"Verve" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Was it he who was dreaming now, or was the event of the night a mere farce of his own imagining? Mr. Brotherson was whistling in his room, gaily and with ever increasing verve, and the tune which filled the whole floor with music was the same grand finale from William Tell which had seemed to work such magic in the night. As Sweetwater caught the mellow but indifferent notes sounding from those lips of brass, he dragged forth the music-box he held hidden in his ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... shoulder, for no reason whatever, the sleek pale face of the manicure girl, who wore emeralds in her ears. And when she had clipped them on she was thrilled; they gave her a distinctive, a resolute charm. She could smile at herself again in that glass, at the colour and light and verve which had come back to her. The face pictured there had all the roundness, the softness and pinkiness of the face of the bride Marie, who had waked and looked therein on wonderful mornings, but it held more than the face of Marie the bride. It was strong; ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... literature that they ceased to exist. Plautus conceived the plan of transporting to Rome Grecian comedies of the time of the new comedy and of adapting them more or less to Latin morals. He possessed a strong and brutal verve which did not lack power, and more than once Moliere did him the honour of taking inspiration from him. Terence, after him, the friend of Scipio the second Africanus, and perhaps in collaboration with ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... the best known of Aphra Behn's comedies. It long remained a popular favourite in the theatre, its verve, bustle and wit, utterly defiant of the modest Josephs and qualmy prudes who censured these lively scenes. Steele has mention of this in an archly humorous paper, No. 51, Spectator, Saturday, 28 April, 1711. He pictures a young lady who has taken offence ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... laid the foundation for a splendid reputation. She toured in England, Germany, Austria and America with great success. In the Grove Dictionary, her playing is described in the following manner: "It is marked by an amount of verve and animation that are most rare with the younger English pianists. She has a great command of tone gradation, admirable technical finish, genuine musical taste and considerable individuality of style." In 1903 Miss Goodson married Mr. Arthur Hinton, one of the most ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... scoundrel of all is approved in the end and rewarded. The comedy is so admirably written and contrived, the personages stand out with such lifelike distinctness in their several kinds, and the whole is animated with such verve and resourcefulness that "The Alchemist" is a new marvel every time it is read. Lastly of this group comes the tremendous comedy, "Bartholomew Fair," less clear cut, less definite, and less structurally worthy of praise than its three predecessors, but full of the keenest and cleverest of satire ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... found to be resistible, vulnerable, breakable. The old verve and elan came back with all the old fire, and along with these, new depths of grim courage and tenacity, and, we are told, of spirituality, which may be the making of a new France greater than the world ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... il n'est pas cruel: au contraire! je sais meme qu'il avait demande une amnistie generale; mais l'idee de decouvrir un chef de conspirateurs va le mettre en verve![43] il deploiera contre vous les ressources de son esprit ... votre signalement sera partout ... je le sais ... le premier soldat ...
— Bataille De Dames • Eugene Scribe and Ernest Legouve
... rather tame, though its literary merit is considerable. He had a fair measure of constructive skill, but very little of poetic impulse or of dramatic verve. His best scenes interest us more for their good sense than for any more stirring qualities. His nearest approach to a strong character is the paterfamilias himself, who is certainly much less "woolly and mawkish"[52] than his pendant in Diderot. Next one may place the artist Wehrmann. Karl is ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... fashionable amateurs and mere soulless professional performers, but the very man who had made the music—the man in whose brain the notes had first gathered themselves together into speaking melody, and who could really judge the comparative merits of her rapid execution. She played with wonderful verve and spirit, so that Lady Exmoor, seated on the side sofa opposite, though shocked at first at Hilda's choice of a piece, glanced more than once at the wealthiest young commoner present (she had long since ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... the ring of men linked by hand-hold outside a ring of their partners, lifted locked arms over their partners' heads, and thus interwoven, the circle balanced before breaking up. Other times, other dances—ours is now the day of the trot and the tango. But they lack the life, the verve of the old dances, the old tunes. To this day when I hear them, my feet patter in spite of me. You could not dance to them steadily, with soft airs blowing all about, leaves flittering in sunshine, and water rippling near, without getting an ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... vessel into which to pour a highly seasoned brew of fun; that to this end his actors went before the public, potentially speaking slap-stick in hand, equipped by nature with liveliness of grimace and gesture and prepared to act with verve, unction and an abandon of dash and vigor that would produce a riot of merriment; that his dramatic machinery is hopelessly crippled and that his evident intentions and effects are hopelessly lost unless interpreted in this spirit: then we relegate Plautine ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... face at such moments was to behold pure sunshine; to hear her voice was to listen to the very essence of laughter and happiness. She had a marvelous power of telling stories, and when she was happy she told them with such verve that all people within earshot hung on her words. Then she could improvise, and dance, and take off almost any character; in short, she was the life of every party who admitted her within ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... spur, a kick, to my jaded mind and bored spirits. It recrudesced the laughter and the song, and put a lilt into my own imagination so that I could laugh and sing and say foolish things with the liveliest of them, or platitudes with verve and intensity to the satisfaction of the pompous mediocre ones who knew no ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... outlines of the character were already visible in all their distinctness from the beginning, as all those who have read the introductory chapters will readily admit. And the same lines were to be followed with an undeviating fixity of artistic purpose and with unfailing verve and spirit to the last. 'The Prodigious Adventures of Tartarin,' 'Tartarin on the Alps,' and 'Port-Tarascon,' form a trilogy; and I know of no other example in modern French literature of so long and so well sustained a joke. How ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... respectable in descent and quite as important historically as some of the favoured and fashionable champions of our time. They do not perhaps possess the outward beauty and distinction of type which would justify their being brought into general notice, but as workers they retain all the fire and verve that are required in dogs that are expected to encounter such vicious vermin as the badger ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... his phrases were conventional and pietistic. I used to feel that he jarred a good deal on Father Payne, but much was forgiven him because of his musical talents, which were really remarkable. His organ-playing, with its verve, its delicacy, and its quiet mastery, was delicious to hear, he was engaged in writing music mainly, and had a piano all to himself in a little remote room beyond the dining-room, which looked out to the stable-yard ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... piece was a march used with Meyerbeerian effectiveness to bring down the curtain. The stout verve of this "El Capitan" march gave it a large vogue outside the opera. Hopper next produced "The Charlatan," a work bordering upon opera comique in its first version. Both of these works scored even larger success ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... hand to conceal his smile over the police official's chagrin. Gilder, staring always at this woman who had come to be his Nemesis, was marveling over the beauty and verve of the one so hating him as to plan the ruin of his life ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... morning with much verve and vigor. It was a pleasant morning: the windows were open; the schoolrooms were all well ventilated; the teachers, the best of their kind, were stimulating in their lectures and in their conversation. ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... with RUFUS; plainly a RIFACCIMENTO of some inferior work; but there are some damned fine lines. As for the purely satiric ill-minded ABELARD AND HELOISE, another TROILUS, QUOI! it is not pleasant, truly, but what strength, what verve, what knowledge of life, and the Canon! What a finished, humorous, rich picture is the Canon! Ah, there was nobody like Shakespeare. But what I like is the David and Absalom business. Absalom is so well felt - you love him as David ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... certain they must have been stingers, to judge from the lovely rosy tint she soon raised on those firm white buttocks of his, which gradually quivered more and more as he worked rapidly in your aunt's pretty Cunt; I could see his white shaft almost withdrawn, to be plunged in again with ever increasing verve. The more Selina whipped and made his bottom smart the more furiously ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... sad smile of indulgence with which Wisdom sometimes deigns to commiserate the gaiety of Folly. Suddenly he disappeared from beside me, and the next that I saw or heard of him—he was hard at work pirouetting on the deck below with a red-tailed demon, and exhibiting in his steps a "verve" and a graceful audacity which at Paris would have certainly obtained for him the honours of expulsion at the hands of the municipal authorities. The entertainment of the day concluded with a discourse delivered out of a wind-sail by the chaplain attached to the person of the Pere Arctique, which ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... to—well, sort of rattle, if you know what I mean. But still perhaps it was only my fancy. Mitchell has such very high spirits, you see, and is determined to make everything go. He won't have conventional parties, and insists on plenty of verve; so, of course, one's forced to have it.' He sighed. 'They haven't any children, and they make a kind of hobby of entertaining in ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... the critics wrote, "Maupassant's verve and Heine's wit;" Some even made a verbal note Of ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... new appointment will be made, one who will bring to her task not only experience and with it a practical knowledge, but the advantage of intellectual discipline recently acquired at a famous educational centre; and the whole concern will go on with its usual verve, swing, snap, toward another year's success. Then next year me for the giddy lights of the metropolitan city and the sacred halls ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... Jones" is in its episodes, its crowded canvas, the unfailing verve and variety of its action: in the fine open-air atmosphere of the scenes, the sense of the stir of life they convey: most of all, in an indescribable manliness or humanness which bespeaks the true comic force—something of that same comic view that one detects in Shakspere ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... man of the middle class, after a stormy youth drifted into revolutionary journalism. With much verve, and a true Voltairian spirit, he at first took up a moderate attitude, but being a time server soon discovered that his interest lay in another direction. From the middle of 1792 he rose rapidly to great popularity by his loud ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... joyeuse et folle, Que ta verve railleuse animait Corilla, Et que tu nous lanais avec la Rosina La roulade amoureuse et l'oeillade espagnole ? Ces pleurs sur tes bras nus, quand tu chantais le Saule, N'tait-ce pas ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... waits For such as you to cherish it to Youth: Raw social soils untilled need Love's own verve That Peace a-flower may oust their weedy hates: And where Distress would faint from wolfish sleuth The perfect lovers' ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... enthusiasm. Suddenly, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Holland had gained political independence, Dutch art struck off by itself, became original, became famous. It pictured native life with verve, skill, keenness of insight, and fine pictorial view. Limited it was; it never soared like Italian art, never became universal or world-embracing. It was distinct, individual, national, something that spoke for Holland, ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... "The Day of Retribution," Shades of avengers in the world below Prodding my man with verve and resolution, And broiling him ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... an' thar's no barkeep nor nosepaint—none, in trooth, of the fav'rable adjuncts wherewith we makes a evenin' in Hamilton's hurdygurdy a season of social elevation, an' yet they pulls off their fandangoes with a heap of verve, an' I've no doubt ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... little party, this patriotic gentleman, in the presence of ladies, whom he reverenced with a knight- errant's devotion and homage, was the life of our circle. He carried an aroma of fun and light-heartedness about him that was simply contagious. He sang Beranger's ditties with a verve and elan that brought back bonny Paris and student days to those of us who were acquainted with them. One moment he played exquisite bits from Mozart on his violin, to the accompaniment of the vicar's violoncello, that were most entrancing; the next, scraped away at some provoking tarantella ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... other French words which like 'prestige' are at this moment hovering on the verge of English, hardly knowing whether they shall become such, or no. Such are 'ennui', 'exploitation', 'verve', 'persiflage', 'badinage', 'chicane', 'finesse', and others; all of them often employed by us,—and it is out of such frequent employment that adoption proceeds,—because expressing shades of meaning ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... probably in any language: 'aplomb,' 'badinage,' 'borne,' 'chic,' 'chicane,' 'cossu,' 'coterie,' 'egarement,' 'elan,' 'espieglerie,' 'etourderie,' 'friponnerie,' 'gentil,' 'ingenue,' 'liaison,' 'malice,' 'parvenu,' 'persiflage,' 'prevenant,' 'ruse,' 'tournure,' 'tracasserie,' 'verve.' It is evident that the words just named have to do with shades of thought which are to a great extent unfamiliar to us; for which, at any rate, we have not found a name, have hardly felt that they needed one. But fine and subtle as in many instances are the thoughts ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... of original poems was La Saisiaz and the Two Poets of Croisic. The Croisic Poets are agreeable studies, written with verve and lucidity, of two fantastic events which lifted these commonplace poets suddenly into fame. They do well to amuse an idle hour. The end of both is interesting. That of the first, which begins ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... had met in Fleet Street. Willie was then a tall, well-made fellow of thirty or thereabouts with an expressive taking face, lit up with a pair of deep blue laughing eyes. He had any amount of physical vivacity, and told a good story with immense verve, without for a moment getting above the commonplace: to him the Corinthian journalism of The Daily Telegraph was literature. Still he had the surface good nature and good humour of healthy youth and was generally ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Glinka; and Ivan, whose piano practice had always been kept up, went quietly to the big Erard which stood lonesomely upon the platform at the end of the hall, opened it, seated himself, and dashed into the brilliant overture to "Russlan and Ludmilla": playing with such verve and spirit that, ere he finished, every man in the room had gone to augment the group around the instrument, and Ivan had his audience worked up ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... bookworm has coined the word bouquiner. And then the charming evenings spent at the theaters and ended at Tortoni's with this truest of "boulevardiers," who knew every one and everything, and whose inexhaustible fund of anecdote was enlivened by a spontaneous easy wit and verve that ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... people which Chopin, the pianist, possesses in so high a degree; he represents a personage instantly and with astounding truth." Liszt remarks that Chopin displayed in pantomime an inexhaustible verve drolatique, and often amused himself with reproducing in comical improvisations the musical formulas and peculiar ways of certain virtuosos, whose faces and gestures he at the same time imitated in the most striking manner. These statements are corroborated by the accounts ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... N. imagination; originality; invention; fancy; inspiration; verve. warm imagination, heated imagination, excited imagination, sanguine imagination, ardent imagination, fiery imagination, boiling imagination, wild imagination, bold imagination, daring imagination, playful imagination, lively imagination, fertile imagination, fancy. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... vespers in the temple of Jupiter." We know how many sketches of possible tragedies Recine would make before he could adopt one as the appropriate theme, on which he could work with that thorough enjoyment of the labour, which is necessary to give life and verve to any creation, whether of the poet or ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... proud of having kept her secret when in the army. "But I told it to the ground," she added; "I dug a hole that would hold a gallon and whispered it there." Phebe kept her faculties to the last, and to the last sold her apples to the Quality by the sea, returned repartees with extraordinary verve and contempt for false delicacy, and knew as much of the quality of Brighton liquor as if she were ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... admitted scruples, but enough beauty and wit to match when and with whom she chooses, who dominates the play; and though Loveworth, whom she finally permits to win her, is rather substantial than gay, she is gay enough for them both. The action, though somewhat farcical, has verve throughout, and the dialogue crackles. And, as regards the nature of comedy, Baker now knows where he stands. There is no character who could possibly be taken as an "example." On the contrary, whenever a ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... which her teacher had hinted at when he had told her to go out and live; but her heart was not in it, she took no pleasure in deceit—and yet she longed for success. She could sing the parts, she had learned her French and Italian and taken instruction in acting; but she lacked the verve, the passionate abandon, without which she could never succeed. Yet succeed she must, or break her father's heart and make his great sacrifice a mockery. She turned and looked back at Denver Russell, and that ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge |
