"Simper" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... He never essayed flattering or even admiring remarks. He said queer things at which one often could not help but laugh, but he somehow wore no air of saying them with the intention of offering them as witticisms which might be regarded as allurements. He did not ogle, he did not simper or shuffle about nervously and turn red or pale, as eager and awkward youths have a habit of doing under the stress of unrequited admiration. In the presence of a certain slightingness of treatment, which he at the outset met with not infrequently, ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... their wives and daughters, wits of both sexes, women of the most exclusive ton, thronged the spacious salons. Each in their turn was greeted with a smirk of ecstatic glee. To Gripstone the courtesy seemed invested with a proprietary interest. A nod was receipted with a simper, a grasp of the hand with a scrape, the most distant recognition by the most obsequious acknowledgment. There appeared to be no doubt in his mind it was all bought and paid for, but it did no harm to be polite for once; and ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... Rose water, or more, make your Syrupe first, and let it stand till it be cold, then take your Rose leaves, having first clipt off all the white, put them into the cold Syrupe, then cover them, and set them on a soft fire, that they may but simper for two or three hours, then while they are hot put them into pots or glasses for ...
— A Book of Fruits and Flowers • Anonymous
... was requested, adding an unnecessary compliment on the good looks of the portress, to which she responded by a simper of gratified vanity—thereby showing that neither belonged to the wisest class of mankind—and he was ushered upstairs, into a small but pleasant parlour, where three gentlemen sat conversing. A decanter stood on the table, half full of wine, and ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... had taken alarm, but the rangers herded them back with persuasive playfulness, while the little Weasel made the rounds, talking cheerfully all the time, and Mount, great fists dangling, minced round and round, with a huge simper on his countenance, as though shyly ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... with more than common fidelity, in his task. Being addressed, he glanced up, but with what seemed a furtive, diffident air, which sat strangely enough on his weather-beaten visage, much as if a grizzly bear, instead of growling and biting, should simper and cast sheep's eyes. He was asked several questions concerning the voyage—questions purposely referring to several particulars in Don Benito's narrative, not previously corroborated by those impulsive cries greeting the visitor on first coming on board. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... the first lesson she drew a fairly clever cartoon of Johnny in an airplane, ascending to the star Venus. She made it appear that Johnny's hair stood straight on end and his eyes goggled with fear, and she made Venus a long-nosed, skinny, old-maid face with a wide, welcoming simper. Up in a corner she placed the moon, with one eye closed and ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... Simper James, Leave the fair Killie dames, There's a holier chase in your view; I'll lay on your head That the pack ye'll soon lead. For puppies ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... a feast, is it not, Mr. Sykes?" he said; and Mr. Sykes assented, and then sat and watched Joe Scott remove the bottle at a sign from Helstone, with a self-satisfied simper on his lips and a regretful glisten in his eye. Moore looked as if he should have liked to fool him to the top of his bent. What would a certain young kinswoman of his have said could she have seen her dear, good, great Robert—her Coriolanus—just now? Would she have acknowledged in that ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... breadth of a hair divided them from the peasantry. The measure of their sense is this: that these symposia of rustic vanity were kept entirely within the family, like some secret ancestral practice. To the world their serious faces were never deformed by the suspicion of any simper of self-contentment. Yet it was known. "They hae a guid pride o' themsel's!" was the word ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... having a thousand arrangements to make, the Squire intending to keep open house on the occasion; and as to the house-maids, you cannot look one of them in the face, but the rogue begins to colour up and simper. ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... Chia Jui ventured with a simper, "and wouldn't it be well if I came every day to dispel your ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... flatter myself that in my time I have had the happiness of not being unpleasing to the sex,' said Delaford, with a sigh and a simper. ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... are two things that go to make up the man, a body and a soul, and the soul besides hath the perogative of governing—that the body should have its peculiar, natural, and proper good, and the soul none at all, but must sit gazing at the body and simper at its passions, as if she were pleased and affected with them, though indeed she be all the while wholly untouched and unconcerned, as having nothing of her own to choose, desire, or take delight in? ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... to simper again). And she behaved awfully well. She quite saw that it was because the boat was late. I suppose the glamour to a girl in service of a man in ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie
... him! We couldn't be married then, but now if anybody would take a little trouble! I told him Mr Wentworth would, if I was to ask him; but then I thought perhaps as Mr Wentworth mightn't like to be the one as married me," said Rosa, with a momentary gleam of vanity through her tears. The little simper with which the girl spoke, the coquettish looks askance at the Perpetual Curate, who stood grave and unmoved at a distance, the movement of unconscious self-deception and girlish vanity which for a moment distracted Rosa, had a great ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... a simper. "Yes, she really is a naughty little thing, and I cannot say I shall be sorry when she is gone. My small son is at such ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... youngest Miss Talbot-Lowry, and half the twins, a slight change fell upon Mr. Coppinger's voluble guests. A stiffening faint, almost imperceptible, yet electric, enforced the circle round Larry. Even Mrs. Whelply's confluent simper, that suggested an incessant dripping from the tap of loving kindness, failed a little. A young Mr. Coppinger was a simple affair, but a Miss Talbot-Lowry, however young, might ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... half a hundred pictures. Not that Restoration levity and Restoration manners were chargeable to Miss Priscilla. She never forgot her parentage; but there were the same kind of prettiness, the same sideways look, the same simper about the lips, and there were the same flat unilluminated eyes. She had darkish brown hair, which fell in rather formal curls on her shoulder, and she was commonly thought to be "delicate." Like her sister and brother, she had never been to school, ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... lip, you would have liked to shrink to the size of a mouse. Godmother, it was true, was not afraid of her; but Cousin Grace was hushed at last and as for Laura herself, she consciously wore a fixed little simper, which was meant to put it beyond doubt that butter would ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... You have a singularly fine & aristocratic disrespect for homely & unpretending English. Every time I use "go back" you get out your polisher & slick it up to "return." "Return" is suited only to the drawing-room—it is ducal, & says itself with a simper & ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... put a mask upon your mind, and preserve that unstained in an atmosphere of corruption? Indeed, your ladyship does not know what you are asking for. To sit and simper through a comedy in which the filthiest subjects are discussed in the vilest language; to see all that is foolish or lascivious in your own sex exaggerated with a malignant licence, which makes a young and beautiful woman an epitome of all the vices, uniting the extreme ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... of speeches, in which fashion and the main chance were blended together, and after a kiss, which was like the contact of an oyster—Mrs. Frederick Bullock would gather her starched nurslings and simper back into her carriage. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... smile. No one must know her heart was broken, for fear the question might arise, "What broke it?" Of course her smile was a make-believe, nothing more nor less than a simper. The large boy across the table looked at her in surprise. "Handsome as a picture," thought he, ...
— Prudy Keeping House • Sophie May
... Men! wiser Coxcombs. What, they wou'd have me train my Nephew up, a hopeful Youth, to keep a Merchant's Book, or send him to chop Logick in an University, and have him returned an arrant learned Ass, to simper, and look demure, and start at Oaths and Wenches, whilst I fell his Woods, and grant Leases: And lastly, to make good what I have cozen'd him of, force him to marry Mrs. Crump, the ill-favour'd Daughter of some Right Worshipful.—A Pox of all of ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... human nature, I see, my dear cousin;" said the hag, with a grin that tried to be a simper. "Such trifles as a little murder and witchcraft, poisoning and stealing, run in the blood even of the innocentest. Bawding was a thing in which I could never hit the mark. And what shall one say when one has to endure thanklessness and woe from one's own ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... turned her head with a vague simper. The old man, building a small heap of chips on the hearthstone, distended his cheeks and let out his breath slowly, as though coaxing ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... larger than the miserable, pinched-up woman of our day. Strength and beauty must go together. Don't you think these broad shoulders can bear burdens without breaking down, these hands work well, these eyes see clearly, and these lips do something besides simper ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... motion, I observed that she was contemplating me with a beaming simper of indescribable suavity, and though she was of an unornamental exterior and many years my superior, I constrained myself from motives of merest politeness to do some simperings in return, since only a churlish would grudge such an economical and ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... your favourite Sunday, to which you are so partial that you treat the other poor six days of the week as if they had no souls to be saved, should, if I could have my will, "shine no Sabbath-day for you." Now, don't simper, and look as innocent as if virtue would not melt in your mouth. Can you deny the following charges?—I lent you "The Botanic Garden," and you returned it without writing a syllable, or saying, -where you were or whither you was going; I suppose for fear I should know how to ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Fame's nothing—the market price of your marble scarecrow is the thing to look at. It took you six months to chisel it, and you can't sell it for a hundred dollars. No, sir! Show me fifty thousand dollars and you can have my daughter —otherwise she marries young Simper. You have just six months to raise the money ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... can withstand you," answered the dark one; his words made Folly simper, she knew not how to blush. "And if," continued Pride, "you succeed, you will make Nelly mortally offend both Duty and Affection; and to break with friends such as they are, will ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... my husband? He belongs to the Philadelphia Bettersons,—a very wealthy and influential family," said the woman with a simper. ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... struggling, with such good or bad success as was given them, to carry Christ's cross along their journey in this earth of ours, they set it by, pass it over, dismiss it out of history, with some poor common-place simper of sorrow or of scorn. It will not do. Mankind have not been so long on this planet altogether, that we can allow so large a chasm to be scooped out of their ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... she, with a simper and a flutter of importance, "to have your name called right out so in the pulpit? I declare, if it hadn't been for seeing the new minister, I wouldn't have come to meeting, I dreaded it so! Ain't he handsome? He's old, though—thirty-five! He's broken-hearted, too! Somebody died, ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... they were built for! Yes, another world it was, when these black ruins, white in their new mortar and fresh chiselling, first saw the sun as walls, long ago. Gauge not, with thy dilettante compasses, with that placid dilettante simper, the Heaven's-Watchtower of our Fathers, the fallen God's-Houses, the Golgotha ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... save solitude. I stood to-day before the mutilated fresco of Morone, my rapture of six years ago, and hated it with unreasoning hatred. The Madonna belied the wreath-supported inscription above her head, "Miseratrix virginum Regina nostri miserere," and greeted me with a pitiless simper. The unidentified martyr on the left stared straight in front of him with callous indifference, and St. Roch looked aggravatingly plump for all his ostentatious plague-spot. The picture was worse than meaningless. It was insulting. It drove me out of the Public ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... care; with her long speeches of prudery and virtue, and the modest reserve of young ladies, and a hundred other such saint-like terms, when all the time she is doing all she can to catch husbands for her three great gawky daughters, who in mamma's presence are all simplicity and simper—sweet girls just introduced; when I am very much mistaken if the youngest is not nearer thirty than twenty. And as for Lady St. Aubyn, you know very well, mamma, papa declared I should never go out with her again; it is just the same as if ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... his back to the light, stood in the embrasure of a window, deeply engaged in examining his features in a small hand-glass which he held daintily before him. The survey seemed to please monsieur, for he showed his teeth in a simper of satisfaction, and began to curl his black moustache between the forefinger and thumb of his disengaged hand. So engrossed was he that he never observed me coming up to him, and it was not until I was at his elbow that he suddenly ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... honey?" Hodges called out as he shambled to a halt before her. His coarse features writhed in a simper that intensified their ugliness. His coveting of this woman was suddenly magnified by sight of her loveliness, flawless in the brilliant light. The blood-shot eyes darted luxuriously over the curving graces beneath the scant ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... her, I could feel Blandina simper. But at that minute Josiah interrupted the dialogue by askin' where Samantha wuz, and I come forward and jined 'em. Blandina looked radiantly happy, and I motioned to Molly and Josiah to come on, I knowed they would rather ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... wasted; usually gossipped or lounged away; or spent in some other manner productive of no pleasure, and generally producing pain in the end. It is very becoming in all persons, and particularly in the young, to be civil, and even polite: but it becomes neither young nor old to have an everlasting simper on their faces, and their bodies sawing in an everlasting bow: and, how many youths have I seen who, if they had spent, in the learning of grammar, a tenth part of the time that they have consumed in earning merited contempt for their affected gentility, would have laid the ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... Rosalie could talk nothing but nonsense; so, everybody who conversed with her, talked nonsense, too, and paid her silly compliments, and made her believe that all she needed to make her quite an angel was a pair of wings; and then she would hold her pretty head on one side, and simper; and they would go away laughing in their sleeves, and saying, "What a vain little ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... Majesty will permit me,' he said, a malicious simper crossing his handsome face—I had often remarked his extreme dislike for Bruhl without understanding it—'I think I can furnish some evidence more to the point than that; to which M. de Bruhl has with so much fairness restricted himself.' ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... buy? Here's Mr. Hayley, Doctor Paley, Arthur Murphy, Tommy Durfey, Mrs. Trimmer's little Primer, Buckram binding, touch and try— Nothing bid—who'll buy, who'll buy? Here's Colley Cibber, Bruce the fibber, Plays of Cherry, ditto Merry, Tickle, Mickle, When I bow and when I wriggle, With a simper and a giggle, Ears regaling, bidders nailing, Ladies utter in a flutter— "Mister Smatter, how you chatter, Dear, how clever! well, I never Heard ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... red; mantelpiece, red, veined yellow, candelabra and clock ditto mounted on bronze, common and heavy in design,—Roman standards with Greek foliage! Above the clock is that inevitable good-natured lion which looks at you with a simper, the lion of ornamentation, with a big ball under his feet, symbol of the decorative lion, who passes his life holding a black ball,—exactly like a deputy of the Left. Perhaps it is meant as a constitutional myth. The face of the ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... at a similar entertainment and assert your delight at revamping the fatuous acquaintanceship. Her facetiousness is elephantine, but the relief of conversation is such that you laugh loudly at her witticisms and simper knowingly at her platitudes—both of which have now been current for ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... Virgins, and dress them like a burgomaster's wife by Cranach or Van Eyck. Give them all long twisted tails to their gowns, and proper angular draperies. Place all their heads on one side, with the eyes shut, and the proper solemn simper. At the back of the head, draw, and gild with gold-leaf, a halo or glory, of the exact shape of a cart-wheel: and you have the thing done. It is Catholic art tout crache, as Louis Philippe says. We have it still in England, handed down to us for ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... tells no lie about them. There is no use in their putting on airs; the make-believe gentleman and lady cannot look like the genuine article. Mediocrity shows itself for what it is worth, no matter what temporary name it may have acquired. Ill-temper cannot hide itself under the simper of assumed amiability. The querulousness of incompetent complaining natures confesses itself almost as much as in the tones of the voice. The anxiety which strives to smooth its forehead cannot get rid of the telltale furrow. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... as often. Nine-tenths of the actors have faces as fixed as the masks of the Greek chorus: they have the hero-mask with the protruding chin, the villain-frown, the comedian-grin, the fixed innocent-girl simper. These formulas have their place in the broad effects of Crowd Pictures and in comedies. Then there are sudden abandonments of the mask. Griffith's pupils, Henry Walthall and Blanche Sweet, seem to me to be the greatest people in the photoplays: ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay |
