"Curio" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one corner stood a fine old mahogany desk of quaint design and many drawers and pigeonholes, one and all sacked, their contents turned out to litter the floor. In another corner, a curio cabinet had fared as ill. Even bookcases had not been overlooked, and stood with open ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... less likely to be suspected by the authorities. Perhaps I attached too great a value to what may have been a delusion; perhaps my theory rested upon no more solid foundation than the belief that I had seen Karamaneh in the shop of the curio dealer. If her appearance there should prove to have been phantasmal, the structure of my theory would be shattered at its base. To-night I should test my premises, and upon the result of my investigations determine ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... world in which he moved were routed by the onrush of the ideals of democratic equality, fraternity, and liberty. With the prosperity of the newer shibboleths, the old-time notion of aristocracy, gentility, and high breeding became more and more a curio to be framed suitably in gold and kept in the glass case of an art museum. The crashing advance of the industrial age of gold thrust all courts and their sinuous graces aside for the unmistakable ledger balance of the counting-house. This new order of things had been a long time in ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... commonplace—but within, like the house again, it is filled with rare bits gathered out of every age and country and jumbled together in utter confusion. If you ride down Seventh street in a horse-car, you are in a psychological curio-shop. On one side, very likely, is a Russian Jew just from the Steppes; on the other, a negro with centuries of heathendom and slavery hinting themselves in lip and eye; the driver is a Fenian, with the blood of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... paintings. These little wooden houses, of such marvelous cleanly whiteness inside, are black outside, time-worn, disjointed and grimacing. When one looks closely, this grimace is to be found everywhere: in the hideous masks laughing in the shop fronts of the innumerable curio-shops; in the grotesque figures, the playthings, the idols, cruel, suspicious mad;—it is even found in the buildings: in the friezes of the religious porticos, in the roofs of the thousand pagodas; of which the angles and gable-ends ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... portraits, old seals, snuff-boxes, and lockets, attract the curio-hunter. Here is a Prayer Book with massive silver clasps, inscribed, "Dearest Mary, on our wedding day, June 4th, 1847, from Gilbert." There, in a red morocco case, is a miniature of a handsome naval officer. At the back, under glass, ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... with dark men smoking chibouques, eating kous-kous, playing dominoes, or sipping absinthe and golden liqueurs which, fortunately not having been invented in the Prophet's time, had not been forbidden by him. Curio shops and bazaars for native jewellery and brasswork were still open, lit up with pink and yellow lamps. The brilliant uniforms of young Spahis and Zouaves made spots of vivid colour among the dark clothes of Europeans, tourists, or employes in commercial houses out for ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... attention to them, but merely strip them off, he will find the carcass of a very tolerable novel left behind. The first plot of Philautus—Euphues—Lucilla, and the successive jilting of the two friends for each other and for Curio, is no mean novel-substance. Not Balzac himself, certainly no one of his successors, need disdain it: and more than one of them has taken up something like it. The journey from Naples to London, and the episode of Fidus and Iffida, could ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... over there—come back, and tell me what I must do or say. You and I are comrades," the jewel seller leeringly said, "and we must lie together! All the world are liars-and half of the world lives by lying." with which sage remark the old curio seller betook himself ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... an old bookworm who has a book and curio shop in Baltimore discovered between the leaves of a very old Spanish manuscript a letter written in 1550 detailing the adventures of a crew of mutineers of a Spanish galleon bound from Spain to South America with a vast treasure of "doubloons" and "pieces of eight," I ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Schofield flushed under his new moustache (repainted since noon) and lectured as he had never lectured before. A new grace invested his every gesture; a new sonorousness rang in his voice; a simple and manly pomposity marked his very walk as he passed from curio to curio. And when he fearlessly handled the box of rats and hammered upon it with cool insouciance, he beheld—for the first time in his life—a purl of admiration eddying in Marjorie's lovely eye, a certain softening of ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... Wants to look over his nearest jay neighbor, I should imagine, and see what sort of a curio he is. He thinks it may be necessary to put up barbed wire ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... one of the ladies who was purchasing jewels in Pearce's shop, "what a lovely curio! Wherever now did ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... Lilli were not to go with us to The Hague. This was the morning for opening the curio cabinets in the drawing-room, and washing the contents, and the girls were expected to help their mother. As the glass doors are never opened, unless that some guest may carefully handle a gold snuff-box, a miniature, ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... over at length. Here was a specimen. But a specimen of what? I am no mere curio-monger, no collector of frivolous and unmeaning trifles. A specimen must illustrate some truth. Now what truth did this specimen illustrate? The question, thus stated, brought forth its ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... Gray looked a trifle surprised at this, and Marian Barber seemed openly displeased. Grace felt thoroughly out of patience, when toward the close of the evening, he approached her as she stood looking at a Japanese curio, and said: ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... havoc with the nervous, had come to be regarded as of no consequence, a mere tap on a drum, eliciting a nonchalant "Ah, there she goes," and nothing more. Everybody was alive for fragments of the dead missiles; curio-hunting was a craze, and hundreds of people were ever ready to pounce upon the projectiles that wasted their sweetness on the desert air. The tiniest crumb of metal was treasured as a valuable memento. The shells fell and broke as would a tea-pot, a brick, or an egg of the ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... foodstuffs throughout the year. Besides, the surplus produce is conveyed to the larger towns on llamas, and there realised to the best advantage. It is a very interesting sight every Sunday morning to see the "market," and the curio hunter would just be in his element, as not only do the Indians bring in vegetables and fruits, but all sorts of native silver in quaint shapes, and ornaments made by the Indians themselves can be picked up very cheaply. The dresses of the Indian squaws are also ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... lacking. For patient work he substituted high talk of Art in the studios of his friends. The gay little suppers in their own rooms were famous; nine at table, mostly men, entranced by Valentine's beauty and her wit. Charming were their afternoons among the curio shops, and their return, laden with loot too precious to wait over night for delivery. Glorious were their holidays in Paris and Vienna; wonderful nights in Venice! Always together! To their sudden migration to Egypt, whence he returned ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... much, Miss Gordon, for brushing away the library dust from that historic cameo. I had so utterly forgotten it lay in the musty tomes, that it has all the charm of a curio." Mr. Cutting took ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... atheism, that a copy is now only to be found in the hands of the curious. This author ridiculed the absurd and horrid doctrine of infant damnation, and was instantly decried as an atheist, and the printer prosecuted to his ruin! Caelius Secundus Curio, a noble Italian, published a treatise De Amplitudine beati Regni Dei, to prove that Heaven has more inhabitants than Hell,—or, in his own phrase, that the elect are more numerous than the reprobate. However we may ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... illustrated in an interesting fashion by a bit of vandalism on the part of Viscount Tanaka, Special Envoy from the Mikado to the Korean Emperor. When the Viscount was in Seoul, late in 1906, he was approached by a Japanese curio-dealer, who pointed out to him that there was a very famous old Pagoda in the district of P'ung-duk, a short distance from Song-do. This Pagoda was presented to Korea by the Chinese Imperial Court a thousand years ago, and ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... Foster was the proprietor of the curio-shop in Wardour street—his daughter was among the ignorant—and but one or two were aware that the business of Benjamin and Company, carried on in Duke street, belonged also to him. None, assuredly, among his sprinkling of acquaintances, would have believed ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... frequently studded with gems which I remember so well in days gone by and especially at the home Gouverneur Kemble in Cold Spring, where it was passed around and freely used by both men and women, now commands no respect except as an ancestral curio. Dryden, Dean Swift, Pope, Addison, Lord Chesterfield, Dr. Johnson, Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Keats, Charles Lamb, Gibbon, Walter Scott and Darwin were among the prominent worshipers of the snuff-box and its contents, while some of them indulged in the habit to the ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... just revenge. It is certainly no lofty ambition that prompts him to accuse me, ambition such as fired Marcus Antonius to accuse Cnaeus Carbo, Caius Mucius to accuse Aulus Albucius, Publius Sulpicius to accuse Cnaeus Norbanus, Caius Furius to accuse Manius Aquilius, Caius Curio to accuse Quintus Metellus. They were young men of admirable education and were led by ambition to undertake these accusations as the first step in a forensic career, that by the conduct of some cause celebre they might make ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... character. Luxury and cupidity, it was said, had produced in our country the same effect which they had produced of old in the Roman republic. The modern Englishman was to the Englishman of the sixteenth century what Verres and Curio were to Dentatus and Fabricius. Those who held this language were as ignorant and shallow as people generally are who extol the past at the expense of the present. A man of sense would have perceived that, if the English of the time of George the Second had really been more ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of a small sheet of paper. "Visit immediately number 87, Rue de Richelieu," they said. "It is a small curio shop. Monsieur Dufrenne, the proprietor, expects you, and will join you at once. Proceed without delay to London and report to Monsieur de Grissac, the French Ambassador. He has lost an ivory snuff box, which you must recover as quickly as possible. You will find money ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... [Sidenote: He has a wife, and many concubines.] & hade a wyf forto welde, a worelych quene, & mony a le{m}man, neu{er} e lat{er}, at ladis wer called. 1352 In e clernes of his {con}cubines & curio{us} wede[gh], [Sidenote: The mind of the king was fixed upon new meats and other vain things.] In noty{n}g of nwe metes & of nice gettes, Al wat[gh] e mynde of at man, o{n} misschapen i{n}ges, Til e lorde of e lyfte ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various |
