"Beanstalk" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tales we were all taught did not, like the history we were all taught, consist entirely of lies. Parts of the tale of "Puss in Boots" or "Jack and the Beanstalk" may strike the realistic eye as a little unlikely and out of the common way, so to speak; but they contain some very solid and very practical truths. For instance, it may be noted that both in "Puss in Boots" and "Jack and the Beanstalk" ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... as he may. Occasionally, however, doubles of this kind are found to emerge from obscurity and establish a reputation of their own. In 1820, a pantomime, dealing with the fairly tale of "Jack and the Beanstalk," was produced at Drury Lane. The part of the hero was allotted to little Miss Povey, who declined, however, to undertake Jack's feat of climbing the famous beanstalk, a formidable structure reaching from the stage to the roof of the theatre. It became necessary to secure a substitute ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... reasonable. The child's reason is not yet developed into any practical activity. The child does not say, Why, this cannot be, because there is such a force or such a law that would be contravened by it. The child knows nothing about these forces or laws: it is a sort of a Jack- and-the-Beanstalk world. The beanstalk can grow any number of feet over night in the world in which the child lives. Anything is possible. If father and mother and nurse tell the child about Santa Claus coming down the chimney with a pack ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... masters, turning their easel painting into painted scenes. He was a parvenu, but a parvenu whose whole bearing proved that if he did dedicate every story in 'The House of Pomegranates' to a lady of title, it was but to show that he was Jack and the social ladder his pantomime beanstalk. "Did you ever hear him say 'Marquess of Dimmesdale'?" a friend of his once asked me. "He does not say 'the Duke of York' ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... It is time for our story, and that would be a nice one, I guess," said Jack, who was as fond of stories as when he sat in his mother's lap and chuckled over the hero of the beanstalk. ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... at present allowed to obstruct the practical conduct of life. And under similar circumstances it would be important to investigate the historical accuracy of Old Mother Hubbard or Jack and the Beanstalk. Any belief, no matter what its nature, must be dealt with as a fact of some social importance, so long as it is believed by large numbers to be essential to the right ordering of life. Whether true or false, beliefs are facts—mental and ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... manager would strongly recommend the people to "Come forward, ladies and gentlemen, the show's just a-going to begin." The performance consisted of a short play, a comic song by "Billy," and a portion of the pantomime, "Jack and the Beanstalk," the whole lasting under half-an-hour. We gave about a score performances a day: it was very hard work, and, what was more, hot weather. I don't want to figure in these pages as a champion boozer—for I know ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... and a sinking downward, downward through the stratas of being into some cavern, reckonless and quiet, of the under-man. It as little served to front the future and try to climb, like Jack of the Beanstalk, to some plane above and beyond war and disappointment and denying. He was unhappy, and he spoke wearily to his horse, then shut his lips and faced the Siberian road. Entering in his turn the fold of the hills, he soon came up with the advance. As he passed the men on foot a sudden swirl ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... heard at William Street—not nice things at all. She had imagined all the world must be like that, for although she was very young, Mary had often thought about things. Still, she had never thought of anything half so wonderful as Jack-and-the-Beanstalk, or Ali Baba, or Aladdin, or Cinderella. Mary grew quite to love Cinderella, and I can't tell you how many times she heard the ...
— The Bountiful Lady - or, How Mary was changed from a very Miserable Little Girl - to a very Happy One • Thomas Cobb
... the climbers! How silly they are! Golden clouds at the top, and just as they are reached, some little Jack comes along and chops down the beanstalk, ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... the lawyer from the neighbouring county with facetious intention. "A boy and a beanstalk will grow, you know. ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... has described the Show in his "Contention for Honour and Riches" (1633). Clod, a sturdy countryman, exclaims, "I am plain Clod; I care not a beanstalk for the best what lack you on you all. No, not the next day after Simon and Jude, when you go a-feasting to Westminster with your galley-foist and your pot-guns, to the very terror of the paper whales; when you land in shoals, and make the understanders in Cheapside wonder ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... irrational. The Renan-France method is simply this: you explain supernatural stories that have some foundation simply by inventing natural stories that have no foundation. Suppose that you are confronted with the statement that Jack climbed up the beanstalk into the sky. It is perfectly philosophical to reply that you do not think that he did. It is (in my opinion) even more philosophical to reply that he may very probably have done so. But the Renan-France method is to write like this: "When we consider Jack's curious and even perilous ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... was coming, having perhaps heard that Polchester was a very jolly place. So might come any day Jack of the Beanstalk, Cinderella, ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... omit Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack the Giant-Killer, and Tom Hickathrift, moving them up into the primary field. A little girl, when eating tongue, confidingly asked, "Whose tongue?" and when told, "A cow's," immediately questioned with tenderness, "Don't he feel it?" Thereafter she insisted that she didn't like ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... anything. I'll wait until I do before I try again, and meantime, 'sweep mud in the street' if I can't do better, that's honest, at least." Which decision proved that her second tumble down the beanstalk had done her ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... recommended to you; and you may, therefore, get great good by copying almost anything of his that may come in your way; except only his illustrations lately published to "Cinderella," and "Jack and the Beanstalk," and "Tom Thumb," which are much over-laboured, and confused in line. You should get them, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... is a sort of exemplum of the sin of pride and avarice. In this respect it is connected in idea with Grimm's story of "The Fisherman and his Wife" (No. 19). In its method and machinery, again, it belongs to the "Jack and the Beanstalk" cycle, the main feature of which is a magic plant which grows rapidly until it reaches the sky and enables its owner to climb to the upper regions and secure magic articles. Macculloch devotes a whole chapter (XVI) to the discussion of this cycle, and cites many folk-tales turning ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... Board of Commissioners for the discovery of magicians, enchanters and sorcerers; for it was the age when invention framed the lie of the day, the marvellous military leadership of Joan of Arc, and credulity stood as ready to receive it as little boys in nurseries the wondrous tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. Through this mist the figure of Cardinal Beaufort loomed largest, unsociable, disdainful, avaricious, immeasurably high-stomached (for he deemed himself on an equality with the king); and, in spite of immoderate riches, inordinately mean: along with these unamiable ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... shaded by large weeping willows, I found it the most creditable thing I had yet seen. It is admirably laid out, the natural undulations of the ground being made the most of, and exceedingly well kept. This in itself is a difficult matter where all vegetation runs up like Jack's famous beanstalk, and where the old proverb about the steed starving whilst his grass is growing falls completely to the ground. There are numerous drives, made level by a coating of smooth black shale, and bordered by a double line of syringas ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... back stairs and fell asleep on his bed to the tune of an adding-machine, run by Porter. In his dreams he stood at the foot of a mighty column—of figures. It reached to the clouds. A ghostly friend of Jack-in-the-Beanstalk's whispered to him that he must climb that column if he would reach Success. ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... of being too tall, Dr. Sterling," said Dorothy, in a tone of mild reproof. "That is getting to be a sore subject with me. I have no intention of being either a toothpick or a beanstalk, though if what my friends tell me is true, I am in a fair way to be either, ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... heart's-ease or a sprig of mignonette in it. One had roses, sweet peas, and daisies in it," here he pinched the plump cheek of the little girl leaning on his arm. "Another had all sorts of curious plants in it, bright pebbles, a vine that went climbing up like Jack's beanstalk, and many good seeds just beginning to sprout; for, you see, this bed had been taken fine care of by a wise old man, who had worked in gardens of ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... problem attached to it was that of providing occupation for the child during the six weeks of quarantine in one room. Remembering the pleasure I had taken as a child in planting seeds on cotton in a glass of water and watching them grow at a rate almost equal to that of Jack's beanstalk, I made a similar "little garden" and sent ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... the days. Mr. J. Holt Schooling, or somebody else with a taste for juggling with figures, might write a very readable page or so of statistics in connection with the growth of love in the heart of a man. In some cases it is, I believe, slow. In my own I can only say that Jack's beanstalk was a backward plant in comparison. It is true that we had not seen a great deal of one another, and that, when we had met, our interviews had been brief and our conversation conventional; but it is the ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... scenes like the cedars of Lebanon, the Parthenon and Colosseum, with full explanations, through dissolving views of cottage and bridge by day and night, summer and winter, of life-boat rescue, and the siege of Sevastopol, with shells flying, on to Jack and the Beanstalk and the New Tale of a Tub, the sea-serpent, and the nose- grinding! Lady Phyllis's ecstacy was surpassing, more especially as she found her beloved little maid-of-all-work, and was introduced to all that small person's younger ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cannot well tell. The child's notion of justice is crude, bad is bad, and whether embodied in an ogre or in Pharaoh of Egypt, it must be got rid of, put out of the story. No child is sorry for the giant when Jack's axe cleaves the beanstalk, and as for Pharaoh, "Well, it's a good thing he's drowned, for he was a bad man, wasn't he?" Death means nothing to children, as a rule, except disappearance. When children can read for themselves, they will take from their stories what suits their ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... This will, I think, want two plates - the child climbing, his first glimpse over the garden wall, with what he sees - the tree shooting higher and higher like the beanstalk, and the view widening. The river slipping in. The road arriving ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... its specialty? Mrs. Adams said that it made a specialty of climbing. It was a climber from away back. "All right," I then to her did straightway say, "let her climb." It was a good early climber. It climbed higher than Jack's beanstalk. It climbed the golden stair. Most of our plants are actively engaged in descending the cellar stairs or in ascending the golden stair most ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... earth in those days" says Scripture. Of course there were. Every barbarous people has similar legends of primitive ages. The translators of our Revised Version are ashamed of these mythical personages as being too suggestive of Jack and the Beanstalk, so they have substituted Anakim for giants. In other words, they have shirked the duty of translators, and left the nonsense veiled under ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... have done of late has been to dig a little in the garden, preparing for winter. I did not take my geraniums up until last week. As for the dahlias I wrote you about, they became almost a scandal in the commune. They grew and grew, like Jack's beanstalk— prodigiously. I can't think of any other word to express it. They were eight feet high and full of flowers, which we cut for the Jour des Morts. I know you won't believe that, but it is true. A few days later there came a wind-storm, ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... cousin up to town; and the result of their coming far outran our fondest anticipations. The Morris, like that magic beanstalk, seemed to outwit the laws of nature: we saw it in the heart of London rise up from its long sleep before our very eyes. In connection with this affair, the mention of that well-beloved fable is appropriate ...
— The Morris Book • Cecil J. Sharp
... sharp-featured, as well as sharp-tongued, he resembled a hawk. It was difficult to realize the fact that the pert and lovely little Angela—who lived up to her name only once in a while!—was his own flesh and blood. It was as incongruous as though a rose had grown on a beanstalk. ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... lamplighters, the shops, the bottles in the chemists' windows, and Hyde Park, failed to rouse me to any intelligent appreciation of the great city, now that I had reached it. After a long weary dream of rattle and bustle, and dim lamps, and houses stretching upwards like Jack's beanstalk through the chilly and foggy darkness, the carriage stopped with one final jolt in a quiet and partially-lighted square; and I was lifted down, and staggered into a house where the light was as abundant and ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... unconscious state, the Station was not so much as visible. Something in the air, like an enterprising chemist's established in business on one of the boughs of Jack's beanstalk, was all that could be discerned of it under the stars. In a moment it would break out, a constellation of gas. In another moment, twenty rival chemists, on twenty rival beanstalks, came into existence. Then, the Furies would be seen, waving their lurid ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens |
