"Masculinity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in love yet? Carol, dear, I always understood that when folks get married they lose their sentimentality. Are you the proving exception? My acquaintance with Chicago masculinity is confined to the office, the Methodist Church, and the boarding-house. The office force is all married but the office boy. The Methodist congregation is composed of women, callow youths and bald heads of families. Women are counted out, of necessity. I am beyond callow youths, ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... off by the gross, she conceals some of her most unmodified characters; and the dark-eyed, demonstrative, rebellious girl may after all turn out to be a passive being compared with this pink-and-white bit of masculinity with the indeterminate features. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... that she had grown a bit passee; but this was refuted by the interviewers who had met her on her return and had duly chronicled that she looked "as rosy and youthful as ever." Brokers, gilded youth, all that curious lot of masculinity classified under the general head of "men about town," crowded into the theatre that night, and when, after being heralded at length by the chorus, the returned prima donna appeared, in shining drab tights, she had ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the church or the school is to reach the boy it will have to recognize and perform its task very largely beyond the traditional limits of the institution as such, and with a heartiness and masculinity which are now often absent. In this field the indirect and extra-ecclesiastical work of the minister will be his best work, and the time that the teacher spends with his pupils outside the schoolhouse may have more educational value than that spent within. ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... It's because, Miss Roberta, beneath your cynicism and your assumption of masculinity, you are as sympathetic as a young mother. It would be mean to put over anything like that, and you ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... deep-chested, legs cleanly built and stretched wide apart, and tall though Imber was, he towered above him by half a head. His eyes were cool, and gray, and steady, and he carried himself with the peculiar confidence of power that is bred of blood and tradition. His splendid masculinity was emphasized by his excessive boyishness,—he was a mere lad,—and his smooth cheek promised a blush as willingly as the ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... beside him breathless. I felt taller, stronger, than ever before. By contrast with our masculinity Mrs. Handsomebody seemed a rather pitiful ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... introduce a certain hardness, or masculinity, into the cultured life of the country which gave an opportunity for escape from the querulousness and the vagueness which had become poetic habits among English poets and lovers of poetry. I say the "Kipling epoch," for Mr. Kipling himself never had the self-discipline, perhaps ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... in every way a sympathetic and entertaining companion. Going deeper, to the roots of human instinct, I find she represents to me—so chance has willed it—the ewige weibliche which must complement masculinity in order to produce normal existence. But as for the "zieht uns hinan"—no. It would not attract me hence—out of my sphere. I could commit an immortal folly for no woman who ever made this planet more lustrous ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... were a prey to the most thrilling terrors. You were a moving picture of tender masculinity in distress. You let bashfulness like a worm i' th' bud prey upon your damask cheek. Have you a damask cheek? Stand out! I wish to consider you impartially. YOU needn't ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... really handsome face, almost beardless. I regarded it closely. A face that would have been beautiful without its masculine touch of heavy black brows and firmly set jaw. His voice as he spoke was low and soft; but at the end, with the concluding words, "I am innocent!" it flashed into strong masculinity. His eyes, shaded with long girlish black lashes, by chance met mine. "I am innocent." His curving sensuous lips drew ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... mere masculinity had failed to impress her, I resorted to subtler measures, and kneeling among the small spring flowers which powdered the lower terrace, I began laboriously erecting a palace ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... of my ray tube as it shone upon her earnest face, I could remark other changes. Glutz, the little beauty specialist, was in this secret. With plastic skill he had altered the set of her jaw with his wax—put masculinity there. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... watching his secretary's regular features as the brown man pursued his work with a trained intentness. The old gentleman derived a deep pleasure from such long scrutinies. It pleased him to imagine that, when he was young, he had possessed the same vigor, the same masculinity, the same capacity for persistent labor. Indeed, all old gentlemen are prone to choose the most personable and virile young man they can find for themselves ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... with a bit of a conscious air, yet with that grace which long use and habit lend; with piquancy, too, for she was the least masculine of girls in mind and manner, and her delicate face with its golden curls bloomed like a flower on a strange stalk, above the assertive masculinity of her attire. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... him to approach she studied him with interest. He had changed much since his landing on Kon Klayu. Under the rigors of hardship, of physical labor, of abstinence, he had developed a clean-cut masculinity that was strangely reassuring. She remembered how unconsciously, during these past weeks, she had turned to him for the steadiness which others had lacked; how instinctively she had counted on him for a perception of the little things, ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... had been threatened in one or two feuds,—it was said, not without cause,—and it is possible that the pathetic spectacle of her father doing his visiting with a shotgun may have touched her closely and somewhat prejudiced her against the neighboring masculinity. The thought that cattle, horses, and "quarter section" would one day be hers did not disturb her calm. As for Mr. Clay, he accepted her as housewifely, though somewhat "interfering," and, being one of "his own womankind," therefore not ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... objections which have been raised to Miss Anglin's assumption of the masculine garments without any attempt at counterfeiting masculinity, I would ask my reader, if she be a woman, what she would do if she found it necessary to wear men's clothes. If she were not an actress she would undoubtedly behave much as she did in women's, suppressing ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... this peculiar boy who chose to remain at home while the men went out to slay, as the mere translation into masculinity of his mother, and of her mothers, of all the converging processions of forest women, who had passed from one to another the secret of their mysticism, coloring it many ways in the dark vessels of their suppressed ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... it frightened her, she was vaguely stirred with pride in him. His masculinity, the masculinity of the fighting male, made its inevitable appeal to her, a female, moulded by all her heredity to seek out the strong man for mate, and to lean against the wall of his strength. She ...
— The Game • Jack London
... girl, having been educated in schools and colleges with boys, naturally acts more freely than her sisters in other countries, where great restraint is imposed upon them. Her actions may be considered as perilously near to the border of masculinity, yet she is as far from either coarseness or low thoughts as is the North from the South Pole. The Chinese lady is as pure as her American sister, but she is brought up in a different way; her exclusion keeps ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... girls who ride straight and don't know what it is to have a headache, very often takes the form of boyishness. Let us console ourselves with the fact that, being perfectly natural, Jane has escaped masculinity.' ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... spent in exclusively masculine surroundings, believed his tastes to be domestic. Not that he had ever pushed this belief beyond the theoretical stage; nor would he have exchanged places with any of his confreres who had taken wives. But he railed inwardly at the intense masculinity of his life, for the same reason that the sailorman curses the sea and the plainsman the plains. Just as the tragedian is certain in his inmost soul that his proper role is light comedy, while the popular comedian is equally positive that he ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... by the bleak upward-pointing nose of William Pitt the younger—the rigid symbol of an indomitable hauteur. With Lady Hester Stanhope came the final stage. The nose, still with an upward tilt in it, had lost its masculinity; the hard bones of the uncle and the grandfather had disappeared. Lady Hester's was a nose of wild ambitions, of pride grown fantastical, a nose that scorned the earth, shooting off, one fancies, towards some eternally eccentric heaven. It was ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... the greatest of them suffer from this garrulous, gesticulating inefficacy. It runs abroad in Wuthering Heights and Aurora Leigh and Sonnets from the Portuguese. And George Eliot, for all her spurious masculinity, is as the rest. You may trace the disease in her ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... men. Even coarse and inconsiderate men are restrained from it by the fact that the sympathy of the woman turns naturally to the victim of physical brutality and against the bully, the Thackerayan notion to the contrary being one of the illusions of literary masculinity. Besides, the husband is not necessarily the stronger man: an appeal to force has resulted in the ignominious defeat of the husband quite as often as in poetic justice as conceived in the conventional novelet. What ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... force, had the artistic temperament. The harmony of outline, the justness of proportion in both the face and figure of the man before him, filled the Irishman with delight; and the splendid virile bulk of the mountain-man appealed irresistibly to the other's masculinity. The little threads of silver in the tempestuous black curls seemed to Kerry but to ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... Dorrance had travelled with the Ridgeley family for three weeks in October, and that he had now been domesticated at the homestead for ten days. Mrs. Aylett's show of fondness for him was laughable, considering what an uninteresting specimen of masculinity he was; but the handsome dame was too worldly-wise, too sage a judge of quid pro quo, to entice him to waste so much of the time he was addicted to announcing was money to him, for the sake of a good so intangible as ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... had ever put her chin up to his as she did, nor with a glance expressed so unreserved a surrender to his masculinity. ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... stronger fibre than she of Devon; more masculinity, ay, even more principle, characterized her. Thrift was a visible virtue, in contrast to Georgiana's improvidence. Command, rather than cajolery, was her political method. Her later life was devoted to securing sons-in-law; three dukes, a marquis, and a knight were of her garnering. She ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... subservience, floated on that ghastly coquetry like a shifting cargo that in the first gale will capsize the ship; she felt her very temples throb, and almost thought they must be heard, in her fierce detestation of all the masculinity of men and most of all—yes, with a flash of eye she could not stay and hoped that he ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... West a "real scout." It is a mere truism to say that his personality had conquered the West, as it had won for him affection everywhere. His straightforward masculinity and his entire lack of side, his cheerfulness and his keenness, his freedom from "frills," as one man put it, had made him the friend of everybody. I heard practically the same expressions of real affection from all grades, ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... in the poem fears. The foreboding itself seems to belong to a barbaric society in which there is a more animal division of the sexes, in which the male fears to become effeminate if he does not insist upon his masculinity even to his mother. But this Frenchman has left barbarism so far behind that he is not afraid of effeminacy; nor does he need to remind himself that he is a male. There is a philosophy to which this forgetfulness of masculinity ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... poems," resumed Halliday, "he is the most virile of the present-day poets. Kipling is virile, but he gives you the man in hot blood with the brute in him to the fore; but the strong masculinity of Henley is essentially intellectual. It is the ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... Gold] and [Symbol: Silver], the male and female seed, the dust of the Adamah from Schamajim, and therefore had the power to multiply himself magically (just as he was celestial) which could not indeed have been otherwise, unless the essential masculinity and femininity were dissociated." I am reminded in this connection that Mercury is also bisexual; the "materia" must be brought into the androgynic state "rebis." The idea of hermaphroditism plays a well known, important part in ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... the voice of Mrs Olliver, a rough-cut Irishwoman, whose short reddish curls, and masculinity of speech and manner, cloaked the woman's heart that glowed deep down in her,—a jewel crusted with common clay. Beside her stood Max Richardson, and Colonel Meredith—a big, broad-shouldered man, extraordinarily ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver |
