"Bookish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... retort often expressed itself by accepting a verbal attack as justified, and elaborating it in a way to throw into shadow the assault of the critic. At a small and familiar supper of bookish men, when there was general dissatisfaction over an expensive but ill-made salad, he alone ate with apparent relish. The host, who was of like mind with his guests, said, 'The Bibliotaph doesn't care ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... of Thrace. His eyes to be picket out with pinnes for his so deadly belying of them, or worse handled if worse could be deuised. But will ye see how God raised a revenger for the silly innocent women, for about the same ryming age came an honest civill Courtier somewhat bookish, and wrate these verses against the whole rable of Monkes. O Monachi vestri stomachi sunt amphor a Bacchi Vos estos Deis est restes ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... fine, With shells about her neck; moccasins neat Were drawn, like gloves, upon her little feet, Adorned with scarlet quills of porcupine. Innocent of the niceties refined That to the toilet her pale sisters bind, Yet much the same beneath the outer rind, She was, though all unskilled in bookish lore, A sound, sweet woman to the ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... remember Robert Baillie's description of Dr. Twiss, the Prolocutor of the Westminister Assembly: "The man, as the world knows, is very learned in the questions he has studied, and very good—beloved of all, and highly esteemed—but merely bookish ... and among the unfittest of all the company for any action." In this respect Dr. Owen was a great contrast to his studious contemporary; for he was as eminent for business talent as most ministers are conspicuous for the want of it. It was on this account that he was selected for ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... as I straddled and spat about the stable-yard in feeble imitation of the coachman, that lessons might go to the Inventor of them. It was only geography that morning, any way: and the practical thing was worth any quantity of bookish theoretic; as for me, I was going on my travels, and imports and exports, populations and capitals, might very well wait while I explored the ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... the use of it is known to every one; and even the lazy monks who take it, are no longer splenetic. In the west of England, the rocks are stripped of it with diligence; and every old woman tells you how charming that leaf is for bookish men: in Russia they use a plant of this kind in their malt liquor: it came into fashion there for the cure of this disease; which from its constant use is scarce known any longer; and they suppose 'tis added to their ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... as she passed Benoist's, she murmured "O festum dies!" and again, by the Berkeley, when she was momentarily jostled by a very large and umbrageous tramp who had apparently been celebrating the joys of beggary—"Acto profanus vulgam!" But generally she was silent, enwrapped, no doubt, in bookish thought. When, at length, they stood before the door of number one thousand she breathed a ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... Wells was not a proper person for the position he held, being far too impulsive in speech for a bookish man; but then Wells had been sorely tried. He told Cranston something of it as they walked away together after loading Mart with provisions and fruit at the corner grocery. Together they stopped to see Dr. Francis and have a brief chat with him about his patient, and then Cranston ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... educated, and I cannot bear to hear her slighted. The fresh-hearted young girl who nowadays plays a good game of tennis, and takes a high place in the Classical or Mathematical Tripos, and is book learned, without being bookish, and . ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... If there ever has been any race of men who invariably acted first and thought afterwards, I can only say that in the course of my reading and observation I have never met with any trace of them, and I am apt to suppose that, if they ever existed anywhere but in the imagination of bookish dreamers, their career must have been an exceedingly short one, since in the struggle for existence they would surely succumb to adversaries who tempered and directed the blind fury of combat with at least a modicum ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... great value. At school, where (as we have seen) the boys get little enough general information, the girls have hitherto got less, instruction in needlework and cookery being given to them in preference to certain more bookish lessons that the boys get. They leave school, therefore, intellectually most ignorant. Then, in domestic service, again it is in cookery and that sort of thing that they are practised; there may be culture of thought and taste going on elsewhere ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... of Provencal matters has convinced me that he is a type. Under his genial guidance it has been my privilege to see much of the inner life of the Provencaux, and his explanations have enabled me to understand what I have seen: the Vidame being of an antiquarian and bookish temper, and never better pleased than when I set him to rummaging in his memory or his library for the information which I require to make clear to me some curious phase ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... of this Almagest are for the exceptional hour; but daily, as one bookish from the nursery, I read much in many directions. For if books are called the best friends of happy men, to the sad they are saviours also. And when I remember too clearly what I am, I turn perhaps ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... good fortune ever befell a bookish man, I should choose this lodge for my own residence, with the topmost room of the tower for a study, and all the seclusion of cultivated wildness beneath to ramble in. There being no such possibility, we drove on, catching glimpses ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The kernel of her speech lay in the end of it—"The boys would always be together." I am sure in her tender heart she blessed my bookish genius, which was to make wealth as well as fame, and so keep me "about the place," and the home birds for ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Worldly knowledge and bookish knowledge were acquired by Lloyd George during the next few years while he was going through his law course in the office of a firm of solicitors in the neighboring little town of Portmadoc. While there he had further opportunity for developing his natural powers of oratory, for he became ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... all in Elgin, but this was the Murchisons' case. They had produced nothing abnormal, but they had to prove that they weren't going to, and Stella was the last and most convincing demonstration. Advena, bookish and unconventional, was regarded with dubiety. She was out of the type; she had queer satisfactions and enthusiasms. Once as a little girl she had taken a papoose from a drunken squaw and brought it home for her mother to adopt. Mrs Murchison's reception of the suggested duty may be imagined, also ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... poets; that she had few posts for them and little of a market. Even her colleges had not the means, if they had the will, to utilize their talents and acquirements. We do owe to her newspapers and magazines, and now and then to the traditional liking of Uncle Sam for his bookish offspring, that some of them did not fall by the way, even in that arid time succeeding the Civil War, when we learned that letters were foregone, not only inter arma, but for a long while afterward. Those were the days when English went untaught, and when publishers were more ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... walks about; a gentleman, not only in the broader and more generous sense, but also according to the narrower, conventional meaning of the term; plainly a scholarly man, fond of books, and knowing the best books; with that modest, diffident air which bookish men have; with a curious shyness, indeed, as of one who was not accustomed and did not like to come into too close contact with the every-day world: such Theodore Winthrop appeared to me. I recollect the surprise with which I heard—not from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... civilization resting on them. On the one side of the old frontier the wild homelessness of the mountains, on the other side park-like country, model towns, and broad, fruitful plains. Hard-bitten, bookless Serbs, and softened bookish Croats. As a responsibility of the peace Serbia has taken over large tracts of smitten Austria. Looking at the new territory, one might reckon it a rich spoil of war. But comparing Serbia as she is with this ex-Austria, ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... attempted in 'The Robbers' to depict human beings before he had seen any.[28] Aside from his acquaintance with Franziska von Hohenheim, and an occasional nearer view of the coy maidens of the ecole des demoiselles, the female sex and the grand passion were for him only bookish mysteries. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... animal—second only to man and his faithful ally—as due to instinct only, deal with metaphysical reasoning. They have never considered the innumerable and irrefutable facts of animal life which no acuteness of analysis and pure thinking can ever explain. Most of these narrow, bookish men deny to animals capabilities which every country schoolboy knows they possess. It is no exaggeration to say that animals exist which sing, dance, play, speak a language, build homes, go to school and learn, wage warfare, protect their homes and property, marry, make laws, ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... new carriage, she was in usual health; second, that Jamie was very well, but impatient for his uncle's return; third, that Juno was spending a few days in Orange, and that Bell had gone to pass the night with her particular friend, Mrs. Meredith, the bluest, most bookish woman in ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a dry and dusty volume of Blue-Bookish lore,— While I nodded nearly napping, suddenly there came a yapping, As of some toy-terrier snapping, snapping at my study door. "'Tis some peevish cur," I muttered, "yapping at my study door,— Only that,—but ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... symbol; and I had caught sight of a binding or two as it lay open in Tithefields that made me curious to see it open again. He was only beginning to collect when we had parted at school, if 'collect' is not too sacred a word: beginning to buy more truly expresses that first glutting of the bookish hunger, which, like the natural appetite, never passes in some beyond the primary utilitarian stage of 'eating to live,' otherwise 'buying to read.' Three years, however, works miracles of refinement in any hunger that is at all capable of culture; and it was evident, when Narcissus ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... to me when in fact you are far more bookish than I am. You sit in your den all alone and read while I'm shut up in my office going over my accounts. From care you have a freedom that I can ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... of scholars, the scraps of evidence found in books and archives, the amazingly accurate hypotheses of bibliographers who have sifted the material so painstakingly gathered together, combine to make its history a bookish ...
— Doctrina Christiana • Anonymous
... ship," replied Peaks, as he turned partly round, so that he could see the craft. "That's a 'mofferdite brig; or, as bookish people would say, an hermaphrodite brig—half brig and half schooner. You must call things, especially vessels, by their right names, or you will fall in ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... conversation. I tried myself to talk like the books I read. Never before had I noticed any difference between men as to education. All were on the same plane, only separable by some personal relation to myself. Little by little they became distinct so that I attempted to classify them in a crude and bookish way. Character and the moral point of view, with their manifold applications to life, were as yet hidden from me. I judged men and women by their speech, even by their pronunciation, and thought that I could detect the accent of the educated. In short, education became ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... their character and sources alike, it is plain to see that in the old phrase, "the pride of the intellect" lifts its lonely column over the desolation of every page. The man of the academy is here, as in the prose, after all. He reveals himself in the literary motive, the bookish atmosphere of the verse, in its vocabulary, its elegance of structure, its precise phrase and its curious allusions (involving footnotes), and in fact, throughout all its form and structure. So self-conscious is ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... The bookish materials offered to Will, in London, were crammed with reminiscences from the classics, were mainly romantic and theatrical; and, from his profession of actor, by far the best channel open to him was the theatre. Badly as it paid the outside author, there was nothing that paid better. ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... thy dreaming and thy bookish phantasies!" roared Hopkins kicking the smouldering log upon the hearth until a river of sparks flowed up and out of the wide chimney. "Dost thou agree to putting fish to decay amid the corn we are to eat by ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... revolution was coming on. Though still on the sunny side of middle life, he was wearying of the cup of pleasure he had drunk so joyously, and was drawing away from the multitude and toward the companionship of those who loved books and bookish things, and who could sympathize with him in the aspirations for the better work, the consciousness of which had dawned. It was now that he began to apply himself diligently to the preparation for higher effort, ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... familiarity, and a most sincere and hearty affection, should exist between Charles and his servant and foster-brother, William Horton. Till Charles went to Shrewsbury he had never had another playfellow, for his brother Cuthbert was reserved and bookish; and the friendship between the two had grown ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... both—was more Spanish than American. An early residence in Lower California, marriage with a rich Mexican widow, whose dying childless left him sole heir, and some strange restraining idiosyncrasy of temperament had quite denationalized him. A bookish recluse, somewhat superfastidious towards his own countrymen, the more Clarence knew him the more singular appeared his acquaintance with Flynn; but as he did not exhibit more communicativeness on this point than upon their own kinship, Clarence finally concluded that it was due to the dominant character ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... had the sheets inlaid in hand-made paper and neatly bound. This was accomplished with the sage advice of my old playmate, Frank M. Morris, the bookman of Chicago. One of these volumes was made for Mr. Allison, (so that he would surely have at least one copy of his own poem), a second was for my bookish friend, James F. Joseph, then of Chicago and now of Indianapolis, and a third was for my own library. The mere fact that Allison was five years autographing my particular copy has no bearing whatever in this discussion, but leads me to say ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... and the Bible very well, and, like most bookish young men, phrase and motto were much on my tongue, though not always given forth. One evening, as we drew to the camp-fire, a deer broke from the woods and ran straight through the little circle we were making, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... elsewhere. The essential element in the confidence Johnson inspired was not his seriousness: it was his sovereign sanity, the unfailing common sense, to which allusion has already been made. He was pre-eminently a bookish man, but he was conspicuously free from the unreality that is so often felt {30} in the characters of such men. He knew from the first how to strike a note which showed that he was well aware of the difference between literature and life and their ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... author of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" than as the conqueror of Quebec. Mr. Cromering would sooner have been the editor of the English Review than the chief constable of Norfolk. His tastes were bookish; Nature had intended him for the librarian of a circulating library: the safe pilot of middle class ladies through the ocean of new fiction which overwhelms the British Isles twice a year. His particular hobby was paleontology. ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... personal development, which, even for a Roman Catholic, were effects of the Reformation, that there was so much in Montaigne of the "subjective," as people say, of the singularities of personal character. Browne, too, bookish as he really is claims to give his readers a matter, "not picked from the leaves of any author, but bred amongst the weeds and tares" of his own brain. The faults of such literature are what we all recognise in it: unevenness, alike in thought and style; lack of ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... worked hard at school, became a first-rate classical scholar, winning the Newcastle Scholarship in 1841, and being elected Scholar of King's in 1842. He seems to have been a quiet, retiring boy, with few intimate friends, respected for his ability and his courtesy, living a self-contained, bookish life, yet with a keen sense of school patriotism—though he had few pleasant memories of ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... implements of iron, hoes to till the fields, but stamped papers, crucifixes, bulls and prayer-books; as he did not have for ideal and prototype the tanned and vigorous laborer, but the aristocratic lord, carried in a luxurious litter, the result was that the imitative people became bookish, devout, prayerful; it acquired ideas of luxury and ostentation, without thereby improving the means of its ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... it?" asked Raven. "Old Crow was rather a bookish chap, I fancy, in a conventional way. I've got some of his stuff up in the hut: rather academic, the kind daguerreotyped young men with high stocks used to study by one candle. What do you suspect—a will, ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... very pretty bairn! A boy or a child, I wonder? A pretty one; a very pretty one: sure, some scape: though I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentlewoman in the scape. This has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work; they were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here. I'll take it up for pity: yet I'll tarry till my son comes; ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... in my limited way—I mean that, sincerely, humbly—I considered what I could do. No slumming—and, in any case, there's none to be done in Forest Gate. So I thought I'd better clear my vision with great books. I went to Robert Halarkenden, the only bookish person in my surroundings, and asked him about it—about what would open up a larger horizon for me. And he, not understanding much what I was at, recommended two or three things which I have been and am reading. I thought I'd try to be a little ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... of melody with the mintage glitteringly fresh! Yet it is so. I have lived to witness the rise of Schumann and, please Apollo, I shall live to see the eclipse of Wagner. Can't you read the handwriting on the wall? Dinna ye hear the slogan of the realists? No music rooted in bookish ideas, in literary or artistic movements, will survive the mutations of the Zeitgeist. Schumann reared his palace on a mirage. The inside he called Bachian—but it wasn't. In variety of key-color ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... characters of Grandmother Garland and Grandmother McClintock, we held them both in almost equal affection. Serene, patient, bookish, Grandmother Garland brought to us, as to her neighbors in this rude river port, some of the best qualities of intellectual Boston, and from her lips we acquired many of the precepts and proverbs ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... fond of rough jokes of his own making, and thinks that giving people material things makes them happy," she continued in her bookish manner. "I remember just such another man as him, a boisterous sort of man, whose old father was dying, who took the old man out to look at a new grand-stand they were making. Poor old man! It was pitiful to see him ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... bookish, how sheerly a literary man Penton Baxter was ... and how absurd, at the same time. How life never drew near him, how he ever saw it through the film of his latest theory, and tried to order his own, as well as everybody else's life, to ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... The solemn, bookish phraseology came smoothly from his tongue. He knew no other. It drew a murmur of amusement from the room and a ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... the post to her proficiency in Italian and English rather than to any scholarly ability. To the end of her life Toni would never be bookish. She would always prefer living to reading about life; and it was fortunate that her work in this new library consisted largely of translating, roughly, from books in Italian and English, or in typing, ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... near me as we pulled down the volumes. My heart beat wildly as she sat by my side, while I mechanically turned the pages. The brush of her garments against my sleeve quite maddened me. I had not dared to look into her eyes, as I talked meaningless, bookish words. ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... kind of plate the mill put out, and so I could demand a high rate of wages and support my demands with logic. My midnight studies had not been in vain. It all came back in cash to the working man; and yet it was my own pals who had rebuked me for being too bookish. This did not make me sour. I loved the fellows just the same, and when they showed their faith in me, it more ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... something of a character, a political hostess, a good friend, and a still better hater; two sons, silent, good-looking and clever, one in the brewery that provided his mother with her money, the other in the Hussars; two daughters not long 'introduced'—one pretty—the other bookish and rather plain; so ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... gave him little help. In his late youth he had thought himself in love twice and had expressed his fiery emotions in a Latin epistle, an elegy, and a number of very correct Alcaics. They pleased his teacher, but frightened the spectacles off one bookish young woman, and drove the other to the arms of a prescription clerk, who knew no Latin except what was on ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... and a venerable garden of olives and oranges. A manor, formerly granted by Charles V. to Don Vincente Robles, of Andalusia, of pious and ascetic memory, it had commended itself to Judge Peyton, of Kentucky, a modern heretic pioneer of bookish tastes and secluded habits, who had bought it of Don Vincente's descendants. Here Judge Peyton seemed to have realized his idea of a perfect climate, and a retirement, half-studious, half-active, with something of the seignioralty of the old slaveholder that he had been. Here, too, ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... friend,' he said, 'I have chosen a work of another temper. You have no bookish habit, but you have a gallant spirit, and so I will ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... as a practical soldier, will have none of the "bookish theoric." He cautions us here not to pin our faith to abstract principles; "for," as Chang Yu puts it, "while the main laws of strategy can be stated clearly enough for the benefit of all and sundry, you must be guided by the actions of the enemy in attempting to secure a favorable position ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... "A mighty bookish place," took up the other neighbor "they say they are all bookworms that live there, and that they are as dry as bits of parchment. I shouldn't say that a bright little miss like you had any call to go ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... Jasper, is a bookish fellow, and, as I have said, a fool where anything else is in question; if this meeting is allowed to take place, I feel that he will most certainly be killed, and his death would mean a new life—more than ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... find out what the sentiment was with which she regarded her cousin Mac. She could not seem to reconcile the character she had known so long with the new one lately shown her, and the idea of loving the droll, bookish, absentminded Mac of former times appeared quite impossible and absurd, but the new Mac, wide awake, full of talent, ardent and high-handed, was such a surprise to her, she felt as if her heart was being won by a stranger, and it became ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... and breadth of the States; but, withal, it is redeemed, illuminated, softened, and brightened by a kindly though serious look out of his eyes, and an expression of homely sagacity, that seems weighted with rich results of village experience. A great deal of native sense; no bookish cultivation, no refinement; honest at heart, and thoroughly so, and yet, in some sort, sly,—at least, endowed with a sort of tact and wisdom that are akin to craft, and would impel him, I think, to take an antagonist in flank, rather than to ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... system and ordered philosophy in Wordsworth. When he tells us that "one impulse from a vernal wood may teach you more of man, of moral evil and of good, than all the sages can," such a proposition cannot be seriously taken as more than a half-playful sally for the benefit of some too bookish friend. No impulse from a vernal wood can teach us anything at all of moral evil and of good. When he says that it is his faith, "that every flower enjoys the air it breathes," and that when the budding twigs spread out their fan to catch the air, he is compelled to think "that there was ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... impossible. But in considering the relation of her manner of life to her work, her creations, her meditations, one cannot but see that when compared with some writers of her own sex and age, she is constantly bookish, artificial, and mannered. She is this because she fed her art too exclusively, first on the memories of her youth, and next from books, pictures, statues, instead of from the living model, as seen in its actual motion. It is direct calls and personal claims from without that make ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... in bookselling you should come here some evening to a meeting of the Corn Cob Club. Once a month a number of booksellers gather here and we discuss matters of bookish concern over corn-cobs and cider. We have all sorts and conditions of booksellers: one is a fanatic on the subject of libraries. He thinks that every public library should be dynamited. Another thinks that moving pictures ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... other personage is there in Shakespeare who shows these traits or some of them? He should be bookish and irresolute, a lover of thought and not of action, of melancholy temper too, and prone to unpack his heart with words. Almost every one who has followed the argument thus far will be inclined to think of Romeo. Hazlitt declared that "Romeo is Hamlet in love. There is the same rich exuberance ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... the twenty-third of August, 1869. The family moved to Illinois the next year. His father was a lawyer, and the child had access to plenty of good books, which he read eagerly. In spite of his preoccupation with the seamy side of human nature, he is in reality a bookish poet, and most of his work—though not the best part of it—smells of the lamp. Fortunately for him he was brought up on the Bible, for even those who attack the Old Book are glad to be able to tip their weapons with biblical language. Ibsen used to say that his chief reading, even in ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... population; but, from our point of view, I do not think anybody can doubt that it still has very considerable defects. It has the defect which is common to all the educational systems which we have inherited—it is too bookish, too little practical. The child is brought too little into contact with actual facts and things, and as the system stands at present it constitutes next to no education of those particular faculties which are of the utmost importance to industrial life—I mean the faculty of ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... commenced the practice of systematically traducing our order of country gentlemen. His picture of Squire Western is not only a malicious, but also an incongruous libel. The squire's ordinary language is impossible, being alternately bookish and absurdly rustic. In reality, the conventional dialect ascribed to the rustic order in general—to peasants even more than to gentlemen—in our English plays and novels, is a childish and fantastic babble, belonging to no form of real breathing life; nowhere intelligible; not in any ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... terminating several feet from the ceiling. On this top a bust or so of an author may be appropriately placed, or copies of an ancient statue, and on the wall above, between the cases of shelves, may hang a few pictures, not necessarily bookish in suggestion, but reposeful in subject and tone, ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... who had procured for me the place and work beside her which I liked so much, was not at all a bookish person, but we had perhaps a better time together than if she had been. She was one who found the happiness of her life in doing kindnesses for others, and in helping them bear their burdens. Family reverses had brought her, with her mother and sisters, to Lowell, and this was one strong point ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... And Humphrey with the peers be fallen at jars. Then will I raise aloft the milk-white rose, With whose sweet smell the air shall be perfum'd, And in my standard bear the arms of York, To grapple with the house of Lancaster; And, force perforce, I 'll make him yield the crown Whose bookish rule hath pull'd fair ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... of nothing whatever in the course of scarcely forty years. An educational system to cover an Empire is not a thing that can be got for the asking, it is not even to be got for the paying; it has to be grown; and in the beginning it is bound to be thin, ragged, forced, crammy, text-bookish, superficial, and all the rest of it. As reasonable to complain that the children born last year were immature. A little army of teachers does not flash into being at the passing of an Education Act. Not even an organisation ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... through Akshay Datta's book on Popular Physics, and had also finished the epic of Meghnadvadha. We read our physics without any reference to physical objects and so our knowledge of the subject was correspondingly bookish. In fact the time spent on it had been thoroughly wasted; much more so to my mind than if it had been wasted in doing nothing. The Meghnadvadha, also, was not a thing of joy to us. The tastiest tit-bit may not be relished when thrown at one's head. To employ an epic to teach ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... with works of standard authors and leaving room above for statuary, or pictures, or the inexpensive decoration of flowers picked from one's own garden. I am inclined to think that the most attractive parlor I have ever visited is that of a bookish friend whose walls are thus furnished with what not only delights the eye, but silently invites the mind to an ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... my earliest conscious years, to have lived in a world of books; and yet my home was by no means "bookish." I was trained by people who had not read much, but had read thoroughly; who regarded good literature with unfeigned admiration; and who, though they would never have dreamt of forcing or cramming, yet were pleased when they saw a boy inclined to read, and did ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... student needs his bookish lore, The bigot shrines to pray before, His pulpit needs the orator; Oh Lord! I nothing ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... spring not apart more swiftly or more opposedly than the minds of two children brought up from one mother in the same nursery. The natural bent of each impels it. Art this one, science that; to Joe adventure, to Tom a bookish habit. Rosalie's natural bent declared itself in "figures"; in the operations, as she discovered them, of commerce; in the mysterious powers, as they appealed to her, developed in countinghouses and exerted by countinghouses. The romance of commerce! A mind ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... sat silent, staring before her with sweet somber eyes. Then, "In the very beginning," she told him with a conscious laugh,—"this sounds very story-bookish, I know—in the very beginning, George Burgoyne Calendar, an American, married his cousin a dozen times removed, and an Englishwoman, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... reconciliation between the brothers, and Richard Waverley himself, who, after this event, resided more constantly in London, was too much interested in his own plans of wealth and ambition to notice more respecting Edward than that he was of a very bookish turn, and probably destined to be a bishop. If he could have discovered and analysed his son's waking dreams, he would have ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the publication of a house-organ called The Book Buyer, and, given a chance to help in this, Bok felt he was getting back into the periodical field, especially since, under Mr. Doubleday's guidance, the little monthly soon developed into a literary magazine of very respectable size and generally bookish contents. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... witnesses the adoration paid to this glorious object, by some bookish pilgrim, who, as the evening sun reposes softly upon the hill, pushes onward, through copse, wood, moor, heath, bramble, and thicket, to feast his eyes upon the mellow lustre of its leaves, and upon the nice execution of its typography. Menalcas sees all this; and ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... to fill your books with flowers. It is a real bookish delight, and they make such a pretty diary. My poets are full of them, and they all mean a memory—old spring mornings, lost sunsets, walks forgotten and unforgotten. Here a buttercup pressed like finely beaten brass, there a great yellow rose—in my Keats; my Chaucer is like ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... walked round to the other side of the castle, where was my lady's flower-garden, or what was to be made into one. Then he entered by French windows, from a terrace overlooking it, my lord's library, also incomplete. For the earl, who was by no means a bookish man, had only built that room since his marriage, to please his wife, whom perhaps he loved all the better that she was so exceedingly unlike himself. Now both were away—their short dream of married life ended, their plans ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... know whether Josephine is prouder of Fred or of David. Certainly her mind is comparatively at rest regarding them both, notwithstanding my second troy is not quite like other people. I do not mean that he is boorish or eccentric, merely that he is bookish and self-absorbed. He takes no interest in his personal appearance, and he avoids every young woman except his sisters. Fred is dandified, keenly fond of the social interests of the day and of the other sex. I foresee that he bids fair to be a leading man ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... unbelievable adventures. They are inventive young devils, these veterans of 21, possessed of the single ideal—to kill—which they follow with men as single-minded as themselves. Battlefield tactics do not exist; when a whole nation goes to ground there can be none of the "victories" of the old bookish days. But there is always the killing—the well-schemed smashing of a full trench, the rushing out and the mowing down of its occupants; the unsuspicious battalion far in the rear, located after two nights' extreme risk ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... letters:—"I never was sent to any school. Female education, in the best families, went no further than writing and arithmetic; in some few and rare instances, music and dancing. It was fashionable to ridicule female learning." But the household was bookish. Her mother knew the "British Poets" and all the literature of Queen Anne's Augustan age. Her beloved grandmother Quincy, at Mount Wollaston, seems to have had both learning and wisdom, and to her father she owed the sense of fun, the shrewdness, the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the front, not indeed beautiful or grand, but intricate, perplexed, or, to use Mr. Price's appropriate phrase, picturesque. The most considerable addition was that of the present Rector, who, "being a bookish man," as the beadle was at the pains to inform Jeanie, to augment, perhaps, her reverence for the person before whom she was to appear, had built a handsome library and parlour, and no ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... gave up the methods of bookish preparation for preaching. He preached as the Old Testament men did, to the occasion and to the event. He spoke to the community as being a man himself immersed in the same life as theirs. On a recent occasion when a woman ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... Bibliomaniac had combined forces to give him a taste of his own medicine. The time had not yet arrived which showed the Idiot at a disadvantage; and the two boarders, the one proud of his learning, and the other not wholly unconscious of a bookish life, were distinctly tired of the triumphant manner in which the Idiot always left the breakfast-table to their ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... between the Hebraic culture and Judaism which supplanted it consists in the fact that, whereas the latter was bookish, transforming its votaries into the "people of the book," the former was the sum total of all that goes to make up the concern of a nation living upon its own soil. Bookishness, literature, has ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... your ruination. Since you got him into your head not one of the boys you met has been good enough. I knew you had him in mind the day you told me you wished Albert was a little more bookish and musical. I know why you wanted him to subscribe to the Symphony. The spats you made him buy. Poor boy! and his ankles aren't cut for them. Love! Your father and I weren't so much in love, let me tell you. Only I knew my parents wanted it and that was enough. I wish to God I'd never lived ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... who had conversed or studied in it. To supply any deficiencies on the shelves, a hundred pounds, Madame D'Arblay states, was placed at Johnson's disposal to expend in books; and we may take it for granted that any new publication suggested by him was ordered at once. But a bookish couple, surrounded by a literary set, were surely not exclusively dependent on him for this description of help, nor laid under any extraordinary obligation by reason of it. Whilst the "Lives of the Poets" was in progress, Dr. Johnson "would frequently produce one of the ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... son was a rhymster, he had rebuked him severely for such idle waste of time, and in a vain attempt to clip the wings of Pegasus, threatened him with punishment if he should hear of such folly again. Mrs. Allan, on the contrary, though she was not a bookish woman, had protested against her husband's command—urging that Edgar be encouraged to cultivate his talent. The ability to compose verse seemed to her, in a boy of Edgar's age, little short of miraculous, and, proud of her pet's accomplishment, she heaped indiscriminate praise upon ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... endeavoured to render the language of the tales simple and free from bookish artifice, I have not felt at liberty to retell the tales in the English way. I have not scrupled to retain a Celtic turn of speech, and here and there a Celtic word, which I have not explained within ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... to my mother's peace of mind, that she had guided my inclinations in the peaceful direction of the library, hoping not to suffer for the son such alarms as she had undergone for the husband. I had grown up, therefore, a musing, bookish youth, rather shy and solitary in my habits: and this despite the care taken of my education in swordsmanship, riding, hunting, and other manly accomplishments, both by my father and by his old follower, Blaise Tripault. I ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... very much inferior. It represents an interminable range of homely and commodious apartments; but the Bodleian library, from beginning to end—from floor to ceiling—is grand, impressive, and entirely of a bookish appearance. In that spacious and lofty receptacle—of which the ceiling, in my humble opinion, is an unique and beautiful piece of workmanship—all is solemn, and grave, and inviting to study: yet echoing, as it were, to the footsteps of those who once meditated within its almost ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Shakespeare's language is no longer the mere vehicle of thought; it has become part of it, its very flesh and blood. The pleasure it gives us is unmixt, direct, like that from the smell of a flower or the flavor of a fruit. Milton sets everywhere his little pitfalls of bookish association for the memory. I know that Milton's manner is very grand. It is slow, it is stately, moving as in triumphal procession, with music, with historic banners, with spoils from every time and every region, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... the greatest surprises of our time in a bookish way was not the sale of the library at Althorp, which had been rumoured as a contingency many years before it occurred, but its transfer by the purchaser to Manchester. We were all rather sorry to learn that the climax had at length been reached; the sacrifice was doubtless a painful one ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... amongst the best known. They also write reviews and literary articles, though the doyen in that department is Mr. James Smith, to whom the Argus pays a retaining fee of L500 a year. Art criticism is also in Mr. Smith's hands; and although all his work is essentially bookish and wanting in originality, he thoroughly understands his subjects, and his style and ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... spoke so regally and responded so little to his emotion, alarmed him. Lucy, too, on her side, felt as if she had been a girl of his own. She put her arm within his, and led him to the library, where all was quiet, and where she felt by instinct—though she was not bookish—that the very backs of the books would console him and make ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... And, in conclusion, Nonsuits my meditators; for, "Certes," says he, "I have already chose my officer." And who was he? Forsooth, a great Arithmetician. * * * * * That never set a squadron in the field, Nor the division of a battle knows More than a spinster; unless the bookish theorick, Wherein the toged Consul can propose As masterly as he; mere prattle, without practice, Is all his soldiership. But, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... am not, like Cassio, "an arithmetician," But by "the bookish theoric"[333] it appears, If 't is summed up with feminine precision, That, adding to the account his Highness' years, The fair Sultana erred from inanition; For, were the Sultan just to all his dears, She ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... greatly surprised when I won from my county and I went but didn't finish there. Then I went a little while to a small university near Lexington, called Allcorn University. I loved to go to school and was considered bookish. But my people died and I had to earn a living for myself and I couldn't find any way to use so much what I learned out of books, as far as making money was concerned. So I came to Texas, doing any kind of labor work I could find. Finally I married ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... should have grown like them, but our father was a bookish man, and with him we travelled; we went with Dickens and Thackeray and those fellows, and as we came to different places in the books, he told us all about them. He'd seen them all, so we got to know his country pretty well. Once he took ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... after seven he retired to the cellar and became as genuine a pawnbroker as could be found in London. Touching books he was easy enough to deal with, but a Shylock as regards jewels and money lent. With his bookish clients he passed for a dull shopkeeper who knew little about literature; but in the underground establishment he was spoken of, by those who came to pawn, as a usurer of the worst. In an underhand way he did a deal ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... that, Gimp?" Dave Lester put in, trying to sound as brash and bold as the others, instead of just bookish. ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... superficial acquaintance with Polish and Russian. There can be no doubt, however, that he was well taught, and that he possessed a remarkable facility in acquiring languages. For all that, he was far from being a bookish boy. In riding, fencing, and all chivalrous accomplishments he took a lively interest and exhibited much skill. It was in stormy times that his boyhood fell, Sweden being at that time involved in frequent wars, and his father, in order to train ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... article contradicts the statement, which is merely one of his exaggerations for the sake of point. She had not a fine understanding: though she was neither silly nor stupid, her sense was altogether inferior to her sensibility. Although living in a most bookish circle she was, as Macaulay himself admits, almost illiterate: and (which he does not say) her comparative critical estimates of books, when she does give them, are merely contemptible. This harsh statement could be freely substantiated: but ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... tone with Valence, his rough home-truths with the parasitical courtiers, and his frank confidence with Melchior, are admirably discriminated. Melchior himself, little as he speaks, is a fine sketch of the contemplative, bookish man who finds no more congenial companion and study than a successful man of action. His attitude of detachment, a mere spectator in the background, is well in keeping with the calm and thoughtful character of the play. Valence, the true hero of the piece, the "pale ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons |
