"Quaintly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her pride of race; her taste In silken rug and chair, And quaintly fashioned furniture ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... 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 I bought eighteen ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... to note that in Corsica, as late as 1743, if a husband died women threw themselves upon the widow and beat her severely. Bruhier quaintly remarks that this custom obliged women to take ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... out. Quaintly and sweetly and with wondrous clearness it began an old, old song I first heard long ago. And as it sang, back with red electric thrill came the fine blood of youth, and beat in pulse with ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... lands have usually a marked family resemblance; the theme being the same, but the number of variants legion. Saint Peter is represented as afflicted with the toothache, and sitting on a marble stone by the wayside. Our Lord passes by, and cures him by a few spoken words. The following quaintly illiterate version of this spell was in vogue in the north of Scotland within recent years: "Petter was laying his head upon a marrable ston, weping, and Christ came by and said: 'What else [ails] thou, Petter?' Petter answered: 'Lord God, my twoth.' 'Raise thou, ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... contrary, you have awakened it. I was just thinking how vivid you looked with that setting of overhanging bushes and the background of fields. I—I think it must have been your gown that gave such a quaintly incongruous effect.' ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... the supposed sleeping man sprang up, knocked Grim down, wrenched the sword out of his hand and killed him. Next, Grettir's enemy Thorir of Garth heard of his whereabouts, and prevailed upon one Thorir Redbeard to attempt to slay him. So Redbeard laid his plans, with the object, as it is quaintly phrased, of 'winning' Grettir. He, however, declined to be 'won,' for Redbeard fared no better than Grim. He tried to slay the outlaw while he was swimming back from his nets, but Grettir sank like a stone and swam along the bottom till he reached a place where he could land unseen by Redbeard. ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... looked grimly on, and when she injured her foot against a root he believed the end had arrived. All the people watched the struggle between the white woman's prayers and the mbiam's power, and when the wound healed they were nonplussed, but quaintly explained the miracle by saying that their Mother was different from other white ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... I presume, were "pearly": But which was she, brunette or blonde? Her hair, was it quaintly curly, Or as straight as a beadle's wand? That I fail'd to remark;—it was rather dark And ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... torpor and tried to brighten the tiny home. She could gladden it wonderfully when she chose, for Miss Margaret possessed many pleasing traits of character; but, alas! she seldom did choose, and, as Miss Deborah quaintly expressed it, "one had to endure innumerable showers of rain for one gleam of sunshine." Nellie had become so accustomed, however, to the invalid's whims and caprices, that she thought little, if at all, about them, and in the meantime ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... Karabugha, the name given by the Turks and Arabs to a kind of great mangonel? This was known also in Europe as Carabaga, Calabra, etc. It is mentioned under the former name by Marino Sanudo, and under the latter, with other quaintly-named engines, by William of Tudela, as used by Simon de Montfort the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... beautiful studies of childhood—Rebecca's artistic, unusual and quaintly charming qualities stand out midst a circle of austere New Englanders. The stage version is making ...
— Tom Swift and his Wizard Camera - or, Thrilling Adventures while taking Moving Pictures • Victor Appleton
... least of which he could still feel the spirit of a debutante. In this matter of war he was not, too, unlike a young girl embarking upon her first season of opera. Walkely, the next morning, saw this mood sitting quaintly upon Coleman and cackled with astonishment and glee. Coleman's usual manner did not return until he detected Walkely's appreciation of his state and then he snubbed him according to the ritual of the Sunday editor of the New York Eclipse. ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... them. It was surrounded by an unusually broad framework, curiously and elaborately carved, and black as polished ebony. Flowers grew all about it,—sweet peas, mignonette, and large purple pansies—while red and white climbing roses rioted in untrained profusion over its wide sill. Above it was a quaintly built dovecote, where some of the strutting fan-tailed inhabitants were perched, swelling out their snowy breasts, and discoursing of their domestic trials in notes of dulcet melancholy; while lower ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... Huxonia, has fallen in love with both the daughters of the merchant, whom he agrees to serve in all kinds of manual labour as Juan de las Brozas. His brother, Don Gilberto, arrives in search of him and a quaintly charming and technically skilful play ends with a double wedding (the Crown Prince of Portugal, present at the acting of this play, had to decide for Don Rosvel ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... angry Aid-de-Camp, who had watched the rapid disappearance of his "travellers best companion," as he quaintly enough termed it, down the capacious gullet of the settler—and snatching at the same moment the nearly emptied canteen from his hands. "I take it, that's not handsome. As I'm a true Tennessee man, bred and born, it aint at all hospitable to empty off a pint of raw liquor at a ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... 