"Adolescence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so that, at rhetoric lecture, our president—Dr. Ralph Kettle—took me by the ears before the whole class. He was the fiercer upon me as being older than the gross of my fellow-scholars, and (as he thought) the more restless under discipline. "A tutor'd adolescence," he would say, "is a fair grace before meat," and had his hourglass enlarged to point the moral for us. But even a rhetoric lecture must have an end, and so, tossing my gown to the porter, I set off at last for Magdalen Bridge, where the new barricado was building, along the Physic Garden, ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... her wasted adolescence, her examination and her "independence," she has been coming home from her office stool or her teacher's desk more or less exhausted; suddenly she finds herself in the midst of a sweet and unlimited idleness, with ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... below this junction we made another meeting of yet more account. For there we were joined by the Aisne, already a far-travelled river and fresh out of Champagne. Here ended the adolescence of the Oise; this was his marriage-day; thenceforward he had a stately, brimming march, conscious of his own dignity and sundry dams. He became a tranquil feature in the scene. The trees and towns saw themselves ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... curmudgeon as one could find in a county. His wife (the lovely Evelyn Wormgate, a daughter of the Duke of Bognor and Wormgate) had died while the radiant Moll was but a puling infant. Thus it was that, knowing no hand of motherly authority, the child perforce ran wild throughout her dazzling adolescence. ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... proportionate, of course, to the richness and vigour of each person's character. Now as in the nation, so in the individual, poetry springs up before prose. Look at the history of English literature, how completely it is the history of our own childhood and adolescence, in its successive fashions. First, fairy tales—then ballads of adventure, love, and war—then a new tinge of foreign thought and feeling, generally French, as it was with the English nation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—then ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... a very normal and typical progress for each person's fatal illness. Their ultimate disease starts out in childhood or adolescence as acute inflammations of skin-like organs, viral or bacterial infections of the same. Then, as vital force weakens, secondary eliminations are shifted to more vital organs. Allergies or colds stop happening so frequently; the person becomes rheumatic, ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... long, lazy summer afternoons when there was nothing to do but read. And dream. And watch the town go by to supper. I think that is why our great men and women so often have sprung from small towns, or villages. They have had time to dream in their adolescence. No cars to catch, no matinees, no city streets, none of the teeming, empty, energy-consuming occupations of the city child. Little that is competitive, much that is unconsciously absorbed at the ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... chimerical stuff—the kind of stuff, that, with youth, takes the place of the recently discarded nursery fiction. I think of the hundreds of women that I have loved, beginning in my early boyhood, passing through my adolescence to the acme of my powers, and even now as I stand on the verge of my desuetude! Surely some one of these many women would have been constant, if women have any constancy in their make-up. Show me a woman howling ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... spectators, drawn together, some from sympathy, others from idle curiosity, but all were compelled to respectful consideration by the ease, dignity, and ability displayed by the ladies in presenting their cause. Only upon the faces of a few newspaper reporters just emerging from adolescence into manhood, rested the traditional sneer at the strong-minded; and when the hour for adjournment arrived, one of the members of the Committee remarked he regretted that a longer time could not have been given to the ladies. To those who think the cause of woman ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... seed-time following upon the harvest. And so it began to appear—so ran the story—that human life, too, was reversed. Persons came into the world as withered grandames and as old gentlemen with gold-headed canes, and then receded like crabs backward into their maturity, then into their adolescence and babyhood. To return from a protracted voyage was to find your younger friends sunk into pinafores. But the story was really ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... after their own interpretation, and the philologists soon reconciled themselves to the change. In this sense it was that Varro employed "vivere," when he said: "Young women, make haste to live, you whom adolescence permits to enjoy, to eat, to love, and to occupy the chariot of ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... thought. The monkish hymns which obscured the pages of Greek manuscripts were blotted out, the splendours of a new method were unfolded to the world, and out of the melancholy sea of mediaevalism rose the free spirit of man in all that splendour of glad adolescence, when the bodily powers seem quickened by a new vitality, when the eye sees more clearly than its wont and the mind apprehends what was beforetime hidden from it. To herald the opening of the sixteenth century, from ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... perception, that all this was due to the slow maturing of his love for her, and that he was still able to make her happy. But this was something to be thought of later. Just now Providence seemed to have offered him a vocation and a purpose that his idle adolescence had never known. He did not dream that his capacity for patience was only the slow ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... theory, agree with Landor, "febriculis non indicari vires, impatientiam ab ignorantia non differre," but their faith will not be proved by lack of works, as Landor's precept and example require. He, who like Milton lisps in numbers usually sings freely in adolescence; he who is really visited by a true inspiration generally depends on mood rather than on circumstance. Milton, on the other hand, until fairly embarked on his great epic, was comparatively an unproductive, and literally an occasional poet. Most of his pieces, whether English ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... acknowledgment of the interest that might play there through some inevitable thoughts. These were, for that matter, intensely in keeping with the ancient scene and air: they dealt with the exquisite difference between that tone and type of ingenuous adolescence— in the mere relation of charmed audition—and other forms of juvenility of whose mental and material accent one had elsewhere met the assault. Civilised, charmingly civilised, were my loquacious neighbours—as how had n't they to ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... liable