"Gender" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unmarried and too young. Oh, I've thought it all over. I'm not jumping without looking for a spot to light on. I thought I could carry my load through, but I had to give in. I can't perform miracles, Alfred; I'm just clay, and the wrong gender of that. If I could keep temptation out of my way I might keep on, but I can't run against Carrie Wade's sneers. I'd rather strut by her house with a husband that was able to take me in out of the wet than anything else I know of, and I want to rest. I want to sleep one ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... the last was the worst, and in the meanwhile the poor man was the sufferer. At any rate, therefore, matrimony must turn to his account, though his wife should prove to be nothing but a creature of the feminine gender, with a tongue in her head, and ten fingers on her hands, to clear out the papers of the housemaid, not to mention the convenience of a man's having it in his power lawfully to beget sons and daughters ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... suffered so much by devilish storms as we did for having seen 'em. Hark ye me, dear rogue, Xenomanes, my friend, I prithee are these hermits, hypocrites, and eavesdroppers maids or married? Is there anything of the feminine gender among them? Could a body hypocritically take there a small hypocritical touch? Will they lie backwards, and let out their fore-rooms? There's a fine question to be asked, cried Pantagruel. Yes, yes, answered Xenomanes; you may find there many goodly ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... and sing whilst she beats on her bamboo sticks an accompaniment that tortures well-tuned ears. For the rest, if her beauty soon fades, her ugliness does not create the least feeling of disgust amongst the Sakais of the masculine gender, who have ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... slipped out between two clouds, the timid inhabitant of the terrace appeared to be encouraged to come out altogether. D'Harmental then saw, by his black velvet knee-breeches, and by his silk stockings, that the personage who had just entered on the scene was of the masculine gender. ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... the English language are wholly indeclinable; having neither case, gender, nor number, and being added to substantives in all relations without any change; as, a good woman, good women, of a good woman; a good man, good men, of ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... etymology is that of gender. That words should be credited with sex is a verbal anthropomorphism that would seem to a Japanese exquisitely grotesque, if so be that it did not strike him as actually immodest. For the absence of gender is ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... to either the masculine or feminine gender, signifying a girl's lover, or a man's mistress: derived from a sweet cake in the ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... there are no inflexions to denote change of number, gender, or person, the connection of Jawi with Jawa is quite unknown to the Malays, just as the second part of the word senamaki (sena-maki, senna of Meccah[49]) is not suspected by them to have any reference to the sacred city. There ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... days. They had seen no company in her time,—for they were then only rising people; and, since that, the great friends to whom Sim, in his wealth, had attached himself, and with whom alone he intended that Barry should associate, were all of the masculine gender. He gave bachelor dinner-parties to hard-drinking young men, for whom Anty was well contented to cook; and when they—as they often, from the effect of their potations, were perforce obliged to do—stayed ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... eldest, as I remind my brothers; and of the more worthy gender, which my sisters sometimes forget. Though we live in the village, my father is a gentleman, as I shall be when I am grown up. I have told the village boys so more than once. One feels mean in boasting that one is better born than they are; but if I did not tell ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Transpose the conditions of each and the same beseeching look so often seen in women's faces will be ludicrously mixed with the whiskers on the faces of their lords. The only ineradicable difference between men and women is gender. They are singularly alike in every other particular. Give a woman liberty, and she will go a man one better in license. Take a man's liberty from him, and he surpasses any woman in timidity. If men have more strength, women have more ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... poet, a painter, or a sculptor wishes to personify a city, why does he invariably give it the feminine gender? Why is this so, even though the city be named for a man, or for a masculine saint? And why is it so in the case of commonplace cities, commercial cities, and ugly, sordid cities? It is not difficult to understand why ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... hundred and twenty to minus one hundred Centigrade. Von Schlichten had seen them sleeping in the open with their bodies covered with frost or freezing rain; he had also seen them wade through boiling water. As to the second, they had practically no sex-inhibitions; they were all of the same gender, true, functional, hermaphrodites. Any individual among them could bear young, or fertilize the ova of any other individual. Fifteen years ago, when he had come to Uller as a former Terran Federation captain newly commissioned colonel in the army of the Uller Company, it had taken some time before ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... his hopes as well as another, had hitherto sate sulky enough in the armchair formerly appropriated to the deceased, and in which she would have been not a little scandalised to have seen this colossal specimen of the masculine gender lolling at length. His employment had been rolling up into the form of a coiled snake the long lash of his horse-whip, and then by a jerk causing it to unroll itself into the middle of the floor. The first words he said when he ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... love a lass, She is so sweet and tender, It is sweet Cowslip's Grace In the Nominative Case. And in the feminine Gender." ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... feet in summer. But I see that, in this list, I had well nigh forgotten the most popular of all superlatives—"prettiest." So accustomed am I to squaring my estimate of beauty by the good, old adage, "he handsome is who handsome does," or "she beautiful is who beautiful does"—to employ a gender more appropriate to the case. Well, then, "the prettiest," withal, as you may easily believe when I tell you that her hair was so gold-like, her eyes so sky-like, her brow so lily-like, her cheeks so rose-like, her lips so cherry-like, ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... long and he listened so hard That anon he grew ever so tender, For it's everywhere known That the feminine tone Gets away with all masculine gender! He up and he wooed her with soldierly zest But all she'd reply to the love he professed Were these plaintive words (which perhaps you have ...
— Love-Songs of Childhood • Eugene Field
... that "the King can do no wrong'' was carried to an extreme length when a schoolboy blunder of Louis XIV. was allowed to change the gender of a French noun. The King said "un carosse,'' and that is what it is now. In Cotgrave's Dictionary carosse appears as feminine, but Mnage notes it as having been changed from ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... canallas: canalla is feminine in its usual collective meaning: rabble. Applied to an individual, however, it agrees in gender. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... of the old creation They're sure to hold forth as a weighty command; And what law can hinder old Adam to gender, And propagate men to replenish the land? But truly he never obey'd the lawgiver, For when the old serpent had open'd his eyes, He sought nothing greater than just to please nature, And work like ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... be supposed that such a bosom could be the shrine of tenderness and affection. Maria's virtues were all of the masculine gender. She really loved, or, rather, liked her husband; but it was with the same kind of emotion with which an energetic and ambitious man loves his wife. She cherished him, protected him, watched over him, and loaded him with honors. He was of a mild, ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... think that the royal bedchamber is in fact a third house of Parliament—that the affairs of the state are always to be put in the feminine gender? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... she gave her (I say her, because The gender still was epicene, at least In outward show, which is a saving clause) An outline of the customs of the East, With all their chaste integrity of laws, By which the more a haram is increased, The stricter doubtless grow the vestal duties ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... inflicting this punishment on the poor fellow remained an impenetrable mystery to me. The blows were given by a person of grisly aspect, with a head almost bald, and sunken cheeks, apparently of the feminine gender, though hardly to be classed in the gentler sex. There being no teeth to modulate the voice, it had a mumbled fierceness, not passionate, but stern, which absolutely made me quiver like calf's-foot jelly. Who could the phantom be? The most awful circumstance ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... able to maintain the town, "as the Tower was to answer for London." He disapproved of his wife's inclination to join him in Holland, for he was likely—so he wrote to her father, Walsingham—"to run such a course as would not be fit for any of the feminine gender." He had been, however; grieved to the heart, by the spectacle which was perpetually exhibited of the Queen's parsimony, and of the consequent suffering of the soldiers. Twelve or fifteen thousand Englishmen were serving in the Netherlands—more ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Shakspeare. And what was our profit from all this loathsome labour, and the loathsome heap of rubbish thus deposited in the memory? Attend, if you please, good reader: the first professes to teach the irregularities of nouns as to gender (i. e. which nouns having a masculine termination are yet feminine, &c.), the second to teach the irregularities of nouns as to number (i. e. which want the singular, which the plural), the third to teach the irregularities of ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Horace said of old: From sheer perversity, that arch-offender Still yokes unequally the hot and cold, The short and tall, the hardened and the tender; He bids a Socrates espouse a scold, And makes a Hercules forget his gender:— Sic visum Veneri! Lest samples fail, I add a fresh one from the ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... stood by her bed. It proved to be a grinning barefoot coloured maid with coffee, rolls, and a plate of luscious fruit. Anne's untuned ear could make little of the girl's voluble replies to her questions, for the West Indian negroes used one gender only, and made a limited vocabulary cover all demands. But she gathered that it was about half-past-five o'clock, and that the loud bell ringing in the distance informed the world of Nevis that it ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... and with a familiar but rather deferential "How-dy'ge," to the Colonel, huddled around and stared at me with open mouths and distended eyes, as if I were some strange being, dropped from another sphere. The two eldest were of the male gender, as was shown by their clothes—cast-off suits of the inevitable reddish-gray, much too large, and out at the elbows and the knees—but the sex of the others I was at a loss to determine, for they wore only a single robe, ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... and Crystal is appropriated to common Mercury; in the Saphire is found the Sulphur and Tincture of Luna, but each one according to a peculiar understanding, and according to its kind, and in Metals according to their form and gender; for when the blew Colour is taken and extracted out of the Saphire, its Rayment is gone, and its other Body is white as a Diamond, wanting only the hardness that is in a Diamond; even so when Gold hath lost ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... helmet, which is like the seventeenth century sallet, suggested that we should climb and get a better view. He was a kindly man, and in speaking English had discovered (as I do when speaking French) that it is simpler to stick to one gender. His choice was the feminine, and the Boche described as "she" throughout made me think better of myself, which is the essence of friendship. We climbed a flight of old stone steps, for generations the playground of little children, and found a ruined ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... happen not to be of the feminine gender," returned Borroughcliffe, with an air somewhat splenetic, "we must abide the fury of the king of beasts. His paw is, even now, at the outer door; and, if my orders have been obeyed, his entrance will be yet easier than that of the wolf to the respectable female ancestor ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... inscriptions the characters run indifferently from left to right, or from right to left, in this linear script their fixed direction is the usual one, from left to right. Suffixes were apparently used to indicate gender, and pictorial signs indicating the contents of the document are also in use, though more sparingly than they came to be in the later form of script. Such signs as occur seem to show that the documents ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... betwixt His terra cotta, plain or mix'd, And thy earth-gender'd sonnet; Small cause has he th' award to dread:— Thy Images are in the head, And his, poor ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... responsibility safe,—for such a woman there is in all England no chance of subsistence but by teaching—that almost ineffectual teaching, which can never countervail the education of circumstances, and for which not one in a thousand is fit—or by being a superior Miss Nares—the feminine gender of the tailor and ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... Some perhaps will except against the sexe, and not allowe it for a male-broode, sithens as our Italians saie, Le parole sono femine, & i fatti sono maschy, Wordes they are women, and deeds they are men. But let such know that Detti and fatti, wordes and deeds with me are all of one gender. And although they were commonly Feminine, why might not I by strong imagination (which Phisicions give so much power unto) alter their sexe? Or at least by such heaven-pearcing devotion as transformed Iphis, according to ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... smart shops in Paris cater to women; a large majority of the smart shops in London cater to men. It shows in their voices; for cities have voices just as individuals have voices. New York is not yet old enough to have found its own sex. It belongs still to the neuter gender. New York is not even a noun—it's a verb transitive; but its voice is a female voice, just as Paris' voice is. New York, like Paris, is full of strident, shrieking sounds, shrill outcries, hysterical babblings—a women's bridge-whist club at the hour of casting up the score; but London ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... Concert: "It is mostly of wind-instruments," King himself often taking part with his flute; "performers the best in Europe. He has three"—what shall we call them? of male gender,—"a counter-alt, and Mamsell Astrua, an Italian; they are unique voices. He cannot bear mediocrity. It is but seldom he has any singing here. To be admitted, needs the most intimate favor; now and then some young ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... unknown, and in the course of her researches perceived a large bell, to which she made such effectual application as alarmed every soul in the family. In a moment she was surrounded by Hatchway, Pipes, and all the rest of the servants half-dressed; but seeing none of the feminine gender appear, she began to storm at the sloth and laziness of the maids, who, she observed, ought to have been at work an hour at least before she called; and then, for the first time, understood that no woman was permitted to sleep within ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... significant meanings. I believe, in their hearts, they wish the angel in the Heaven that is ready to receive her, and thee at the proper place, that there might be an end of their flurries—another word of the same gender. ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... we personify our new name; but as we give it no distinction of sex, and though it will be active in its vocation, yet we apply to it the neuter gender. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the first of the adjectives agreeing with les sentimens in the wrong gender? The blot may be a trifling one, but I think I may say that it defaces every copy of this well-known billet-doux. I have seen many editions of The Sentimental Journey, some by the best publishers of the time in which they lived, and I find the same mistake in all: I do not ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... answered hesitatingly, never very sure of herself under Rebecca's fire; "but though we often speak of a baby, a chicken, or a kitten as 'it,' they are really masculine or feminine gender, not neuter." ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... first fire he has a cinder; Auld Tubalcain's fire-shool and fender; That which distinguished the gender O' Balaam's ass: A broomstick o' the witch of ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... long before their time, furrowed her face and neck; she was clothed so grotesquely in a worn-out goatskin that if it had not been for a dirty yellow petticoat, a distinctive mark of sex, Hulot would hardly have known the gender she belonged to; for the meshes of her long black hair were twisted up and hidden by a red worsted cap. The tatters of the little boy did not cover him, but left ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... for number and case as the nouns they qualify, and are placed after them. They are without gender. ...
— The Wiradyuri and Other Languages of New South Wales • Robert Hamilton Mathews
... are supposed to preside over the destiny of the people, are but emanations, the so-called "play" of Brahm. Properly speaking they are neither supreme nor possessed of truly divine attributes. Even the Hindu Triad—Brahma (masculine gender), Vishnu and Siva—are but manifestations of the delight of the eternal Soul to invest itself with qualities (guna). These three gods are no more real existences than are the myriad other children of ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... mother, it wouldn't have mattered, because she would have known it was a screw he had lost, and she would have known just what comfort he would have needed; whereas a Fraulein would know nothing about a screw, beyond the German for it, and the gender, of course. And of what use is that to a child? It may sound very unconventional, and I suppose it was so, to go to a strange house and ask for Thomas, and my only excuse a small screw. But still ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... such as they, For whom all change must bring alloy? And thou, young Love! canst thou not make A lonely Eden for their sake? 'Tis better that but two should find Gladness of heart and peace of mind, Than all the greater sum of life— With burning hearts that fates unbind And crowding thoughts that gender strife. But no, the gift of life is one Of strangest form, of blended tints And crossing lines, with mingled hints Of glory from an unseen sun; And shades that hourly darker grow For those who seek that sun to know;— And they must take the whole or none. So they must wake to memory Of ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... Pitkin was. It was a general fact about this young lady that anybody who gave one look at her, whether at church or at home, always inquired at once with effusion, "Who is she?"— particularly if the inquirer was one of the masculine gender. ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... call lifeless things by names connoting sex, and therefore connoting, not only activity, but also life and personality? We explain it by the theory that man called lifeless things male or female—by using gender-terminations—as a result of his habit of regarding lifeless things as personal beings; that habit, again, being the result of his consciousness of himself as a ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... ghosts appear unto Ulysses, before the heroes and masculine spirits,—why the Psyche or soul of Tiresias is of the masculine gender, who, being blind on earth, sees more than all the rest in hell; why the funeral suppers consisted of eggs, beans, smallage, and lettuce, since the dead are made to eat asphodels about the Elysian meadows:—why, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... already begun transformation and resulted in the new language's possessing in the fourteenth century a grammar remarkably simple, brief and clear. Auxiliaries were introduced, and they allowed every shade of action, action that has been, or is, or will be, or would be, to be clearly defined. The gender of nouns used to present all the singularities which are one of the troubles in German or French; mona, moon, was masculine as in German; sunne, sun, was feminine; wif, wife, was not feminine but neuter; as was also maeden, maiden. ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... no rule whereby to tell the gender of a word, except in the case of animate objects, where the ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... sun is of the feminine gender, and not, as with us, when personified, spoken of as "he." We beg to make this observation, lest the roses' wish "to kiss the sun," be thought unmaidenly. We are anxious, also, to remove a stumbling block, which might perchance trip up exquisitely-refined modern notions, sadly shocked, no ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... and King of the Romans. But this passage of his opening speech is what I recollect best of him there: "Right reverend Fathers, date operam ut illa nefanda schisma eradicetur," exclaims Sigismund, intent on having the Bohemian schism well dealt with—which he reckons to be of the feminine gender. To which a cardinal mildly remarking, "Domine, schisma est generis neutrius (schisma is neuter, your Majesty)," Sigismund loftily replies: "Ego sum Rex Romanus et super grammaticam (I am King of the Romans, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... in German and cognate tongues. Now, if there is a man in the moon, and if it be the case, as is asserted by antiquarians, that the 'man in the moon' is one of the most ancient as well as one of the most popular superstitions of the world, the masculine is surely the right gender after all. Those who look to Sanscrit for the solution of all mythological, as well as philological, problems will confirm this, for in Sanscrit the moon is masculine. Dr. Jamieson, of Scottish Dictionary fame, gets out of the difficulty by saying that the ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... went its way then, and Fairchild his, still wondering; the sheriff's question, with a different gender, recurring again ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... must be so tempered with love, that it vents not to the breach of Christian peace and concord. Charity envieth not, or is not zealous. When zeal wants charity, it is not zeal but envy. And hence it is that there are so frequent and fervent exhortations to avoid such questions as may gender strifes, and contentions, and malice. Now certainly there was some truth in them, and something of conscience also in them. Yet he dissuades entirely the prosecution of them to the rigour, as men are apt to ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning |
