"Bookworm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... disposed to judge another man by his mental talents and his peculiarities of temper—or blatant self-advertisement. A woman's first thought is for that vague, but comprehensive trait "manliness. She drives straight home for the peg upon which to hang her judgment. That is why in feminine regard the bookworm goes to the wall to make room for the athlete. Possibly Jacky and Mrs. Abbot had probed beneath "Lord" Bill's superficial weariness and discovered there a nature worthy of their regard. They were both, in their several ways, fond of this scion of a ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... old landlubber and bookworm never addressed me in that manner,'—but perhaps he meant ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... themselves, most of the poets who have taken the poet's character as their theme, indulged their weakness for words before that long-suffering bookworm, the reader, had turned, but one who at the present day drags from cobwebby corners the accusive mass of material on the subject, must seek to justify, not merely the loquacity of its authors, but one's own temerity as well, in forcing it ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... graduate, and now went in two days each week for teaching classes. His father had left some business interests in Salem, rather distasteful to him, but he was a strictly conscientious person and attended to them, if with a sort of mental protest. For the rest, he was a bookworm ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... have her bothered with books too early," Mr. Linton had said when nurse hinted, on Norah's eight birthday, that it was time she began the rudiments of learning. "Time enough yet—we don't want to make a bookworm of her!" ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... bookworm, bicycling to get an appetite,' he observed. 'I wonder why a certain type of Frenchman always wears kid boots with square patent leather toes, and a Lavalliere tie, ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... constitution, I can attract manna from Heaven." The manna here spoken of does not specify any particular thing, but is of universal application, and is simply used as an unknown quantity, like x, y, z in mathematics. But, ever since the days of Paracelsus, half-initiated mystics and bookworm occultists, have endeavored to discover what this manna really was. Some, the more spiritual, were of the opinion that, it was spiritual power, or purity of spirit; others imagined it to mean special magnetic qualifications, similar in nature ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... is, and where he ought to be, is all signified in these two lines. And do we not taste a dash of benignant irony in the implied repugnance between the spirit of the man and the stuff of his present undertaking? The idea of a bookworm riding the whirlwind of war! The thing is most like Brutus; but how out of his element, how unsphered from his right place, it shows him! There is a touch of drollery in the contrast, which the richest steeping of poetry does not disguise. And the irony is all the more ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... book, led the way and soon he heard of the younger man's anxieties. But the bookworm increased rather ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... sunset. I am impatient to begin my acquaintance with our fellow citizens—our future friends, if I may so call them. Let us look out of the windows, and see what the excellent people are doing. Perhaps it may interest even a recluse and bookworm like you." ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... Some of them I have not seen for more than forty years. Mentioning their names may serve to recall incidents connected with them: My two brothers, both graduates of Washington College; Berkeley Minor, a student at the University of Virginia, a perfect bookworm; Alex. Boteler, student of the University of Virginia, son of Hon. Alex. Boteler, of West Virginia, and his two cousins, Henry and Charles Boteler, of Shepherdstown, West Virginia; Thompson and Magruder Maury, both clergymen after the war; Joe Shaner, of Lexington, Virginia, as ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... the loving ties which united her with her kind protectors and relations. Every week grew and deepened the pleasure of the intercourse they held together. Those were happy years for all parties. Dolly had become rather more talkative, without being less of a bookworm. Vacations were sometimes spent with her mother and father, though not always, as the latter were sometimes travelling. Dolly missed nothing; Mrs. Eberstein's house had come ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... The professor is too loyal to go beyond that. I suppose you know you have the best man in all the world for your guardian? But it was a little unkind of your people, was it not, to give you into the keeping of a confirmed bookworm—a savant—with scarcely ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... "a little wild thing like me beside a learned great man like you. I should be like the frog in the fable! And yet I should so much like to learn, to know things, to be initiated. What fun it would be to become a regular bookworm, to bury my nose in a lot of old papers!" she had gone on, with that self-satisfied air which a smart woman adopts when she insists that her one desire is to give herself up, without fear of soiling ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... mighty tattered cap in the bargain, I should say," remarked Owen, who was something of a bookworm, filled with a theoretical knowledge concerning subjects that, as a rule, his cousin Max had personal ...
— In Camp on the Big Sunflower • Lawrence J. Leslie
... not try this delicate experiment,—in fact, she began rather to avoid literary people, with the exception of Beau Lovelace. His was a genial, sympathetic nature, and, moreover, he had a winning charm of manner which few could resist. He was not a bookworm,—he was not, strictly speaking, a literary man,—and he was entirely indifferent to public praise or blame. He was, as he himself expressed it, "a servant and worshipper of literature," and there is a wide gulf of difference between ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... had been school-fellows together at the grammar-school, and their friendship had lasted after each was started in his own career. Hundreds of times he had crossed this door-sill to have a chat with the studious and quiet bookworm within whose modest life was so great a contrast with his own. Jean Merle ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... character would suffer. What could I do?—Oh, yes, I recollect all now! I married her, that my old friend's child might have a roof to her head, and come to no harm. You see I was forced to do her that injury; for, after all, poor young creature, it was a sad lot for her. A dull bookworm like me,—cochlea vitam agens, Mr. Squills,—leading the life of a snail! But my shell was all I could offer to my ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... quite well for her. Madame has added a few incomparable toilet touches. Floyd is attentive to her, and Prof. Freilgrath takes her to supper, promenades with her, and is quite delightful for an old bookworm. Mr. Latimer talks to her and finds her a great improvement on Marcia, but the German keeps thinking over her poor little story. If there was something for her to do! and he racks his brain. There are no crowds of nephews and nieces, there is ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... in fact, simply uses with scrupulous exactness the methods which we all, habitually and at every moment, use carelessly; and the man of business must as much avail himself of the scientific method—must as truly be a man of science—as the veriest bookworm of us all.[1] ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... of his choice remains unknown, her maiden name and family. Mere trifles these, to be sure,—but interesting in an antiquarian point of view,—and valuable, perhaps, should the inquiry hereafter lead some more than usually acute bookworm into the real mystery and meaning, the main drift ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... Faust opposite me," said Pasquale, raising his champagne glass. "Hasn't he been transformed from the lean and elderly bookworm into the gay, young gallant about the town? Once one could scarcely drag him from his cell to the quietest of dinners, and now—has he told you of his dissipations this ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... the little girls who were pale and pensive-looking, as that was the only ladyfied standard in the romances. Of course, the chief pleasure of reading them was that of identifying myself with every new heroine. They began to call me a "bookworm" at home. I did not at ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... glossographer; grammarian; litterateur [Fr.], literati, dilettanti, illuminati, cogniscenti [It]; fellow, Hebraist, lexicologist, mullah, munshi^, Sanskritish; sinologist, sinologue^; Mezzofanti^, admirable Crichton, Mecaenas. bookworm, helluo librorum [Lat.]; bibliophile, bibliomaniac^; bluestocking, bas-bleu [Fr.]; bigwig, learned Theban, don; Artium Baccalaureus [Lat.], Artium Magister [Lat.]. learned man, literary man; homo multarum literarum [Lat.]; man of learning, man of letters, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... fact, simply uses with scrupulous exactness, the methods which we all, habitually and at every moment, use carelessly; and the man of business must as much avail himself of the scientific method—must be as truly a man of science—as the veriest bookworm of us all; though I have no doubt that the man of business will find himself out to be a philosopher with as much surprise as M. Jourdain exhibited, when he discovered that he had been all his life talking prose. If, however, there be no real difference between the methods ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... perfectly bowed down with remorse last time I saw him," said Will, regarding Tom with eyes full of fun, for Will was a boy as well as a bookworm, and relished a joke ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... Valpy. Alternately writer, Baptist minister, and reporter, he eventually settled down in the monastic solitude of Clifford's Inn to compose verses, annotate Greek plays, and write for the magazines. How the worthy, simple-hearted bookworm once walked straight from Lamb's parlour in Colebrooke Row into the New River, and was then fished out and restored with brandy-and-water, Lamb was never tired of telling. At the latter part of his life poor old Dyer became totally blind. He died ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... known only by the extracts in this book; and among them may be mentioned a writer named Conon, who is said to have written fifty novels, which Photius condensed to his liking. All this, of course, was merely pour passer le temps; the really important works of this bookworm being a lexicon and a number of books on theology. Needless to say in due course ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... father, this old bookworm," murmured the frightened girl in a strange repulsion, as she fled away to her room. It was a grateful relief when the servant maid announced that the travelers would be served ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... his part, I made the effort of my life, and, remarking lightly, "She must have been here looking for the pin her friend has lost," I launched forth into an impromptu dissertation on one of the subjects I knew to be dear to the heart of the bookworm before me—and kept it up, too, till I saw by his brightening eye and suddenly freed manner that he had forgotten the insignificant episode of a minute ago, never in all probability to recall it again. Then I made another effort, and released myself with something like deftness from the long-drawn-out ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... not until he had slowly descended half the narrow uneven stairs that led down to the dining-room did he fully realise the guile of a sister that could induce a hopeless bookworm to waste a whole morning over the stupidest of companions, simply to keep his tired-out mind from rankling, and give his Sabathier a chance to ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... for the bookworms. Anthony Magliabecchi, the notorious bookworm, was born at Florence in 1633; his passion for reading induced him to employ every moment of his time in improving his mind. By means of an astonishing memory and incessant application, he became more conversant with literary history than any man of his time, and was appointed librarian ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... he is like other young men, while you are a dear old bookworm. No one would ever mind what you did, so you may go to parties with me every night and not a word would be said or, if there was, I shouldn't mind since it is 'only Mac,'" answered Rose, smiling as she quoted a household phrase often used to excuse ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... character, if I may say so—a case possessing, in the fullest sense of the word, the hallmark of time, and circumstances pointing to a person and life of different surroundings. The real culprit is a theorist, a bookworm, who, in a tentative kind of way, has done a more than bold thing; but this boldness of his is of quite a peculiar and one-sided stamp; it is, after a fashion, like that of a man who hurls himself from the top of a mountain ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... in the least jealous of the interest with which Dorothea had looked up at Mr. Casaubon: it never occurred to him that a girl to whom he was meditating an offer of marriage could care for a dried bookworm towards fifty, except, indeed, in a religious sort of way, as for a clergyman of ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... a bookworm and student. Jim, who was growing very fast, was a regular boy, and, I am sorry to say, did not always have perfect lessons. He was so very quick and correct in figures that he managed to slip through other things. Moreover he carried authority. ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... shall not pretend that I was a bookworm, or that I shared Gregoire's ambitions; on the contrary, the world beyond the walls looked such a jolly place to me that the mere sight of a classroom would sometimes fill me with abhorrence. But, mon Dieu! if other fellows were wild occasionally, ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... off. On the way they dropped the red-faced farmer and his hands, who clearly regarded the professor as some sort of an amiable lunatic. But that worthy man, supremely happy despite his wet clothes, was quite contented, and from time to time dipped into his satchel, like a bookworm into a favorite volume, and drew out a particularly ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... laughed and Dorothy said, "Charlotte is such an old bookworm that she won't know how to get on with any one who doesn't like to read. For my part I hope she will be full of fun and like having a good time better than poking in ...
— Glenloch Girls • Grace M. Remick
... humbly, "it's my fault that you've become the brainy woman that you are, for I encouraged you at book learning (knowing as how when you found your heart 'twould shine with the more lustre), but if you were to go and live along side of a man as is a bookworm you'd lose your chance of this life (let alone your soul's salvation by the apostasy which you think lightly of now). Anyhow I'd wait if I was you till his mother asks you, for she'd be in an awful taking if you and he were talk, talk, talking of what she didn't understand. And he ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... been taken into account, Bryce saw no better clue for the moment than that suggested by Ambrose Campany—Barthorpe. Ambrose Campany, bookworm though he was, was a shrewd, sharp fellow, said Bryce—a man of ideas. There was certainly much in his suggestion that a man wasn't likely to buy an old book about a little insignificant town like Barthorpe ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... thought of meeting you here, old bookworm?" exclaimed a happy-looking youth hailing from a shipper's office on the ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... distinguished him, at the same time that he showed a lightness of disposition which many will think at strange variance with the gravity and even solemnity of his later years. Among his fellow-students he was not distinguished by any special or exclusive devotion to study. He was certainly no bookworm, and he was known rather for his love of sport and boisterous high spirits than for attention to his lessons or for a high place in his class. More than once he was involved in affairs that, if excusable and ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... maiden I am betrothed to, Caesar. He is now alone, for his wife has long been altogether separated from him, being devoted to gaiety and belonging to a family richer and more powerful than his, and looking down upon her husband as a mere bookworm. He has borne with her neglect and disobedience to his wishes for a long time, and has shown, as it seemed to me, far too great a weakness in exerting his authority; but his patience has at last failed, and when yesterday, in defiance of him, she would have ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... imaginative in any true sense, nor actual in any sense, that up to the present hour there was nothing in the bank, and only the money for impending needs in the house. He could not be called a man of learning; he was only a great bookworm; for his reading lay all in the nebulous regions of history. Old family records, wherever he could lay hold upon them, were his favourite dishes; old, musty books, that looked as if they knew something everybody ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... him, but I know that he bears a splendid reputation for manliness, sobriety, and studiousness. He was something of a bookworm at college, I believe, and has developed a taste for literature. You see, I have heard much of him. Oh, I am sure something has happened to him, some misfortune! You see, she had asked him to call upon me, and he would never have left Hilda—not to mention his ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... in, Toby. My latch-string is always out to my chums. I see you managed to pick up Steve on the way across; but I wager you had really to pry him loose from that dandy new volume on travel he was telling me about, because he's such a bookworm." ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... discipline in abundance, but love and sympathy had been denied. Unconsciously his heart had become chilled, benumbed and overshadowed by his intellect. The actual world gave him little and seemed to promise less, and, as a result not at all unnatural, he became something of a recluse and bookworm even before he had left behind him the years ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... one generation only. Where it is possible, he is to be an eye-witness of what he writes of; where that is out of his power he is to test all traditions and stories carefully and not to be ready to accept what is plausible in place of what is true. He is to be no bookworm living aloof from the experiences of the world in the artificial isolation of a university town, but a politician, a soldier, and a traveller, a man not merely of thought but of action, one who can do great things as ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... books and colleges refines, yet it is often but an ethical culture, and is gained at the cost of vigor and rugged strength. Book culture alone tends to paralyze the practical faculties. The bookworm loses his individuality; his head is filled with theories and saturated with other men's thoughts. The stamina of the vigorous mind he brought from the farm has evaporated in college; and when he graduates, he is astonished ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... son, that Mr. Algernon seldom went a mile beyond the precincts of the park. His hours, consequently, must be loitered away in some dwelling near at hand. Algernon was not a young man of sentimental habits. He was neither poet nor bookworm, and it was very improbable that he would fast all day under the shade of forest boughs, watching, like the melancholy Jacques, the deer come down to the ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... one sits bewildered among words, the other walks enlightened among things; the one has not even the shadow, the other more than the substance—the very essence and life of knowledge; and at twelve years old he may be a better naturalist than ever the mere bookworm will be, were he to ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... bookworm work, but the giving the subtle power of observation, the faculty of seeing, the eye and mind to catch hidden truths and new creative genius. If the cursed rule-mongering and technical terms could be banished to limbo, something might ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... want you to be like your father. To tell the truth, a bookworm such as he is is one of the most irritating persons in existence. But there! What am I saying? I oughtn't to speak against him in your presence. And your poor mother loved him, oh, so much! Now then, dear, to return to yourself and your sisters. I presume ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... enough, to please your poor mother, to let you be schooled for a bookworm, and a man of law and quips and quiddities, always ready to enter into an argument with me, and prove that black's white and white's no colour, as they say. Hark ye, sir, if it was not too late I'd get Jack Lawrence to take you to sea ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... thin, long beard was also grizzled. He spoke in a gentle, kindly voice, with little Southern gestures. He was clad in a great Italian cloak and a big, slouchy hat, which between them, almost served to extinguish the bookworm. ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... to her own books. Mercy was a bookworm—nor did she like being asked questions about her studies. Those first few weeks Ann Hicks's recitations did not ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... a year younger than myself: she was in truth a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass, and unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and bookworm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys. How she caught the contagion I cannot tell; I never expressly said I loved her: indeed I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... industry alone. Keep good company, my boy. Keep good hours. Never forget that a gentleman must look like a gentleman, dress like a gentleman, frequent the society of gentlemen. To be a mere bookworm is to be a drone in the great hive. I hate a drone—as I hate ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... An active politician who wishes to impress his doctrines upon his countrymen, should have a kind of knowledge to which I can make no pretension. I share the ordinary feelings of awful reverence with which the human bookworm looks up to the man of business. He has faculties which in me are rudimentary, but which I can appreciate by their contrast to my own feebleness. The "knowledge of the world" ascribed to lawyers, to politicians, financiers, and such persons, ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Referring to BOOKWORM's note at p. 29, I beg to observe that the dedication negativing Bodenham's authorship of Politeuphuia is not peculiar to the edition of 1597. I have the edition of 1650, "printed by Ja. Flesher, and are to be sold by Richard ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... boys but early found their conclusions and discussions primitive. He became an ardent bookworm, reading incessantly or rather at such times when his parents permitted, for they were simple folk who were rather alarmed at their boy's interests and zeal. No noticeable difference from other boys was noted aside from precocity in study, yet even at the age of ten ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... soundness of his mind. The most charitable said, "He is an oddity." This eccentric man had naturally no great fondness for M. Seneschal, the mayor, a former lawyer, and a legitimist. He did not think much of the commonwealth attorney, a useless bookworm. But he detested M. Galpin. Still he bowed to the three men; and, without minding his ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... friends. A fine Chickering piano arrived between Christmas and New Year's day, and was set up in the space left for it between the bookshelves. Books continued to flow in; books of all sorts—science and art, history and biography, poetry and general literature. And Lois would have developed into a bookworm, had not the piano exercised an almost equal charm upon her. Listening to Mrs. Barclay's music at first was an absorbing pleasure; then Mrs. Barclay asked casually one day "Shall I ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... Bookworm you are growing!—no good!—come out!" cried King Corny. "Lay down whatever you have in your hand, and come off this minute, till I show you a badger at bay, with ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... seem blunt in comparison. No respecters of persons, they harried the rich and taunted the powerful, and would have as soon jailed a bishop or a judge as a pickpocket if he deserved it. Between them they knew more kinds of law than most of their professional brethren, and as Mr. Tutt was a bookworm and a seeker after legal and other lore their dusty old library was full of hidden treasures, which on frequent occasions were unearthed to entertain the jury or delight the bench. They were loyal friends, fearsome enemies, high chargers, and maintained their ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... different from what they are now. Therefore, the contention that the administration will be changed overnight for the better after a change in the form of the State is, if not a wicked untruth to deceive the common people, the ridiculous absurdity of a bookworm. Thus the theory that a constitutional monarchy will immediately follow, if the President consents to become ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... to put away the linen and then she went upstairs to her room. She felt easier in her mind and taking her seat on a cane couch by the window she fell into a book. The History of the Civil War. This bookworm had always one sure ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... unvisited. I have seen many old libraries, the doors of which remained unopened from week's end to week's end; where you inhaled the dust of paper-decay with every breath, and could not take up a book without sneezing; where old boxes, full of older literature, served as preserves for the bookworm, without even an autumn "battue" to thin the breed. Occasionally these libraries were (I speak of thirty years ago) put even to vile uses, such as would have shocked all ideas of propriety could our ancestors have foreseen ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... told,' said he, 'that you were a perfect bookworm, Miss Grey: so completely absorbed in your studies that you were lost ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... rare old editions, books he has longed to look upon and never seen before, rarities, precious old volumes, incunabula, cradle-books, printed while the art was in its infancy,—its glorious infancy, for it was born a giant. The old bookworm is so intoxicated with the sight and handling of the priceless treasures that he cannot bear to put one of the volumes back after he has taken it from the shelf. So there he stands,—one book open in his hands, a volume under each ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... accessibility of person. From him I learned to acquiesce in every fortune, to exercise foresight in public affairs, to rise superior to vulgar praises, to serve mankind without ambition, to be sober and steadfast, to be content with little, to be practical and active, to be no dreamy bookworm, to be temperate, modest in dress, and not to be led away by novelties." What a picture of an emperor! What a contrast to such ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... grand occasions. Hope you like it. Now I'll tell you who these chaps are, and then we shall be all right. This big one is Prince Charlie, Aunt Clara's boy. She has but one, so he is an extra good one. This old fellow is Mac, the bookworm, called Worm for short. This sweet creature is Steve the Dandy. Look at his gloves and top-knot, if you please. They are Aunt Jane's lads, and a precious pair you'd better believe. These are the Brats, my brothers, Geordie and Will, and Jamie the ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... philologer[obs3]; lexicographer, glossographer; grammarian; litterateur[Fr], literati, dilettanti, illuminati, cogniscenti[It]; fellow, Hebraist, lexicologist, mullah, munshi[obs3], Sanskritish; sinologist, sinologue[obs3]; Mezzofanti[obs3], admirable Crichton, Mecaenas. bookworm, helluo librorum[Lat]; bibliophile, bibliomaniac[obs3]; bluestocking, bas-bleu[Fr]; bigwig, learned Theban, don; Artium Baccalaureus[Lat][obs3], Artium Magister[Lat]. learned man, literary man; homo multarum literarum[Lat]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... transplanting of Martin Cortright from his city haunts. At Meadow's End, though he works in the garden in a dilettante sort of way with Lavinia, takes long walks with father, and occasionally ventures out for a day's fishing with either or both of my men, he is still the bookworm who dives into his library upon every opportunity and has never yet adapted his spine comfortably to the curves of a hammock! In short he seems to love flowers historically—more for the sake of those in the past who have loved ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... a strange mixture of tomboy and bookworm, which was a mercifully kind arrangement for both body and mind. The spiritual side of her was groping and staggering and feeling its way about as does that of any little girl whose mind is exceptionally active, and whose mother is unusually busy. It was on the Day of Atonement, known ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... had read and thought more than many youths of twenty. Gibbon's "Rome," Hume's "England," Sears's "History of the World," besides several books on chemistry,—a subject in which he was even then deeply interested,—were familiar friends. Yet he was not, by any means, a serious bookworm. On the contrary, he was as full of fun and mischief as any healthy boy of ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... never since been the man I was before I left England. The stage I had then reached was the result of a slow and elaborate building up; I could look back and see the processes by which I had grown from the boy who was a mere bookworm to the man who had all but succeeded as a novelist. It was a perfectly natural, sober development. But in the last two years and a half I can distinguish no order. In living through it, I have imagined from time to time that my powers were coming ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... had many times been her guest at the lodge; and she, though so small and feeble herself, loved to see tall and stalwart men, so that she had given him the name of "the little dry Bookworm," hardly accounting him a man at all. When she heard of his newly-gained wealth, she said: "If instead of being the richer by these thousands he could but be the same number of years younger, lift a hundredweight ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... signature or note accompanies an item worth only so much per lb., and your connoisseur in the autograph surrenders all but his portion to its destiny. Who can gainsay him? He shrugs his shoulders; he is no bookworm; he ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... Association would applaud, and would send their checks to the campaign fund of this friend of the common man. Mr. Burchard's deputy, Mr. Stannard, was a legal fox who told his chief what to do and how to do it; a dried-up little man who looked like a bookworm, and sat boring you thru with his keen eyes, watching for your weak points and preparing to pierce you thru with one of his legal rapiers. He would be quite friendly about it—he would joke with you in the noon hour, assuming that you would of course ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... though the heavens rehearsed for a flood! Let a tempest come out of the west! Let the chimney roar as it were a lion! And if there must be a clearing, let it hold off until the late afternoon, lest it sow too early a distaste for indoors and reading! There is scarcely a bookworm who will not slip his glasses off his nose, if the clouds break at the hour of sunset when the earth and sky are filled with a green and golden light. I took the book off the library shelf and timidly glancing across my shoulder ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... family coming down in a crash presently, through a fatal neglect of the basement. In such a view, an American Indian or a Kaffir warrior may be a wholesome object, good for something already, and for much more when he gets a brain built on. But when one sees a bookworm in his library, an anxious merchant-prince in his counting-room, tottering feebly about, his thin underpinning scarcely able to support what he has already crammed into that heavy brain of his, and he still piling in more,—one feels disposed ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... of an English abbe when I was at school at Hereford. This was Dr Duthoit, Prebendary of Consumpta per Sabulum in Hereford Cathedral, Rector of St Owen's, bookworm and, chiefly, rose-grower. He was a middle-aged man when I was a little boy, but he suffered me to walk with him in his garden sloping down to the Wye, near a pleasaunce of the Vicars Choral, reciting sometimes the poems of Traherne, which he had ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... "He's no bookworm, for he seemeth Much too martial—nor a soldier Either, as he looks too modest; He may be a necromancer, An adept in all dark witchcraft, Alchemy, and other black arts. Wait, I'll catch thee;" and he turned their Talk to hidden buried ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... half muttered half said Alexius, but so low as to hide his meaning from the officers of the wardrobe, who entered to do their office,—"thus, then, this bookworm—this remnant of old heathen philosophy, who hardly believes, so God save me, the truth of the Christian creed, has topp'd his part so well that he forces his Emperor to dissemble in his presence. Beginning ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... of the late Hezekiah Howe, one of the best in New England, and particularly rich in those rare and costly works which form a bookworm's delight, was one of Percival's best-loved lounging-places. He bought freely, and, when he could not buy, he was welcome to peruse: He read with marvellous rapidity, skipping as if by instinct everything that was unimportant; avoiding the rhetoric, the commonplaces, the falsities; glancing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... childhood, not without its redeeming features. Left to himself, seeing his brothers and sisters die around him, expecting soon to follow them, the boy grew up stern, hardy, and self-reliant. He was by no means a bookworm. He had learned to ride in the best mode, by falling off, and had acquired a passion for fishing which lasted as long as his life. There were few better yachtsmen in England than Froude, and he could manage a boat as well as any sailor in his native county. His religious education, as ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... I went through all in your library—at the time, and came out at the other side not much the wiser. I was a bookworm then, but when I came to know it, I woke among the butterflies. To be sure I have given up reading for a good many years—ever since I was made sexton.—There! I smell Grieg's Wedding March in the ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... just now for anything outside of their final examinations. Many papers had to be prepared, and poor Tom often wondered how he would ever get through with any satisfaction, either to himself or his instructors. With Sam, the task seemed much easier, for, as Dick had once declared, Sam was "a regular bookworm," and no studies seemed to worry ...
— The Rover Boys in Business • Arthur M. Winfield
... a bookworm, like his son, rather than a tradesman. He knew and loved his books, but he made little money by them. A student himself, he was proud of his studious boy, and wanted to send him to college. But he was miserably poor and could not afford it. A well-off friend, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... and my little sister is entirely and overwhelmingly happy, for he is literally her Prince. Physically he is much improved; has developed surprisingly, but has the shy, taciturn manner of a student, and is, I fear, a hopeless bookworm." ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... distinguish between becoming a bookworm and talking seriously once in a way, there is no more to be said! I'm sorry I spoke. Now I suppose you will be offended with me, and ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... treasured and why the people gaze at it: 'Relic from the Hawthorne Cottage.' The Hawthorne Cottage stood half a mile out of Stockbridge on the road to Lenox. It was burned two months ago. It was a little red story-and-a-half house on a lonely farm, and an old farmer, himself somewhat of a bookworm, dwelt in it with his family at the time it mysteriously took fire. The cottage was a landmark, because Nathaniel Hawthorne dwelt therein in 1850 and 1851 for a year and a half. A great many people go out to see the ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... he began to read at all, an instinctive attraction towards books, and a love for and interest in even the material form of knowledge,—the plates, the print, the binding of the Doctor's volumes, and even in a bookworm which he once found in an old volume, where it had eaten a circular furrow. But the little boy had too quick a spirit of life to be in danger of becoming a bookworm himself. He had this side of the intellect, but his impulse ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bookworm and not at all practical. If his horse got out and was put in with other strays, he could never tell it, but had to wait until everyone took theirs and then he would take what ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... some dating back to 1681 and 1702, and methinks I can see Lovecraft poring over these time-stained bits o' bookish lore as the monks of old followed the printed lines with quivering fingers in the taper's uncertain, flickering light. For Lovecraft appeals to me as a bookworm—one of those lovable mortals whose very existence seems to hang on the numbered pages ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... works. They may find enough of it, and to spare also, in Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy.' He, like Knox, and many another scholar of the 16th and of the first half of the 17th century, was unable to free his brain altogether from the idola specus which haunted the cell of the bookworm. The poor student, knowing nothing of women, save from books or from contact with the most debased, repeated, with the pruriency of a boy, the falsehoods about women which, armed with the authority of learned doctors, had grown reverend and incontestable with age; and even after the Reformation ...
— Women and Politics • Charles Kingsley
... Rome as dearer than life.'' Thenceforth he steered clear of theological polemics. He devoted himself to persistent reading and study, combined with congenial society. With all his capacity for study he was a man of the world, and a man of affairs, not a bookworm. Little indeed came from his pen, his only notable publications being a masterly essay in the Quarterly Review of January 1878 on "Democracy in Europe''; two lectures delivered at Bridgnorth in 1877 on "The ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Dent engaged, Dent to be married in the autumn—why, Rowan, am I dreaming, am I in my senses? And to this girl! She has entrapped him—poor, innocent, unsuspecting Dent! My poor, little, short-sighted bookworm." Tears sprang to her eyes, but she laughed also. She had a mother's hope that this trouble would turn to comedy. She went on quickly: "Did you know anything about this? Has he ever spoken to you ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... found in our busy land) crooning over a strange black-letter folio, and laughing to himself with a sort of invisible chuckle. The unseen in that volume was revealed to us through that laugh of the old bookworm, and quite unseen we partook of his amusement. Another alcove was vacant; a crabbed manuscript, just laid down by the writer, was on the desk. He was invisible; but the watchful guardian at the head of the room saw us peering in, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... sir," prompted the younger. "The mob, meanwhile, just stood there, dumb,—mutes and audience, you know. All at once, the hindmost began squalling 'Foreign Dog,' 'Goat Man.' We stepped outside, and there, passing, if you like, was that gentle bookworm, ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... a grave professor will then waste his midnight oil, or worry his brain through a long morning, endeavouring to restore the pure text, or illustrate the biographical hints of "Come, tell me, says Rosa, as kissing and kissed;" and how many an arid old bookworm, like the worthy little parson, will give up in despair, after vainly striving to fill up some fatal hiatus in ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... realm of learning, as well as a figure in society. You were the beautiful wife of tutor Hilsenhoff, the buxom girl with the form of a Venus and the passion of that goddess as well, tied to a thin, pallid bookworm ten years your senior, neglecting his pouting wife with blood full of fire for the pages of the literature of Hindoostan, prating of the loves of Ganesha and Vishnu, when a goddess awaited his own neglectful arms. So when on the day when he stepped into the box, leaving us the sole repository of ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... human abodes that no one can complain of it as a nuisance. Since the disappearance of my valet I have been travelling in my own yacht. I reached England the day before the trial. 'No. I never read the newspapers. Thank goodness I am no bookworm.' ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... Helen; a "musty library, who loved Greek and Latin;" but cousin Helen loved the bookworm, and taught him how to love far better than Ovid could with his Art of Love. Having so good a teacher, Modus became an apt scholar, and eloped with Cousin ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... read well and wisely, the girl should not turn into a bookworm. Unless our reading fits us for better thought and better action, we should examine into what we are reading and change it for something better. Reading should never be a hindrance to work, but a help. Nor should we put reading in ...
— The Canadian Girl at Work - A Book of Vocational Guidance • Marjory MacMurchy
... I'm a Mexican," continued the man in his mellow, pleasant voice, "but I'm not. I'm a Texan—by the way of Maine. As I told you, I live in the next tomb, the one on the right. I'm a watch, clock and tool maker by trade and a bookworm by taste. Because of the former I've come into your cell, and because of the latter I use the ornate language that you hear. But of both those subjects more further on. Meanwhile, I suppose it's you who have been yelling in here at the top of your voice and disturbing ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... noticed a shop in Zhitnaia Street kept by an old man named Asiev? Once that man had ten sons. Six of them, however, died in infancy. Of the remainder the eldest, a fine singer, was at once extravagant and a bookworm; wherefore, whilst an officer's servant at Tashkend, he cut the throats of his master and mistress, and for doing so was executed by shooting. As a matter of fact, the tale has it that he had been making love to his mistress, and then been thrown ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky |