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 ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... black 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 ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... writes nonsense, we generally read it with pleasure except indeed when he tries to be droll. A more insufferable jester never existed. He very often attempts to be humorous, and yet we do not remember a single occasion on which he has succeeded further than to be quaintly and flippantly dull. In one of his works he tells us that Bishop Sprat was very properly so called, inasmuch as he was a very small poet. And in the book now before us he cannot quote Francis Bugg, the renegade Quaker, without a remark on his unsavoury name. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... her court in the southland. Tall and soldierly, this last gay army of the flowers passes in review before her. Blazing stars in pink and purple, tall and picturesque, with long rows of brilliant buttons; regiments of asters in blue and white and purple; rattle-snake root with big and quaintly slashed leaves and hundreds of tassels in delicate shades of lilac, purple and white; swamp sunflowers in dazzling yellow, camped in millions along the creek bottom to make it more glorious than the historical pageant of the Field of ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... not know it, but there was the least show of wrinkles between her eyes and her mouth was puckered quaintly. ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... his duchess in Westminster Abbey. His literary labours are now almost forgotten, if we except his principal production, "A new method and extraordinary invention to dress Horses," &c., which has obtained much praise from judges in the art. Grainger quaintly remarks, that "the Duke of Newcastle was so attached to the Muses, that he could not leave them behind him, but carried them to the camp, and made Davenant the poet-laureate, his lieutenant-general of the ordnance." His second wife was Margaret, the imaginative Duchess of Newcastle, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... on my surroundings. It is about six o'clock, 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 experience a real charm in feeling that this dwelling and the woman who leads the dance, are mine. On the whole ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... my room in Manitou could I fix the bird's place in the avicular system. By consulting Coues's Key and Professor Cooke's brochure on the Birds of Colorado, I found this quaintly costumed woodpecker to be Williamson's sapsucker (Sphyrapicus thyroideus), known only in the western part of the United States from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast. I now lingered in the beautiful pine grove surrounding the Halfway House, hoping to see him ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... talk about himself and go on 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 ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... our branches gently With a murmur low and loving; He will say we sang him quaintly Some old ballad, sweetly moving. 'Tis of all the ways the surest To awake a poet's fancies, For he loves these things the purest— Sigh of leaves, and scent of pansies. He has loved us, we will love him, And will cheer his hour of sadness, Spirits, wave ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... who had nothing but advertisements pasted upon him. I had seen Marphorius in the Capitol; there has long been an end to the witty dialogues of the days of Sixtus V., so quaintly told by Leti; they are so little 'birds of a feather' (for Pasquin is a mutilated fragment, Marphorius a colossal statue of the ocean) that, residing as they did at different parts of the town, it is difficult to understand ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... used as an exchange since 1742. The site of the present building was occupied by a still older one down to 1552, and to this the hall, which is vaulted and supported on four slender pillars of granite, belongs architecturally. It was very quaintly decorated with pictures, statues, reliefs, &&, both of Christian ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Perpendicular architecture, lighted by four lofty windows on each side. There is no triforium, its place being occupied with panelling. On each side of the choir are fifteen stalls with quaintly carved misericords. ...
— Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch • Sidney Heath
... 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 seditions, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... 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 that proved itself the true, And rescued the brave language of the land, From that[3] which ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... for wee Dollie was never long unhappy. She had almost forgotten how vexed she had been, and she laughed as she saw small bubbles sailing, sailing away to the meadow. Softly she hummed, and then little words, describing what she saw, fitted quaintly into the droll melody— ...
— Princess Polly's Playmates • Amy Brooks
... have seen a quaintly despondent little figure, whose curly head issued from a hooded cloak, staggering hopelessly from a hammock, and seating herself on a mossy stump. From the limpness of her attitude and the pathetic expression of her eyes, I fear Polly was reviewing former happy nights spent on spring-beds; ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... sort of taste your work is graced. Vast stores of modern anecdote we find, With good old story quaintly interlaced— The theme as various as ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... of Teutonic liberty. The right of self-government, the right of free speech in free meeting, the right to equal justice at the hands of one's equals, were brought safely across ages of tyranny by the burghers and shopkeepers of the towns. In the quiet quaintly-named streets, in town-mead and market-place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the bell that swung out its summons to the crowded borough-mote, in merchant-gild, and church-gild and craft-gild, lay the life of Englishmen who were doing more than knight and baron ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... for evening, when I might summon you to my presence. An unusual—to me—a perfectly new character I suspected was yours: I desired to search it deeper and know it better. You entered the room with a look and air at once shy and independent: you were quaintly dressed—much as you are now. I made you talk: ere long I found you full of strange contrasts. Your garb and manner were restricted by rule; your air was often diffident, and altogether that of one refined by nature, but absolutely unused to society, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... perfumes and waved hair! Her cheeks were pink and her expression was placid, and each of her white-gloved hands held tight to a pretty picture-book child who was wriggling with wild excitement. One had yellow frilly hair and one had brown bobbed hair, and both were quaintly, immaculately, expensively kissable. They were the kind of children every girl wishes she could have a set like, and hugs when she gets a chance. Mother and children were making their way, under an awning that crossed the street, to the matinee of ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... Swedenborgians believe, spirits seen at a distance appear like the things they most resemble in disposition, as doves, hawks, goats, lambs, swine, and so on, I'm sure that I shall see his true and kindly soul in the guise of a noble old Folio, quaintly lettered across his back in old English ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... 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
... the piquant paragraphs of The Pioneer Bushman, Timber Town's evening journal, or fashioned those gay dresses which by day helped to make the town so bright, and went to bed early and slept with a soundness and tranquillity, well-earned by the labour of playing so quaintly at the game ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... with business subjects. The boys are enthusiastic. I am constantly approached in the corridors by lads who say it has always been their ambition to become a Tipton or a Whiteridge, or a Gilling and Warow, as the case may be. One little fellow quaintly confessed that he had always longed to be a "Mother Spiegel." Great Britain's future in trade is assured ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... writings, that if she had entered the House of Lords and beckoned the Lord Chancellor to leave the Woolsack and follow her, he must have obeyed. Gibbon had evidently racked his brains to think of the most audacious act of which a woman could be capable, and that quaintly proved in his case to be the enchantment of a Lord Chancellor! If, at the present moment, there is a lady possessed of charms equal to those of Elizabeth Duchess of Devonshire, let us hope that the precincts of both ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... breathed, "you are a devotee of Nature, too, I know. You are a great traveller,—the Countess has said it," she continued quaintly. "You have been around the whole world. While as for me, I know Europe only, and of course Russia best of all countries. I have seen much of her—those wonderful rolling steppes, and rugged mountains. The North Sea, too, for I love the sea ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... from a domestic Mont Blanc; some climb about the bellows; some scale the shaft of the shovel; while some, forming in magic ring, dance festively on the yet glowing hearth. Tiny troops promenade the writing-table. One perches himself quaintly on the top of the inkstand, and holds colloquy with another who sits cross-legged on a paper weight, while a companion looks down on them from the top of the sandbox. It was an ingenious little device, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 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 severe, worn pressure of thought about his temples, a ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the keeper's lodge—a sort of Doric temple, quaintly standing in the middle of a hedge-enclosed garden, and half-buried under thickly-clustering, interlacing creepers—from the side of the enormous nest of evergreen foliage there emerged, in a state of high excitement strenuously ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... 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 ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... when the city wearied me, To Katsura I'd wend— A garden hid across green miles Of rice-lands quaintly penned. And, by the stork-bestridden lake, I'd walk or musing mend My soul with lotus-memories And ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... square, the Gruyere people better loved their dances, the long Celtic Korols (or Coraules), when, singing in chorus in wild winding farandoles, they went dancing over vales and hills, day in and day out until human strength could bear no more. Such was the famous dance quaintly recounted in ancient French ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... If I have hesitated to describe the hollow-eyed cripple, the quaintly-dressed artisan's wife, a few pages ago, what shall I do with this graceful, shapely, elegantly-attired gentlewoman into whom she has been merged within these two months? In good faith she was very pretty. You and I, my dear madam, would have been quick to see that those charming dimples were misplaced ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... ultimo piano that the Leatherstonepaughs pitched their lodge in a vast wilderness of colorful tiled roofs, moss-grown and lichen-laden, amid a forest of quaintly-shaped and smokeless chimneys. Their floors, guiltless of rugs or carpets, were of earthen tiles and worn into hollows where the feet of the palace-dwellers passed oftenest to and fro. A multitude of undraped windows opened like doors upon stone balconies, whither the inhabitants flew like ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... The 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
... selfish girl I've ever known, Melissa," said he quaintly. "You won't let anybody else have a thing to say about ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... and all around lay the garden—flowers and fruit quaintly intermingled. Down the long path to the gate, where three roads met, great bunches of peonies lifted white blossoms—luminously white in the moonlight; and on either side rows of currant bushes cast low, dark shadows, and here and there dwarf crab-apple ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... psychology can be, innocent. He had the sensualities of innocence: he loved the stickiness of gum, and he cut white wood greedily as if he were cutting a cake. To this man wine was not a doubtful thing to be defended or denounced; it was a quaintly coloured syrup, such as a child sees in a shop window. He talked dominantly and rushed the social situation; but he was not asserting himself, like a superman in a modern play. He was simply forgetting ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... be the delight of my childish heart," went on Dora quaintly. "So many people came out to our farm then. It was quite like living in the village and having neighbors. And then I do love maple sugar. My father makes ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... old Bob worn out, mas'r; and Buckra what sell nigger,—what make 'e trade on him, run 'im off sartin. He sell old nigger what got five dollar wof' a work in 'e old bones. Mas'r set 'um free, bad Buckra catch 'um, old Bob get used up afo' he know nofin," quaintly replied the old man, seeming to have an instinctive knowledge of the "nigger trade," but with so much attachment for his master that he could not be induced to accept ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... towers, and a protecting castle. Don Fernando anchored off the mouth of the river, which appeared to form a spacious harbor. In a little while a barge was seen issuing from the river. It was evidently a barge of ceremony, for it was richly though quaintly carved and gilt, and decorated with a silken awning and fluttering streamers, while a banner, bearing the sacred emblem of the cross, floated to the breeze. The barge advanced slowly, impelled by sixteen oars, painted of a bright crimson. The oarsmen were uncouth, or rather antique, in ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... we visited an old Armenian church, which was gaudily decorated with red brocade hangings and very antiquated paintings quaintly representing scenes from Bible history. In the court-yard of the church a young Armenian kindly offered us a pitcher of water, which he said had been brought from a spring outside the city for the use of the monks in the adjoining convent. We received it most gratefully, for the ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... herself in the white gown; it was of linen quaintly woven, with a tiny star thrown up in the pattern, and shone like damask. The apron was of heavy black silk, trimmed all around with crimson lace, and crimson lace on the pockets. A crimson rose in Victorine's black hair and crimson ribbons at ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... queer words under his breath, for he had a way of talking to himself when anything "upsot him," as he would quaintly remark. Trot always knew he was disturbed or in trouble when ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... originally printed had a series of quaintly explanatory notes in the margin, and an introductory argument which read ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... outer world and talk to these people. No, no, he may to some extent have secured notoriety in circles even as far off as London, but really there is nothing in the man. Why, he was brought up here in the village! But these quaintly prejudiced folk are, after all, but a remnant, and the great mass of people all around in the farms and cottages prize his fame highly. The pride with which a villager refers to the fact that he went to school ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... devices for helping him to do without her, forget her and forgive her. These reflections are perhaps the source of the character you find in a moss-coated stone stairway climbing outside of a wall; in a queer inner court, befouled with rubbish and drearily bare of convenience; in an ancient quaintly carven well, worked with infinite labour from an overhanging window; in an arbour of time-twisted vines under which you may sit with your feet in the dirt and remember as a dim fable that there are races for ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... of acquaintance, he finds a total of 67 men, from 73 to 93 years of age. Their average age is 78 and a fraction. Of these 67, 54 were smokers or chewers; 9 only, non-consumers of tobacco; and 4 were doubtful, or not ascertained. About nine-elevenths smoked or chewed. The compiler quaintly adds, "How much longer these men might have lived without tobacco, it is ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... must be polite," she said to herself. And so when the servants, who took their tone from their mistress, were insolent and ordered her about, she would hold her head erect, and reply to them sometimes in a way which made them stare at her, it was so quaintly civil. ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... now dust; soon, with the last of its inhabitants, its very memory shall follow; and they, in their turn, shall suffer the same law, and, both in name and lineament, vanish from the world of men. "For remembrance of the old house' sake," as Pepys once quaintly put it, let me tell one story. When the tide of invasion swept over France, two foreign painters were left stranded and penniless in Grez; and there, until the war was over, the Chevillons ungrudgingly harboured them. It was difficult to obtain supplies; but the two waifs ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... retyre, farewell, my Lord. Ha, Rodoricke, are not we fine Polyticians That have so quaintly wrought the king of Fraunce Unto our faction that he threatens warre Against ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... of both nations. The suggestion is, at least, an interesting one, and though the scheme would certainly not benefit the habitual drunkard, who becomes enamoured of his own debauchery, it might be very welcome to many of the working people, who, as "our neighbour" quaintly remarks, like a big drink, but do not necessarily wish to ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... mystification the study and the business of their lives. For this science a peculiar turn of mind gave him instinctively the cue, while his physical appearance afforded him unusual facilities for carrying his prospects into effect. I quaintly termed the domination of the Baron Ritzner von Jung, ever rightly entered into the mystery which overshadowed his character. I truly think that no person at the university, with the exception of myself, ever ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... vicar and his wife, a quaintly-costumed little couple, still marvelling about on their own ground floor by the unnecessary light ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... by giving no opinion on the REFORM OF THE LEGISLATURE. As undoubtedly you have some secret reason for the reservation of your sentiments on this latter head, I cannot but apply the same reason to the former. Upon what principle is your conduct to be explained? In some parts of England it is quaintly said, when a drunken man is seen reeling towards his 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 ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... yards along the road brought us to the Joss House. It would take many drawings, to describe the many arrangements of courts and steps and quaintly curved roofs, and the foliage and flickering shadows. In the interior were Chinese and some Burmese, and all the pastime of their lives seemed to go on there, prayers, feeding, gambling and theatricals, ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... of those early works, nor the delightful book on Edinburgh, prophesied of the story teller. Mr. Stevenson's first published tales, the "New Arabian Nights," originally appeared in a quaintly edited weekly paper, which nobody read, or nobody but the writers in its columns. They welcomed the strange romances with rejoicings: but perhaps there was only one of them who foresaw that Mr. Stevenson's forte was to be fiction, not essay writing; that he was to ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... only white and black which you must make valuable; you must give rare worth to every colour you use; but the white and black ought to separate themselves quaintly from the rest, while the other colours should be continually passing one into the other, being all evidently companions in the same gay world; while the white, black, and neutral grey should stand monkishly aloof in the midst of them. You may melt your crimson into ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... brother, Bartholomew, who was a map-maker and a serious student of geography, also settled in Lisbon. The two either opened a book-and-map shop, or at least they worked in one at odd times, Christopher acting as a draftsman; for, as he himself quaintly expressed it, "God had endowed me with ingenuity and manual skill in designing spheres, and inscribing upon them in the proper places cities, rivers and mountains, isles and ports." He appears to have tried to earn a little money by commerce as well ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... fold her little hands So quaintly and demurely, You'd think she must be quite a saint, Or ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... 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 ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... readiness with which the drowning clutch at straws. The most diverse climes, races, tongues and religions were united in blessing vaccination and its discoverer. The North American Indians forwarded to Dr. Jenner a quaintly worded address full of the deepest gratitude for what he had saved them from: "We shall not fail," said these simple people, "to teach our children to speak the name of Jenner, and to thank the Great Spirit for bestowing upon him so much ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... hypothetical degrees of blackened shadow and yellowed light, of lost outline and buried detail, of chilled luster, dimmed transparency, altered color, and weakened force—he would finally pause before a small picture on panel, representing two quaintly dressed figures in a dimly lighted room—dependent for its interest little on expression, and less on treatment—but eminently remarkable for reality of substance, vacuity of space, and vigor of quiet color; ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Moody. These commonplace tankards of staves were not so rare as the beautiful carved and hooped tankard which is here pictured, and which is in the collection of Mrs. Samuel Bowne Duryea, of Brooklyn. I have seen a few other quaintly carved ones, black with age, in American families of Huguenot descent; these were ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... lockers, their heads pillowed upon, and their bodies thickly covered with skins, whilst the fourth, doubtless the master spirit of the expedition, sat as in life at the narrow or after end of the table, his body supported in a massive quaintly carved oaken chair. ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... obtained by treating the two storeys differently. Very great skill in carving is shown, all the posts, brackets, beams, and projecting rafters being formed into elaborate representations of animals and plants, or quaintly conceived grotesques; and the flat surfaces have frequently a shallow incised arabesque pattern intertwined with foliage. The roofs are always covered with tiles, and a curious effect is produced by enriching the hips and ridges with several courses of tiles in cement, thus making ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... Carlyle has somewhere in his voluminous but well-indexed writings a highly humorous and characteristic passage in which he, with all his delightful gusto, dilates upon the oddity of the scene where a withered old sinner perched on a bench, quaintly attired in red turned up with ermine, addresses another sinner in a wooden pew, and bids him be taken away and hung by the neck until he is dead; and how the sinner in the pew, instead of indignantly remonstrating with the sinner on the bench, 'Why, you cantankerous old absurdity, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... claims it is not always easy to measure. And it is not till some stages later in our journey that we come to see how our own prejudices or shortsightedness or self-will are really at the root of the perplexity. For God demands no impossibilities. As has been quaintly said, 'He neither expects us to be in two places at once, nor to put ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... of 1880 and of the two successive years should ever be memorable, for it marks a great change in the constitution of English society. It would seem that, under the quiet regime of the Tory Cabinet, the upper ten thousand (as they were quaintly called in those days,) had taken a somewhat more frigid tone. The Prince of Wales had inclined to be restful after the revels of his youth. The prolonged seclusion of Queen Victoria, who was then engaged upon that superb work of introspection ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... the occupant of the chair, with shining grey curls peeping out from beneath her black satin hood. She was wrapped in some sort of fur-lined cloak; and by her side walked two little dark-faced, shy-looking girls of seven, quaintly dressed in rich black velvet, very like two wee maidens stepped out of some old picture, and each wearing a hood similar to that worn ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... freedom of European navigation lies at Berehaven and not at Dover. With Berehaven won from English hands, England might close the Channel in truth, but Ireland could shut the Atlantic. As Richard Dox put it in 1689, quaintly but truly, in his dedication to King William III, and Queen Mary of his "History of Ireland ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... of about 40 years answered Dicky's sounding of the quaintly carved knocker. He lifted his hat with a ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... moment Guest thought nothing of all this, but at a sign from Myra drew open the outer door, and she stood in the dimly lit entry as if framed; she let her hood fall back, and gazed straight before her into the quaintly furnished room as if wondering that she did not at once see the ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... with a sympathetic interest, which Law quaintly likens to that shown by Dido for Aeneas, but money was not forthcoming, and Law soon found that Suja-ud-daula was not on sufficiently good terms with the Mogul's[110] Vizir[111] at Delhi to risk an attack on Bengal. On the 18th of October he returned to Allahabad, ...
— Three Frenchmen in Bengal - The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757 • S.C. Hill
... but here's a bit you may like, since it's about our folks," answered Eph, turning the yellow page to look at a picture of two quaintly dressed children in ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... reptile's head a turquoise is set, the eyes are formed of garnet, and the tongue of red onyx. The whole is of silver-gilt, and within the mouth is a small figure of Jonah, whose adventure is thus strangely mixed with the general design. The sea is quaintly indicated by the circular base, chased with figures of sea-monsters disporting in the waves. It would not be easy to select a more characteristic specimen of antique table-plate. The inventories of similar articles once possessed by the French king, Charles V., and his brother, the ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... in the United Kingdom, and there is still, happily, a large selection, none perhaps is so picturesque and quaintly original in its architecture as the secluded Warwickshire house Compton Winyates. The general impression of its vast complication of gable ends and twisted chimneys is that some enchanted palace has found its way out of one of the fairy-tale books of our early youth and concealed itself ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... an unique feature of the Cathedral, dates from the late fifteenth century; it was built to relieve the central tower of the main building from the weight of the eight bells, most of them ancient, with quaintly worded and spelt inscriptions. The Arundel screen has been placed within the tower, but special permission must be obtained to ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... when he came in—" the words refused utterance. She looked up quaintly, appealing to him, desiring to be ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... least, were in his wishes, years in which to provoke her quaintly inflected English, and its quaint little slips. She had learned it in London long before, playing with wee Honorable toddlers while her father played France's diplomacy with grown-ups. That accent of hers, then, was as broad as Mayfair, and to the ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... slowly out of hearing like a stone through a quagmire. Stephen saw it sink as he had seen many another, feeling its heaviness depress his heart. Cranly's speech, unlike that of Davin, had neither rare phrases of Elizabethan English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish idioms. Its drawl was an echo of the quays of Dublin given back by a bleak decaying seaport, its energy an echo of the sacred eloquence of Dublin given back ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... that loveliest of lakes prepared the new-comers to be charmed with all they saw; and when, entering by the old stone gate, they were led into a large saloon, quaintly furnished and opening into a terrace-garden overhanging the water, with Chillon and the Alps in sight, Amy declared nothing could be more perfect, and Helen's face proved ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... abundance, 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 ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... 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 ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... a noble peroration at the somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion, that the spirit of liberty, "the guide of homeless winds and playmate of the waves," is to be found only among the elements, and not in the institutions of man. And in the same quaintly ingenuous spirit which half touches and half amuses us in his earlier poems he lets us perceive a few weeks later, in his Fears in Solitude, that sympathy with a foreign nation threatened by the invader may ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... over His children, it is partly because few have so completely abandoned themselves to that care. He dared to trust Him, with whom the hairs of our head are all numbered, and who touchingly reminds us that He cares for what has been quaintly called "the odd sparrow." Matthew records (x. 29) how two sparrows are sold for a farthing, and Luke (xii. 6) how five are sold for two farthings; and so it would appear that, when two farthings were offered, an odd sparrow was thrown in, as of ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... she could stand on her feet and the third day she was restored to perfect health. Later, a nun was cured of a headache by the same girdle, but when next it was wanted, it could nowhere be found. Bede argues quaintly that its disappearance was also an act of Divine Providence, since some of the sick who flocked to it might be unworthy, and, not being cured, might doubt its efficacy, while in reality, their own unworthiness was to blame. "Thus," he concludes, "was ...
— Early Double Monasteries - A Paper read before the Heretics' Society on December 6th, 1914 • Constance Stoney
... Scipio's position on Suffering Creek, but it does not tell half of what lay somewhere in the back of his quaintly-poised mind. No one who knew him failed to realize his worship for his wife. His was a love such as rarely falls to the lot of woman. And his devotion to his girl and boy twins was something quite beyond words. These things were the mainspring of his life, and drove him to such superlative ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... scores, and behind them are long lines of covered wicker chairs of peculiar form, each with its foot-stool, where one may sit, shaded, from the sun and sheltered from the wind, and read, chat or doze by the hour. Bath women are seen quaintly clad with their baskets of bathing dresses and labeled with the signs bearing their names, such as Trintje or Netje; everywhere there are sightseers, pedlers calling their wares, children digging in the sand, strolling players performing and the sound ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... the ice field and steaming past Cape St. John. This was the dividing line between the English and French in the settlement of their troubles in 1635. North of it is called the French or Treaty Shore, or as the French themselves so much more quaintly named it, "Le Petit Nord." It is at the north end of Le Petit Nord ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... a distinct judgment that that same money will enable you to carry out all your schemes," May said quaintly, "from the new cottages to the seat ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... embroidered shirts, and funny little turbans lounged about, and stared at us as if they were every-day people and we extraordinary. And the setting for the lively picture was the deeply-indented bay, surrounded with quaintly pretty houses among vineyards and olive groves, which climbed terrace after terrace to a mountainous horse-shoe, hemming in ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... attributes the edifice as having belonged to Blanche de Navarre, the wife of Philippe de Valois. Again it is thought to have been a sort of royal attachment to the Abbaye de Royaumont, built near by, by Saint Louis. This quaintly charming manor of minute dimensions was a tangible, habitable abode in 1333, but for generations after appears to have fallen into desuetude. A mill grew up on the site, and again the walls of a chateau obliterated ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... double value; in the hope and courage which must rise from contact with such a personality and its rich experience, and in the strong light it throws upon "how the other half live." As Rose Pastor Stokes so quaintly put it, "Half the world does not know how. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... 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 ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... the Negroes for a generation, and led them well. He was a Baptist preacher, and when he died, two thousand black people followed him to the grave; and now they preach his funeral sermon each year. His widow lives here,—a weazened, sharp-featured little woman, who curtsied quaintly as we greeted her. Further on lives Jack Delson, the most prosperous Negro farmer in the county. It is a joy to meet him,—a great broad-shouldered, handsome black man, intelligent and jovial. Six ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... meaning was hidden from all but the Wise One. She beheld with amazement the chimneys, like lighted torches, that topped its roof and the blazing flame-bushes that surrounded it. When the Prince knocked on the quaintly carved door and entered at the Wise One's word, she drew back quickly and seated herself under a flame-bush until he should ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... 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
... "Oh," she said quaintly, "there was a good genie who let me in through the keyhole. I didn't meddle with anything, you know—I just looked at the beautiful room where you work. And I didn't glance, even, at the picture on the easel. The genie ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... these three years," she persisted, "and none ever walked the mountain by the path you have come." She watched us as I held the bowl for the Princess to drink, and asked quaintly, "But is there truly no marrying in heaven? I have thought upon that many times, and always it ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... in Hungary is a puzzle to any outsider. There is the original substratum of Slavs, overlaid by Szeklers, Magyars, German immigrants, Wallacks, Rusniacks, Jews, and gipsies. An old German writer has quaintly described the characteristics of these various peoples ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... quaintly said by a governor of Arkansas, that he believed that a public official should be "reasonably honest." Even should that limited standard of official integrity be invaded the people with an honest ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... and transcendantly. He buried his genius in the visionary grave of Rowley, "an old chest in an upper room over the chapel on the north side of Redcliff church;" and thence, most rare young conjurer, he evoked its spirit in the shape of fragments of law-parchment, quaintly inscribed with spells of verse and armorial hieroglyphics, to puzzle antiquaries and make fools of scholiasts. Puzzle them he did; and they could not forgive a clever stripling, whom hunger had tempted to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... at the others at their table, she felt that she had been fortunate in sitting next to the old ma'amselle. For though she could not judge entirely by appearances, no one else at the table seemed to be so quaintly interesting as the ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... screams of the girl brought all the household to the spot—the Canons, the little Abbe, the cook, the scullion—indeed all the inmates of the Seminary. Jasmin quaintly remarks, "A girl always likes to have the sins known that she has caused others to commit." But in this case, according to Jasmin's own showing, the girl was not to blame. The trick which he played might be very innocent, but to the assembled ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... of silence follow when she has done. The Courier is not weak enough yet to speak without stopping to think first. Still keeping his eyes on the Countess, he makes a quaintly insolent remark on what he has just heard. "I have not hitherto been a religious man; but I feel myself on the way to it. Since your ladyship has spoken to me, I believe in the Devil." It is the Countess's interest to see the humorous ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... with him, all the time his brain busy to invent some fresh scheme to obtain funds. Then, punctually at five, he took leave of his friend, and entering a fiacre, drove along to Deauville, that fashionable village of smart villas, with its big, white casino and its quaintly built ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... 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 ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... Another quaintly realistic touch occurs in the line (Idyl II.) in which Battis declares that Amaryllis, when she died, was as dear to him as his goats. In this line, no doubt, we have the supreme ideal of Sicilian pastoral love; nor is there a line which indicates that Theocritus himself ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... thyme and watch it, hour after hour, and still no interruption; nothing to break it up. It was something like the broad folio of an ancient illuminated manuscript, in gold, gules, blue, green; with foliated scrolls and human figures, somewhat clumsy and thick, but quaintly drawn, and bold ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... celebrated city. We know that he must have made a great many mistakes in drawing a map of his little island world which measured eight thousand miles by three thousand eight hundred miles. It must have been quaintly arranged. The Caspian Sea was connected with a Northern Ocean, the Danube sent a tributary to the Adriatic, there was no Bay of Biscay, the British Isles lay in the wrong direction, Africa was not half its right size, the Ganges flowed into the Eastern Ocean, Ceylon was ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... absolutely alone in the church, he still stood and waited a few moments. To Jane those moments seemed days, weeks, years, an eternity. Then he came out into the centre of the chancel, his head erect, his eyes shining, his whole bearing that of a conqueror sure of his victory. He walked down to the quaintly carved oaken screen and, passing beneath it, stood at the step. Then he signed to Jane to come ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... Wainewright died, in giving him birth, at the early age of twenty-one, and an obituary notice in the Gentleman's Magazine tells us of her 'amiable disposition and numerous accomplishments,' and adds somewhat quaintly that 'she is supposed to have understood the writings of Mr. Locke as well as perhaps any person of either sex now living.' His father did not long survive his young wife, and the little child seems to have been brought up by his grandfather, and, on the death of the latter in 1803, by his uncle ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... truth, and to paint the stormy democracies of Greece in all their grandeur and in all their wretchedness." Lord Byron said of the author: "His great pleasure consists in praising tyrants, abusing Plutarch, spelling oddly, and writing quaintly; and—what is strange, after all—his is the best modern history of Greece in any language." But this was penned before Thirlwall's and Grote's histories were published. Lord Macaulay says of Mitford: "Whenever this ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... called the gray-haired house. An old lady lived there who knitted bright worsted; also a fat old gentleman in a gay skull-cap who showed much attention to a long-leaved rubber-plant that flourished behind the glass of the street door. Gwendolyn leaned out, chin on palm, to canvass the quaintly curtained windows—none of which at the moment framed a venerable head. Next the gray-haired house there had been—up to a recent date—a vacant lot walled off from the sidewalk by a high, broad bill-board. Now a pit yawned where formerly was the vacant space. And instead ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... turned a slow eye toward the west. "I don't own no telescope," he said quaintly. He shifted the cud a little, and gazed at the plain around them—far as the eye could see, it stretched on every side. Only the little, white house stood comfortably in its midst—open to the eye of heaven. It was a rambling, one story and a half house, with no windows above ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... Humph! [The book on the drawing-table catches her eye. She picks it up, and evidently finds the title very unexpected. She looks at Ellie, and asks, quaintly] Quite sure you're not ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... for the long, dark vessels, with their grotesque, quaintly carved prows and sterns, seemed to be like some strange living creatures working along paths of silver, so regularly went the paddles, turning the sea into ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn |
