"Idiomatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Catalogue continues to list this as a "translation" of Ovid's Metamorphoses, X. For a somewhat later example of an actual translation of this tale, considerably amplified, see James Gresham's (not Graham's, as in STC) The Picture of Incest, STC 18969 (1626), ed. Grosart (Manchester, 1876). In idiomatic English, occasionally ornamented with such triple epithets as "azure-veyned necke" and "Nectar-candied-words," Gresham expands Golding's Ovid by more than 300 lines. Although he invents a suitable brief description of Mirrha's ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... Tract is one of great interest, not only on account of its intrinsic merit, but also for the racy style of writing adopted by its author. We find him continually garnishing his language with such idiomatic and colloquial expressions as the following:—"Quhae's sillie braine will reache no farther then the compas of their cap" (page 2); and again, "but will not presume to judge farther then the compasse of my awn cap" (p. 20). He observes of ...
— Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue - A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles • Alexander Hume
... honest, direct, sympathetic, humorous writing about Australia from within is worth a library of travellers' tales. . . . The result is a real book — a book in a hundred. His language is terse, supple, and richly idiomatic. He can tell a ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... the first place, it is in every respect different from all others which I have studied, with perhaps the exception of the Turkish, to which it seems to bear some remote resemblance in syntax, though none in words. In the second place, it abounds with idiomatic phrases, which can only be learnt by habit, and to the understanding of which a Dictionary is of little or no use, the words separately having either no meaning or a meaning quite distinct from that which they possess when thus conjoined. And thirdly the helps afforded ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... to the old doctrine of temperaments, the English character must be classed not under the phlegmatic but under the melancholic temperament; and the French under the sanguine. The character of a nation may be judged of in this particular by examining its idiomatic language. The French, in whom the lower forms of passion are constantly bubbling up from the shallow and superficial character of their feelings, have appropriated all the phrases of passion to the service of trivial and ordinary life: ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
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