"Quaint" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... breaking-point, was not perhaps normally so intense as it is to-day; yet there was certainly much oppression and unnecessary hardships to be suffered by the weak, even in that age. The Ancren Riwle, that quaint form of life for ankeresses drawn up by a Dominican in the thirteenth century, shows that even then, despite the distance of years and the passing of so many generations, the manners and ways and mental attitudes of people depended very much as to whether they were among ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... reader will wish to know, are these men really so dangerous, and have the business men of America been driven to treat them as here described. The reader may again address the I. W. W. National Headquarters for a four-page leaflet with the quaint title, "With Drops of Blood the History of the Industrial Workers of the World has Been Written." Despite the fact that it is a bare record of cases, there are many men serving long terms in prison in the United States for ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... Loder's paramount emotion was one of envy for the mistress of Greenriver. She used to think, as she came into the house each morning, that it would have suited her much better, as a background, than it would ever suit the quaint, childish-looking Toni; and it grew almost unendurable to her to have to sit at the luncheon table as a guest—not even that—and watch Toni's ridiculous assumption of dignity as she sat in her high-backed chair opposite ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... smile, are neat and trim in white duck, while their women walk a step or two behind them, in native dress, with a baby on their backs. The Japanese children, in bright coloured frocks, their little heads shaven, look like quaint dolls. Then there are the Chinese. The men, fat and prosperous, wear their American clothes oddly, but the women are enchanting with their tightly-dressed black hair, so neat that you feel it can never be ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... from me but my own pride. I could even see with distinctness those who trod it, not only the saints of far-off days, but men like Father Dolling, and women whose pale intense faces met mine from beneath the quaint ugliness of Salvation Army bonnets. These soldiers of the League of Service moved everywhere around me in the incessant processions of a tireless love. I knew their works, and there was no hour when my heart did not go out to them in sympathy. Why was it that ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... resented the doubt with quick jealousy, and, opening the bottom drawer of the chest, drew forth a battered portfolio. Out rolled manuscripts, faded and worn, and arose a faint far scent of sweet-kept age. The writing was delicate and curled, with the quaint fineness of half a century before. She read a ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... to us by men whose accuracy and truthfulness cannot be doubted. The Honorable Robert Boyle, a scientist of unquestioned seriousness, tells in his New Experiments, Physico-Mechanical touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects about Drebel's work in the quaint language ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... crews of the other ships, secreted themselves on board the Caesar, and the day after the action presented themselves on the quarter-deck, with a request that intercession might be made for them with their captain, telling their story in the following quaint manner:—"Sir, we belongs to the Le Pompee, and finding our ship could not get out, we stowed ourselves away in this ship, and, in the action, quartered ourselves to the "10th gun, and opposite —— on the lower deck," referring, at the same time, to the officer in command ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... and they amused themselves by making up stories about their fellow passengers. There was the quaint little man in number four who reminded them of Professor Arnold Dempsey and who might very easily have been a professor, judging from the number of ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... exquisite crayon portrait of Jim at three, and Derry a delicious eighteen-months- old. There was the white bowl that had always been filled with violets, empty now. And there were the low bookcases where a few special favorites were kept, and the quaint old mahogany sewing- table that had been old Mrs. Gregory's ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... pointed arches on each side, beneath which were as many chapels. The walls were rich with pictures, not only in the chapels, but up and down the nave, above the arches. There were gilded virgins, too, and much other quaint device that produced an effect that I rather liked than otherwise. At the end of the church, farthest from the high altar, there were four columns of exceedingly rich marble, and a good deal more of such precious material was wrought into the chapels and altars. ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of setting out for the English Prospect on Saturday evening when there was a knock on my door, and to my surprise Nicholas Markovitch came in. He was in evening dress—rather quaint it seemed to me, with his pointed collar so high, his tail-coat so much too small, and his large-brimmed bowler hat. He explained to me confusedly that he wished to walk with me alone to the church... that he had things ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... little Quakeress, She is so quaint; I like her dress, Her very, very plain white bonnet, Her stuff gown with no trimming ...
— Little People: An Alphabet • T. W. H. Crosland
... London, according to our quaint Lutheran, "a pious, true, and godly spirit, a clear understanding, a sound youthful elbow-grease, and the wish to put it to good use." During the two years of his residence in the British metropolis, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... many charges and countercharges. She had that almost impossible gift in a woman—the power of telling a tale whimsically. It was said that once, when Orvay Lafarge, a new Inspector of Customs, came to spy out the land, she kept him so amused by her quaint wit, that he sat in the doorway gossiping with her, while Tarboe and two others unloaded and safely hid away a cargo of liquors from the Ninety-Nine. And one of the men, as cheerful as Joan herself, undertook ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... nobler Future, broken, snatched away from her allotted place in the long chain of the ages! Heiress of infinite hope, and dowered with latent fitness to fulfil her part, now so suddenly fallen by the wayside! That quaint dialect silent so soon! and for ever vanished from this earth that keen, eager perception, that fathomless love and devotion! But such ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... a capital joke, Piers disbursed the coin. Quaint, comical fellow, this brother of his I He liked him, and was ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... So did the quaint fellow announce his engagement to us. It was quite a romantic little history, for it turned out that he had loved the girl for full two years, but for a long time had not been able even to make her acquaintance, and when that was accomplished, had hardly dared to speak of ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... way. Outside, in the slippery streets, over which the red-capped children passed with shouts of glee, I had seen something of the preparations; the men, steel-like and stolid, marching by, the officers, stiff and martial-looking, saluting right and left under the quaint arcades of this charming city. Colored photographs of corps commanders adorned the windows and seemed to find a ready sale. These things pointed in the same direction. Switzerland, posted on her crests, was watching the issue of the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... conveying that peculiar Simla-by-South-Kensington atmosphere of retired Anglo-Indian society which she suggests with such intimate understanding. But, to be honest, the others (with the exception of one quaint little comedy of a canine ghost) are but indifferent stuff, too full of snakes and hidden treasure and general tawdriness—the kind of Orientalism, in fact, that one used to associate chiefly with the Earl's Court Exhibition. Mrs. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... unsurpassable, no less perfect, than the "Ode to the Nightingale" of Keats, or the Lycidas of Milton. It were superfluous to linger over the humour of Thackeray. Only Shakespeare and Dickens have graced the language with so many happy memories of queer, pleasant people, with so many quaint phrases, each of which has a kind of freemasonry, and when uttered, or recalled, makes all friends of Thackeray into family friends of each other. The sayings of Mr. Harry Foker, of Captain Costigan, of ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... Gilbert, with their half-brother, Walter Raleigh, here, when little boys, played at sailors in the reaches of Long Stream; in the summer evenings doubtless rowing down with the tide to the port, and wondering at the quaint figure-heads and carved prows of the ships which thronged it; or climbing on board, and listening, with hearts beating, to the mariners' tales of the new earth beyond the sunset; and here in later life, matured men, whose ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... of her hiding place, and, going with two or three quick strides down the yard, waited within a foot or two of the man, who now proceeded to lift himself up by the window ledge preparatory to opening the barn window. With the aid of a claspknife he could very easily push back the quaint and imperfect fastening; then it was but to push in the glass, and he could enter the barn. He sat on the window ledge with his back to Nora. His huge, gaunt form looked larger than ever, intensified now by the light of the moon. ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... until he saw that the little creature who waddled at the rear of the party was a Japanese in European clothes. Notwithstanding her western garb, she resembled a print of Utamaro. Beside her walked a tall, grave girl, with dark hair and gray eyes, attired in the quaint garb of some early nineteenth-century epoch—1840 or thereabouts. As old-fashioned as she looked, a delicate girlish beauty was hers, and when she indifferently gazed at Davos, straightway he heard humming in his head the "glance motive" from Tristan and Isolde. They passed on, but not leaving ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... my day and week was devoted to the study of this quaint people, and the following are the results. Those who have dealings with the Fan universally prefer them in point of honesty and manliness to the Mpongwe and Coast races; they have not had time to become thoroughly corrupt, to lose all the lesser without gaining anything of the greater virtues. ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... upon to be. You can shine, and by shining show how dark the darkness is. The obligation is laid upon us all; the commandment still comes to every Christian which was given to the old prophet, 'Declare unto My people their transgression, and to the house of Jacob their sin.' A quaint old writer says that the presence of a saint 'hinders the devil of elbow room to do his tricks.' We can all rebuke sin by our righteousness, and by our shining reveal the darkness to itself. We do not walk as children of the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the fire. And now he enjoyed the pleasure of a new experience. The stereotyped fashionable house he knew all about, but this old house that looked small, and yet stretched itself out into many cosy rooms; it was quaint, it was unique, and so was the little household. It was like stepping into a book, and that a book of poems. What was the charm of that low-browed room he sat in? Could it be the broad fireplace, wherein blazed and snapped a veritable back-log? Mr. Winters ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... the Iscam, where a bathing-shed had been built, and after enjoying the bathe as only the first bathe in a season can be enjoyed, they struck off over the fields towards some neighbouring villages, which De Vayne had often wanted to visit, because their old churches contained some quaint specimens of early architecture. On the way they passed through Barton Wood, and there found some fine specimens of herb Paris, with large bright purple berries resting on its topmost trifoliations, one of which Julian eagerly seized, saying ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the manageress's room, a cosy apartment in the back of the quaint old hostelry, when a waitress came and announced Inspector Deane. The official was at once shown ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... officially, and their States are, officially, as well administered as Our territories. Also, the private allowances to various queer people are not exactly matters to put into newspapers, though they give quaint ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... The hunter's quaint speech is encouraging; but for all, it does not hinder him and his comrade from soon after returning to a condition of despondency, if not ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... admiring, but which will fill you with pleasure on account of the novelty and freshness of everything you meet; whether it is the old bonnet-less, short-petticoated women walking arm and arm with their grandsons, whether the church with its quaint sculpture of the Entombment of our Lord, and the sad votive candles ever guttering in front of it, or whether the plain evidence that meets one at every touch and turn, that one is among people who live out of ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... small shops or bazaars, where wares of all sorts were offered for sale. At one of these, a booth of oriental trinkets, Mr. Banks stopped and bought each of the girls a necklace of gay-coloured beads. They were not valuable ornaments, but had a quaint, foreign air, and were very pretty in their own way. Patty was greatly pleased, and when they passed another booth which contained exquisite Armenian embroideries, she begged Ethel to accept the little gift from her, and picking out some filmy ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... while Beth quietly introduced me. And Miela spread her wings, curtsied, and replied in a quaint, soft little voice: "I am honored, sir." Then she laughed prettily and, extending her hand, added: "How ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... He was always an agreeable companion. There was a good deal of bonhomie and pleasantry in his conversation. He was not exactly witty, nor was he very humorous, though he gave a light turn to table-talk and enjoyed exceedingly any pleasantry or fun, even. He often made a quaint or slightly caustic remark, but he took care that it should not be too trenchant. On reading his letters one discovers this playful spirit in many of them, as, for instance, in his letter to the spiritualist who asked his opinion of Von Moltke and the French war. He wrote in reply ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... look very homelike," said Mrs. Hamilton, glancing at the photographs which adorned desk, mantel and table. "Are these all friends of yours?" she added with a sly smile, as her eye caught the picture of the little Queen of Holland in quaint peasant costume. ...
— Glenloch Girls • Grace M. Remick
... on the north side of the island of Voorne, at the mouth of the New Maas, 51/2 m. N. of Hellevoetsluis. Pop. (1900) 4107. It is a fortified place and has a good harbour, arsenal, magazine and barracks. It also possesses a quaint town hall, and an orphanage dating from 1533. The tower of the Groote [v.04 p.0562] Kerk of St Catherine serves as a lighthouse. Most of the trade of Brielle was diverted to Hellevoetsluis by the cutting of the Voornsche Canal in 1829, but it still has some business in corn and fodder, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... and Chiswick was then enough of a country village to supply him amply with material. But, although a keen satirist, it is certain that he had as much tenderness for the lower orders of creation, as a young loving girl. In a corner of this quaint old garden, two tiny monuments are affixed to the wall, one chiselled perhaps by Hogarth's own hand, to the memory of his canary bird! The thinking character of the painter's mind is evidenced in this as in every thing he did—the engraving ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... you're too quaint!" his mother exclaimed, putting out to caress him a practised but ineffectual hand. He slipped out of it, but looked with intelligent innocent eyes at Pemberton, who had already had time to notice that from one moment to the other his small satiric face seemed to change its time ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... the other digested; when one slept, the other snored; if one sold a thing, the other scooped the usufruct. This independent and yet dependent action was observable in all the details of their daily life—I mean this quaint and arbitrary distribution of originating cause and resulting effect between the two —between, I may say, this dynamo and the other always motor, or, in other words, that the one was always the creating force, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hearts with poetic afflatus Took wing and impulsively soared As the lead-line (a quaint ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... not ringed with roses blowing, Nor set in meadows where cool waters croon; Parched wastes were round it, and no shade was going, Nor breath of violets nor song-birds' tune; Only at times from the adjacent dwelling Came down with Boreas the quaint, compelling Scent of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... of Edith's life. She also provided a good deal of romance in the lives of several other people. Her position was unusual, and her personality fascinating. She had no parents, was an heiress, and lived alone with a companion in a quaint little house just out of Berkeley Square, with a large studio, that was never used for painting. She had such an extraordinary natural gift for making people of both sexes fond of her, that it would have been difficult to say which, of ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... when the children joined hands and danced around the Fairy Tree they sang a song which was the Tree's song, the song of L'Arbre fee de Bourlemont. They sang it to a quaint sweet air—a solacing sweet air which has gone murmuring through my dreaming spirit all my life when I was weary and troubled, resting me and carrying me through night and distance home again. No stranger ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... doubting those traditions did not make those traditions one whit the less facts, for all that. One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the Hebrew story was this: —He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head —a peculiarity only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the contracted forehead, while his lips closed about a short brier-wood pipe of a kind only used by men. The pipe had gone out, unnoticed by the smoker; and he did not seem to mind the fierce heat thrown out by the broken coals. Above the mantel was the portrait of a gentleman in the quaint costume of the latter Victorian age; the absurd starched collar and shirt, the insignificant cravat, the trousers reaching to the ankles, and the coat and waistcoat of black cloth and fantastic cut, familiar to the readers of the London Punch. ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... There was something quaint and straightforward in the letter, in spite of the utter ignorance of grammar and spelling; and while I smiled at the evident pride in the "brutther" who was a "verry good hite," and the offer to take less wages if "I would do his washin," I found myself wondering ...
— J. Cole • Emma Gellibrand
... simple. It was to help them drive a flock of sheep to the market of the city. One morning early we made the venture in a melancholy drizzle of rain, and passed through the frowning gates unmolested. Our friends had friends living over a humble wine shop in a quaint tall building situated in one of the narrow lanes that run down from the cathedral to the river, and with these they bestowed us; and the next day they smuggled our own proper clothing and other belongings to us. The family that lodged us—the Pieroons—were ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... cool within the little cottage after the blazing sunshine outside. The place was evidently no longer used for anything but a storehouse and a shelter for picnics of this kind, but it was a quaint, attractive little dwelling and evidently very old. The main room where they sat had a big-beamed ceiling, deep casement windows, and a door that swung open in two sections, one above the other. The upper half was wide open now, framing a sun-bathed ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. "'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door— ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... healthy wholesome reading, full of breezy life and movement, full of quaint stories vigorously told, will not be excelled by any book to be published throughout the year. Sound, hearty, ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... to go with me to our house beyond the Seine," he said. "It is a quaint old place hidden away, as so many happy homes are in this city. You will find nobody there but my mother, my sister Julie, and a faithful old servant, Antoine ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... bottle; from the wedding dress of a Solomon Islander to the exquisite models of the ships he had sailed in, executed by Jack's skilful fingers. He had also rigged up shelves, or made cupboards into which to put his curiosities; and every addition of his handiwork increased the air of quaint comfort ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... with choicest sports, All pastime fit for Phoebus Courts; And Thou great Master of the Revels, joyne The Graces, to thy Daughters nine; Witt pure and quaint, with rich conceits and free From all obscaene scurrilitie: Here free from care, nimbly let's dance a round Upon ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski
... my hopes haue end in their effects, When blood and sorrow finnish my desires: Horatio murdered in his Fathers bower, Vilde Serberine by Pedrigano slaine, False Pedrigano hang'd by quaint deuice, Faire Isabella by her-selfe misdone, Prince Balthazar by Bel-imepria stabd, The Duke of Castile an his wicked sonne Both done to death by olde Hieronimo, My Bel-imperia falne as Dido fell, And good Hieronimo slaine by himselfe! I, these were ...
— The Spanish Tragedie • Thomas Kyd
... limit. Not infrequently the public welfare is imperilled by too much, rather than too little, legislation. It was the belief of Jefferson that government should touch the citizen at the fewest possible points. The quaint lines of the old English poet have lost nothing ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... went back to his study to do some more thinking and planning. And very late he came up to his sleeping-chamber. And he was just cuddling his head into the soft pillow for the night, when the door opened, so softly, and in there came a little body in simple white night garb, with a quaint old-fashioned nightcap on, candle in hand. She came in very softly. And he ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... metal monster. He walked in the eight-foot track of one of its treads. As he went, he continued the cleaning of sand from the rifle in his hands. The rifle was useless against such a monster, of course, but it is quaint to reflect that in that automatic rifle, firing hexynitrate bullets, each equivalent to a six-pounder T.N.T. shell in destructiveness, Sergeant Walpole carried greater "fire-power" than ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... was a good scene for such a narrative, with the oak-wainscoting, quaint, and clumsy furniture, the heavy beams that crossed its ceiling, and the tall four-post bed, with dark curtains, within which you might imagine what shadows ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... stammering fashion, to imitate the high artistic culture of the neighbouring people. The wide deviations from the original have arisen not from the freedom, but from the rudeness of the imitation; the treatment is sometimes insipid, sometimes turgid, the language harsh and quaint.(9) We have no difficulty in believing the statement of the old critics of art, that, apart from the compulsory reading at school, none of the poems of Livius were taken up a second time. Yet these labours ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... believe there is always Golden Seal, but it is the kind that comes in bottles, and not in the gloom of "deep, cool, moist woods," where Mrs. Creevey describes it as growing, along with other wildings of such sweet names or quaint as Celandine, and Dwarf Larkspur, and Squirrel-corn, and Dutchman's breeches, and Pearlwort, and Wood-sorrel, and Bishop's—cap, and Wintergreen, and Indian-pipe, and Snowberry, and Adder's-tongue, and Wakerobin, and Dragon-root, and Adam-and-Eve, and twenty more, which must have got their ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... transformations, and by which she may always be recognized through her disguises. In the next scene we find Amie suffering from the effect of Karol's kiss. She is ill at ease, she knows not why, and the innocent description of her love-pain possesses, in spite of its quaint artificiality, something of the naivete of Daphnis ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... insensible breaches here and there, mildewed and rusted the surface everywhere; then, political and religious revolutions, which, blind and fierce by nature, fell furiously upon it, rent its rich array of sculpture and carving, shivered its rose-windows, shattered its necklaces of arabesques and quaint figures, tore down its statues—sometimes because of their crown; lastly, changing fashion, even more grotesque and absurd, from the anarchic and splendid deviations of the Renaissance down to the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... (smiling) what a quaint noise! (Approaching Mr. FERNANDEZ.) Monsieur, allow me to offer you my snuff-box—it is heartily at your service. (Mr. FERNANDEZ accepts the courtesy with effusion.) And now, my old friend, take this packet, which I fancy is from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... upon a midnight dreary, While I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious Volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, Suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, Rapping at my chamber door. "'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "Tapping at my chamber door Only this, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... The fashion quaint, the time-worn flaws, The narrow range, the doubtful tone, All was excused awhile, because It seemed a creature ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... more to the purpose, Nance was able to avenge herself in the flesh, only a few months after these contemptuous lines had been penned. It happened at Bath, in the summer of 1703, and the story of her triumph, brief as it is, sounds quaint and pretty, as it comes down to us laden with a thousand suggestions of fashionable life in the reign of Queen Anne—a life made up of gossip and cards, drinking, gaming, patches and powder, fine clothes, full perriwigs and empty heads. ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... deacon's maiden sister, was a character in her way, and was surely not one of those vain, frivolous females to whom the Apostle Paul had reference when he condemned the plaiting of hair and the wearing of gold and jewels. Quaint, queer and simple-hearted, she had but little idea of any world this side of heaven, except the one bounded by the "huckleberry" hills and the crystal waters of Fairy Pond, which from the back door of the farmhouse were plainly ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... told to one another by a party of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. According to our gentle author, who was one of them, they stopped over night at a house in England called the Tabard Inn, and here they passed the hours repeating fine stories. Afterward Chaucer wrote these down in a book in quaint old English. One might look at these words all day long and not know in the least what what some of them meant, though they do ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... being testified to by Mr. Larkyns and Mr. Bouncer (who was considered a high authority in canine matters), and Verdant also liking the quaint appearance of the dog, Mop eventually became his property, for "four-ten" minus five shillings, but plus a pint of buttery beer, which Mr. Lucre always pronounced to be customary "in all dealins whatsumever atween gentlemen." Verdant was highly gratified at possessing ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... that she has heard something about the Pacific Ocean, and has set out to see for herself whither the reports are correct," was the quaint thought of the Irish lad, as he pushed vigorously through the undergrowth, which was dense enough to turn him aside more than once and compel him to keep his wits about him to prevent going ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... last he decided: "A little man, well groomed, clean shaven, a soldierly appearance." The other smiled: "All right, come along." A quaint building in the form of a chalet appeared to the left; and to the right side, almost opposite, was the main house. It was a strange-looking building, where there was a mixture of everything, a mingling of Gothic fortress, manor, villa, hut, residence, cathedral, mosque, pyramid, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Sanom, and myself, were marched onward through the gate and up a steep narrow winding street, where the solidly-built houses were set close together to obtain the shade, to the market-place. Here, amid the promiscuous firing of long flint-lock guns and quaint ancient pistols, such as one sees in curiosity shops at home, a further demonstration was held, our carriers themselves infected by the popular enthusiasm, seeming also to lose their senses. They heaped upon Omar every indignity, scoffed and spat at ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... side of the valley, following the graceful curves and swellings of the hills. The little towns are so lost in the recesses that one comes upon them quite unexpectedly, and, whirling through their one long main street, catches glimpses of quaint churches and buildings which fairly overhang the highway, and narrow vistas of lawns, trees, shrubbery, and flowers; then all is hidden by the next bend ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... equally to the priest of Nemi himself, the nominal hero of the long tragedy of human folly and suffering which has unrolled itself before the readers of these volumes, and on which the curtain is now about to fall. He, too, for all the quaint garb he wears and the gravity with which he stalks across the stage, is merely a puppet, and it is time to unmask him before laying him up in ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... an oak, with his back against the trunk of the tree, while the boy lay full length on the soft grass, looking up into the green depths of foliage where a tiny brown bird flitted from bough to bough. In his quaint way, Pete was carrying on a conversation with his little friend in the tree top, translating freely the while for his less gifted, but deeply interested, companion on the ground below, when Brave, the shepherd dog, lying near, interrupted the talk by a short ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... the merchants were implored to take pity on their poverty-stricken lord, were cast into utter oblivion. It was harvest tide for skilled craftsmen and artisans. Any one blessed with a clever or fantastic idea easily found a market for the product of his brain. He could see his poetic or quaint conception presented to an applauding public with a wealth of paraphernalia that a modern stage manager would not scorn. How much the nobles spent can only be inferred from the ducal accounts, which are eloquent with information ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... birds there is nothing to compare for beauty and speed with the swift, or for power and cleverness with the hawk. On moist evenings, when the swifts fly low and level, backward and forward, with a quaint little musical squeak, like a mouse's, they remind one of fish that dart through the water of clear streams under bridges. The hawk, even in a high wind, can remain, by tilting his body at the needed angle, perfectly still in the air, while his steady wide ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... and I could see trouble ahead for him as plainly as though I had been a palmist reading his hand at two guineas a visit. There are other proverbs fully as wise as the one which Mortimer had translated from the Swahili, and one of the wisest is that quaint old East London saying, handed down from one generation of costermongers to another, and whispered at midnight in the wigwams of the whelk-seller! "Never introduce your donah to a pal." In those seven words is contained the wisdom ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... "This quaint English custom!" he said lightly. "All you women go into another room to gossip and we men are condemned to the society of one another! I'm afraid even I'm not British enough to appreciate such a droll arrangement. Especially ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... Romantic School can be pretty definitely set at about 1796; its cradle was in the quaint university town of Jena, at that time the home of Schiller and his literary-esthetic enterprises, and only a few miles away from Goethe in Weimar. Five names embody about all that was most significant in the earlier ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... bazaar without any trouble. In her chubby hand was clasped a little gold five-franc piece, which had been given her the previous day, and visions of glittering treasures which should be bought with that tiny gold piece floated before her eyes. She hurried on by the quaint fountains which are placed at the corners of the bazaars, to cheer those water-worshiping people, and soon found herself amid the charms and mysteries of the bazaar, and in front of the little shops like bow-windows, with their owners sitting cross-legged in the midst ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... a quaint little Kate Greenaway dress, and big-brimmed hat of dark green velvet with white feathers tumbling over its brim. The frock was ankle length and short-waisted and she wore old-fashioned little slippers, with crossed ribbons, and black lace mitts. A shirred silk workbag hung at her ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... iron works built in the present United States that were commercially successful, were established in Massachusetts, in the town of Saugus, a few miles from Boston. The company had a monopoly of manufacture under grant for ten years. [Footnote: Some quaint records exist of the incidents of ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... little commercial importance—a quaint and quiet old place, with a fine cathedral and many notable buildings which testify ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... bodies, Hebrew, Persian, and various cabalistic characters, the dark enigmas of the work of transmutation, and the invocations or prayers for success employed by the alchymist. Here and there pieces of their quaint and uncouth shaped apparatus, the aludel, the alembic, and the alkaner, the pelican, the crucible, and the water-bath, occupy their respective stations. The clumsy, heavy, oaken table in the centre is covered with copies of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... to the Mermaid Inn, One dark May night, Fiddling a tune that quelled our motley din, With quaint delight, It haunts me yet, as old lost airs will do, A phantom strain: Look for me once, lest I should look for you, And look ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... editors who wanted to get hold of his next book. It is almost incredible to what stratagems publishers will descend to influence an author. Andrew had written in "Paradise Regained" of the tramps who visit us, how quaint and appealing some of them are (let me add, how dirty), and how we never turn away any one who seems worthy. Would you believe that, in the spring after the book was published, a disreputable-looking vagabond ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... of a quaint corner of New England, where bygone romance finds a modern parallel. The story centers round the coming of love to the young people on the staff of a newspaper—and it is one of the prettiest, sweetest and quaintest of old-fashioned ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... the most popular orators of his day. He had a deep, sonorous, flexible voice, which he used to great advantage. He had a wonderful gift of touching the human heart, now melting his hearers by his pathos, then convulsing them with his quaint humor. He was attractive in manner, generous in feeling, spontaneous in expression, and free from ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... the Karaoli Raja, whose following was the most quaint of all. Amongst the curious signs of his dignity he had on his escort four tigers, each chained on a separate car, and guarded by strange-looking men ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... jovial, and pressing; he almost scolded Maggie because she would not take more than twice of his favorite pudding: but she remembered what her mother had said, and that she would be watched all day; and this gave her a little prim, quaint manner, very different from her usual soft charming unconsciousness. She fancied that Edward and Master Buxton were just as little at their ease with each other as she and Miss Harvey. Perhaps this feeling on the part of the ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... forever doing good in his quiet yet earnest way. Not only on Sunday when he preached solid gospel sermons, full of quaint familiar expressions, such as I fear few of my readers could take up, full of solemn, affectionate, appeals, full of his own simplicity and love, the Monday also found him ready with his every-day gospel. If he ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Quaint reis Marcs nus out conjeies E de sa curt nus out chascez, As mains ensemble nus preismes E hors de la sale en eissimes, A la forest puis ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... one else wanted to live in such a desolate place, so far from the scattered hamlets, she had got it for a small rent. The house was a tiny imitation of a castle, with crenelated parapet and tower. Crumbling now and weather-stained, it had a quaint, human, wistful air. Its face was turned away from the road toward a bit of garden, which was fenced off from the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... complaint that came to Anwoth from Kilmacolm was expressed in the quaint and graphic language natural to that day. 'Security, strong and sib to nature, is stealing in upon us.' The holy law of God, they mean, was never preached in their parish; at any rate, it was never carried home to any man's conscience. Nobody was ever disturbed. ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... Hospitality demanded that he should do all in his power to secure his guest's material comfort; but there, in his opinion, immediate obligation ceased. In thus remaining standing he had a quaint sense of safeguarding the sanctities of the place. The man's tone was curiously offensive. Involuntarily Mr. Iglesias' back stiffened ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... and me, ma'am, we have thoughts of applying for Dunmow flitch. Quaint old custom, Dunmow flitch. Heard of it, ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... nearly eight o'clock that night when Selwyn alighted from a train at the village where he and Elise had heard the fateful announcement of war. He walked through the quaint street, silent and deserted in the November night. Except for two or three people at the station, there was no one to be seen as his footsteps on the cobbled road knocked with their echo against the casement windows of the slumbering dwellings. Reaching the inn, he bargained for a conveyance, ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... little room, daintily furnished, individual in its quaint colouring, and the masses of perfumed flowers set in strange and unexpected places. A great bowl of scarlet carnations gleamed from a dark corner, set against the background of a deep brown wall. A jar of pink roses upon a tiny table ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... voice she joined the birds, and woke the echoes from the brown cliffs. The tune was quaint and rapid; both it and the words had come down to her with the old folklore ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... florid exordium. The voice was clear and cold and distinct; not especially musical, not at all magnetic. The orator was incessantly moving; not rushing vehemently forward or stepping defiantly backward, with that quaint planting of the foot, like Beecher; but restlessly changing his place, with smooth and rounded but monotonous movement. The arms and hands moved harmonious with the body, not with especial reference to what was said, but apparently because there must be action. The first part of the discourse ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... which the foregoing observations are directed, is this. As most of the peculiar terminations by which the second person singular is properly distinguished in the solemn style, are not only difficult of utterance, but are quaint and formal in conversation; the preterits and auxiliaries of our verbs are seldom varied in familiar discourse, and the present is generally simplified by contraction, or by the adding of st without increase of syllables. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... old street, with only a few yards of ground between it and the road, it had a large and ancient garden behind it. A large garden of any sort is valuable, but an ancient garden is invaluable, and this one had retained a very antique loveliness. The quaint memorials of its history lived on into the new, changed, unsympathetic time, and stood there, aged, modest, and unabashed. Yet not one of the family had ever cared for it on the ground of its old-fashionedness; its preservation ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... interesting everyone with whom she came in contact. Her wise, fat face, somewhat solemn in expression, was the essence of good-humor. Her blue eyes were as serene as an unruffled summer pool. She could say heaps of old-fashioned, quaint things. She had strong likes and dislikes, but she was never known to be cross. She adored Judy, but Judy only liked her, for all Judy's passionate love was already disposed of. It centered itself ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... glimpse of the bride, with her sweet, patient, dewy face shadowed like a honey-drop in the gauzy calyx of her artisanne cap; for she was in the simplest of morning dresses—something gray, with a clean white apron. The quaint, old-fashioned house where we met was decorated with exquisite trifles, the memorials of the mistress's old fashionable taste, but scattered over the tables also were lecture programmes, hospital reports and photographs of eminent philosophers. As I took up for a plaything a gold pen-case, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... the right-hand side of this surface of the sherd, painted obliquely in red on the space not covered by the uncial characters, and signed in blue paint, was the following quaint inscription:— ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... the town where the report had come to us before of the finding of the body of Rena Taylor. There was, of course, no one at the station to meet us, and, after wasting some time in learning the direction, we at last walked to Dr. Mead's cottage, a quaint home, facing the state road that led from Suffern up to the ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... moustache. Awfully attractive blue eyes! He lives on a farm at Sollers, Maryland. No one else, it seems, is so familiar with the unusual corners of New York City, the sort of places that get themselves called "quaint." No one else manages the affairs of young lovers (on paper) with quite so much of the airy spirit of young love. I can think of no one else who could write such a scene as that in The Owl Taxi, where the dead-wagon, on its way in the night to the vast cemetery in a New ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... The quaint methods of previous witnesses are amplified by M. de la Rive. Like Dr Bataille, he tells us that the Order of Oddfellows, though quite distinct from Palladism, is "essentially Luciferian," but he does not ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... Sir Thomas Rowe's Welcome, leads due north out of Hudson Bay, being parted by Southampton Island from the strait through which we entered. Its name is quaint, for so was its discoverer, Luke Fox, a worthy man, addicted much to euphuism. Fox sailed from London in the same year in which James sailed from Bristol. They were rivals. Meeting in Davis Straits, Fox dined on board his friendly rival's vessel, which was very unfit ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... an account which he gave me, in his quaint way, of an excursion he went upon with a botanist, to collect specimens of the plants and flowers of ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... stout lady in a quaint black dress, who looks young enough to wear much smarter raiment, if she would—I call her Agnes Helstone. She married my brother James, and ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... life of a trapper and hunter among the Indians, and was known as the "Female Hunter of Long Eddy." She published a book regarding those experiences. I have not been able to see it, but it is said to be quaint and well written. She regarded herself as practically a man, and became attached to a young woman of good education, who had also been deserted by her husband. The affection was strong and emotional, and, of course, without deception. It was interrupted by her recognition and imprisonment ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... an old-fashioned, rather massive, gold chatelaine; heavy and rich and quaint, with various trinkets fastened ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... of the facts of Wilkins' life, as well as of his character. It is given in one of those "Brief Lives" which might well serve as models to modern biographers; lives compressed into two pages of nervous English, adorned here and there, rather than disfigured, by quaint pedantic words and phrases, relics of the euphuism of the sixteenth century. Aubrey is credulous, appallingly frank, a strong partisan, a man of great industry and learning, by no means trustworthy, but none the less entertaining ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... Dutch is a capital instance of wit as distinguished from fun. It rather exercises than tickles the mind, so full is it of quaint fancy: ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... taken place unknown to the defenders, who, from the narrowness of the entrance, were shut off from seeing the quaint, sardonic face of the old miner, as he stood holding the bag, with the burning fuse spluttering and sending up ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... very much to either of them now; but rather implied by her words and manner, and by many a pathetic touch here and there, that she was dwelling on it as a pleasant reminiscence of the dear old friend, whose quaint sayings were household words among them, because of their wisdom, and because of the honour and the love they gave her. Her earnestness increased, as, by and by, she saw the impatience pass out of her sister's face and manner; and it never came into her mind that ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... The quaint old wooden mansion, with the stately but simple old-fashioned mahogany furniture, real and ungarnished; the swords and relics of campaigns and scenes familiar to every schoolboy now; the key of the Bastile hanging in the hall incased in glass, calling to mind ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... is such a place; a quaint old hunting and fishing camp, where a few nature lovers hide away from; the world every summer and really "rough it." I caught there some of the finest mountain trout I have even seen; I also saw a party of men bring in a very fine deer one afternoon, a feat which caused quite ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... for us, who were accustomed to toil over the long combers and stormy banks of the North Sea. The variety of fish taken alone made the voyage of absorbing interest, numbering cod, haddock, ling, hake, turbot, soles, plaice, halibut, whiting, crayfish, shark, dog-fish, and many quaint monsters unmarketable then, but perfectly edible. Among those taken in was the big angler fish, which lives at the bottom with his enormous mouth open, dangling an attractive-looking bait formed by a long rod growing out from his nose, which lures small victims into the cavern, whence, ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... be seen in Singapore; their quaint architecture is always interesting to the occidental tourist, and the hideous images to be seen within will repay the trouble of removing one's shoes, which must be done before admittance ...
— Wanderings in the Orient • Albert M. Reese
... With what quaint simplicity does the thirteenth chapter tell of the Holy Spirit's initiation of those great missionary journeys of Paul from the new center of world evangelization? "the Holy Spirit said, etc." And how like it is the language of James in delivering the judgment ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... quaint Picardy town which the Germans had transformed into an almost impregnable stronghold and fortress, was a special cause for rejoicing by the British troops. It was a prize they had longed for through many weary months. There was no waving ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various |
