldon

In my Future of an Illusion I was concerned [ ... ] with what the ordinary man understands by his religion, that system of doctrines and pledges that on the one hand explains the riddle of this world to him with an enviable completeness, and on the other assures him that a solicitous Providence is watching over him and will make up to him in a future existence for any shortcomings in this life. The ordinary man cannot imagine this Providence in any other from but that of a greatly exalted father, for only such a one could understand the needs of the sons of men, or be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that to one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. ~ Sigmund Freud

Human experience is usually paradoxical, if that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy. ~ George Eliot

Death went well with bare stone and it was the little crowd of modern men who looked incongruous. ~ Catherine Aird

The incongruous combination of white hair, beard, and powerful arms usually caused boys to scatter with the muddled impression that Father Christmas was angry with them. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts. ~ Herman Melville

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste. ~ Susan Sontag