"Rip van Winkle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Cave, famous in the Middle Ages of Christianity (Gibbon chaps. xxxiii.), is an article of faith with Moslems, being part subject of chapter xviii., the Koranic Surah termed the Cave. These Rip Van Winkle-tales begin with Endymion so famous amongst the Classics and Epimenides of Crete who slept fifty-seven years; and they extend to modern days as La Belle au Bois dormant. The Seven Sleepers are as many youths of Ephesus (six royal councillors ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... the men who do one thing in this world who come to the front. Who is the favorite actor? It is a Jefferson, who devotes a lifetime to a "Rip Van Winkle," a Booth, an Irving, a Kean, who plays one character until he can play it better than any other man living, and not the shallow players who impersonate all parts. The great man is the one who never steps outside of his specialty or ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... the Academy on March 29, 1858, with Mme. Lagrange in the principal rle, but the score was already a dozen years old, and it is not likely that the composer's state of health would have permitted him to undertake the writing of a new opera even if he had been so disposed. Mr. Bristow's "Rip Van Winkle," which had a production in New York in the year of Ole Bull's announcement, may, for all that I know to the contrary, have been written for the prize. The scheme of uniting a training school for singers with an opera house was not heard of again, so far as I can ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... called from the bow. "Look! There's the same old steamer tied to the same old bank. We've been gone a year, and yet the world hasn't changed a mite. I wonder if Hazleton has taken a Rip van Winkle sleep all ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Willis and the New England Magazine is very notable in the history of American literature. The traditions of that literature were grave and even sombre. Irving, indeed, in his Knickerbocker and Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane, and in the general gayety of his literary touch, had emancipated it from strict allegiance to the solemnity of its precedents, and had lighted it with a smile. He supplied a quality of grace and cheerfulness which it had lacked, and without ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... with a half-amused, half-pitying face, had watched Mr. Berder's wonderful combinations, and when Rip Van Winkle was placed between two togated Roman senators, and Ichabod Crane arranged as if making love to a Greek goddess, he came near laughing outright. But when Mr. Berder spoke he approached and said, kindly and respectfully, "Will you let me try to ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... not to be confounded with some Boers who fled from British rule on account of the emancipation of their Hottentot slaves, and perhaps never would have been so had not every now and then some Rip Van Winkle started forth at the Cape to justify in the public prints the deeds of blood and slave-hunting in the far interior. It is therefore not to be wondered at if the whole race is confounded and held in low estimation by ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... said Mollie, without even turning to look. "No one ever knew Mr. Jeffries to take the least interest in outdoor sports before. He must have waked up from his Rip Van Winkle sleep, apparently. I even heard that he declined to contribute a dollar to the new gymnasium that some of the town people are building to satisfy the craving of the boys for physical exercise, saying he guessed boys ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... kept his brain constantly active; Sir Peter had allowed his brain to dawdle over old books and lazily delight in letting the hours slip by. Therefore Travers still looked young, alert,—up to his day, up to anything; while Sir Peter, entering that drawing-room, seemed a sort of Rip van Winkle who had slept through the past generation, and looked on the present with eyes yet drowsy. Still, in those rare moments when he was thoroughly roused up, there would have been found in Sir Peter a glow of heart, nay, even ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... time you're to appear in public, Katherine Walton," said Allison, severely, when Kitty proposed her best array. "There's to be a reception at the White House next week, and Friday night we're to go in to Washington to see Jefferson in 'Rip Van Winkle,' and there's to be a studio tea soon, and a recital, and all sorts of things. I saw the bulletin of the term's entertainments in the hall ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... it polite to refrain from saying so. He had gone back to his former state of fuzziness, and looked more like Rip van Winkle than ever. Indeed, his beard seemed even more fierce and bristly than in the old days—probably shaving had tended to ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... sort, and for whom will the End be? All grows, and seeks and endures its destinies: consider likewise how much grows, as the trees do, whether we think of it or not. So that when your Epimenides, your somnolent Peter Klaus, since named Rip van Winkle, awakens again, he finds it a changed world. In that seven-years' sleep of his, so much has changed! All that is without us will change while we think not of it; much even that is within us. The truth that was yesterday a restless ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... like returning to city hubbub and accustomed ways. True, Indian life was strange to most of our officers, if not to all; but there was about Bombay that which made you feel you had got back into the world, albeit in many particulars as different from that you had hitherto known as Rip Van Winkle found after his long slumber. Then, a decade only after the great mutiny, travel to India for travel's sake was much more rare than now. The railway system, that great promoter of journeyings, was not complete. Two years later, when returning ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... mountainside, above the spring, just where a swell of the slope made a "table-land," and where a space had been cleared for these tests of skill. The clearing was long and slender, such a glade through the trees as the alley of the mountain bowlers which Rip Van Winkle found in the Catskills—only the shooting-range was longer. A hundred and fifty yards were needed for one ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... spirits of this region must have met Washington Irving more than half way, and the rest was like play to him. How real and living are all the people of his fancy! Of all the author's work—serious and humorous ... Rip Van Winkle took the most immediate and lasting grip of his ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... I am tired, tired, and I would that I could sleep like Rip Van Winkle, and awake an old man, with an old man's passionless resignation; or better, awake not at all. Such poor fools as I are ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... imagine in the bag To sleep the sleep of Rip Van Winkle, Removed from sunshine's golden flag And duller daylight's smallest twinkle? Well have you earned your rest; but yet, Although disturbance seem uncivil, Unless your cheeks and chin be wet With oil, your ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... just when a trader has laid in a supply of blue beads) they refuse to wear any color but yellow. At the time of writing [1886] the men wore small black pot hats, but several years ago they had used huge felt hats, like that of Rip Van Winkle, and as a consequence the stores are full of those ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... self-possession tried in a different way. We were dining with a gentleman who had overpartaken of his own hospitality. Mr. Murat Halstead was of the company. There was also a German of distinction, whose knowledge of English was limited. The Rip Van Winkle craze was at its height. After sufficiently impressing the German with the rare opportunity he was having in meeting a man so famous as Mr. Jefferson, our host, encouraged by Mr. Halstead, and I am afraid not discouraged by me, began to urge Mr. Jefferson to give us, as he said, "a touch ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... the height of a success altogether unexampled—deliberately throwing away his opportunities, and consigning himself to a slumber of thirty years, which might almost justify us in terming him the "Rip Van Winkle" of British art. The causes of this strange decadence, this singular mental inactivity, which seem to us to have been hitherto very little or at best very imperfectly understood, we now propose ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... remember well a controversy that raged between critic and public for many weeks in the days when Joe Jefferson was playing Rip Van Winkle. Ah, sir, do you remember (but, of course, you don't) that entrance of Joe in the first act with his dog Schneider? That was not my first play by many years, but I believe that it is still my favorite. I think the first time I ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... if even Rip Van Winkle, in his most shiftless mood, ought to have been able to support a large number of daughters under ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... tone suddenly changed, and he let out a yell that would have awakened Rip Van Winkle from ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... regulated the proceedings and relations of its inhabitants. It is to be hoped, therefore, that the London solicitor will some day drop in quietly upon his friend in Charleston, to smoke a cigar, and discuss old times with him. He will in that case probably fancy himself chatting with a contemporary of Rip Van Winkle. Doubtless there are thousands of such men in the States, where frequently everything that is estimable in the English ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various |