than adults to this complication, especially with rheumatism. Therefore, acute mild endocarditis with future valvular lesions occurs most frequently during childhood and adolescence, and if one attack has occurred, a subsequent infection, especially of rheumatism, is liable to cause another ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... of the world have recognized youth's need of spiritual help during the trying years of adolescence. The ceremonies of the earliest religions deal with this instinct almost to the exclusion of others, and all later religions attempt to provide the youth with shadowy weapons for the struggle which lies ahead of him, for the wise men ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... do not wait for the completion of the years of adolescence to dub a scion of the royal family with the title of "man." The Prince Imperial, prior to his departure for the wars, was presented at Court as the "first gentleman" of France. For a youth of fourteen he is ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... he was blind, was that any more than others had done? He had never burst out against them. What was the matter with him? He surveyed the whole trend of his life up to this minute: how he had broken at late adolescence from a glowing idealist to a wanderer through varying paths of thought; always stirred, stimulated, and swept on by contact with other people, books he had read, women for whom he had occasional fancies of love, until gradually he settled into his assured manner. It was exercise he needed, ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... concealment to the winds, is a riddled target indeed: he is tempted to the peril of cajoleing, that he may escape from the torment and the ridicule; he is tempted to sigh for the gallant spirit of his naughty adolescence. 'Come to me—will you?—apply to me, if there's ever any need. I happen to have money. And forgive ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... diluted verse now current—if not yet submerged—under the name or the pseudonym of the present {237} Viceroy—or Vice-empress is it?—of India. But the obvious truth is this: the voice of Shakespeare's adolescence had as usual an echo in it of other men's notes: I can remember the name of but one poet whose voice from the beginning had none; who started with a style of his own, though he may have chosen to annex—"annex the wise it call"; convey is obsolete—to annex whole phrases or whole verses ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... chance, but skill, and such, indeed, it proved to every Yankee who put up his money against the bank. With an apparently congenital gift of sleight of hand, developed by years of practice at pitch penny from toddling babyhood to cock-fighting adolescence, the native could so manipulate the tools of his game that no outsider had the faintest "show for his money," while, as against each other, as when Greek met Greek, it became a battle of the giants, a trial of almost superhuman skill. It was the one game left ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... pulse. Two more transcontinental railroads had to be built. All-red routes of round-the-globe steam ships were established; all-red round-the-world cables were laid. The quickened pulse was Canada's passing from hobble-de-hoy adolescence with a chip on the shoulder and a tremor in the throat to big ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... "over-stimulation of the emotions" which, in plainer-spoken days, used to be called wantonness, than a fair share of healthy work, directed towards a definite object, combined with an equally fair share of healthy play, during the years of adolescence; and those who are best acquainted with the acquirements of an average medical practitioner will find it hardest to believe that the attempt to reach that standard is like to prove exhausting to an ordinarily ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... representation, either as a participant or as a spectator, is an ineradicable instinct of childhood and adolescence. Most of these plays call for a somewhat large number of children. This need not daunt the producer as the chief characters are few and many of the parts have very few lines to speak. Many extra children may be introduced in several of the plays, as a chorus. At Christmas ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... at once his fortune and his misfortune to pass his life contemporaneously with the birth and adolescence of a great nation, and to feel the passion of the hour. There is unquestionably a parochial sort of nationality which it is easy to satirize. No one could well set it out in stronger light than Webster himself in those passages in the preface ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... wherever may have been his wanderings, wherever may have been his birth, who watches with anxiety the recovery of the Arts, and acknowledges the supremacy of Genius. Besides, it is in Italy at last that all our few friends are resident. Yours were left behind you at Paris in your adolescence, if indeed any friendship can exist between a Florentine and a Frenchman: mine at Avignon were Italians, and older for the most part than myself. Here we know that we are beloved by some, and esteemed by many. It indeed gave me pleasure the ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... intense hideousness of their countenances. Nations whom they would never have vanquished in fair fight fled horrified from those frightful—faces I can hardly call them, but rather—shapeless black collops of flesh, with little points instead of eyes. No hair on their cheeks or chins gives grace to adolescence or dignity to age, but deep furrowed scars instead, down the sides of their faces, show the impress of the iron which with characteristic ferocity they apply to every male child that is born among them, drawing blood from its cheeks before it is allowed its first taste of milk. ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... declared that the time which had elasped since Coblentz had not existed. In the same manner that Louis XVIII. was by the grace of God, in the five and twentieth year of his reign, the emigrants were, by rights, in the five and twentieth year of their adolescence. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... make the wife a widow, may sweep out of existence all that she had made fundamental in her life, may enrich her with insurance profits or hurl her into poverty, and restore all the drifting expectancy of her adolescence.... ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... Theatre in New York. George and Terry are the son and daughter of Professor and Mrs. McIntyre who struggle valiantly to lead their children through the difficult phases of adolescence, so familiar to us all. Terry is shown outgrowing the tomboy stage, and unable to play with the boys on an equal status. She finds herself thrown back on her feminine resources; and how she tries out her "resources," makes this play an illuminating study of feminine psychology. George ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... cerebral organization is chiefly completed after birth, as we see by contrasting the smooth ape-like brain-surface of the new-born child with the deeply-furrowed and myriad-seamed surface of the adult civilized brain. The plastic period of adolescence, lengthened in civilized man until it has come to cover more than one third of his lifetime, is thus the guaranty of his boundless progressiveness. Inherited tendencies and aptitudes still form the foundations of character; but individual experience has come to ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... a razor and twice a week, trembling and apprehensive, drew it across his maidenly cheek. He slashed himself fearfully but he did not mind that. He wore his scars proudly, a warning to all that adolescence was on him, as the young ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... Agassiz alone whom Nature thus invited; to the whole human race, in its childhood, its adolescence, its maturity, she has always been saying the same thing. She has been seeking, through all the ages, to disclose to us all the mysteries of this marvelous universe. We have been slow learners; it took ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... eighteen she looked sixteen, there was that kind of timid adolescence about her, and yet when she said, "Mamma, you stayed down so late," the bang of a little pistol shot was ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... prevented him from rereading the scene until be came to edit the play. Johnson's deepest feelings and convictions, Professor Clifford has recently reminded us, can be traced back to his childhood and adolescence. But it is surprising to learn, as one does from his commentary, that other scenes in these very plays (Hamlet and King Lear, and in Macbeth, too) leave him unmoved, if one can so interpret the absence ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... want warmth, air, light, and water. But by-and-by, if it is to have special complex principles as a part of its organization, they must be supplied by the soil;—your pears will crack, if the root of the tree gets no iron,—your asparagus-bed wants salt as much as you do. Just at the period of adolescence, the mind often suddenly begins to come into flower and to set its fruit. Then it is that many young natures, having exhausted the spiritual soil round them of all it contains of the elements they demand, wither away, undeveloped and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... as her door, then turned to the window. She opened this and scrambled out—a thing she had not done for five long years of adolescence—upon the leaded space above the built-out bath-room on the first floor. Once upon a time she and Roddy had descended thence ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... before would have seemed insuperable obstacles, his limited income, his desire to be irresponsible and independent, had in this forty hours become the merest chaff before the wind of his infatuation. If he did not marry her his life would be a feeble parody on his own adolescence. To be able to face people and to endure the constant reminder of Gloria that all existence had become, it was necessary for him to have hope. So he built hope desperately and tenaciously out of the stuff of his dream, a hope flimsy enough, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... does the same, for all her being older than he, for all her marriageable daughter, her separated husband, her agitated history. Though they're young enough, my pair, I don't say they're, in the freshest way, their own absolutely prime adolescence; for that has nothing to do with it. The point is that they're mine. Yes, they're my youth; since somehow at the right time nothing else ever was. What I meant just now therefore is that it would all go—go before doing its work—if ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... to learn that the mother of this infant phenomenon, who exhibits symptoms so alarmingly like those of adolescence repressed by gin, is herself a phoenix. We are assured, again and again, that she had a remarkably original in mind, that she was a genius, and "conscious of her originality," and she was fortunate enough to have a lover who was also a genius and a ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... was written by a man at the very close of his days, when every hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one without the eye of faith to be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism. But there is a still happier season in the adolescence of generous natures that have been wisely fostered, when the horizons of the dawning life are suddenly lighted up with a glow of aspiration towards good and holy things. Commonly, alas, this priceless opportunity ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... awaiting you. A selection is made among them; you reenter the Tribune; five antique statues form a circle here—a slave sharpening his knife; two interlocked wrestlers whose muscles are strained and expanded; a charming Apollo of sixteen years whose compact form has all the suppleness of the freshest adolescence; an admirable Faun instinct with the animality of his species, unconsciously joyous and dancing with all his might; and finally, the "Venus de Medici," a slender young girl with a small delicate head, not a goddess like her sister of Milo, but a perfect mortal ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... Roebuck? The question is important on the threshold of a drama of ideas; for under such circumstances everything depends on whether his adolescence belonged to the sixties or to the eighties. He was born, as a matter of fact, in 1839, and was a Unitarian and Free Trader from his boyhood, and an Evolutionist from the publication of the Origin of Species. Consequently he has always classed himself ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... daughter of a carpenter and bee-keeper. On her mother's death, this man married a young woman, and allowed her, as stepmother, to persuade him to place the narrator, Tatiana, in a convent, where she (Tatiana) lived from the age of nine till adolescence, and, meanwhile, was taught her letters, and also a certain amount of manual labour; until, later, her father married her off to a friend of his, a well-to-do ex-soldier, who was acting as ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... larger Studies of sex; others were therein implied but only to be read between the lines. Here I have expressed them in simple language and with some detail. It is my hope that in this way they may more surely come into the hands of young people, youths and girls at the period of adolescence, who have been present to my thoughts in all the studies I have written of sex because I was myself of that age when I first vaguely planned them. I would prefer to leave to their judgment the question ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... own accord, in order to devote herself to the duties of a wife and mother. The only serious grief she and her husband had experienced was the loss of two young children. Edouard, though delicate from his birth, had nevertheless passed the trying years of infancy and early adolescence; he was them nearly fourteen. With a sweet and rather effeminate expression, blue eyes and a pleasant smile, he was a striking likeness of his mother. His father's affection exaggerated the dangers ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... but he felt in his own person a craving for something that Titian could not teach him. The Venice he was born in was not the Venice of Titian's early youth, and his own adolescence fell in the period when Spain was rapidly making herself mistress of Italy. The haunting sense of powers almost irresistible gave a terrible fascination to Michelangelo's works, which are swayed by that sense as by a demonic presence. Tintoretto felt this fascination because he was in sympathy ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... inevitable, tiring both with its earnestness and its utter absence of a common ground. Because in him apparently remained every vital germ of convention and of generations of training in every precept of formality; and in her—for with Valerie West adolescence had arrived late—that mystery had been responsible for far-reaching disturbances consequent on the starved years of self-imprisonment, of exaltations suppressed, of fears and doubts and vague desires and dreams ineffable possessing the ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... And the night after I was told of that I sat over my fire in my little upper room, my study, in my father's house, with his praise—his rare praise—and his sound counsels ringing in my ears, and I smoked my favourite pipe—the formidable bulldog of adolescence—and thought of that door in the long white wall. 'If I had stopped,' I thought, 'I should have missed my scholarship, I should have missed Oxford—muddled all the fine career before me! I begin to see things better!' I fell musing deeply, but I did not doubt then ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... after a drowsy and meandering childhood, passed peacefully among the sedges and marigolds of its water meadows, suddenly and somewhat disconcertingly grows up and, without any period of transition and adolescence, becomes, from being a mere girl of a rivulet, a male and full-blooded estuary of the sea. At Coton, for instance, the tips of the sculls of a sauntering pleasure-boat will almost span its entire width, while, but a mile farther down, ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... fixed design, without a preconceived choice, what inspiration spontaneously dictated to him; it is thus that there arose in his music, without solicitation, without effort, the most idealised form of the emotions which had animated his childhood, chequered his adolescence, and embellished his youth...Without making any pretence to it, he collected into a luminous sheaf sentiments confusedly felt by all in his country, fragmentarily disseminated in their hearts, vaguely ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... which might be called the adolescence of the style Louis XV, Audran and his collaborators produced another marvellous and inspired set of portieres. These were executed for the Grand Dauphin, to decorate his room in the chateau at Meudon, and were called the Grotesque Months in Bands. The most self-sufficient of ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... empires of former days, we have no right to think that the goal of prosperity and glory is attained. England has by no means reached the zenith of earthly power; science is as yet but in its infancy; the human mind has scarcely arrived at adolescence; and, for aught we imperfect beings know, this little island may be destined by Divine Providence to continue as a light unto the heathen—as a nucleus for the final civilization of man."—Preface to "Taxation of the British Empire," published ...
— A Letter from Major Robert Carmichael-Smyth to His Friend, the Author of 'The Clockmaker' • Robert Carmichael-Smyth
... interesting presumably to middle-aged scholars, but I submit that a half truth that needs so much explanation and so many admissions before it can be made safe or actual, is a rather dangerous thing to offer to adolescence or to a congregation of average men and women. It cannot sound to them very much like the good news of Jesus. Culture is a precious thing, but no culture, without the help of divine grace and the responsive affection on our part which that grace induces, will ever knit ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Adjust arangxi, almezuri. Administer administri. Administration administracio. Admirable admirinda. Admiral admiralo. Admiration admiro. Admire admiri. Admission allaso. Admissible permesebla. Admit allasi. Admonish admoni. Admonition admono. Adolescence juneco. Adolescent junulo. Adopt alpreni. Adopt (child) filigi. Adore adori. Adorn ornami. Adroit lerta. Adroitness lerteco. Adulation adulacio, flato. Adult plenkreskulo. Adult plenkreska. Adulterate falsi. Adultery adulto. Adultery, to commit adulti. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... enquired after bliss in those places, situations, and circumstances which neither bliss, nor felicity, nor happiness ever visited. Thus it remained with little change, and continued without much alteration, all through the days of my youth, the years of my juvenility, and the period of my adolescence." ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... adolescence was uttered too lightly to be a weight on my conscience as an old man. May God kindly prove to me some day that I never used an less innocent shaft of speech in the battle of life! But I now ask ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... sitting after dinner in the library at Craven Towers—his mother lying on the sofa that had been rolled up before the fire, and himself sprawled on the hearthrug at her feet. Already tall and strong beyond his years and confident in the full flush of his adolescence he had launched into a glowing anticipation of the life that lay before him. He had noticed that his mother's answers were monosyllabic and vague, and then when he had broken off, hurt at her seeming lack of interest, she had suddenly spoken—telling ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... would be enigmas and mysteries and maternal dignitaries that one would approach in a state of emotional excitement and seclude piously when serious work was in hand. A girl would blossom from the totally negligible to the mystically desirable at adolescence, and boys would be removed from their mother's educational influence at as early an age as possible. Whenever men and women met together, the men would be in a state of inflamed competition towards one another, and the women likewise, and the intercourse of ideas would ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... tall boy looked almost ludicrous to her in his ultra-correct man's outfit, so vividly did she recall him, three or four years before, in short trousers and round-collared shirt-waist. His smooth, rosy face had still the downy bloom of adolescence. ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... Once, long ago, he had been a roly-poly pepper-and-salt kitten; he had a home in those days, and a name, "Gipsy," which he abundantly justified. He was precocious in dissipation. Long before his adolescence, his lack of domesticity was ominous, and he had formed bad companionships. Meanwhile, he grew so rangy, and developed such length and power of leg and such traits of character, that the father of the little girl who owned him was almost ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... pigtail, because she was too old to wear it loose upon her shoulders, and too young to turn it up; when the front hooks and eyes of her frock were always bursting off, and her sister's sweethearts used to call her "little girl." A humiliating experience altogether, the period of adolescence. But more humiliating still it is to be a mature, grown-up person, and know how far off you are from being the wonderful creature you intended to be, when you began the world. You did not contemplate ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... sound, and in character all that could be desired. He then did his best to convey to the General an understanding of the psychic condition that must be a cause of watchfulness and anxiety on the part of those who guarded his adolescence. ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... his age, and the life of the streets had sharpened his wits, so he was old for his years. He was studious and very religious, as children struggling with adolescence often are. Sundays were sacred to church, morning and evening, and the spare hours were given over to reading the lives of the martyrs. Only on weekdays did he read history or political tracts. In Sunday School he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... undying youth. Bring to our lips these cups of the fresh wine of life, if you would do good. Bring us these; for it is by perpetual rekindlings of the youth in us that our life grows and unfolds. Each advancing epoch of the inward life is no less than this,—a fresh efflux of adolescence from the immortal and exhaustless heart. Everywhere the law is the same,—Become as a little child, to reach the heavenly kingdoms. This, however, we become not by any return to babyhood, but by an effusion or emergence from within of pure life,—of life which takes from years only their wisdom ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... tell him where babies come from. The physiological side of sex is the less important; you can take a child through all the usual stages—pollination of plants, fertilisation of eggs, right up to human birth, but the child will find no help in these informations when he faces his sex instinct at adolescence. Sex instruction should be psychological; it should deal with the sex instinct as one form of life force or libido. The child should be led to face it openly. It should be entirely dissociated from sin, and moral lectures should ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... exercises the boy was being prepared for the conflict which awaited him in more advanced[159] age; and already in his own person he was challenging the adversary. Such, then, was the boyhood of Malachy. Moreover he passed through his adolescence with like simplicity and purity; except that as years increased, there increased also for him wisdom and favour with God ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... them; here stood adorable adolescence, a hint of the awakening in the velvet-brown eyes which were long and slightly slanting at the corners; hints, too, in the vivid lips, in the finer outline of the profile, in faint bluish shadows under the eyes, edging the ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... keeping children in ignorance are well appreciated. We have yet to determine the effect upon them of the very frank and free exposure of the subject which is recommended by many modern writers. Nevertheless, it must be granted that it is not right to allow the boy or girl to approach adolescence without some knowledge of sex and the processes of reproduction. If nothing is said on such subjects, which in the nature of things are bound to excite a lively interest and curiosity in the minds of older children, evil results are apt to follow. Because parents have never ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... dexterity as a mere function of her femaleness. And on the other hand every woman, over and above this almost unescapable legacy from her actual grandmothers, also inherits admission to that traditional wisdom which constitutes the esoteric philosophy of woman as a whole. The virgin at adolescence is thus in the position of an unusually fortunate apprentice, for she is not only naturally gifted but also apprenticed to extraordinarily competent masters. While a boy at the same period is learning from his elders little ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... age as a member of church or chapel without once receiving any first-hand teaching on the powers and needs of the soul or the technique of prayer; or obtaining any more help in the great religious difficulties of adolescence than a general invitation to believe, and trust God. Morality—that is to say correctness of response to our neighbour and our temporal surroundings—is often well taught. Spirituality—correctness of response to God and our ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... painful exactitude, what we experienced and saw in our youth, but the happenings of our middle life slip away from us or become blurred, like a stretch of low-lying landscape overflowed by grey and nebulous mist. Far off the sun still seems to shine upon the plains and hills of adolescence and early manhood, as yet it shines about us in the fleeting hours of our age, that ground on which we stand to-day, but the valley between is filled with fog. Yes, even its prominences, which symbolise the more startling events of that ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... common consent of philosophers and physicians, mental imbecility in the extreme degree is termed idiotcy; and this state may exist "ex nativitate," or supervene at various periods of human life. When a child proceeds from infancy to adolescence, and from that state advances to maturity, with a capacity of acquiring progressively the knowledge which will enable him to conduct himself in society and to manage his affairs,—so that he is viewed as a responsible agent and considered "inter homines ...
— A Letter to the Right Honorable the Lord Chancellor, on the Nature and Interpretation of Unsoundness of Mind, and Imbecility of Intellect • John Haslam
... and those perhaps the most important in the history of the Society, the period, in fact, of adolescence, the Society was governed by the seven Essayists, and chiefly by four or five of them. Mrs. Besant had made her reputation in other fields, and belonged, in a sense, to an earlier generation; she was unrivalled as an expositor and an agitator, and ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... fifteen, and queer even for that queer age. He had a streak of the girl in him at his adolescence, and, as he sat there in a huddle, the wind coming out of this huge new gulf of life seemed to pass through him, bone and tissue, and tears rolled down ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... as it passed, strengthened the grande passion which preserved Maurice from the restlessness and the errors of adolescence. ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... by the sublime folly of a Babel), the reverence paid to elders, to women; the sense of law and justice in our kind: in the leafy shades of Upcote in Oxfordshire, he had pondered these things during his lonely years of youth and adolescence—had pondered, and in some cases already decided them UPON THE MERITS. This was remarkably so in the matter of Betty Coy, as he will tell you for himself before long. Meantime, lest I keep Dr. Lanfranchi ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... estate gambling and "the distant church that topt the neighboring hill." In the childhood of the town the cattle trail appeared and with the cattle trade came wild days and sad disorder. But the railroad moved westward and the cattle trail moved with the railroad and then in the early adolescence of the town came coal and gas and oil. And suddenly Harvey blossomed ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... At classic Athens, where I went erelong, I learnt to draw the line 'twixt right and wrong, And search for truth, if so she might be seen, In academic groves of blissful green; But soon the stress of civil strife removed My adolescence from the scenes it loved, And ranged me with a force that could not stand Before the might of Caesar's conquering hand. Then when Philippi turned me all adrift A poor plucked fledgeling, for myself to shift, Bereft ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... easy words. How characterless they looked: Shuley without his deep unbuttoned collar, Ennis without his scarlet belt with the snaky clasp, and Connolly without his Norfolk coat with the flapless side-pockets! It was a pain to see them, and a sword-like pain to see the signs of adolescence that made repellent their pitiable nakedness. Perhaps they had taken refuge in number and noise from the secret dread in their souls. But he, apart from them and in silence, remembered in what dread he stood of the mystery of ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... half an hour, in twenty minutes." We planned splendidly spectacular ways in which we were to be brought down, always omitting one, however, the most horrible as well as the most common,—in flames. Thank Fortune, we have outgrown this second and belated period of adolescence and can now take a healthy ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... From its crest, brooded over by cloud, glittering with crusted snows, the traveler can look over crag and precipice, mounting files of pines and ravines swimming in unfathomable shadow, to where, vast, pale, far-flung in its dreamy adolescence, ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... from the age of puberty to his marriage was, indeed, a fight against temptations to unchastity. Is it anything else in the case of other men? The physical effects of adolescence, as we remarked before, are a natural and morally pure phenomenon; Luther's frank way of speaking of them does not make them impure. But this physical condition in a growing young man or woman may become the occasion for impure ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... see the way of it beyond that. It had come to her when she was a child in brilliant, clear flashes; it had come again and again in her adolescence, with more brilliant and clearer flashes; then, after leaving her for twenty-three years, it had come like this—streaming in and out of her till its ebb and flow were the rhythm ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... juvenility, youthfulness; adolescence, teens, minority, nonage, juniority; young man, lad, boy, stipling, cadet, minor, juvenile, adolescent. Associated Words: rejuvenescence, rejuvenation, rejuvenate, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... not long in feathering, and yet Dicky had not begun to sing. Still, at moments, after supper, or on a Sunday afternoon, walking in a green lane, Dicky would unbosom himself. He would tell you touching legends of his boyhood and adolescence. Then he would talk to you of women. And then he would tell you how it was that he came to forsake ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... bastions of Perugia, it is the spirit which informed and made these things you get in Perugino's pictures—in the hot sensualism of their colour-scheme, the ripeness and bloom of physical beauty encasing the vague longing of a too-rapid adolescence. The desire could never be fed and the bloom wore off. Look at Duccio's work on the facade of San Bernardino, Duccio was a Florentine, but where in Florence would you see his like? What a revel of ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... older. Her face was of high vivid colour and was corrugated by chronic rage and curiosity; but these vivifying emotions had preserved to her an astonishing activity of mind and body, which fully accounted for the comparative adolescence with which she would have been credited anywhere except in the charming little town which she had inhabited so long. Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... America was no more than a nebulous splendor on the horizon in 1779. It was a new world forming by the law of youth. The men who bore the burdens of its exacting life were mostly stalwart striplings who, before the down of adolescence fairly sprouted on their chins, could swing the ax, drive a plow, close with a bear or kill an Indian. Clark was not yet twenty-seven when he made his famous campaign. A tall, brawny youth, whose frontier experience had enriched a native character of the best ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... good London never leaves its true lover and believer long unprovided. One could count them on one's fingers (an abundant allowance), the liberal firesides beyond the wide glow of which, in a comparative dimness, female adolescence hovered and waited. The wide glow was bright, was favourable to "real" talk, to play of mind, to an explicit interest in life, a due demonstration of the interest by persons I qualified to feel it: all of which meant frankness and ease, the ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... advanced nations, living on the continents animated by the "life-wave," whilst the less evolved go to form the so-called degenerate races vegetating in obscure parts of the world. Look now at the adolescence of Russia, the youth of America, the old age of France, and the decrepitude of Turkey. Look backwards at the glorious Egypt of bygone ages; nothing remains but deserts of sand on which imperishable structures still testify to the greatness of her past; the race that witnessed the majesty of the ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... real name, either, but its appropriateness was obvious. They were friends instantly with the quick unquestioning friendship of young ones not yet quite in adolescence, before even the first stains of adulthood ...
— Youth • Isaac Asimov
... from brigade headquarters had been strict against illuminations, for the Confederates were near at hand in force, and a surprise was proposed as well as feared. A tired and sleepy youngster, almost dropping with the heavy somnolence of wearied adolescence, he stumbled on through the trials of an undiscernible and unfamiliar footing, lifting his heavy riding-boots sluggishly over imaginary obstacles, and fearing the while lest his toil were labor misspent. It was a dry camp, he felt dolefully certain, ...
— The Brigade Commander • J. W. Deforest
... was born with that ardour of soul which is termed ambition, the instinct of glory and of grandeur. This instinct, which was also that of her house and her age, soon obtained the mastery on emerging from her pious adolescence, and when she despaired of overcoming her father's resistance to the serious desire she had manifested of burying herself, at fifteen, in the convent of the Rue St. Jacques, with her already formidable beauty and the nascent desire to shine and to please. That desire was at once Madame de Longueville's ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... had practically no preparation at all for the stir and emotions of adolescence. Towards the young the world maintained a conspiracy of stimulating silences. There came no initiation. There were books, stories of a curiously conventional kind that insisted on certain qualities in every love affair and ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... creature finds itself ashamed of father or mother. Instinctively the child is proud of the parent, and if youth is wounded in its tenderest point, its sense of conventionality—for nothing is as conventional as adolescence—that natural instinct is headed off, and of course there is suffering. Mrs. Maitland, living in her mixture of squalor and dignity, had no time to consider such abstractions. As for there being anything unwomanly in her occupation, such an idea never entered her head. To Sarah Maitland, no ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... to study Luigi, to know him; and before long they mutually esteemed each other. The girl, who was older than Luigi, found a charm in being courted by a youth already so grand, so tried by fate,—a youth who joined to the experience of a man the graces of adolescence. Luigi, on his side, felt an unspeakable pleasure in allowing himself to be apparently protected by a woman, now twenty-five years of age. Was it not a proof of love? The union of gentleness and pride, strength and weakness in Ginevra were, to him, irresistible attractions, and he was ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... Mantle)—this was the early and innocent affection to which we owe the tenderest pages, not only of Redgauntlet, but of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and of Rokeby. In all of these works the heroine has certain distinctive features, drawn from one and the same haunting dream of his manly adolescence. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... a new material object or of an activity on any one's part. The teacher's earliest appeals, therefore, must be through objects shown or acts performed or described. Theoretic curiosity, curiosity about the rational relations between things, can hardly be said to awake at all until adolescence is reached. The sporadic metaphysical inquiries of children as to who made God, and why they have five fingers, need hardly be counted here. But, when the theoretic instinct is once alive in the pupil, an entirely new order of pedagogic relations begins for him. Reasons, causes, ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... and invests the commonplace things of this world with qualities unsuspected by plainer folk—the eyes of a poet or a house agent. He was quietly dressed—that sartorial quietude which frequently accompanies early adolescence, and is usually attributed by novel-writers to the influence of a widowed mother. His hair was brushed back in a smoothness as of ribbon seaweed and seamed with a narrow furrow that scarcely aimed at being a parting. His aunt ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... that the inhabitants of India begin to know that England has done her best, and does feel a disinterested solicitude for the peoples under her charge. She has long been a mother of nations, and is not frightened by the problems of adolescence. ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... his adolescence, Sir Hugh the Heron, has been so frequently alluded to, that it seems necessary to tell the story of it, as the author himself, in conversation, was accustomed to do. At about twelve years of age, the young poet wrote a scrap of a poem under this title, and then cast it aside. His grandfather, ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... that thing," are ever falling from his lips. And they are supplemented with such positive instructions as: "Sit still," "Stand on the form," "Hold yourself up," "Fold arms," "Hands behind backs," "Hands on heads," "Eyes on the blackboard." At every turn—from infancy till adolescence, "from early morning till late in the evening"—these "dead and deadening formulas" await the unhappy child. The aim of his teachers is to leave nothing to his nature, nothing to his spontaneous life, nothing to his free activity; to ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... the belief that he possessed the clue to all these mysteries, and had a working theory of all the phenomena in the natural and spiritual world in which he moved. To such mystical natures this confidence is unavoidable anywhere through the period of the pride of adolescence; but it was heightened in this case by the simplicity of life's problems in this narrow valley, and in the provincial little village which was the metropolis of this sparsely settled region. To him "the cackle of that bourg was the murmur ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... predecessors, Martin Schoen in Germany, and Mantegna in Italy, so that Longhi does not hesitate to say that he was the first who carried the art from infancy in which he found it to a condition not far from flourishing adolescence. But, while recognizing his great place in the history of engraving, it is impossible not to see that he is often hard and constrained, if not unfinished. His portrait of ERASMUS is justly famous, ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... Mr. MACKENZIE is an overlord of words, old and new, bending them to strange and unexpected uses, yet always avoiding affectation by the sheer vitality of his strength. As for the matter of these first chapters, one might say that nothing whatever happens in them. They are an epic of adolescence wherein growth is the only movement. Events are for the second half of the volume. Here Michael has come down from Oxford, and has set himself to find and rescue by marriage the girl Lily, whom (you remember) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... Gy-ei constituted the chief portion, appeared to enjoy greatly the representation of these dramas, which, for so sedate and majestic a race of females, surprised me, till I observed that all the performers were under the age of adolescence, and conjectured truly that the mothers and sisters came to please their children ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... in the world. What boy of ten will wear a collar different from what his school-mates are all wearing? He must conform to the rule and custom of the majority or he suffers fearfully. But, if he has a sulphitic leaven in his soul, adolescence frees him from the tyrannical traditions of thought. In costume, perhaps, men still are more bromidic than women. A man has, for choice, a narrow range in garments—for everyday wear at most but four coats, three collars and two pairs ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... body forth? Has any true 'maker' been such an incessant sufferer? From his childhood, as he himself said apropos of the Child's Garden, he could 'speak with less authority of gardens than of that other "land of counterpane."' There were, indeed, a few years of adolescence during which his health was tolerable, but they were years of apprenticeship to life and art ('pioching,' as he called it), not of serious production. Though he was a precocious child, his genius ripened slowly, and it was just reaching maturity when ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... that it was merely a notion which had occurred to him at the moment concerning the new reading of the new reading public, whether it might not be all juvenile literature, adapted in mature terms to people of physical adolescence but of undeveloped thinking and feeling: not really feeble-minded youth, but aesthetically and intellectually children, who might presently grow into the power of enjoying and digesting food for men. By-and-by they might gather fortitude for pleasure in real literature, in fiction which should not ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... his mother for having contracted an intimacy with such a man. Hence the change of name—he belonged to neither of them. But as this was at adolescence, the unrest of the youth should not be taken ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... the south of France and Italy had residences far more favourable for such a disease, than our own country. This was one of the provincial notions of the day, that were entailed on us by means of colonial dependency. I suppose the colonial existence is as necessary to a people, as childhood and adolescence are to the man; but, as my Lady Mary Wortley Montagu told her friend, Lady Rich—"Nay; but look you, my dear madam, I grant it a very fine thing to continue always fifteen; that, everybody must approve of—it is quite fair: but, indeed, indeed, one ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... heaven than when I saw you last by the altitude of a chopine!"—in other words: "How the boy has grown!"—a chopine being a shoe with a heel of inordinate height. And then comes reference to that change of voice from alto to bass which attends advance from boyhood to adolescence. ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... observation and inference, of hypothesis and verification. There is a unity of method as between the natural and social and psychical sciences, the reach of which is startling to reflect upon. Indeed, the physiological aspects of psychology, the investigations of the relation of adolescence to conversion, suggest that the distinction between the physical and the psychical is a vanishing distinction. Science comes nearer to offering an interpretation of the universe as a whole than the opening paragraphs of this chapter would imply. But it does so ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... the predaceous stage is seldom accomplished with the same degree of completeness as in boys; and in a relatively large proportion of cases it is scarcely undergone at all. In such cases the transition from infancy to adolescence and maturity is a gradual and unbroken process of the shifting of interest from infantile purposes and aptitudes to the purposes, functions, and relations of adult life. In the girls there is a less general prevalence of a predaceous interval in the development; and in the cases where it occurs, ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... wholly irresponsible. The urge of vital youth had caught him and held him. And Clayton, sitting that day beside him in the car, while Graham drove and the golf clubs rattled in their bags at his feet, remembered again the impulses of his own adolescence, and wondered. There had been a time when he would have gone to the boy frankly, with the anxieties he was beginning to feel. There were so many things he wanted to tell the boy. So many warnings he ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... which he manfully wiped away with a sneaking little movement of his left hand, as he pretended to look out of the window toward the distant lights. A man whose tear-ducts have dried with adolescence is cursed with a shriveled soul for the ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... standardized, and authoritative systems of social control found among all primitive peoples gives a vivid impression of the difficulty of the task of compelling man to die to himself, that is, to become a socius. The rigors and rituals of initiation ceremonies at adolescence impressed the duties of sociality at that impressionable period. The individual who refused to bow his head to the social yoke became a vagabond, an outcast, an excommunicate. In view of the fierceness of the struggle for food and the attitude toward the stranger among all primitives, the outcast's ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... and that it may get through its various Child-Diseases, without death: though it has had sad plunges and crises,—and is perhaps just now in one of its worst Influenzas, the Parliamentary-Eloquence or Ballot-Box Influenza! One of the most dangerous Diseases of National Adolescence; extremely prevalent over the world at this time,—indeed unavoidable, for reasons obvious enough. "SIC ITUR AD ASTRA;" all Nations certain that the way to Heaven is By voting, by eloquently wagging the tongue "within those walls"! Diseases, real or imaginary, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Spanish War closed our first volume with a bang. And now in the second we bid good-by to the virgin wilderness, for it's explored; to the Indian, for he's conquered; to the pioneer, for he's dead; we've finished our wild, romantic adolescence and we find ourselves a recognized world power of eighty million people, and of general ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... o'clock when Joan stood once more in the old, familiar bedroom in which she had slept all through her childhood and adolescence. ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... began Ishmael, then paused. Till that moment he and she had equally despised anything ladylike.... Now he had become a man, with a man's dislike of anything conspicuous in his womenkind. Something of the woman came to Hilaria, but whereas with him adolescence had meant the awakening of the merely male, with her it brought a first touch of the mother. She urged her own cause ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... holidays of the Seine were among the Childe-Harold enormities of a not over-sinful youth, was sadly disappointed. Thinking of the groves of an Eden, I ran against the furnaces of a Pandemonium. For a stroll back toward my adolescence, Belleville was a bad beginning. I determined to console myself with the green meadows of Saint-Gervais and the pretty woods of Romainville. Attaining the latter was half an hour's affair among long walls and melancholy houses: at Saint-Gervais, a double ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... reader will already be asking, "What is all this to do with political education?" The connection is a close one. For the prevalence of this particular form of immorality may be ascribed to two main causes. At some time during early adolescence the majority of boys automatically become acquainted with the sensation of sex, and, as part of a natural process, try to reproduce the pleasurable experience. But why do so many of these repeat and repeat the process, until the thing becomes a habit for which ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... surrounded by every ignominious sign of disease and infirmity, his dream was yet of cleanness, of health, and the splendor of physical perfection. The thing that young Ransome most loathed and abhorred was Flabbiness, next to Flabbiness, Weediness. The years of his adolescence were one long struggle and battle against these two. He had them ever before him, and associated them, absurdly but inveterately, with a pharmaceutical chemist's occupation; of Weediness his father being the prime example; while for Flabbiness, ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... herself; but soon becoming tired of so helpless and troublesome a nursling, she had gladly yielded to my entreaties to be allowed to take charge of it; and I, by carefully nursing the little creature from infancy to adolescence, of course, had obtained its affections: a reward I should have greatly valued, and looked upon as far outweighing all the trouble I had had with it, had not poor Snap's grateful feelings exposed him ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte |
