"Gawky" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on the trailer's shoulder and waiting for his turn in the line in front of the ticket window, when a tall, gawky, good- looking country lad sprang out of it and at him with an expression of surprise and anxiety. "Father," he said, "father, what's wrong? What are you doing here? Is anybody ill at home? Are ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... Montagnards have followed the majority, and are there to encourage the insurrection; Danton takes Henriot's hand and tells him, in a low voice, "Go ahead, don't be afraid; we want to show that the Assembly is free, be firm."[34164] At this the tall bedizened gawky recovers his assurance, and in his husky voice, he addresses the president: "Herault, the people have not come here to listen to big words. You are a good patriot... Do you promise on your head that the Twenty-two shall be given up in twenty-four hours?"—"No."—"Then, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... pattern. At any rate he was distinctly hairy, like the Ainos, or aborigines of Japan, in our own day, of whom Miss Isabella Bird has drawn so startling and sensational a picture. Several of the pre-Glacial sketches show us lank and gawky savages with the body covered with long scratches, answering exactly to the scratches which represent the hanging hair of the mammoth, and suggesting that man then still retained his old original hairy covering. The ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... who jilted William for Touchstone. She is an excellent specimen of a wondering she-gawky. She thanks the gods that "she is foul," and if to be poetical is not to be honest, she thanks the gods also that "she is not poetical."—Shakespeare, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... my best by her, too, Aunt Emily. I rather shy at perfect types; girls, at the best, make me skittish. They make me think of myself and then I get gawky." ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... chinked as he pressed it in. Then he replaced the brick, and went to bed. He said nothing about the bank in the morning nor about the hole in the mill-wall; and he parried Mrs. Lake's questions with gawky ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... and she is a curious Being to pretend to be censorious—an awkward Gawky, without any one good ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... till it very nearly touched a projecting underlip like a bracket, giving her an expression of determined contempt which she very certainly had never felt. In short, she suggested the absurd idea of a solemn, gawky Marlborough disguised as ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... he knew of a man who knew of a man whose brother had just the horse for me, "sound, stylish, kind, gentle as a lamb, fast as the wind." Profiting by experience, I said I would look at it. Next day, a young man, gawky and seemingly unsophisticated, brought the animal. It looked well enough, and I was so tired. He was anxious to sell, but only because he was going to be married and go West; needed money. And he said with sweet simplicity: "Now I ain't no jockey, ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... not answer at once, for his gaze was held by her face. He had never dreamed that the gawky and rather plain little girl whom he had romped with long ago in Paris would grow into such a being. The clean delicate lines of her figure, the exquisite pure colouring of hair and skin, the charming young arrogance of the ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... something dignifiedly humorous to her, for she is laughing. I wish that he would sometimes be dignifiedly humorous to us, or even humorous without the dignity. Barbara, true to her life-long instincts, is inviting the clergyman's shabby, gawky man-of-all-work, at whom the ladies'-maids are raising the nose of contempt. Mr. Musgrave ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Luke's Square, on behalf of Birkinshaws, since before railways, Mrs. Baines had treated him with a faint agreeable touch of maternal familiarity; and, both her daughters being once in the shop during his visit, she had on that occasion commanded the gawky girls to ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... believers, 'the children of the kingdom?' As St. Peter very charitably calls them, 'cursed children.' 2 Peter ii. 14. That is, I suppose, children with beards, children that never grew to sense enough to put away childish things, but did in gawky manhood, like new-born babes, desire the pure milk and lollipop of the gospel. 'For of such is the kingdom of Heaven.' And who are they whom Christ will set upon his right hand, and to whom he will say, 'Come ye blessed ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... because Nature had at last succeeded in making a temporary success of Ann's skin and had fashioned a rounded line above her shoulder-blade! It made him quite cross with himself. Ten years ago she had been gawky and sallow-complexioned. Ten years hence she might catch the yellow jaundice and lose it all. Passages in Sylvia's letters returned to him. He remembered that far-off evening in his Paris attic when she had knocked at his door with her great gift ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... good at anything—a harmless mafflin; he was a long gaumless gawky when he went awa," said Richard Turnbull. "The Feltrams and the Mardykes was sib, ye know; and that made what passed in the misfortune o' that young lady spoken of all the harder; and this young man ye speak of is a grandson o' the lad that was put ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... gawky; he neither sat erect nor lounged—he slumped spineless. Big spectacles were in style now, but Pop's big spectacles were just out of it. His face was like a parchment that had been left out in the rain and had dried carelessly in deep, ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... later the service was over, and the congregation sauntered out down the aisle. A gawky group of men remained loitering by the church door: one of them called to Anthony; but, nodding curtly, he passed on, and strode away down the road, across the grey upland meadows, towards home. As soon as he ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... boy walked forward with no more articulate complaints, though his face was drawn and he bit his lips. He was shown the chicken-yard—full of gawky, half-grown chickens shedding their down and growing their feathers—and forgot his feet in the fascination of scattering grain to them and watching their fluttering scrambles. He was shown the rabbit-house and allowed to take one of the limp, unresponsive little bunches of fur ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the scare-crows, scraggy ones, now come In turn; the lean, ill-favored, gawky, bald, Long-nosed, uncouth, raw-boned, and those with scald And freckled, frowsy, ricketty and squat, The stumpy, bandy-legged, gaunt, each bought A man; though ugly as a toad, they sold, For every man with her received his gold. The heaped-up gold which beauteous ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... never saw a sheepman yet that would fight, but you've got to" Frontispiece "Put up them guns, you gawky fools! This man ain't going to eat ye!" 177 "No!" said Kitty, "you do not love me" 287 Threw the sand full in ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... few perilous weeks throve amazingly. He ceased to be a pretty creature, pathetic in his helplessness, and grew into a gawky hobbledehoy, rough and rude ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... tall, shambling man, long, bony, gawky, but tremendously impressive. It was a raw, slushy morning of a late February day, and the great war President was just through with his solemn pronunciamento in regard to the bonds that might ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... gawky chap of sixteen, Peter didn't impress people too favorably. They felt for him the instinctive distrust of the conservative and commercial mind for the free and artistic one. The Peter Champneyses of the world challenge ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... youngsters, stump-tailed, frog-mouthed, blundering, foolish, gawky, and squawking, landed, all of a heap, right into the very middle of ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... looked like a rifle. The revenue men halted at once. They suspected an ambuscade. Experience had taught them that the Moonshiners would fight when the necessity arose, and they held a council of war. The great gawky boy, with the curiosity of youth and ignorance combined, stood in the road and watched them. When they proceeded toward him in a compact body, he passed on across the road. Hearing a command to halt, he broke into a run, and endeavoured to make his ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... What a heart must Harry have to give his hand to one whom she considered as little better than George's murderer! For shame to say so! For shame upon you, ungrateful boy, forgetting the dearest, noblest, most perfect of brothers, for that tall, gawky, fox-hunting Colonel, with his horrid oaths! How can he be George's murderer, when I say my boy is not dead? He is not dead, because my instinct never deceived me: because, as sure as I see his picture now before me,—only 'tis not near so noble or so good as he used ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... These people may exhaust their slang, and make blackguards of themselves, but they cannot defile us. And as for the suggestion to exclude slaveholders from your London clubs, we scout it. Many of us, indeed, do go to London, and we have seen your breed of gawky lords, both there and here, but it never entered into our conceptions to look on them as better than ourselves. The American slaveholders, collectively or individually, ask no favors of any man or race who tread the earth. In none of the attributes of men, mental or physical, do ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... Lincoln's small boat seemed admirably placed to serve as a transport to a couple of gentlemen who came down to the shore to ship on the steamboat. Their trunks were taken out of their carriages, and they selected Lincoln's new boat among some others. In his homespun, the gawky youth looked what he was—not the owner of the craft and about to try a speculation on the river, but one of the "scrubs." The "scrubs," not from any relation with washing—quite otherwise—were those poor families on the outskirts of towns who lived in the scrub or dwarfed pines. Accordingly ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... was he to criticise the flowers and frills of Catie? If she had had the chances which had come to him, if she could have gone to Smith, for instance, or Bryn Mawr, she would have come out of the mill a finished little product, clever, adaptable, and not a gawky, under-nourished, over-strenuous bumpkin like himself. In the depths of his self-abasement, Scott Brenton did not hesitate to ply himself with ugly adjectives. Indeed, they seemed to him to be doing something towards the removal of his ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... longer alone. You were with me. And between us was the child. We were holding it by the hands—our little child. (Angrily, to keep herself from crying) It's too silly for anything! I know, of course, that our child would be a gawky youngster of twenty-three by now—that it might have turned into a scamp or a good-for-nothing girl. Or that it might be dead already. Or that it had drifted out into the wide world, so that we had nothing left of ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... transformed into such a thing of beauty that Clarence could hardly recognize her. Instead of tow-colored hair, crowded back by means of a black rubber comb, Susan had been taught a neat arrangement of her blonde locks—so great is the magic of a few deft touches. Instead of being a gawky girl of seventeen, in a faded blue calico wrapper, Susan, as transformed by one of Mrs. Smith's simple white gowns, was a young lady. She so worshipped Mrs. Smith that she imitated her in everything, even to the lesser things, like ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... used rouse ourselves and march into the demonstrations on other estates. We were a small and an unknown tribe. The Gobstown contingent always brought up the rear of the procession—a gawky, straggling, bad-stepping, hay-foot, straw-foot lot! The onlookers hardly glanced at us. We stood for nothing. We had no name. Once we rigged up a banner with the words on it, 'Gobstown to the Front!' but still we were put ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... with a good suit of jeans. Soon after, he mounted his young horse and rode back to his native State, and took charge of the tavern aforesaid in the town of Bolivar, Hardiman County, of which tavern he was waiter, clerk, and book-keeper. Here he had a pretty hard time. Being very young, gawky, and ill-dressed, he was subject to a good deal of jesting and ridicule. But he was fond of reading. Finding, by chance, at the house of an uncle, Pope's translation of the Iliad, he was perfectly ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... already entered the living-room, bound for her chamber to see if, by chance, Betty had finished dusting there. She did not hear the second automobile stop nor the cheerful voice of its gawky driver as ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... just of that awkward age when boys fancy themselves men, and men are not prepared to lower themselves to their level. Ladies get on better with them than men: either the ladies are more tolerant of twaddle, or their discerning eyes see in the gawky youth the germ of future usefulness. George was on capital terms with himself. He was the oracle of Mr. Latherington's school, where he was not only head boy and head swell, but a considerable authority on sporting matters. He took ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... carronades. My ship's company consisted of sixty men and officers; that is, myself, two mids, boatswain, gunner, and carpenter. The mids were young lads of about sixteen years of age, a Mr Brown and a Mr Black, gawky tall boys, with their hands thrust too far though the sleeves of their jackets, and their legs pulled too far through their trowsers; in fact, they were growing lads, who had nothing but their pay to subsist upon, being ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... disapproving eye. The beginning was stiff, for many of those present were unknown to each other and had little in common. Most of them were "Americans," Jews and Mexicans. The men were all a good deal alike in their dress suits, but the women displayed an astonishing variety. There were tall gawky blonde wives of prominent cattlemen; little natty black-eyed Jewesses, best dressed of all; swarthy Mexican mothers of politically important families, resplendent in black silk and diamonds; and pretty dark Mexican girls of the younger ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... ungraceful, bungling, maladroit, gawky, inelegant, ungainly, loutish, unskillful, unwieldy, uncourtly; embarrassing. Antonyms: graceful, dexterous, deft, courtly, elegant, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... were off again, lying in heaps on the ground in a mammoth circle. The ship was a skeleton, a long, gawky structure of naked metal beams. Even now a dozen men were scampering around the scaffolding, before Dan's incredulous eyes, and he saw some of the beaming coming off the body of the ship, being dropped onto the crane, moving slowly to ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... an overgrown poor young thing you are! But we must all go through the gawky age; we must each of us take our turn. Maisie is just through her bad time, but when she was fourteen, wasn't she a show just! You're fourteen, ain't ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... my eyes when she stepped down from the car platform, for the somewhat gawky maiden, as I used to term her in our not altogether infrequent playful differences of opinion, when similar compliments were common, had grown into a handsome woman, fair-skinned, but ruddy of color, as all of us were, and I was embarrassed when to the envy of the loungers she embraced ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... ordered some of our cards at Black's, the stationers. I ordered twenty-five of each, which will last us for a good long time. In the evening, Lupin brought in Harry Mutlar, Miss Mutlar's brother. He was rather a gawky youth, and Lupin said he was the most popular and best amateur in the club, referring to the "Holloway Comedians." Lupin whispered to us that if we could only "draw out" Harry a bit, he would ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... gawky and stumble-over-things age! Piano-stools, rugs, anything that comes in his way. And the impressions wouldn't do him a bit of good. They might, in fact, do him harm," and she laughed merrily and spread her fingers to ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... isn't he a curious bird, that red, long-leg'd Flamingo? A water bird, a gawky bird, a ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... of her motherhood had been enacted. Tom, her eldest, the thin, spectacled lawyer, had, as a boy of seven, rampaged on that identical Turkey hearthrug, when it was new, a quarter of a century earlier. He was now seated at the grand piano with the youngest child, Alicia, a gawky little treasure, always alternating between pertness and timidity, aged twelve. Jimmie and Johnnie, young bloods of nineteen and eighteen, were only present in their mother's heart, being in process of establishing, by practice, the right ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... fair to tell you, Prissie," she said, addressing the tall, gawky girl, who stood with her hands folded in front of her— "it's only fair to tell you that hitherto I've just made two ends meet for one mouth alone, and how I'm to fill four extra ones the Lord knows, but I don't. Still, I'm going to try, for it shall never ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... voice and the other's, between the girl's laugh and the woman's! It was only very lately, indeed, that Fanny, when looking in the little glass over the Bows-Costigan mantle-piece as she was dusting it, had begun to suspect that she was a beauty. But a year ago, she was a clumsy, gawky girl, at whom her father sneered, and of whom the girls at the day-school (Miss Minifer's, Newcastle-street, Strand; Miss M., the younger sister, took the leading business at the Norwich circuit in 182-; and she herself had played for two seasons with some credit T.R.E.O., T.R.S.W., until she fell ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to notice the mistakes father and mother make, and he lets Uncle John talk by the hour about any trivial thing. I wonder if he really, really likes me—as—as much as he seems to. It has been three years since he first hinted at it, and, oh, my! I must have been as gawky and silly as Ann. Still, you never can tell; the heart must have a lot to do with it. I wasn't thinking of looks, or clothes, or the rich man they all said he was, and I guess he wasn't thinking of anything but—" She checked ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... could remember when it had been any different. Those who came to town as little children grew into gawky youths knowing no more about other parts of the world than their geography books told them. When any one died, a strand in the Life hanging above the town broke and flapped in the wind, growing more and more frayed with the passing of time, until after ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... this intimacy between the odd assorted pair—the high-bred woman of fervid action and the mild and gawky Colonel born in a travelling circus. Holding the key to his early life, and losing myself in conjecture as to his subsequent career until he found himself possessed of the qualities that make a successful soldier, I could not help noticing the little ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... caused James quite to forget a certain stinging snubbing he had received from the selfsame lady, because once, back in the dark ages—before Nancy had opened her blue eyes on this naughty world—when he was a gawky, freckle-faced boy of sixteen, he had dared to walk home from church with Mildred, the eldest daughter of the house ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... but he was not at all like the dragons of our imagination. With his great bullet head and prick ears, his beetling brows and deep sunken eyes, his ferocious mouth and protruding tusks, his short thick neck and massive shoulders, his large, gawky, and misshapen trunk, coated with dingy brown fur, shading into dirty yellow on the stomach, his stout, bandy legs armed with curving talons, and his huge leathern wings hanging in loose folds about him, he looked more like an imp ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... love that comes in early youth—and always it does come then, though it is not always confessed—is a gawky and somewhat guilty joy that spends itself in sighs and blushes and Heaven knows what of self-discovery. Thus Grant in Laura's autograph album after all his versifying on the kitchen table could only write "Truly Yours" and leave her to define the deep significance of the phrase ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... now indistinct in the haze. An early electric car whirred and jangled past the station, and Porter was half conscious of the noise. He got up, straightened his stiff joints, and went to the lunch counter, where he had to jostle between two gawky privates before he could order a cup of smoky cereal coffee and a sandwich. After getting a place he could not eat, so he returned to the office. Now that some sort of routine was established, the Captain showed a willingness to ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... some of the circumstances of the war which they were now waging gave a subsequent importance to which no talents or virtues of his own entitled him. The Marquis de La Fayette was a young man of ancient family, and of fair but not excessive fortune. He was awkward in appearance and manner, gawky, red-haired, and singularly deficient in the accomplishments which were cultivated by other youths of his age and rank.[5] But he was deeply imbued with the doctrines of the new philosophy which saw virtue in the mere fact of ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... was the fashion in my young days. The motto was, 'Children are to be seen and not heard.' I dodged visitors always; when I met them by any chance I was always a fool with them, blinking and stammering like anything. When I was first at the hospital among men I was gawky until quite by chance I discovered that whisky made me graceful, stopped the stammering, gave me a surprising flow of eloquence and made me feel a damned fine chap. Naturally I went at it like anything, and of course after each burst ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... struggle; but if we should find him too many for us all three, we were to demand the assistance of our competitors, who should be ready to enforce us, or oppose anything that might be undertaken for the master's relief. One of my principal assistants was called Jeremy Gawky, son and heir of a wealthy gentleman in the neighbourhood; and the name of the other, Hugh Strap, the cadet of a family which had given shoemakers to the village time out of mind. I had once saved Gawky's life, by plunging into a river and dragging ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... disordered, she set about the task of doing it over. "'T is beyond belief!" she murmured. "I must be very beautiful!" She paused in her task, and studied her own face. "Now I know why he always makes me feel so uncomfortable —and afraid—and—and gawky. 'T is because he is a lord. Sometimes he does look at me as if—as if he were hungry— ugh! It frights me. But he must know what 's the mode. 'Lady Janice Clowes.' 'T is a pity the title is not prettier. Whatever will Tibbie say ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... poems which showed a truly poetic vein. He was long a member of the House of Commons, where his ready wit, his fearless decision, and good-humored audacity of expression, always gained him a hearing, though his tall person and awkward manner gained him the nickname of Squire Gawky, among the political scribblers of the day. With a patron of this jovial temperament Goldsmith probably felt more at ease than with ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... gawky embarrassment, bewildered by the splendor of the room; and after some deliberation selected the most substantial of the chairs, on the extreme edge of which he carefully ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... friends who came from time to time during his holidays was Leonard Everard, now a tall, handsome boy. He was one of those boys who develop young, and who seem never to have any of that gawky stage so noticeable in the youth of men made in a large pattern. He was always well-poised, trim-set, alert; fleet of foot, and springy all over. In games he was facile princeps, seeming to make his effort always in the right way and without exertion, as if by an instinct ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... "I'm glad you're not my cousin," she said; "I'm glad you're not really a relation. You're far dearer as it is. You're the best friend and truest gentleman I ever met in my life. Now I sha'n't thank you any more. Mind your dancing, and set to that gawky woman ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... comely personage, on knock-knees, in torn shirt open at the throat, with apathetic, listless, unlighted face, stood the lean and gawky Beck. ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Flamingo's crimson silk gown," said good-natured Mrs. Sedley. "What a gawky it was! And his sisters are not much more graceful. Lady Dobbin was at Highbury last night with three of them. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of a high spur, I saw a couple of gawky fellows shambling along in an imitation European dress, and I pricked up my ears—it seemed as if Europeans were about. One of the fellows had on a pair of long-legged khaki trousers ludicrously patched with ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... and bowed. Sir Meeson Corby simulated a petrifaction of his frame at seeing the Countess of Fleetwood actually partly bent with her gracious acknowledgement of the tramp's gawky homage. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... gawky fellow, dry and bronzed, with a crooked nose, a long rat-tail moustache, two great yellow piercing and mocking eyes, under a large felt hat set off by a scarlet cock's feather. He was dressed in a green jacket with a ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... will make short work of your gawky bumpkins;" he remarked to Jack as the recruits loitered about the wide, shaded streets, waiting to be forwarded ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... ease, thoroughly prepared to take advantage of all gratification that might come in his way, and thoroughly preserving the manners of a gentleman accustomed to the companionship of a prince. John Leech's Master Slender," she continues, "was picturesquely true to the gawky, flabby, booty squire.... His mode of sitting on a stile, with his long ungainly legs dangling down ... ever and anon ejaculating his maudlin cuckoo cry of 'Oh sweet Ann Page,' was a delectable treat." Without disrespect to Leech's memory, it may be said that others of his friends did not ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... great deal too short; and look at his coat—at least three years behind the fashion; and such a hat, with that rusty old band of crape around it. Wonder if he is in mourning for his grandmother. Oh, my! we boys would hoot him in Boston. He's what I call a gawky." ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... a big dinner, he announced casually that the Directors had shifted on to him a Natural Curiosity, from England, in the Accountant line. He was perfectly correct. Mr. Silas Riley, Accountant, was a MOST curious animal—a long, gawky, rawboned Yorkshireman, full of the savage self-conceit that blossoms only in the best county in England. Arrogance was a mild word for the mental attitude of Mr. S. Riley. He had worked himself up, after seven ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... naturalness of expression, which insensibly gave confidence to his friends, although it aroused their irritation. A spirit of boyish rebellion and importance looked out of Ephraim's black eyes; his mouth was demure with mischief, his gawky figure perpetually uneasy and twisting, as if to find entrance into small forbidden places. There was something in Ephraim's face, when she looked suddenly at him, which continually led his mother to infer that ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... is a very odd one, Anne Hamilton. That gawky child, all eyes and forehead. I remember I wanted you to have ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... an attitude that betokened the utmost admiration for both parties to the tete-a-tete. Under ordinary conditions,—that is to say, if Vavasour's existence depended on his own exertions,—Helen's eyes would have dwelt on a gawky youth endowed with a certain pertness that might in time have brought him from behind the counter of a drapery store to the wider arena of the floor. As it was, a reasonably large income gave him unbounded assurance, ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... see their white, obscure figures through the blinding snow, Even old Mr. Clifford went out to question them. "Yes, Mr. Burt come up in de mawnin' an' stirred us all up right smart, slashed down a tree hisself to show a new gawky hand dat's cuttin' by de cord how to 'arn his salt; den he put out wid his rafle in a bee-line toward de riber. Dat's de last we seed ob him;" and Abram went stolidly on to unhitch and ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... won't hev nothin' tew say tew him," said the girl. "That gawky-lookin' John Barker 'pears tew be hangin' raound her consid'able. 'Twould be kind er funny ef she should like him better." And she ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... for her. She can be here by Monday or Tuesday. I told her to be in readiness, and to have her boxes packed. My dear, I wish you would not poke out your chin so much. How old are you? Oh, sixteen—a very gawky age. Now then, that I am refreshed and rested, I think that we'll just go round ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... enabled him to be brave on the cheap, so by dint of digging his weapon into the ribs of all and sundry, they being, as he expressed it, too thick on the clod, he cleared a path for the grocer-mayor, who had gotten himself again into his scarlet gown. His worship was gawky, flustered, and uncertain, and listened like a scared rabbit to mine host, a man of much talk, who explained proudly ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... think of securing their tithes, eating their heavy dinners, puffing out their cheeks with importance on country justice benches, and occasionally exhibiting their conceited wives, hoyden daughters, and gawky sons ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... reprehensible character. A number of friends and relations, both of Schuetz's and Sittmann's, also hastened to Tuebingen. Sittmann had been married once before he took Wilhelmine's sister to wife, and of this former union he had two gawky sons, who accompanied their father and stepmother to this land ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... early sunshine, and Natalie's mamma, comely and portly, did chaperonage duty. It was not long before the sails gave swell into the breeze and the little boat scurried to the Sound. Past the lighthouse on its gawky iron stalls, she flew, and now rounded the white ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... The angular, gawky feeling gradually disappears; the girl becomes self-conscious; new impulses arise, and she gives up many of the hoydenish ways of childhood. The girl's imagination is more lively, and just at this time ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... a compositor—a tall, lank, hollow-eyed man with a bad cough. His mother was a woman of the people, angular and taciturn. Jonas himself was pale and gawky ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... Shosshi was a gawky young man with a blotched sandy face ever ready to blush deeper with the suspicion that conversations going on at a distance were all about him. His eyes were shifty and catlike; one shoulder overbalanced the other, and when he walked, he swayed loosely ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... which the would-be young can and should avoid. Surely Miss Wilcox ought to have known better than to flop down on the grass with an effort and a bump, clasping (with some difficulty) her knees because Vera, who is sixteen, slim and lithe, with the gawky grace of a young colt, had made such an obvious success ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... which showed it to be the residence of a Musk-rat of honour and eminence, a chief of high degree among his people. The chief of the Musk-rats bade the Nanticoke enter this cabin, but a moment after he said, "No, no, that cannot be done. It is not high enough for such a tall, strapping gawky as you are. So sit you here, while I go and fetch you food." So the Nanticoke seated himself on the sward, while the chief of the Musk-rats went to his house to fetch food ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... its appearance in 1819: this was the velocipede, or as it was then called "the hobby," the grandfather of the bicycle and tricycle of our day. A tall gawky perched on the summit of a lofty bicycle, with an enormous wheel gyrating between a couple of spindle shanks capped with enormous crab-shells, is a sufficiently familiar and ridiculous object in our times; but the appearance presented by the people of 1819, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... hot. Almost before he knew what he was saying his tongue began to wag, and he heard himself saying, in a stiff, stilted voice, "It was very nice in the Park this afternoon!..." Oh, banal fool, he thought, she will despise you now, as if you were a great, gawky lout.... ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... runnin' mate was a dead give away. He looked like he might have just left a bench in the Oriental lodgin' house down at Chatham Square. He's a thin, gawky, pale haired youth, with tired eyes and a limp lower jaw that leaves his mouth half open all the time; and his costume looks like it had been made up from back door contributions,—a faded coat three sizes too small, a ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... of the University boys seemed to drop in there whenever they felt like it, were almost members of the family; but they were better looking than he, and better company. To be sure, long Baumgartner was an intimate of the house, and he was a gawky boy with big red hands and patched shoes; but he could at least speak German to the mother, and he played the piano, and seemed to know a ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... stay here, my Didine. All is at an end. And is this fortune so lightly earned after all? Must I not marry a gawky, tow-haired creature, with a red nose, the daughter of a notary, and saddle myself with a stepmother who could give Madame de Piedefer points on the score ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... she's nice! If she did her hair better, and sat up, and had a colour, and didn't poke her chin, she'd look quite decent. I should think it would be interesting to take some one who needed improving, and see what you could do. Lavender's gawky, of course, girls are gawky at her age, but I shouldn't wonder if she grew quite decent-looking in time. Rest ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... short by a tap at the door; a long, gawky youth, with a budding moustache, entered and slouched over to a chair. He was young Isaacstein, son of the Tarrong storekeeper, a would-be sportsman, would-be gambler, would-be lady-killer, would-be everything, who only ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... said Mrs Tit, "only to think of it; such a tiny body as I am to have twelve children, and all the while that great gawky, Mrs Stockdove, only to have one, for the other she had rolled out of the ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... of slavishness; the gay and frivolous, no insignificant portion of a large court, at his feet through his wife,—it was observed that this timid, shy, self-concentrated prince, this precise (piece of) virtue, this (bit of) misplaced learning, this gawky man, a stranger in his own house, constrained in everything,—it was observed, I say, that he was showing himself by degrees, unfolding himself little by little, presenting himself to society in moderation, and that he was unembarrassed, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... mufflers, topped with a worsted helmet, which left nothing of his face visible but a pair of twinkling eyes. Thus equipped, he led the way out of doors, and roared for Hans and his gun, till a great gawky youth, with high cheek-bones and a downy beard, came out from the yard ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... was the first of Edison's masters, and perhaps his fellows, who appreciated him. Mediocrity had only seen the gawky stripling, with his moonstruck air, and pestilent habit of trying some new crotchet. Himself an inventor, Milliken recognised in his deep-set eye and musing brow the fire of a suppressed genius. He was then ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... organ-like folds; and Linda, whom Ann Eliza had remembered as an uncouth child with a sly look about the eyes, surprised her by a sudden blossoming into feminine grace such as sometimes follows on a gawky girlhood. The Hochmullers, in fact, struck the dominant note in the entertainment. Beside them Evelina, unusually pale in her grey cashmere and white bonnet, looked like a faintly washed sketch beside ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... can't play the pianner, jabber French, nor get French dresses. We ain't got no fancy 'Shallet,' as they call it, with a first-class view of nothing; but only a shanty on dry rock. But, afore I'D take advantage of a lazy, gawky boy—for it ain't anything else, though he's good meanin' enough—that happened to fall sick in MY house, and coax and cosset him, and wrap him in white cotton, and mother him, and sister him, and Aunt Sukey him, and almost dry-nuss him gin'rally, jist to get him sweet on me and on mine, and ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... military and severe. Indeed, it is so thorough that the graduate of a Normal School is exempted by military law from more than a year's service in the army: he leaves college a trained soldier. Deportment is also a requisite: special marks are given for it; and however gawky a freshman may prove at the time of his admission, he cannot remain so. A spirit of manliness is cultivated, which excludes roughness but develops self-reliance and self-control. The student is required, when speaking, to look his teacher in the face, and to utter his words not only ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... him. Already, at the ago of sixteen, Samuel Soligen was a good three inches taller than his father, at least ten pounds heavier. The boy was bright of eye, toothy of smile, gawky as only a teen-ager can be gawky, and obviously the proverbial apple ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... bench, in front of the house, facing the open esplanade on the high banks of the river, at the foot of which boats and arks were momentarily arriving. One afternoon, while engaged in earnest conversation with Harrison, I observed a tall, gawky youth, with white hair, and a few stray patches just appearing on his chin, as precursors of a beard, approach furtively, and assume a listening attitude. He had evidently just landed, and had put ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... substitute work. He retained but fifteen dollars and gave the rest to his father, with whom he had moved from Vermont to Western Pennsylvania, and for whom he had camped out many a night to guard the sheep from wolves. He was nearly twenty-one; and, although tall and gawky, with tow-colored hair, a pale face and whining voice, he resolved to seek his fortune in New York City. Slinging his bundle of clothes on a stick over his shoulder, he walked sixty miles through the woods to Buffalo, rode on a canal ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... looked dirty; Bittlesea itself had the appearance of a village with foolish aspirations to be considered a port, and he noticed, with a strong sense of pity tempered with disdain, the attentions of two young townsmen to a couple of gawky girls ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... volunteered Eph, with suspicious amiability, holding out his hand, which the Frenchman took daintily. "I'm a 'shoveleer' myself, and this awkward, gawky looking boy with me ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... later by the black magic of development, bringing brick buildings, prohibition, picture shows, real-estate boosters, speculation and attendant evils or benefits as one chooses to classify them, they became neither elemental nor ethical—mere gawky mimics ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... women are," Christine said, "but men look after them and say, 'What big, gawky women!' and you don't want to be looked after. If people did so, they would see that you didn't walk one bit like a woman, and that your shoulders were very wide, and your arms very ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... longed to take it; but,] my dear, what could I do? Did not Mrs. Catgut say it was the most fashionable; and if I had not taken it, was not that awkward, gawky Sally Slender ready to ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... comprehended his meaning, but the rapture of his eye infected me like a glisk of the sun. He was a plain, gawky, nervous man, very freckled at the hands, and as poor a leg in the kilt as well could be. He was fronting us with the unspoken superiority of the fowl on its own midden, but he had a most ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... cream" were prescribed by the fairy godmothers of our childhood to stay the stature of those gawky youngsters who were shooting up into an ungainly development like ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... low on the horizon when they got there. In the little shanty that served as a station, loafing and wishing for something to do, was a red-headed, gawky youth whose business it was to set signals and listen at a telegraph key for the orders that went flashing up and down ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters - or Jack Danby's Bravest Deed • Robert Maitland
... the horse nibbled at a tall weed in the roadway. They had got fairly into the prairie, and now at some distance on left and right gawky Queen Anne houses appeared. But along their path the waste was unbroken. The swamp on either side of the road was filled with birds, who flew in and out and perched on the dry planks in the walks. An abandoned electric-car track, raised ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... look at this one he appeared to be really very young, and perhaps just a little gawky, and he wore the most appreciably store-clothes, and the funniest little black string of a neck-tie. Isn't it queer that silly things should enter one's head at such times? But he looked like a fine, strong, honest boy, and I liked him for coming, ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... A huge gawky vehicle seemed to be waiting for the ship to land; it shot out from the huddle of gray buildings almost the moment they touched down. Jack slipped into the furs that he had pulled from stores, and went out through the entrance lock ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... used often to amuse him, and he always felt more at home with her than with the other two. She had only been a gawky and thin fifteen or sixteen when she began to assert herself in his kitchen, dictate to Kow, and waste good butter and eggs on experiments. He had secretly rather admired her quick tongue and her daring, he liked ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... the freshest thing imaginable; he was overtall and gawky, his cheeks were as delicately rosy as apple blossoms, and his smile was an epitome of ingenuous interest and frank wonder. It was as if some quality of especial fineness, lingering unspotted in Hunter Kinemon, had found ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... pageant of life, but his mind was preoccupied with grave and heavy matters. He had left school that day, and what his eyes saw as he leaned on the bridge was not a willing beast and a gladdened infant, but the puzzling world and the advance guard of its problems bearing down on him. Slim, gawky, untidy, fair, with his worn black-braided clothes, and slung over his shoulders in a bursting satchel the last load of his schoolbooks, and on his bright, rough hair a shapeless cap whose lining protruded behind, he had the extraordinary wistful look of innocence and simplicity ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... continually set their faces to the winds and waves. David was different altogether. He was exceedingly tall, and until years filled in his huge framework of bone and muscle, would very likely be called "gawky." But he had the face of a mediaeval ecclesiastic; spare, and sallow, and pointed at the chin. His hair, black and exceeding fine, hung naturally in long, straggling masses; his mouth was straight and perhaps a little cruel; his black, deep set eyes ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... the door, surmounted by dried palms reminiscent of Easter festivals. There seemed to be any number of children, from an infant lying in a homemade cradle of boards, one of which displayed an advertisement of soap, to a bashful youth who looked at Hugo as if he worshipped him and a freckled, gawky and friendly-faced girl of fifteen who stood around, evidently delighted to see people and anxious to be civil ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... little fellow about a cubit high, and for a time he does not seem to change at all; then one morning you notice that his legs have come out half a yard or more from his pantaloons, and soon your bright little page is a gawky, long-limbed lout, who comes to ask for leave that he may go to his country and get married. If you do not give it he will take it, and no doubt you are well rid of him, for the intellect in these people ripens about the age of fourteen or fifteen, and after that the faculty of learning anything ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... she was anxious to discover what impression her friend Mr. Holsworthy was making on me. Till then, I had no idea she was fond of anyone in particular; but the way her glance wandered from him to me and from me to Hilda showed clearly that she thought much of this gawky visitor. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... had moved his family down from Pierre to occupy the Irishman's shack, came to the school, bringing her son, a gawky, hangdog lad of twelve. While she recited a long account of his past experiences with teachers, and dictated her wishes as to his treatment by the little girl, he acted as interpreter. When she finally departed, with admonitions and ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... she looked at her face in the glass more critically than she had done for years. Anne Stockard at her best had never been pretty. When young she had been called "gawky." She was very tall and her figure was lank and angular. She had a long, pale face and dusky hair. Her eyes had been good—a glimmering hazel, large and long-lashed. They were pretty yet, but the crow's feet about ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... while Cleopatra had looked on, wistfully it is true, but not enviously at her sister's astonishingly successful career: for was not Baby only a child after all? And, from the age of eleven to fourteen, Leonetta had been so outrageously gawky and unattractive, no matter how beautifully she happened to be clad, that Cleopatra's feelings of uneasiness about her sister were laid to rest as if ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... a' through the toun, An' the wee lairdie trows I 'll hang or I 'll droun. Wi' his gawky-like face, yestreen he did say, "I 'll maybe tak you, for Bess I 'll no hae, Nor Mattie, nor Effie, nor lang-legged Jeanie, Nor Nelly, nor Katie, nor skirlin' wee Beenie." I stappit my ears, ran aff in a fury— I 'm thinkin' to bring them afore judge an' jury. For oh! what ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... he's the most perfect specimen of manhood I've ever beheld. He's abnormally big without the slightest suggestion of being either too big or awkward. He's simply magnificent. Most men of that size are just leggy and gawky: he is neither. Again, other men built as he, are usually rather brainless and weak, or probably made so much of by women that they become wrapped up in themselves, and are always expecting admiration. Alymer Hermon has the freshness ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... nursery was "Chany," the under nursemaid. Gawky, sleek, and black, she sat flat upon the floor, her large, well-shod feet turned to the fire, a ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... dilettante diners-out sneer when Clodpole at Dives's table doubles his soup, knifes his fish, tilts his plate into his lap, puts muscle into the crushing of his meringue, and tosses off the warm beaker in his finger-bowl. Camps by Tacoma sneer not at all, but candidly roar, at parallel accidents. Gawky makes a cushion of his flapjack. Butterfingers drops his red-hot rasher into his bosom, or lets slip his mug of coffee into his boot drying at the fire,—a boot henceforth saccharine. A mule, slipping his halter, steps forward unnoticed, puts his nose into the circle, and brays ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... green, And plum-blooms scent the evening breeze, And robin's songs throb through the trees; And when the year is raw thirteen, And Spring's a gawky hoyden yet, The season mirrors in its mien And in its tom-boy etiquette, Maid Mignonette, ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... to be pretty and picturesque. "That charming little girl with the dark braids, going to England," she heard some man on the steamer say. The ranch, the chickens, weeds, and preserving, the dusty roads and shabby stores of Los Lobos were gone; she was no longer a gawky child; she was a young lady in a loose, soft, rough blue coat, with a black quill in ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... doorway and came slowly toward them, eyeing the two from the Sawtooth curiously while he chewed tobacco. His hands rested on his hips, his thumbs hooked inside his overalls; a gawky pose that fitted well his colourless personality,—and left his right hand ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... I wuz a lunkhead; but them fellers didn't know, Thought they wuz the biggest punkins an' the purtiest in the row. An' I, I uster laff an' say, "Them lunkhead chaps will see W'en they go out into the worl' w'at gawky things they be." ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... through to the unfurnished and somewhat dingy kitchen. It had a low window-seat, from the extreme ends of which, as the two skippers entered, two figures—a middle-aged woman and a gawky lad— arose and saluted them; the one with a highly genteel curtsey, the other with an awkward half-pull at his forelock, and much scraping with ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch |
