"Quaintly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... too material for such imaginings," Francis replied, "but there is a quaintly artificial air about it all. We must go and look for Wilmore and ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... probably the only relic of the local history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... middle ages was as dead as its religion. Men spoke of women as coarsely as they spoke of their cattle. Human nature indeed could not be entirely crushed. John Paston's wife (see p. 321), for instance, was quaintly affectionate. "I would," she once wrote to her husband, "ye were at home, if it were for your ease ... now liever than a gown, though it were of scarlet." But the system of wardship (see p. 116) made marriages a matter of bargain and sale. ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... clock with arched top and brass feet; and its face, suggesting that of a grandfather clock, was quaintly decorated with garlands of red roses. It had beautifully pierced hands, small brass cherub's heads at the corners, and at the top a single small hand pointed to its musical repertoire which consisted of: cotillion, jig, minuet, song, air, ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... with his left hand. Some hundred yards away a young man, who was carrying two logs toward New Place, had paused to rest. A girl was with him. Now laughingly she was pretending to assist the porter in lifting his burden. It was a quaintly pretty vignette, as framed by the peach leaves, because those two young people were so merry and so candidly in love. A symbolist might have wrung pathos out of the girl's desire to aid, as set against ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... my father's chair forward into the open doorway, and stood close behind him, as was her custom, one arm resting lightly upon the quaintly carved chair-back. ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... See, as deriving its own right from the same Divine source. Political science in this essay takes rank as an independent branch of philosophy, and the points which Dante seeks to establish are supported by arguments implying much historical knowledge, though quaintly scholastic in their application. The Epistles contain the same thoughts: peace, mutual respect, and obedience to a common head, the duty of the chief to his subordinates and of the governed to their lord, are urged with ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... come in?" he said courteously. A refusal was at Maitland's lips when the door was opened by an old lady in a white frilled cap and without being able to explain how it came about he found himself in the quaintly furnished but delightfully cosy living-room, soaking in the comfort of a great ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... hung over the joyous summer morning. I was back again on my way from Bow Street, threading a difficult passage through the market baskets of Covent Garden, the child stepping blithely by my side, graceful even then, notwithstanding her immatureness, and quaintly attractive, though her deep blue eyes were full of tears, and the white terror had not passed wholly from her face. It was those few moments of her complete and trustful helplessness which had transformed my life ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... like. Ivan's outfit, consisting solely of the things she herself had given him, had been packed in his mother's one small foreign trunk, whose contents until then, Miss Clarkson, observed, was an ikon, quaintly framed. Of letters, of souvenirs, of any clue of any kind to the identity of mother and son, there was none. She felt sure that the names they had given ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... possibly follow and fix. First it was a hymn, all abrupt, odd, minor cadences and monotonous refrain. Then he shifted to a ballad—and the mountains are full of old ballads of Scotland and England, come down from the time of the first settlers, and with local names quaintly substituted for the originals here ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... that had well nigh disturbed the entire arrangement of the table, and broke up the harmony of the scene "with most admired disorder;" for on the head of the Marigold family likening the youngster's noise to a chamber organ, and quaintly observing that they always had music during dinner at Fishmongers' Hall, the lady mother of the infant, a jolly dame, who happened to be engaged in the shell fish line, took the allusion immediately to herself, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... can write at once so beautifully, so quaintly, so suggestively, and so evangelically as John Bunyan. 'The Lord Willbewill,' says John Bunyan, 'took special care that the gates should be secured with double guards, double bolts, and double locks and bars; and that Ear-gate especially might the better be looked to, for that was ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... naturally locked they made no further effort to effect an entrance. They contented themselves with strolling around it once again, admiring its shingles that were weather-beaten to a silvery gray, enthusing over the quaintly-gabled windows of its upper story, calling each other's attention to ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... smiled at Sylvia. "It will be," she said, quaintly, and in English, "my 'treat,' dear friend." And then, as Sylvia shook her head decidedly—there were often these little contests of generosity between the two women—she ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... for he thinks a black-letter volume reads best in one of those venerable chambers where the light struggles through dusty lancet windows and painted glass; and that it loses half its zest, if taken away from the neighbourhood of the quaintly-carved oaken book-case and Gothic reading-desk. At his suggestion, the Squire has had the library furnished in this antique taste, and several of the windows glazed with painted glass, that they may throw a properly tempered light upon the pages of ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... and fell into a number; it might be ten, or twenty, or twenty- five, it did not much matter; she looked to see what it was, but right or wrong, never failed to eat the bonbon—an illogical result, which contrasted quaintly with the intense seriousness with which she made her stakes. Sometimes she would place two or three sugar-plums on one number, always naming it aloud—"trente-et-un," "douze-premier," "douze- apres." It was ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... the flower of chivalry and the soul of honour, is still "like ointment poured forth" in the estimation of the world—whose death rises almost to the dignity and grandeur of a martyrdom—and who has left in his "Arcadia" a quaintly decorated, conceived, and unequally chiselled, but true, rich, and magnificent monument of his genius. In spite, however, of all Waller's tender ditties, of the incense he offered up—not only to Dorothy, but to her sister Lady Lucy, and even to her maid Mrs. Braughton—his goddess ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... light of the moon, which rose nightly during the week following this great calamity. From the city gates, standing gaunt, black, and now unguarded, to the Temple, the level waste seemed sombre as a funeral pall; whilst the Thames, stripped of wharves and warehouses, quaintly gabled homes, and comfortable inns—wont to cast pleasant lights and shadows on its surface—now swept past the blackened ruins a melancholy river of ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... examining the leaves and the flowers with extraordinary interest. From time to time a deep, sad sigh broke from his oppressed chest; he passed his hand over his brow as if to efface the importunate images. He sat down amid the quaintly clipped boxwood which ornamented the garden in the antique fashion, called his son again to him, held him between his knees, interrogating him again, in a low voice, as he had done before; then drew him toward him and clasped him tightly for a long time, as if to draw into his own heart ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... swans could have been cited in a simile illustrating profusion. Bass quaintly stated that the "dying song" of the swan, so celebrated by poets, "exactly resembled the creaking of a rusty ale-house sign on a windy day." The remark is not so pretty as, but far more true than, that of the bard who would have us believe ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... missed it in Paradise. It was the measure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd "carved it out quaintly in the sun;" and, turning philosopher by the very occupation, provided it with mottos more touching than tombstones. It was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded by Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... a dull moment in the quaintly-written story, adventure following adventure, holding the reader in thrall; whilst the love interest ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... in 1910, a number of ancient facades, most picturesque and quaintly pinnacled. There also a small botanical garden floriated most luxuriantly, and here again the Dyle reflected the mossy walls of ancient stone palaces, and there were rows of tall, wooden, carved posts ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... prayed for the damnation of an opponent because he did not agree with him in his theory of irregular verbs. Freeman, whose self-assertion was perpetual, represented himself throughout his libel as fighting for the cause of truth. His own reverence for truth he illustrated quaintly enough at the close of his last article. "I leave others to protest," said this veracious critic, "against Mr. Froude's treatment of the sixteenth century. I do not profess to have mastered those times in detail from original sources." I leave others to protest! From 1864 to 1870 Freeman had ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... written, let us say, from thirty or forty years to a century or two ago, amuse us in a way their poor dead authors never intended. Most amusing are the dead ones who take themselves seriously, whose books are pulpits quaintly carved and decorated with precious stones and silken canopies in which they stand and preach to or ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... frequently abused and persecuted; and in 1773 "she was by a direct revelation instructed to repair to America;" and it is quaintly added that "permission was given for all those of the society who were able, and who felt any special impressions on their own minds so to do, to ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... devil, you heard, if you like," quaintly retorted Mullins: "but bear a hand, and tell us all about this ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... having deposited her basket, was bent, not on prayer, but on counting her money. In Brittany, on market-days, there is never a lack of pious worshippers; here it is not so, the good folks of Seine et Marne evidently being inclined to materialism. The interior of this picturesque church is very quaintly coloured, and, as a whole, it is ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... of altitude, when McElvina beat to quarters, that he might accustom his men to the exercise of the guns. The rays of the sun had not power to pierce through the fog; and, shorn of his beams, he had more the appearance of an overgrown moon, or was, as Phillips quaintly observed, "like a man disguised in ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... which were positively delicious. We concluded our banquet by tossing off the contents of two more young cocoanuts, after which we regaled ourselves with the soothing fumes of tobacco, inhaled from a quaintly carved pipe ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... extended and entire epic, but that the two great epics we now possess were then constructed by stringing together a number of detached poems, the separate chants of the old Greek bards or rhapsodists. Mr Grote sees in the Odyssey all the marks of unity of design, and of what he rather quaintly calls "single-headed authorship." With regard to the Iliad, he admits that there is not the same stringent evidence of an original plan according to which the whole poem has been written, and he detects here ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... to discover truth by intuition, rather than by deduction. The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge's cottage. I think I see him now. He answered in some degree to his friend's description of him, but was more gaunt and Don Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed (according to the costume of that unconstrained period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait, not unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... nightly pressed their chosen haunts, and to mark the "little people's" favorite dancing ground. "They had always fine music among themselves, and danced in a moonshiny night around or in a ring, as one may see to this day upon every common in England where mushrooms grow," quaintly says one old writer. And the Rev. Gerard Smith still further voices the belief of the people as to the nature of ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... heart's love. (He sighs happily, and takes her hands in his, looking quaintly at her.) That must positively be my last kiss, Grace, or I shall become downright silly. Let us talk. (Releases her and sits a little apart from her.) Grace: is ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... but ah, not seen— Things proper to the age of Saturn— Shall greet you here; for we have been Wrought quaintly, on the Arcadian pattern. Your poet's lips will break in song For joy, to see at last appearing The bulls and bears, a peaceful throng, While a lamb leads ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... 1914-15 they perfected their plans. The Armenian race was to cease, and the Valis and other officials were, each in his district, to see to the thoroughness of its cessation. Sometimes, as happened at Erzerum, the Vali in question, not having the broad out-look of Enver, or quaintly and curiously having a womanish objection to the national duty of flogging men to death and giving over young girls to a barbarous soldiery, remonstrated with the authorities, or even refused to obey orders. Such a one was instantly removed from his office, and a stauncher ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... black patent shoes showing beneath the flouncing of her skirt, to the white hat with its clusters of roses. Her foulard gown was as simple as genius could make it, and she wore no ornaments, save a fine clasp to her waistband of dull gold, quaintly fashioned, and the fine gold chain around her neck, from which hung her racing-glasses. She was to him the very type of everything aristocratic. It might be, as she had told him, that she chose to work for her ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... after a moment quaintly asked. Then for the joke of it she explained. "I'm putting you, you see, in relation with ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... drawbridge, which gave entrance into streets so narrow, as to admit with difficulty three horses abreast, and evincing with what strictness the ancient lords of the village adhered to their prejudice against fortifications, and their opinion in favour of keeping the field, so quaintly expressed in the well-known proverb of the family,—"It is better to hear the lark sing than the mouse cheep." The streets, or rather the lanes, were dark, but for a shifting gleam of moonlight, which, as that planet began to rise, was ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... was almost deserted. On the opposite side two stout, elderly and rather quaintly dressed gentlemen were walking along in the direction of the station, but away down towards the Charleston ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... they don't," thought Ida, as she looked around the quiet and quaintly beautiful spot, to which a kind Providence had brought her. It seemed as if her burden already were beginning to ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... the younger poet with the Cambridge neighborhoods; and I never saw him walking for pleasure except on the east veranda of his house, though I was told he loved walking in his youth. In this and in some other things Longfellow was more European than American, more Latin than Saxon. He once said quaintly that one got a great deal of exercise in putting on and ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... edition entered thoroughly into the spirit of the author's intent. The contemporary opinion of the French character is quaintly shown in the portrait of the Devil dressed as a French gentleman, his cloven foot discovering his identity. Whatever deficiencies are revealed in these early attempts to illustrate, they invariably ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... lovely neuk, this Braehead, preserved almost as it was two hundred years ago. "Lot and his wife," mentioned by Maidie,—two quaintly cropped yew-trees,—still thrive; the burn runs as it did in her time, and sings the same quiet tune,—as much the same and as different as Now and Then. The house is full of old family relics and pictures, the sun shining on them through the small deep windows ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... world is of individual and varying compass. It may be likened to one of those curious Chinese balls of quaintly carved ivory, containing other balls, one within another, the proportions ever dwindling with each successive inclosure, yet each a more minute duplicate of the external sphere. This might seem the least world of all,—the restricted limits of the quadrangle of this primitive ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... stony track, down which a streamlet trickled from the peat bog above. The house had stood in the same place for two hundred years, and Jos Hughes looked as if he too had lived there for the same length of time. His quaintly cut blue cloth coat adorned with large brass buttons, his knee breeches of corduroy, and grey blue stockings, looking well in keeping with his dwelling, but very out of place behind a counter. His brown wrinkled ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... his elbows upon the table, his inscrutable face propped in the crotch of his hand. A ruby, set quaintly in a cobra's head, gleamed from a ring upon his little finger. Presently ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... up as of old to the standard of Divine Truth, though even the fires of another persecution should blaze around them," he feared that he would not be able to do so. The spirit was surely willing but the purse was empty, "as thee know," he quaintly adds, "our farming business does not put much cash in our pockets." The cash he needed was generously supplied by Samuel E. Sewall, and Whittier went as a delegate to the convention after all. The disposition on ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... had passed, retraced their steps northward till they reached the Mohawk river. Along this stream and the upper waters of the Hudson they made their first abode; and here they remained until, as their historian quaintly and truly records, "their language was altered." The Huron speech became the Iroquois tongue, in the form in which it is spoken by the Caniengas, or Mohawks. In Iroquois tradition, and in the constitution of their league, the Canienga nation ranks as the ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... almost immediately with the brandy in a quaintly cut liqueur glass. A glance at the clock as she passed seemed ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... folds of his robe.—Ver. 267. 'Rorant pennae sinusque,' is quaintly translated by Clarke, 'his wings and the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... deny; nor if we once allow this prodigious leap of inference, shall we find much difficulty in reaching the famous conclusion that "thought conceived to affect the matter of another universe simultaneously with this may explain a future state." This proposition, quaintly couched in an anagram, like the discoveries of old astronomers, was published last year in "Nature," as containing the gist of the forthcoming book. On the negative-image hypothesis it is not hard to see how thought is conceived ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... his daughter into the hurricane-house—or, as the packet-men quaintly term it, the coach-house, where they stood watching the movements on the quarter-deck for the next half-hour; an interval of which we shall take advantage to touch in a few of the stronger lights of our picture, leaving the softer tints and the shadows to be discovered by the ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... surpassed by the scenes afforded by any other river of its size in the world. This city was founded by Brennus, the chieftain of the Gauls and the conqueror of Rome, 388 B.C., and tradition states that his brother Belinus aided him in the work. The statues of these worthies are quaintly carved on the gateway of John's Church, in Broad Street, and are of very great antiquity. In the earliest writings that bear upon the west of England—the Welsh Chronicles—this city is called Caer oder, which means the city of the Chasm. This the Saxons called ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... Leslie gibed over, and shot alongside the canoe, jumping into her with the end of a rope that he had already made fast on board the catamaran. This rope's-end he deftly threw in the form of a half-hitch round the quaintly carved figure-head of the canoe, taking the end aft and making it fast round the heel of the mast, thus effectually securing the craft to the catamaran in a manner convenient for the towage of the ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... realised that there were redeeming points in the situation. Small as it was, the cubicle was decidedly pretty, and blue enough to satisfy the blondest of mistresses. Blue was the paint on the walls, blue the mat on the floor, blue and white the coverlet on the bed, blue the quaintly shaped china on the wash-stand. She remembered with a thrill of satisfaction that her own bags and cases were of the same hue, and took off her hat feeling that she had found an oasis in the ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... enriched the world with one of the most vivid panoramas of human nature known to man, happened in Tom Davies's bookshop in Covent Garden. Mr. and Mrs. Davies were friends of the Doctor, who frequently visited their shop. Of them Boswell remarks quaintly that though they had been on the stage for many years, they "maintained an uniform decency of character." The shop seems to have been a charming place: one went there not merely to buy books, but also to have a cup of tea in the back parlor. It is sad ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... that we're not a large family, isn't it?" she said, quaintly. "I'm almost glad now that Wealthy didn't come, papa. Wouldn't she say it was little? Littler than Miss Fitch's schoolhouse, ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... out a character by our English level, it is a picture (real or personal) quaintly drawn in various colours, all of them heightened by ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... fever, that is, Loved One did, and daddy was lost at sea. Reda thinks I had it, and she says I must not do things like other girls or it will come back and kill me, but I don't believe her now. Since I have known you girls I feel so much stronger and wiser," she finished quaintly, with a significant toss ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... inches in length, which, he observed, could be stuck in one corner of the mouth, or twisted in the hatband, and would never be in the way. Thus ended this alarming insurrection, which was long known by the name of the Pipe Plot, and which, it has been somewhat quaintly observed, did end, like most plots and ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... with one hand on a short hickory bow, while the other rather touched than sought support, from the long, delicate handle of an ashen lance. A quiver made of the cougar skin, from which the tail of the animal depended, as a characteristic ornament, was slung at his back, and a shield of hides, quaintly emblazoned with another of his warlike deeds, was suspended from his neck ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... widening and rising spiral. The fiction of the first volume consists of fables, fairy tales and folk stories; the poetry of nursery rhymes and children's verses; the biography of anecdotal sketches of Field and Stevenson; and history is suggested in the quaintly written Story of Joseph. On a subsequent turn of the spiral are found fiction from Scott and Swift; poetry from Homer, Vergil, Hay, Gilbert and Tennyson; hero stories from Malory; ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... to some, having been a great traveller, had improved himself diligently in the art of war; and, as the old chronicles quaintly relate, "he visited most of the courts of Europe, even as far as Constantinople; wherein he made such advances in the school of Mars, that his superior skill in arms was generally applauded in every country he passed through." ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... green table that I remembered well sat a small boy, rather quaintly dressed in a by-gone fashion, with a frill round his wide shirt-collar, and his golden hair cut quite close at the top, and rather long at the sides and back. It was Gogo Pasquier. He seemed a very nice little boy. He had pen and ink and copy-book before him, and a gilt-edged volume ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... Did wisely one sweet instrument to choose— The native reed; which, tutored with rare skill, Brought other Muses[1] down to aid its trill! A cheerful song that sometimes quaintly masked The fancy, as the affections sweetly tasked; And won from England's proud and foreign[2] court, For native England's tongue, a sweet report— And sympathy—till in due time it grew A permanent voice ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... shan't see you again—unless you come here some day. Do you think that you can?" He bent to see her face. The bonnet framed it quaintly. ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... commentary in the quaintly humorous style characteristic of the writer, describes the teaching of a dozen or more popular nursery songs to the author's three little maids, the April, May, and June Baby respectively. The music for each is given, and ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... pleasure that only one endowed as he could feel. This part of him was often the subject of talk with those of us who knew him well. But what charmed me most, more even than his brilliant mental gifts, were the sweetness of his disposition and his quaintly quizzical and happy humour. Ambition was not strong in him, was in fact all but absent, and he often rallied me on mine. He never in all his life asked for any improvement in salary or position; but, in spite of his inveterate ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... people learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: we dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each place in the right spirit. The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, 'fait des discours en soi pour se soutenir ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... call in joyous vein, And bade his arms be brought; now while in view Of Agramant he donned the plate and chain, Those lords the former question moved anew; Who was the knight, that on the martial plain The manage of the lance so quaintly knew? And of Ferrau, who spake with him whilere, Craved, if to him was ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... through the whole campong Of goldsmiths, seeking there the best to make The fan and girdle. And the hammered gold Soon shone with many amethysts and gems. It was a marvel to behold those rare And quaintly fashioned ornaments, to deck A sultaness. Of priceless worth they were. Four days, and all was ready for the Queen. But she had never eaten all this time Because of grief. She thought the fan more fine Than Java ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... are interwoven with Custer's own recollections of his generals and their campaigns. We are irresistibly reminded of Lever in the style of the narration, and of that dashing creature "O'Malley" in the adventures of our own dragoon. The story of General Custer's wooing is quaintly told, and shines like a bow of promise through all the clouds of his stormy career; it is a romance by itself. Apropos of the charge which we are told won the boy general his star, we clip a bit of word painting which could only have been written by "one who ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... 304: Ingram's narrative was first published in Hakluyt's folio of 1589, pp. 557-562, but in his larger work, Principal Navigations, etc., London, 1600, it is omitted. As Purchas quaintly says, "As for David Ingram's perambulation to the north parts, Master Hakluyt in his first edition published the same; but it seemeth some incredibilities of his reports caused him to leaue him out in the next impression, the reward of lying being not to be beleeued in ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... thence. Would I were dead! if God's good will were so; For what is in this world but grief and woe? O God! methinks it were a happy life, To be no better than a homely swain; To sit upon a hill, as I do now, To carve out dials quaintly, point by point, Thereby to see the minutes how they run, How many make the hour full complete, How many hours brings about ...
— King Henry VI, Third Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... her expectations and to those of Nizza Macascree, enjoyed undisturbed repose. She awoke in the morning greatly refreshed, and, after attiring herself, gazed through her chamber window. It looked upon a trim and beautiful garden, with a green and mossy plot carved out into quaintly-fashioned beds, filled with the choicest flowers, and surrounded by fine timber, amid which a tall fir-tree appeared proudly conspicuous. Mrs. Compton, who, it appeared, always arose with the sun, was busied in tending her flowers, and as Amabel watched her interesting pursuits, she could ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... went again. The cave was narrow here but presently broadened out. The roof was, for the most part, less than ten feet high, so the boys felt just as if they were "walking between big pie crusts," as Roger quaintly expressed it. The cave seemed to be dry, although when they stopped once more to look around, they heard the distant gurgle of a stream ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... children grew up, of their managing mother, and the slightly soured and disappointed painter their father, is drawn vividly enough. But what unamiable people they all are! "MILES IGNOTUS," who supplies a quaintly attractive little preface, in which he speaks of having read the book in proof under shell-fire, affects to discover in them a kinship with Prussia. Certainly they are almost ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... doubts, seemed constructed to exalt the doughty glory of Augustus the Strong—Dresden's local Thor, its chief heroic figure in the favorite Teuton galaxy of muscled Titans. Somber medieval squares, blocked away quaintly from the world, were relieved by the celebrated Bruehl Terrace, enlivened by gilded statuary and by historic and ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... of the country. On every side of them stretched the unbroken fastnesses of the primeval wilderness, sheer precipices dropping suddenly into infinite space, jagged peaks towering dizzily into the misty vault of heaven, quaintly situated valleys so masked by timber and brushwood that one came across them only by accident. There is something in the naked face of Nature, in the sheer magnificence of incredible heights and the marvellous massiveness of big ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... of men. Other figures, of women, glided here and there noiselessly. They wore long, spreading dove-gray clothes, with a starched white kerchief drawn over the shoulders and across the breast. Their heads were quaintly white-garbed in stiff winglike coifs, fitting close about the oval of the face. Then Thorpe sighed comfortably, and closed his eyes and blessed the chance that he had bought a hospital ticket of the agent who had visited camp the ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... midnight masquerades. So changed the times! say, philosophic sage, Whose genius suits so well this tasteful age, Is the Pantheon, late a sink obscene, Become the fountain of chaste Hippocrene? Or do thy moral numbers quaintly flow, Inspired by th' Aganippe of Soho? Do wisdom's sons gorge cates and vermicelli, Like beastly Bickerstaffe or bothering Kelly? Or art thou tired of th' undeserved applause Bestowed on bards affecting ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... WATSON who began his official career as a Liberal. He was frightened into Conservatism, and WORDSWORTH, then a hot young youth, goes for him as youth does sometimes gird at Respectability. 'Upon what principle,' he asked the Bishop, 'is your conduct to be explained? In some parts of England it is quaintly said when a drunken man is seen reeling home, that he has business on both sides of the road. Observing your Lordship's tortuous path, the spectators will be far from insinuating that you have partaken ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... custom was, one hot and thunderous day, in the country lanes; it was very still, and through the soft haze that filled the air, the distant trees and fields lost their remoteness, and stood stiffly and quaintly as though painted. There seemed a presage of storm in the church-tower, which showed a ghostly white among the elms. A fitful breeze stirred at intervals. Hugh drew near the hamlet, and all of a sudden stepped into a stream of inconceivable sweetness and fragrance; he saw in ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... it seemed as if she might float onward like a spirit. The extreme whiteness of her feet attracted my eye, and I was surprised to find that instead of being bare, as I had supposed, these were incased in white satin slippers quaintly ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... Merrick's life was so simple and unostentatious that his personal expenses, however erratic some of his actions, could not make much headway against his interest account, and nothing delighted him more than to find a way to "get even with fate by reckless squandering," as he quaintly expressed it. He was far too shrewd to become the prey of designing people, but welcomed any legitimate channel in ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... lady replied, looking up at him quaintly. "I admire your wish, though not your reservation. I've just been reading those ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... he, with his head on one side, quaintly, "wasn't that a blasphermous yarn old Dave was givin' us about the wind blowing that log chain away a link at a time? Old ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... the steam boat on Lake Ontario, asked me to go to church; and as I felt he would be annoyed if I did not, I accompanied him to a Presbyterian meeting not far from the Falls, which sounded like distant thunder. The sermon was upon temperance—a favourite topic in America; and the minister rather quaintly observed, that "alcohol was not sealed by the hand of God." It was astonishing to me that he did not allude to the Falls, point out that the seal of God was there, and shew how feeble was the voice of man when compared to the thunder of the Almighty so close at hand. But the fact was, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... of merit. Perhaps the earliest of these was David Cusick, who, in 1825, printed his Ancient History of the Six Nations. He was a full blood Tuscarora, and his English is far from correct. Yet the arrangement of his matter is skillful, and some passages quaintly vivid and forcible. Another member of the Iroquois confederacy, Peter Dooyentate Clarke, has taken up the Origin and Traditional History of the Wyandotts, and has made a readable little book (published at Toronto, 1870); while still more lately, Chief Elias Johnson, of the Tuscaroras, ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... the Adriatic, as the ceremony was quaintly termed, has been too often described to need a repetition here. Our business is rather with incidents of a private and personal nature than with descriptions of public events, and we shall pass over all that has no immediate connexion with the ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Israelites, on entering Canaan, instead of obeying the Divine injunction of extirpating their enemies, made a hollow truce with them. What was the result? Years upon years of tedious warfare. "They were scourges in their sides, and thorns in their eyes!" It is quaintly but truthfully said by an old writer, "The candle will never burn clear, while there is a thief in it. Sin indulged, in the conscience, is like Jonah in the ship, which causeth such a tempest, that the conscience is like a troubled sea, ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... down; Not more submissive Israel heard and saw At Sinai's foot the Giver of the Law. Less stern he seems, who sits in equal Mate On the twin throne and shares the empire's weight; Around his lips the subtle life that plays Steals quaintly forth in many a jesting phrase; A lightsome nature, not so hard to chafe, Pleasant when pleased; rough-handled, not so safe; Some tingling memories vaguely I recall, But to forgive ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... shrivelled pippin, and the general appearance of a Zingari, for she wore huge ear-rings and possessed shrewd eyes of Oriental shape and colour. There was a bluish tinge about her lips, and she had a trick of pressing one labour-gnarled hand to her breast. She curtsied quaintly. ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... quaintly describes it thus:—"The limbs of a bear, the body of a badger, the head of a fox, the nose of a dog, the tail of a cat, and sharp claws, by which it climbs trees like a monkey." We cannot admit the similarity ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... place, its magnificent proportions, terminating in the great, upward sweep of steps, and the mellow stained window, struck her more than ever after coming from the crowded and inconvenient little court within. The vaulted roof, with its quaintly carved angels, was for the most part dim and shadowy, but here and there a ray of sunshine, slanting in through the clerestory windows, changed the sombre tones to a golden splendor. Erica, very susceptible to all high influences, was more conscious of the ennobling influence of light, ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... persistent efforts to traverse these perilous Arctic ocean wastes. Let us go back to the oldest of the daring navigators of this frozen sea, the worthy knight Sir Martin Frobisher, and tell the story of his notable efforts to discover a Northwest Passage, "the only thing left undone," as he quaintly says, "whereby a notable mind ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Western humour, and the quaintly untrammelled American intelligence, focussed upon diverse and age-encrusted civilizations, which caught the instantaneous fancy of a vast public. It was a virgin field for the humorous observer; Europe had not yet become the playground of ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... up looking around her. Suddenly her eyes fell upon a quaintly built cottage, perched upon the edge of the cliff about ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that were passing and repassing between gave it a chance; and invested the cellar- opening and the outstanding corner of the house with striking and unwonted dignity, in a light that revealed nothing except to the imagination. Nothing was more fancifully dignified, or more quaintly travestied by that light than the figures around it, busy and flitting about, and showing themselves in every novel variety of grouping and colouring. There was Earl Douglass, not a hair different ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... very weary, and has come a long way, I think,' said a lady; adding, in an imaginative tone, 'the humble creature looks so aged and is so quaintly saddled that we may suppose it to be only an animated relic, of the same date as ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... pleasant afternoon when Millicent Leslie stood in the portico of her villa, which looked upon the inlet from a sunny ridge just outside Vancouver. Like the other residences scattered about, the dwelling quaintly suggested a doll's house—it was so diminutively pretty with its carved veranda, bright green lattices, and spotless white paint picked out with shades of paler green and yellow. Flowers filled tiny borders, and behind the house small firs, spared by the ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... quaintly in the centre of the Cantankerous Old Lady's sallow cheek. 'My dear,' she murmured, 'my name is the one thing on earth I'm really ashamed of. My parents chose to inflict upon me the most odious label that human ingenuity ever devised for a Christian soul; and ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... pleasure of discovering them," said Mrs. Hungerford; "they are as a woman's accomplishments and acquirements ought to be, more retiring than obtrusive; or as my old friend, Dr. South, quaintly but aptly expresses it—more ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... a foot to a foot and a half thick. Small blocks of sandstone were used for the latter. Heaps of debris cover a considerable space, in which, among other things, are relics of pottery and of ornaments made of sea-shells. Pieces of quaintly-carved cedar posts were found here, and their condition of decay, compared with that of the cedar beams at "El Moro," "indicated great antiquity." The place of this ruin is now one of the consecrated places of ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... became printer to King Henry VII., and after this produced editions of Fabyan's and Froissart's "Chronicles." He seems to have had a bitter feud with a rival printer, named Robert Rudman, who pirated his trade-mark. In one of his books he thus quaintly falls foul of the enemy: "But truly Rudeman, because he is the rudest out of a thousand men.... Truly I wonder now at last that he hath confessed it in his own typography, unless it chanced that even as the devil made a cobbler a mariner, he made him a printer. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of North-west Africa. It was also a North African people, the Algerians, who gave us the word Zouave. Every one has seen since the Great War began pictures of the handsome and quaintly-dressed French soldiers called "Zouaves." Perhaps some children wondered why they wore such a strange Eastern dress. It is because the Zouave regiments, which are now chiefly composed of Frenchmen, were originally formed from an Algerian mountain tribe called the ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... after a day spent on duty, when I reach Diou-djen-dji. The evening sun, low in the sky, on the point of setting, pours into my room, and floods it with rays of red gold, lighting up the Buddhas and the great sheaves of quaintly arranged flowers in the antique vases. Here are assembled five or six little dolls, my neighbors, amusing themselves by dancing to the sound of Chrysantheme's guitar. And this evening I experienced a real charm in feeling that this dwelling and ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... a month passed rapidly and pleasantly away, what with exploring excursions by land and air, in the latter of which by no means the least diverting element was the keen and quaintly-expressed delight of Louis Holt at the new method of travel. Two or three times Arnold had, for his satisfaction, sent the Ariel flying over the ridge across which she had entered Aeria, but he had always been content ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... first read it as a boy. But there were certain paragraphs that especially caught his eye and arrested his attention,—paragraphs that he read and reread, finding in them he knew not what secret delight and significance. These were the quaintly turned phrases describing the effect on the once poor Aladdin of his wonderful riches, and those descanting upon the beauty and charm of the Sultan's daughter, the ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... which at length emboldened Monsieur to receive in like manner the emissaries of Ferdinand and Philip. These nocturnal movements were not, however, so unobserved as the conspirators had believed; and the result of the suspicions which they engendered is so quaintly narrated by Rambure that we shall give it in the identical words of ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... opens with that alluring picture of the South Sea house, and is followed by the reminiscences of Christ's Hospital, where Lamb was a schoolboy for seven years. These show one side of Lamb's nature—the quaintly reminiscent. Another side is revealed in "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist," with its delicate irony and its playful humor, while still another phase is seen in the exquisite phantasy of "Dream Children," with its tender pathos and its revelation of a heart that never knew the joys of domestic ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... struggles of the Punic wars. Much is only artificially transplanted, there are various faults in delineation and colouring, the form of art and the language are deficient in purity of treatment, Greek and national elements are quaintly conjoined; the whole performance betrays the stamp of its scholastic origin and lacks independence and completeness; yet there exists in the poets and authors of that age, if not the full power to reach their high ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... sweet face appeared in the vestibule, and red nose, suffused eyes, cough, and tired look, told the story; but, looking up quaintly, the poor ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... but for the most part quaintly-shaped orchids of cream, and yellow, and brown, some among the moss, others clinging to the mossy bark of the trees. But the greatest curiosities of all were the pitcher-plants hanging here and there, some fully suspended, others so large that they partly rested on the moss, ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... as she said to herself, too good to be true—certainly more than she deserved. Among her unmerited blessings she quaintly placed being herself, but this was the less naive in that she placed among her blessings nearly everything of which she was conscious in her world. Her world at this time was not a large one, and every element in it seemed to her ideal. Her loving, indulgent father, who always ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... frown puckered her brow, and for a moment the lines of her pretty mouth drooped and pouted with a quaintly petulant expression, like that of ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... prosecuting and pursuing!' 'Why, has the fugitive wings?' asks Socrates. 'Nay, he is not very volatile at his time of life!' 'Who is he?' 'My father.' 'Good heavens! you don't mean that. What is he accused of?' 'Murder, Socrates.' Then Euthyphro explains the case, which quaintly illustrates Greek civilisation. Euthyphro's father had an agricultural labourer at Naxos. One day this man, in a drunken passion, killed a slave. Euthyphro's father seized the labourer, bound him, threw him into a ditch, 'and then sent ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... seems to have recognized that Trade is one of the great motive powers of the State and of the world. He would make retail traders only of the inferior sort of citizens (Rep., Laws), though he remarks, quaintly enough (Laws), that 'if only the best men and the best women everywhere were compelled to keep taverns for a time or to carry on retail trade, etc., then we should knew how pleasant and agreeable all ...
— The Republic • Plato
... looked like some imperial goddess, her forehead encircled by the faint band of mist that still lingered caressingly to the mountain tops, her countenance glistening with the dew on the green hill-slopes, her garments quaintly fashioned for her by the civilization that had brought her into being, her slippers the lustrous waters of the Bay itself. Later I came to know that she, too, was a goddess of moods, and dangerous moods; a coquette to some, ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... courteously called a good-morning at her. She did not reply by any word, but nodded quaintly, and blinked seriously and yet blithely on him. He was preparing to dismount. As he did so he paused, astonished that she did not speak at all. Her face did not have a familiar language; its vocabulary was its own. He slid from his horse, and, throwing his arm over its neck as it ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... talking, not exactly to me or even at me (he would not even look up but kept his eyes fixed on the deck) but more as if communing in a low voice with his familiar devil. Now and then he would give me a glance and make the hairs of his stiff little moustache stir quaintly. His eyes were green and every cat I see to this day reminds me of the exact contour of his face. What he was travelling for or what was his business in life he never confided to me. Truth to say, the only passenger on board that schooner who could have talked openly about his activities ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... arrive. [Picture: View of Percy Cross] No connection whatever that I am aware of exists between the locality and the Percy family, and it only affords another, very recent local example of what has been as happily as quaintly termed "the curiosity of change." The most favourable aspect of the house is, perhaps, the view gained of it from a neighbouring garden across a piece of water called Eel Brook, which ornaments an ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... very little physical endurance. In spite of this physical handicap he was very vivacious and gay. He was a genial and companionable man, loved by all who knew him. He was very modest, even to the point of shyness, exceptionally sincere, and quaintly humorous. He established homes in New Jersey and West Virginia, where he spent the greater part of his time from 1882 until his death ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... us by remarking that in all our experience that which makes up personality is "connected with nerve structures," so that we cannot attribute such a quality to "a Being who is described to us as devoid of any nerve structure." "I know of no answer," he quaintly adds, "that could be called satisfactory from a theistic standpoint." [1] It is evident that Mr. Vivian does not remember the famous passage in the Essay on Theism where John Stuart Mill explains that ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... called Empyrean," he says in his letter to Can Grande, "which is the same as a heaven blazing with fire or ardor, not because there is in it a material fire or burning, but a spiritual one, which is blessed love or charity." But this splendor he bodies forth, if sometimes quaintly, yet always vividly and most often ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... woman threw handful after handful of small silver coins among us. In several places we trod upon great quantities of flowers thrown in our path by peasant girls. The flags of England, Germany, France, and Italy, were everywhere to be seen. The quaintly uniformed corps of firemen turned out in splendor to do us honor, and we saluted with grave dignity the immense statue of Columbus standing in the centre of the town. By those who entered Mayaguez that day none of these things will ever ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... one or two of her friends may serve. The tea is made at the table and served with very small, dainty sandwiches and all kinds of quaintly-shaped cakes. Bonbons, salted nuts and sometimes ices ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... of the XIVth century. The illuminations are small, but pretty and perfect; the backgrounds are generally square, diamond-wise, without gold; but there are backgrounds of solid shining gold. The subjects are rather quaintly and whimsically, than elegantly, treated. In the whole, one hundred and sixty leaves. From Romances, of all and of every kind, let us turn our eyes towards a representation of subjects intimately ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Mrs. West ran on. "So interesting! I always do think that Australians are so original—so quaintly original. It must be the wild life you lead. So unlike dear, quiet little England. Bushrangers, and savage natives, and gold-mining. How I should like to ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... landscape. And as William and Esther pursued their way the Rye seemed to grow longer and longer. It opened up into a vast expanse full of the last days of cricket; it was charming with slender trees and a Japanese pavilion quaintly placed on a little mound. An upland background in gradations, interspaced with villas, terraces, and gardens, and steep hillside, showing fields and hayricks, brought the Rye to a ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... was a secret compact between them, for he said, quaintly: "They all sing one song, and she hath ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... you will understand... I am not very old," said Candeille quaintly, "I... I am only an actress... but if a young actress ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... rather quaintly, of more temporal and material benefits, the Infant D. Pedro, then Regent of the kingdom, gave to his brother Henry a charter, granting him the whole of the fifth of the profits which appertained to the King, and, considering that it was by him alone that the ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... there, too, he instituted the tea ceremonial whose votaries were thenceforth recognized as the nation's arbitri elegantiarum. Landscape gardens also occupied his attention. Wherever, in province or in capital, in shrine, in temple, in private house, or in official residence, any quaintly shaped rock or picturesque tree was found, it was immediately requisitioned for the park of Higashi-yama-dono, as men then called Yoshimasa, and under the direction of a trio of great artists, So-ami, Gei-ami, and No-ami, there ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... simple observation of phenomena, is often used as an opiate to quiet the higher faculties. There can be no question of the fact that many persons pass much of their lives working in the in-door or out-door laboratories of science, just as old women knit, just as prisoners carve quaintly elaborate toys in their dungeons. The product is not absolutely useless in either case; the fingers of the body or of the mind become swift and cunning, but the soul does not grow under such culture. We are willing to allow that many of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... climaxes of dreams and aspirations, of loves and bitter jealousies. And out of all this straining and this fever of humanity, came messages to Deborah: last appeals for aid and advice, and gifts for the child who was to be born; tiny garments quaintly made by women and girls from Italy, from Russia and from Poland; baby blankets, wraps and toys and curious charms and amulets. There were so ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... drunken man to subsequent consequences was rather quaintly shown by that weird individual Dr. Tanner, when he went up to Sir Ellis Ashmead Bartlett in the lobby of the House of Commons, and ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... "Boys," he said quaintly, "San Francisco is a very lonesome place for the godly. The hosts of sin are very strong, and the faithful are very few. Mortal flesh is weak; and mortal spirit is prone to black discouragement. When I bought those chickens ...
— Gold • Stewart White |
