"Toothless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... guess they just scraped acquaintance in the Alley after dinner, like they sometimes do. A man with eyelashes like his always speaks to any woman alone who isn't pockmarked and toothless. Two minutes after he's met a girl his voice takes on the 'cello note. I know his kind. Why, say, he even tried waving those eyelashes of his at me first time he turned in his key; and goodness knows I'm so homely that pretty soon I'll ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... art, no king, no priest, no God; While round the freezing founts of life in snarling ring, Crouch'd on the bareworn sod, Babbling about the unreturning spring, And whining for dead gods, who cannot save, The toothless systems shiver ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... For the edification of some of my readers as ignorant as I am myself upon ovine matters, I may mention that the above teeth are to be looked for in the lower jaw and not the upper, the front portion of which is toothless. The ewes, then, being one year old to start with, they will be eight years old at the end of seven years. I have only, however, given you so long a term that you may see what would be the result of putting out sheep on terms either for three, ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... and shaggy, or pale and bloated beast-men, or white-haired, toothless, blear-eyed satyrs grown venerable in vice. But beautiful, youthful profligates, limbed like the gods and fauns of the old Greek sculptors; soft of skin, golden of hair, with sleepy eyes like green jewels, soft persuasive voices with ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... many who thought it was especially appropriate for a prince who was more qualified for a college than a palace. Most of the chroniclers of the period gave an unfavorable picture of the new ruler, who was described as "thin and toothless," and as "lank in figure, low of stature, with a haggard face, a reserved look, and a quiet exterior." He was superior to his external aspect, for it may be truly said that although he had to deal with new conditions he evinced under critical ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... of the fireplace, in the horse-hair arm-chair where Mrs Verloc's mother was generally privileged to sit, Karl Yundt giggled grimly, with a faint black grimace of a toothless mouth. The terrorist, as he called himself, was old and bald, with a narrow, snow-white wisp of a goatee hanging limply from his chin. An extraordinary expression of underhand malevolence survived in his extinguished ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Pam's toothless gums grinned appreciation of the jest as he tottered from the room to take a chair for a rout ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... fish is toothless, the jaws resembling the beak of a turtle, and in some species both the upper and the lower jaws have medial sutures like those of a snake. Was there not a Roman statesman or warrior whose jaws were fitted with a consolidated ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... sombre leaves of the sacred olives almost hid the white low walls of the rambling buildings. On the fourth side, facing the sea, the dusty road wound east toward Megara. Here, by the gate, were gathered a rustic company: brown-faced village lads and lasses, toothless graybeards, cackling old wives. Above the barred gate swung a festoon of ivy, whilst from within the court came the squeaking of pipes, the tuning of citharas, and shouted orders—signs of a mighty bustling. Then even while the company grew, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... Secondly, we are always most zealous when Religion goes in his silver slippers; we love much to walk with him in the street, if the sun shines, and the people applaud him." What a fine grotesque, again, Bunyan gives us in toothless Giant Pope sitting in the mouth of the cave, and, though too feeble to follow Christian, calling out after him: "You will never mend till more of you be burnt." We do not read The Pilgrim's Progress, however, as a humorous book. Bunyan's pains ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... had a hectic flush; his heart was beating with the exhilaration of an old war-horse. Looking over Tom's shoulder, he squinted into the distance, his underlip quivering against his toothless gums. ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... little shrivelled beaming old woman, in a crumpled, shining, black satin gown. Her hair was scanty, showing a wide bald parting, and to hear in all the confusion she was obliged occasionally to cup one hand behind her ear, but her snapping eyes were as bright as a monkey's and her lips, over toothless gums, worked constantly with a rotary motion as she talked and laughed. On each side of her were grouped other old ladies—Mrs. Sark, Mrs. Mulkey, Mrs. Hansen, and Mrs. Mussoo—her friends since the days, fifty years before, when they had crossed the plains in hooded wagons, and fought ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... that this monstrous Nought had come to his kingdom and was opening a yawning mouth and toothless jaws to swallow its all down into the throat that it has not got—you, and me, and your young officer, with this splendid, recreant city and the sky and the earth. Wait, only wait! The glorious image of Serapis still stands radiant, but the cross ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... crafty-looking head, reminded him exactly of a long green grasshopper. Vuillet impressed him as a pale, slimy toad. He was more considerate for Roudier, a fat sheep, and for the commander, an old toothless mastiff. But the prodigious Granoux was a perpetual cause of astonishment to him. He spent a whole evening measuring this imbecile's facial angle. When he heard him mutter indistinct imprecations against those blood-suckers the Republicans, ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... up and feel the Presence there! Who knew what might have passed between the soul and God? It was safe to leave that little sinful soul with Him who had died to save. It was good to go out from there knowing that the pretty, sinful girl, the hardened, grizzled sot, the poor old toothless crone, the little hunchback newsboy who lay in the same row, were guarded alike and beloved by the same Presence ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... him. He had been tricked, foiled, and out-witted! The old Canterville look came into his eyes; he ground his toothless gums together; and, raising his withered hands high above his head, swore according to the picturesque phraseology of the antique school, that, when Chanticleer had sounded twice his merry horn, deeds of blood would be ...
— The Canterville Ghost • Oscar Wilde
... but there was still another. Olivier Delagarde had been unmasked, and the whole island had gone tracking him down. No aged toothless tiger was ever sported through the jungle by an army of shikarris with hungrier malice than was this broken traitor by the people he had betrayed. Ensued, therefore, a commingling of patriotism with lust of man-hunting and eager expectation of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... river, of certain peeled and scorched undulations. A sweet desolation, an everlasting peace, seemed to hang in the air. A very old man (a fragment, like the castle itself) emerged from some crumbling corner to do me the honors, - a very gentle, obsequious, tottering, toothless, grateful old man. He beguiled me into an ascent of the solitary tower, from which you may look down on the big sallow river and glance at diminished Tarascon, and the barefaced, bald-headed hills behind it. It may appear that I insist too much upon the nudity ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... street into what appeared to be a spacious court, but as the only light it received was from a blinking candle in the window of the conciergerie, I could not determine. After exchanging some cabalistic sentences with a toothless old woman, the proprietor of the candle, Afra turned to the right, and walking a few steps came to a door opening on a stairway, which we mounted. I can think of nothing black enough for comparison with the darkness surrounding us. At last a faint glimmer showed an old ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... toward the train, and then turned and sped up the lane to meet the new emergency. Jake and Hannah, their faces settled once more into their accustomed expressions of good-humored placidity, leaned from their windows and waved their hands. Hannah smiled a toothless but happy smile, and Jake's eyes beamed a great content as he sat back in his seat, and, holding the rattle between his teeth, fumbled happily for a match. He looked across at his wife, and their eyes met in a rapturous smile; for ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... at it; looked at it, counted it; and if she had not been so old, so infirm, so toothless, the smile that passed over her face ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... said I. "There are men to whom all women who are not seventy and toothless and rheumy at the eyes are beautiful. Pasquale has said the same to every woman he has met. He is a Lothario and a Don Juan and a Caligula and a Faublas ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... heavy can of soup for her, or joking with some of the old men.... "Now, uncle ... you ought to be at the war! What have they done, leaving you? So young and so vigorous! They'll take you yet!" and the old man, a toothless trembling creature, clutching his hunk of bread with shaking hands, would grin like the head of Death himself! How close to death they all seemed! How alive were my friends, strong in the sun, compassionate but also perhaps a little despising this poor gathering ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... were more indications of life, and the peasant stood up and made beseeching gestures. Soon a whole flock of miserable people had come out to the Greeks, men, women and children, in crude and comic smocks, prancing here and there, uproariously embracing and kissing their deliverers. An old, tearful, toothless hag flung herself rapturously into the arms of the captain, and Coleman's brick-and-iron soul was moved to admiration at the way in which the officer administered a chaste salute upon the furrowed cheek. The ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... comes the reverend Sanhedrim Of lawyers, priests, and Scribes and Pharisees, Like old and toothless mastiffs, that can bark But cannot bite, howling their accusations Against a mild enthusiast, who hath preached I know not what new doctrine, being King Of some vague kingdom in the other world, That ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... haunted air about the whole place that made it easy for me to believe in the existence of a phantasm like Miss Mehetabel's son, who, after all, was less unearthly than Mr. Jaffrey himself, and seemed more properly an inhabitant of this globe than the toothless ogre who kept the inn, not to mention the silent Witch of Endor that cooked our meals for us over ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... their muskets short. A French woman, who has visited the Indians across the river for a supply of maple sugar, comes to Gladwin on May 5 with the same story. From eight hundred, the Indians increase to two thousand. Old Catherine, a toothless squaw, comes shaking as with the palsy to the fort, and with mumbling words warns Gladwin to "Beware, beware!" So does a young girl whose fine eyes have caught the fancy of Gladwin himself. Breaking out with bitter weeping, she covers her head with her shawl and bids her white lover have a ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... I wish I had. It is not very enlivening to meet a fellow-creature whose expression and accents say, "You are the hair that breaks the camel's back of my endurance, you are the last drop that makes my cup of woe run over"; persons whose heads drop on one side like those of toothless infants, whose voices recall the tones in which our old snuffling choir used to ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... man had finished his punch and set down his mug, and he now yawned with a completeness that revealed vastly more of red toothless mouth than one might have calculated his face could contain. "Some take it easier than others," he went on. "It's harder with young men like you." Again he opened his jaws in a gape as whole-souled as that of a house-dog before a kitchen fire. "It must be disagreeable to have a rope ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... certainly as to the feet of his Dorking fowls: he could probably fix, but with much more difficulty, an additional pair of molar teeth in either jaw, in the same way as he has given additional horns to certain breeds of sheep; if he wished to produce a toothless breed of dogs, having the so-called Turkish dog with its imperfect teeth to work on, he could probably do so, for he has succeeded in making hornless breeds of cattle ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... many floors of its four elevations, that it might have been said to resemble at that moment the cascatelles of Saint-Cloud. Water flowed everywhere; it boiled, it leaped, it murmured; it was black, white, blue, and green; it shrieked, it bubbled under the broom of the portress, a toothless old woman used to storms, who seemed to bless them as she swept into the street a mass of scraps an intelligent inventory of which would have revealed the lives and habits of every dweller in the house,—bits of printed cottons, tea-leaves, artificial flower-petals ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... filtered through the screen of geranium leaves, the visitor looked for a moment or so doubtfully at the owner of the cottage. But only for a moment. Those bright blue eyes and apple cheeks, that benevolent expression, bore no likeness to the strange old man he had seen on the Fell. Mr. Barlow was toothless and nut-cracker like of outline; he was thin and shrunken, and bent with the burden of long years, but his healthy visage had none of those deep lines, those cross markings and hollows which made the pallid countenance ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... to the backyard to finish weeding the circle of pansies before dinner—she wondered about the gash that was his mouth. She distinctly remembered carving it so that the ends curved upward into a frozen and quite harmless smile. But one end of the toothless grin seemed to sag a little, like the cynical smile of one who knows his powers have ...
— Weak on Square Roots • Russell Burton
... hoofs of two-score horses had daily rattled over the stony yard, to and from the stalls within, thick grass now grew, whilst the line of roofs—once so straight—over the decayed stalls, had sunk into vast hollows till they seemed like the cheeks of toothless age. ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... stags towered knee-deep in verdure; one had a single antler, the other none. A pair of toothless lions brooded over their lost dignity. Between their disconsolate sentry, mounted flight on flight of marble steps to the house of the manor. It lay like an old frigate storm-shattered and flung aground to rot. The hospitable doors were ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... mistresses, he who traffics on the future as on the past, receiving pay with both hands, who sells horoscopes and is supposed to know all things,—that semi-devil came in, saying to the old man, 'Good-day to you, brother.' With him he brought a hideous old woman,—toothless, humpbacked, twisted, bent, like a Chinese image, only worse. She was wrinkled as a withered apple; her skin was saffron-colored; her chin bit her nose; her mouth was a mere line scarcely visible; her eyes were like the black spots on a dice; her forehead emitted ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... I passed two jagged slits in a stone wall; the lions' mouths—now toothless—where, in the distempered horror of my sleep, I thought denunciations of innocent men to the old wicked Council, had been dropped through, many a time, when the night was dark. So, when I saw the council-room to which such prisoners were taken for ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... you, Madame?" she cried, smiling a broad toothless smile. "I thought it was you, an' Minnie she says, I believe that's ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... temperate zone—both in its seas and fresh waters; although, when you go farther south into the warmer climate, no sturgeons exist. I am sure there are some here, perhaps more than one species. Sink your bait for the sturgeon is a toothless fish, and feeds upon soft ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... offer is a fair one: I have not sold myself to the devil, for I could never find him. I am married, but so are you. I sometimes write verses, but so do you. Come! HIC QUIES! As for the commandments, I have broken them so small that they are the dust of my chambers; you walk upon them, triturate and toothless; and with the Golosh of Philosophy, they shall not bite your heel. True, the tenement is falling. Ay, friend, but yours also. Take a larger view; what is a year or two? dust in the balance! 'Tis done, behold you Cosmo Stevenson, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to be in it," laughed Tom, "there's Watchie, that Svein rescued off a skerry; and there's old toothless Tory at the Manse. But now, what about the hapless captive? What do you price ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... went on, and hurried up the path to the little one-story house where the Ballards lived. Grandsir was by the fire, pounding walnuts in a little wooden mortar, to make a paste for his toothless jaws, and little 'Melia, a bowl of nuts before her, sat in a high chair at the table, lost in reckless greed. Her doll, forgotten, lay across a corner of the table, in limp abandon, the buttonholed eyes staring ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... vigorously in an attempt to dislodge the small assailant, but the cub clung tenaciously, growling, clawing and biting the while. Then the ant-eater reared himself straight upright and fanned the air with his murderously armed forefeet; his long, round tongue played out of his minute, toothless mouth like a snake's. Still the Jaguar retained his footing. The ant-eater then dropped on all fours, leisurely ambled to the nearest tree and, scraping his back on the low branches soon brushed the cub off when he started unconcernedly ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... and Eves many," happy one day, have been "miserable exiles" the next; and always because some satanic ambition or passion or person entering has cast baneful shadow o'er the scene. Men talk of the scythe of time and the tooth of time. But, said the art historian: "Time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm; we who smite like the scythe. Fancy what treasures would be ours to-day if the delicate statues and temples of the Greeks, if the broad roads and massy walls of the Romans, if the noble architecture, castles and towns ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... lay now in evasion, and it was for this that I was thus craftily preparing. Once out of Castile I could deal with Philip, and he should not find me as impotent, as toothless as he believed. But I ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... know that at the Court nobody except the bald and toothless marries, except for fortune. There are plenty of lovers, but no husbands. Because she is poor she is passed about in the family, sometimes as lady of honour to the Princess, sometimes to the Marechale de Noailles, ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... bags. She wore a gray calico slip, tied in around the waist with her apron strings; both were ragged, abominably soiled. Her hair was white; strands of it hung around her neck from a little knot twisted tight on the back of her head. Her face was ghastly white, wrinkled, toothless, but the pale blue eyes, rolling wildly, senselessly, in the cavernous sockets, gave her an expression so terrible that Selah started back involuntarily as she lifted her head, stared at her, and went on with her mending on the ill-smelling ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... of their croquet; the day, though bright, was cold, and a bonfire on the rocks was greatly patronized by the very old and very young, while distant preparations for tea were viewed, at first with stealthy, half-reluctant admiration, and then with open restlessness. The patriarchs—toothless and wrinkled, yet not a man of them over fifty-eight—stood around in expectant silent clusters, and also in their best clothes, of which a great deal of faded red neck-tie and pepper and salt trousers seemed chiefly to strike ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... of his head, which grew on a lean, plucked neck like that of an old fowl, had brought his face into the light. It was long, and run to seed, and had a large, red nose; its thin, colourless lips were twisted sideways and apart, showing his semi-toothless mouth; and his eyes had that aged look of eyes in which all colour runs into a thin rim round the iris; and over them kept coming films like the films over parrots' eyes. He was, or should have been, clean-shaven. His hair—for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... As they crossed the Parc Monceau to reach their carriage, which was waiting for them on the Boulevard Malesherbes, they made the young people, Giselle and Fred, walk ahead, that they might have an opportunity of expressing themselves freely, the old dowager especially, whose toothless mouth never lost an opportunity of smirching the character and the ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... the Transylvanians, and they all jargoned together at once, and laughed at the jokes passing among them. One old gentleman had a peculiar fascination from the infantile innocence of his gums when he threw his head back to laugh, and showed an upper jaw toothless except for two incisors, standing guard over the chasm between. Suddenly he choked, coughed to relieve himself, hawked, held his napkin up before ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Fernand, being old and lame, will be forgiven if he is a little late, and not fined of his dinner. In other ways consideration was shown to him, and he was often sent to dine in the infirmary, not being expected with his toothless jaws to munch the dry crusts set before the rest of the house. This, it seems, was a custom which had been learnt from St. Justina's at Padua, to put out the stale crusts first, before the new bread, to break appetite upon: just as in the old Quaker ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... about the matter. Some people are said to be born with silver spoons in their mouths; if that means, as I suppose it does, that from their earliest days they enjoy all the luxuries of life, then I may say that when I first saw the light I must have had a very rough wooden one between my toothless gums. However, as I've often since thought, it isn't so much what a man is born to which signifies, as what he becomes by his honesty, steadiness, perseverance, and above all by his earnest desire to do right in the sight ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... and mended his pace. I guessed that he was anxious to get his mission over as quickly as possible. He barely gave himself time to shake hands with me and made a rush at the narrow glass door with the words Hotel Entrance on it. It swung to behind his back with no more noise than the snap of a toothless jaw. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... the wealth of the Protestants is opposed to the number of the Catholics; and if all the seventy members returned were of the Catholic persuasion, they must still plot the destruction of our religion in the midst of 588 Protestants. Such terrors would disgrace a cook-maid, or a toothless aunt—when they fall from the lips of bearded and senatorial men, they are nauseous, ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... when the Brahman, opening his toothless mouth, prepared to eat the fruit of immortality. Then his wife addressed him in these words, shedding copious tears ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... of snow-white doves, What wealth could price for me your guileless loves? My earthly cherubim, my precious pearls, My pretty flock of loving little girls, My stores of happiness with least alloy, My treasuries of hope and trembling joy! Yon toothless darling, nestled soft and warm On a young yearning mother's cradling arm; The soft angelic smiles of natural grace Tinting with love that other little face; And the sweet budding of this sinless mind In winning ways, that round my heart-strings wind, Dear ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... them; and accosting one, I asked if she knew of the persons I had just left. She replied, that she did not; nor did she want to. I then asked another, a miserable, toothless old woman, with a tattered strip of coarse baling stuff round her body. Looking at me for an instant, she resumed her raking in the rubbish, and said that she knew who it was that I spoke of; but that she ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... again. Angry at this, he called for some one to wrestle with him. "My men," said King Utgard, "would think it beneath them to wrestle with thee, but let some one call my old nurse Eld, and let Thor wrestle with her." A toothless old woman entered the hall, and after a violent struggle Thor began to lose his footing, and went home excessively mortified. But it turned out afterward that all this was illusion. The three blows of the mallet, instead of striking the giant's head, had fallen ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... their will. They are distorted, disfigured, almost unrecognisable. But the free spirit is still unbroken. The eyes that meet ours are still keen and piercing; they have even the old twinkle of good-humoured irony, and the toothless mouth relaxes in frank laughter. What was the secret of this gaiety? In spite of his poverty, he had still a corner in which to paint. Beside him stand an easel and an antique bust, perhaps a relic of his former wealth. He holds his maul-stick ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... venerable as well as respectable. There are old, gray lies that men half worship. The more toothless and drivelling, often the more venerable. They have imposed their solemn emptiness on men for generations. They have awed the souls of the fathers. They make the children tremble. Men chant their praises, call them great names, and tell each ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... old lecher, what more odious, what can be more absurd? and yet what so common? Who so furious?[4739] Amare ea aetate si occiperint, multo insaniunt acrius. Some dote then more than ever they did in their youth. How many decrepit, hoary, harsh, writhen, bursten-bellied, crooked, toothless, bald, blear-eyed, impotent, rotten, old men shall you see flickering still in every place? One gets him a young wife, another a courtesan, and when he can scarce lift his leg over a sill, and hath one foot already in Charon's boat, when he hath the trembling in his joints, the gout in his ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... her left hand were drawn down so as nearly to close it, and were fixed; the nails on that hand were almost four inches long and extended above her wrist; her head was covered with a thick bush of gray hair; but she was toothless and totally blind, and her eyes had sunk so deeply in the sockets as to have disappeared altogether. Nevertheless she was pert and sociable and would talk as long as people would converse with her. She ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... is it so small a thing to have saved a nun—even though she be neither old, nor wrinkled, nor toothless?" And behold, the nun's meek head was high and proud, her humility ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... painter would gladly have paid four francs an hour to copy,—a dazzling mass of snow, worn like that in all the classical representations of Deity. It was easy to guess from the way in which the cheeks sank in, continuing the lines of the mouth, that the toothless old fellow was more given to the bottle than the trencher. His thin white beard gave a threatening expression to his profile by the stiffness of its short bristles. The eyes, too small for his enormous face, and sloping like ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... in my strength of youth Thou hadst met me—ha, thy friends had not rejoiced, For all thy might! But me the grievous weight Of age bows down, like an old lion whom A cur may boldly drive back from the fold, For that he cannot, in his wrath's despite, Maintain his own cause, being toothless now, And strengthless, and his strong heart tamed by time. So well the springs of olden strength no more Now in my breast. Yet am I stronger still Than many men; my grey hairs yield to few That have within them all the ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... I touched the corpse; I turned the face to the light; I searched for a pulse of life, a breath. There was none: he was dead. A single blow had been given, and the blow had been sure. A ghastly grimace distended the thin lips of the toothless mouth; the eyes were starting from their orbits; the hands were clenched: it had been a death swift, silent, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours. Towards four o'clock the human spirit again began to lick the body, as a flame licks a black promontory of coal. Mrs. Paley felt it unseemly to open her toothless jaw so widely, though there was no one near, and Mrs. Elliot surveyed her found flushed ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... in to him regularly three or four times by a toothless old woman who refused to talk. They watched him too closely for any attempt at escape, one of his guards remaining in ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... hierarchy. Works also like the Bundehesh and Minokhired belong by language and thought to the same period of mystic incubation, when India and Egypt, Babylonia and Greece, were sitting together and gossiping like crazy old women, chattering with toothless gums and silly brains about the dreams and joys of their youth, yet unable to recall one single thought or feeling with that vigour which once gave it life and truth. It was a period of religious and metaphysical delirium, when everything became everything, when Maya and ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... dirt clogs those bright generous eyes, and years after this fine big-hearted boy is wasted! And I shall forget all about him, too. Marion l'Edol, that very pretty girl behind him, is to become a blotched and toothless haunter of alleys, a leering plucker at men's sleeves! And blue-eyed Colin here, with his baby mouth, is to be hanged for that matter of coin-clipping—let me recall, now,—yes, within six years of to-night! Well, but in a way, these people are blessed in lacking foresight. For they ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... intruder, he'd give a fierce bark or two, when, discovering his error, he'd wag his tail and go back to his den—all this being evidently done to show that he was as vigilant as ever—a sort of protest, that said, "Don't believe one word about my being blind and toothless, still less flatter yourself that the place is secure. It requires all my activity and watchfulness to protect; but go back in peace, I'm ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... disinheritance came round to the place where the two parents were sitting, the mother lifted up her voice and wept aloud; and the father, clenching his toothless gums to conceal his emotion, remained with his head bent down: presently, in a husky voice, he said, "Wife, give me ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... the old days one took women. Well, well, my holding can pay for all. How thinkest thou? It is a well-watered strip, but my men cheat me. I do not know how to ask save at the lance's point. Ugh! I grow angry and I curse them, and they feign penitence, but behind my back I know they call me a toothless old ape.' ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... the Ethnological Museum; nay, he ran neck and neck with the President of the University, a prehistoric relic who had known Emerson, and who was still sent about the country in cotton-wool to open educational institutions with a toothless ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... village, where he has battened on the necessities of his neighbors for years, till he has got bloated like an ancient spider in its web. He hobbles up and down, never interchanging a word with his fellows, but unceasingly mumbling his huge toothless jaws; they say he never mutters anything but curses; if so, his daily expense in blasphemy is something fearful to contemplate. I think that cleanliness is as foreign to that horrible old creature's soul as godliness: he never shows a vestige of linen, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... beasts and foraging parties, to their "camels, children, and women." This brought them to their senses, the usual effect of such threats; and presently arose the senior who had spat upon us for luck's sake. With his toothless jaws he mumbled a vehement speech, and warned the tribe that it was not good to detain such strangers: they lent ready ears to the words of Nestor, saying, "Let us obey him, he is near his end!" The mules arrived, but when I looked for the escort, none was forthcoming. ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... seat, his eyes gleaming in a fixed and intense glare at the attorney; his hands were clenched, his lips parched, and his mummy-like cheeks sucked, as before, into his toothless jaws. In addition to all this, there was a bitter white smile of despair upon his features, and his thin gray locks, that were discomposed in the paroxysm by his own hands, stood out in disorder upon his ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... manifestly what you are ettling at—but you must clap your hand, Doctor, without discrimination, on the great body of the rural population of England, male and female, and take whatever comes first—be it a poor, wrinkled, toothless, blear-eyed, palsied hag, tottering horizontally on a staff, under the load of a premature old age (for she is not yet fifty), brought on by annual rheumatism and perennial poverty;—Be it a young, ugly, unmarried woman, far advanced in pregnancy, and sullenly trooping ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... Then Needle Rock—a desolate hut on the Desert, house and barn in one building. The station-keeper is a miserable, toothless wretch, with shaggy yellow hair, but says he's going to get married. I think ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... emerged from the prison door and was greeted by a roar that curdled the blood in at least one woman's heart there, an old Irish hag, who sat in a coign of vantage, hugging her knees and crooning, a little black pipe held in her toothless jaws, ceased her dismal hum to concentrate all her ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... throw it on somebody else who but for me might go through existence lightly? Should I call sentient beings out of the blessed gulf of nothingness, that they may pay a duty to my weakness by and by, and curse me in their hearts? That would be somewhat too high a price to pay for broth when I am toothless, and the coddling comforts of one who has lived ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... student; he was rich; he had an income of four thousand francs; four thousand francs! a splendid scandal on Mount Sainte-Genevieve. Tholomyes was a fast man of thirty, and badly preserved. He was wrinkled and toothless, and he had the beginning of a bald spot, of which he himself said with sadness, the skull at thirty, the knee at forty. His digestion was mediocre, and he had been attacked by a watering in one eye. But in proportion as his youth disappeared, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... a sunny place to stand, and lifts his bleary eyes, And smiles a bit—a toothless smile half touched, perhaps, with fear; And though he cannot see them he is looking at the skies, As if he prays, but silently, for hope and ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... in dreams men picture! Treasured there Are multitudes of she-goats and of sheep, Swathed in whose wool from top to toe I sleep. The fire that boils my pot, with oak or beech Is piled—dry beech-logs when the snow lies deep; And storm and sunshine, I disdain them each As toothless sires a nut, when ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... curved, gaping, toothless mouth, She has no qualm when she catches my finger in her steel overlapping gums, But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking are nothing to her, She does not even know she is nipping me with her curved beak. ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... Stretches of sagging, empty buildings, whose windows and doors seem to have been chewed away, an intimidating silence, a graveyard of crumbling little houses—these remain. And you see Venus, grown old and toothless, snoozing amid the debris ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... foaming spume. It raised its voice higher and higher, shrieking senseless gibberish in its rage. Then it began to hurl its whole body madly against the glass walls and to beat its head. It appeared to have a sudden incomprehensible hatred for the three strangers. It was trying to fly at them. The toothless gums moved spasmodically, and it threw its face into horrible grimaces. That nameless, loathsome abortion was the nearest that Oliver Haddo had ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... was touched with a whip—the thrilling whip of pride. It lasted but a moment. His memory threw up a home for the friendless, and upon a background of hunger, squalor and wretchedness his fancy flashed the picture of an Italian hag, crooning and toothless. ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... brow A group of trees, whereof each blackened bough Bore up to heaven as if in protest mute Its clustering load of ghastly charnel fruit,[12] The swaddled forms of all the village dead— Maid, lusty warrior, and toothless hag, The infant and the conjurer with his bag, Peacefully rotting in their airy bed. As on a battle plain she saw them lie, Fouling the fairness of the moonlit sky; And heavily there flapped above her head, ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... word heart, and talk about the voice of natur and its sensations, and its laws and its simplicities, and all that sort of thing. The noise water makes in tumblin' over stones in a brook, a splutterin' like a toothless old woman scoldin' with a mouthful of hot tea in her lantern cheek, is called the voice of natur speaking in the stream. And when the wind blows and scatters about all the blossoms from your fruit ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the open porch and down the gravel path under the trees, hearing the cries of voices and crack of sticks from the playfield. The lions couchant on the pillars as he passed out through the gate: toothless terrors. Still I will help him in his fight. Mulligan will dub me a new name: the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the door, then? Hell take them! They are reaping in the lower fields — hell take them!" he repeated, his bony, toothless jaws gnashing with ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... old workman," says the economist of the proprietary school; "turn off that sick domestic, that toothless and worn-out servant. Put away the unserviceable beauty; to the hospital with ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... his finger into it, and rubbing it on his toothless gums, smiling and nodding thanks to his young master; while the little maid at his knee, unrebuked, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... from eight years old to eighty,—and what a ridiculous result would be produced. I climbed the rugged staircase, stopping now and then to peep at great holes where the rafters and floors were once,—bare as toothless gums now,—or to enjoy glimpses of the Medway through dreary apertures like sockets without eyes; and, looking from the Castle ramparts on the Old Cathedral, and on the crumbling remains of the old Priory, and on the row of staid old red-brick ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... there a tuft of short gray wool. She wore a blue calico gown of ancient cut, a little red shawl fastened around her shoulders with an old-fashioned brass brooch, and a large bonnet profusely ornamented with faded red and yellow artificial flowers. And she was very black,—so black that her toothless gums, revealed when she opened her mouth to speak, were not red, but blue. She looked like a bit of the old plantation life, summoned up from the past by the wave of a magician's wand, as the poet's fancy had called into being the gracious ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... they but serve to cultivate the taste for the wines that cement friendships such as ours. Henceforth pour for us only the Coan, Leucadian, and Thasian, and see that you select those amphorae whose contents are toothless with age." ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... agreeable atmosphere. He was not hungry. To sit with old people over an austere table with no flowers on it because of the day, and see the Paymaster snuff above his tepid second day's broth, and hear the Cornal snort because the mince-collops his toothless-ness demanded on other days of the week were not available to-day, would be, somehow, to bring a sordid, unable, drab and weary world close up on a vision of joy and beauty. He felt it in his flesh, in some flutter of the breast ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... he drew toward him a Syrian dancer, and kissed her neck and shoulders with his toothless mouth. Seeing this, the consul Memmius Regulus laughed, and, raising his bald head with wreath awry, exclaimed,—"Who says that Rome is perishing? What folly! I, a consul, know better. Videant consules! Thirty legions ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... would not come together, since many of the species are unlike the others both in appearance and habits; but in a scientific point of view the absence of incisor teeth has caused them to be ranged together in a group, known as the edentata, or toothless animals. ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... skate but they consider the weather better for corn-popping! You ask for a bicycle but they had already found a very nice bargain in flannels! You beg to dine the gay-kerchiefed Scissor-Grinder's child, but they invite the Minister's toothless mother-in-law!... And when you're old enough to go courting," he sighed, "your lady-love's sentiments are outraged if you don't spend the day with her and your own family are perfectly furious if you don't spend the day with them!... ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... red in color, their bodies strewn with erratic blue speckles and identifiable by their jagged double stings, silver-backed skates, common stingrays with stippled tails, butterfly rays that looked like huge two-meter cloaks flapping at middepth, toothless guitarfish that were a type of cartilaginous fish closer to the shark, trunkfish known as dromedaries that were one and a half feet long and had humps ending in backward-curving stings, serpentine moray eels with silver tails and bluish backs plus brown pectorals trimmed in gray ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... until they see us safe landed at the grave. We can do nothing (but be poisoned) with impunity. What is worst of all, we must marry certain relatives and connexions, be they distorted, blear-eyed, toothless, carbuncled, with hair (if any) eclipsing the reddest torch of Hymen, and with a hide outrivalling in colour and plaits his trimmest saffron robe. At the mention of this indeed, friend Plato, even thou, although resolved ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... of the club I am not informed. Doubtless it ran an honorable course and passed on from class to class the tradition of its high ambition, but never again was the lost digamma so nearly in its grasp. If it still meets upon its midnight labors, a toothless member boasts of that night of its topmost glory, and those who have gathered to his words rap their stale unprofitable ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks |
