"Senile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is usually fat with puffy eyelids. The skin is smooth and cool, marble-like often, poor in pigment and color. Sometimes it is sallow, wrinkled and senile in a man in his early twenties. At others, it is distinctly feminine in its hairlessness, and the delicate texture of the skin, as well as in the clean-cut patterning of the features. Every gradient between premature senility and sex ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... hardly articulate. When she caught hold of her fork she began to tremble so acutely that she let it fall again. The hunger that possessed her made her wag her head as if senile. She carried the food to her mouth with her fingers. As she stuffed the first potato into her mouth, she burst out sobbing. Big tears coursed down her cheeks and fell onto her bread. She still ate, gluttonously ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... of, and respectful to, Miss Sally. Strange indeed if he had not noticed—although always in his resigned fashion—the dull green stagnation of the life around him, or when not accepting it as part of his trouble he had not chafed at the arrested youth and senile childishness of the people. Stranger still if he had not at times been startled to hear the outgrown superstitions and follies of his youth voiced again by grown-up men, and perhaps strangest of all if he had not vaguely accepted it all as the hereditary curse of that barbarism under which ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... The senile whine trailed off into a thin, abusive whimper. His bony jaws moved slowly and meditatively. He ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... the Winter Palace, in which he convinced him that by war with Napoleon, and by enticing him into the heart of Russia, Europe would be saved. Lehmann has shown ("Knesebeck und Schoen") that this story is contradicted by all the documentary evidence. It may be dismissed as the offspring of senile vanity.] ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... humanitarian democracy. It was sad to see such a figure as that of Mr. Chumbleton, genial and hospitable, I admit, but utterly heedless of the trend of the times, hopelessly ignorant of the Progressive program, and deriving a senile satisfaction from memories of a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... the least idea of what it all meant. But, like most fathers of his kind, he made no objection to the man's proposal, and told him his daughter was in the house. As Offitt walked away on the same quest where Bott had so recently come to wreck, Saul sat smiling, and nursing his senile vanity with the thought that there were not many mechanics' daughters in Buffland that could get two offers in one Sunday from "professional men." He sat with the contented inertness of old men on his well-worn ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... professor. 'What do you mean by that senile manner, that tart voice! What a Cassandra-like tone! You disgrace ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... of saying "Cric!" and he immediately said "Crac!" and laughed in a touching, senile way—"Cric!—Crac! c'est bien ca!" and then he became ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... been written. Here is the full title of an example: An Aged Wanderer, A Life Sketch of J. M. Parker, A Cowboy of the Western Plains in the Early Days. "Price 40 cents. Headquarters, Elkhorn Wagon Yard, San Angelo, Texas." It was printed about 1923. When Parker wrote it he was senile, and there is no evidence that he was ever possessed of intelligence. The itching to get into print does not guarantee that the ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... of a different sort also. Anna's father was failing. He had written her a feeble, half-senile appeal to let bygones be bygones and come back to see him before he died. Anna was Peter's great prop. What would he do should she decide to go home? He had built his house ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... from our food the deleterious earthy matter is our constant aim. To that alone do we owe immunity from old age far in advance of that period of life when your people become decrepit and senile. The human body is like a lamp-wick, which filters the oil while it furnishes light. In time the wick becomes clogged and useless and is thrown away. If the oil could be made perfectly pure, the wick would ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... Definition History Pathology Changes in the Bursa Changes in the Cartilage Changes in the Tendon Changes in the Bone Causes Heredity Compression Concussion A Weak Navicular Bone An Irregular Blood-supply to the Bone Senile Decay Symptoms and Diagnosis ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... again in the third section of the trilogy. But his resolution is taken. He has returned to his native land, and will claim his own. The land is now ruled by Harald Gille, who is, like Sigurd Slembe, an illegitimate son of Magnus Barfod, and who, during the last senile years of Sigurd Jorsalfar's life, had won the recognition that Sigurd Slembe might have won had he not missed the chance, and been acknowledged as the king's brother. When the king died, he left a son named Magnus, who should have been his successor, ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... observer of this phenomenon cannot help wondering what has made this radical difference in the development of these two animals. The solution is not far to seek. From the beginning of puberty to the beginning of senile decay, the stallion derives from the testes what is referred to above ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... been the Protestant pasteur of Nyons for forty-four years. He was eighty-six years old, and on week-days the old gentleman dozed in the sun all day, and was quite senile and gaga. On Sundays, no sooner had he ascended the pulpit than his faculties seemed to return to him, and he would preach interminable but perfectly coherent sermons with a vigour astonishing in so old a man, only to relapse into childishness again on returning ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... but there was a pleasant glow from the fire on the hearth, and Ewbert made his guest sit down before it. As he lay back in the easy-chair, stretching his thin old hands toward the blaze, the delicacy of his profile was charming, and that senile parting of the lips with which he listened reminded Ewbert of his own father's looks in his last years; so that it was with an affectionate eagerness he set about making Hilbrook feel his presence acceptable, when Mrs. Ewbert left them to finish up the work she had promised ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... the character of a man, which gets rusty and senile by not mixing in affairs but living in obscurity. For mute inglorious ease, and a sedentary life devoted to leisure, not only injure the body but also the soul: and as hidden waters overshadowed and stagnant get foul because they have no outlet, so the innate powers ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... usefulness until eighty, at least, and now are encouraged to feel that one hundred years is the natural span of life. There are, it is true, few really important studies of how to keep people from growing senile and really old before the time now set for failure of powers. Such studies, however, are prophesied in a small "endowment for the study of diseases of the aged" already given, and more in the statement of appeals for ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... in adventures not normally within the reach of, or suited to the taste of, the citizens of an ordered state. It is little wonder that the boy regards the moral law as a nuisance and the state as a suitable refuge for those suffering from senile decay. ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... impatiently, yet with a pleased senile, endeavoured to release himself from her arms, but she interrupted his exclamation, "Don't you know, Miss Thoughtless," with the whispered entreaty: "Here me out first, father! Maestro Appenzelder asked me to add ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... day of our visit to the infirmary we found 5 patients in bed or crouched in the oriental manner upon their bedsteads; 1 suffering from senile paralysis, 2 from bronchitis, 1 from inflammation of the ears, and 1 from ...
— Turkish Prisoners in Egypt - A Report By The Delegates Of The International Committee - Of The Red Cross • Various
... born about the year 539. The care of his education was confided to the venerable Senile, who was eminent for his sanctity and knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. It was probably through his influence that the young man resolved to devote himself to the monastic life. For this purpose he placed himself under the direction of ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... commander-in-chief who seemed destined to revolutionize the art of war, whose prudence and foresight were unparalleled, whose correctness of judgment was a thing to wonder at. And in contrast to that picture of Germany he pointed to France: the Empire sinking into senile decrepitude, sanctioned by the plebiscite, but rotten at its foundation, destroying liberty, and therein stifling every idea of patriotism, ready to give up the ghost as soon as it should cease ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... she dreams that I am in my dotage, and may relent, she strangely forgets the nature of the blood she saw fit to cross with that of a beggarly foreign scrub. Go back and tell her, the old man is not yet senile and imbecile; and that the years have only hardened his heart. Tell her, I have almost learned to forget even how ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... higher and higher till it was well nigh a scream of agony. Strangely too, in spite of the fictitious youth that glowed in his veins and coloured his cheek, it sounded like a senile shriek. ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... that my Diary stirred up the youth. Oh, if so, then I feel happy. Youth! youth! you are all the promise and the realization! But why do you suffer yourselves to be crushed down by the upper-crust of senile nincompoops? Oh youth, arise, and sun-like penetrate through and through the magnitude of the work to be accomplished, and save ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... Hall. The keeper fetched their breakfast to the hounds; The smart, young ostler whistled in the stalls; The pretty housemaid tripped from room to room; And grave and grand behind his master's chair, But wroth within to have the partridge spoil, The senile butler waited for his lord. But neither Regnald nor young Eustace came. And when 't was found that neither slept at Hall That night, their couches being still unpressed, The servants stared. And as the day wore on, And evening came, and then another day, And yet another, till a week ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... spoke; and, though his words were seemingly irrelevant, they were to the point. His voice had a note of martyrdom running through its senile quaver. ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... Rogers of 1854,—senile, as was natural at the age of ninety-one years and eight months, yet still retaining much of the old Rogers, hospitable, sometimes caustic, sometimes pathetic, and always a true lover and appreciator of the fine arts. Leslie declared him to be the only ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... until one of two things happens. Either the customer is obdurate, and staggers to his feet at last and gropes his way out of the shop with the knowledge that he is a wrinkled, prematurely senile man, whose wicked life is stamped upon his face, and whose unstopped hair-ends and failing follicles menace him with the certainty of complete baldness within twenty-four hours—or else, as in nearly ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... with a black crest and a red mark on its throat, half blind with age, and tottering on its pedestal. This solemn old bird sat apart from all the others, nodding its head oracularly in the sunlight, and blinking now and again with its white eyelids in a curious senile fashion. ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... Archangel, while others show the symbols of the Passion to the group of kneeling Saints. The four Angels are very noble figures, and resemble those of the "Hell" and "Resurrection," of Orvieto. The "S. Jerome" is sincerely painted, and without any of the senile sentimentality with which Signorelli occasionally represents this Saint. The one false note in the work is the stunted figure of the dead Christ, which seems all the more insignificant by contrast with the grand Archangel who supports ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... gloom. G.J. sympathised with the man in the coffin, the simple little man whose non-political mission had in spite of him grown political. He regretted horribly that once he, G.J., who protested that he belonged to no party, had said of the dead man: "Roberts! Well-meaning of course, but senile!" ... Yet a trifle! What did it matter? And how he loathed to think that the name of the dead man was now befouled by the calculating and impure praise of schemers. ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... of society,—is wonderful. Its dramatic strength is none the less marked. But aside from and above all this, for me it has a far greater merit—utility. I have no sympathy with the flippant, effeminate, and senile cry, "Art for art's sake"; that is the echo of a decaying civilization, the voice of Greece and Rome in their decline. It is the shibboleth of a people drunken with pleasure; of a popular conscience anaesthetized; the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... when "the old man" died—an event that would have to occur if the first vice-president's dream of elevation ever came true, for there wasn't the remotest likelihood that he would have the sense of decency to resign, no matter how old or how senile he became in the course ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... passionately, "Austria is lost. If I were capable of hate, I should hate these Jesuits, who, propagating the senile vagaries of an old Spanish dotard, have sought to govern the souls of men, and have striven for nothing on earth or in heaven save the extension of ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... whom passion is enjoyment. But it is afflicting to peaceable minds. Tranquillity is the old man's milk. I go to enjoy it in a few days, and to exchange the roar and tumult of bulls and bears, for the prattle of my grand-children and senile rest. Be these yours, my dear friend, through long years, with every other blessing, and the attachment of friends as warm and sincere, as ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... shall come a time when death shall be overcome, is a persistent part of every prophecy, and of every religious cult. In these days we find that science is speculating upon the probability of discovering a specific for senile death, as well as for the final elimination of death from ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... a time when the whilom "Cupid's" boast, "Civis Anglicanus sum," was not an empty claim, as it is in these days of poverty-stricken "retrenchments," and senile forfeitures of all that made England great and grand through five hundred ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... rate, dissembled his mirth to perfection. The look which he shifted from me to Susannah and back was eloquent of senile indecision. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... will not advance as typical a drummer I once saw read a cheap magazine from cover to cover in the finest stretch of the Canadian Rockies. He was not a man, but a sample-fed, word-emitting machine. These people, emotionally speaking, are senile. They should ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... the Hilarys there was misgiving on this point of their approval of Matt's marriage. Some of them thought that the parents' hands had been forced in the blessing they gave it. Old Bromfield Corey expressed a general feeling to Hilary with senile frankness. "Hilary, you seem to have disappointed the expectation of the admirers of your iron firmness. I tell 'em that's what you keep for your enemies. But they seem to think that in Matt's case you ought to have been more of a ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... "Which goes to show you, Joe, just how much titles mean. Commissioner Pepper has been all but senile for the past five years. Frank, here, is the true ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... repeated, eyeing him with a dreadful sternness. 'Or he would ha' kept his mistake to himself. Who knows of it? Or why should he be telling them? 'Tis for them to find out, not for him! Yo' call yourself a lawyer? Yo' are a fool!' And she sat down in a palsy of senile passion. 'Yo' are a fool! And yo' ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... Legations, each with its own particular ideas and intrigues, but crouching all together under the Tarter Wall and tremblingly awaiting with mock assurance the bursting of this storm? If you are so good as to see this you will realise the wonderful stage effects, the fierce Mediaevalism in senile decay, the superb distances, the red dust from the Gobi that has choked up all the drains and tarnished all the magnificence until it is no more magnificence at all—this dust which is such a herald of the coming ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... were overwhelmed with delight at sight of the tears of senile disappointment that dribbled down the old man's cheeks. Then, unnoticed, Hoo-Hoo replaced the empty shell with a fresh-cooked crab. Already dismembered, from the cracked legs the white meat sent forth a small cloud of savory steam. This attracted the old man's nostrils, ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... stove, a base-burner with faint fire showing through its mica, the identity of her figure merged with the fat upholstery of the chair, except where the faint pink through the mica lighted up old flesh, Mrs. Miriam Horowitz, full of years and senile with them, wove with grasses, the ecru of her own skin, wreaths that had mounted to a great stack in ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... "I am a senile old dotard! Good Lord, I know colonial law; I've been skating on the edge of it on more planets than you're years old. And I never thought of that; why, of course it would. Where are you now, with the Company, ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... This senile divergence from the topic in hand surprised George painfully. "I have no interest whatever in the law," he said. "I don't care for it, and the idea of being a professional man has never appealed to me. None of the family has ever ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... good car to steal," Mother Corey wheezed. He was puffing now, mopping rivulets of perspiration from his face. "I'm getting old, cobbers. Once I broke every strong-man record on Earth—still stand, too. But not now. Senile!" ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... a senile, cackling laugh. He did not want to laugh, but laughed again and, stooping, reached for the bullets. He stared at his fingers, bewildered; they groped helplessly at a spot a foot from the place where lay the two bullets with their ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... there, and I suddenly realised that my extremities were cold. Sniffing and coughing, whimpering a little, perhaps, I fumbled back to bed. "It is surely a dream," I whispered to myself as I clambered back, "surely a dream." It was a senile repetition. I pulled the bedclothes over my shoulders, over my ears, I thrust my withered hand under the pillow, and determined to compose myself to sleep. Of course it was a dream. In the morning the dream would be over, and I should wake up strong and vigorous again ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... repeated in mild surprise. "Ah, yes; she has gone to New York to make our fortune with the system. You see," he continued with senile cunning, "she has taken away the system, and so I am not sure whether I can beat you. But make your play, monsieur." There was at least no indecision in the manner in which he ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... God, our modern minds insist upon believing, can have no appetite for unnatural praise and adoration. He does not clamour for the attention of children. He is not like one of those senile uncles who dream of glory in the nursery, who love to hear it said, "The children adore him." If children are loved and trained to truth, justice, and mutual forbearance, they will be ready for the true God as their needs bring them within his scope. They should be left to their ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... I didn't think about them. Yes, I have. Six months ago I should have fretted myself sick. Remember at Cairo? I've only had two or three bad times. Am I getting better, or is it senile decay?" ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... Afterward, his senile emotions betraying him, he broke down completely and had to be led from the field. It is rumored he did not live ...
— It's a Small Solar System • Allan Howard
... Square, a lean-faced, unkempt and haggard waif, I drifted to Great Orme's Head and back again. Senile dementia had already laid its spectral clutch upon my wizened cerebellum when I was rescued by some kindly people, who tell me that they found me scorching down Hays Hill on a cushion-tired ordinary. They have since told ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... presented an aquiline silhouette, which suggested the Oriental or Jewish type. His hands—thin, slender, full of nerves which projected like strings upon the finger-board of a violin, and armed with claws like those on the terminations of bats' wings—shook with senile trembling; but those convulsively agitated hands became firmer than steel pincers or lobsters' claws when they lifted any precious article—an onyx cup, a Venetian glass, or a dish of Bohemian crystal. This strange old man had an aspect so thoroughly rabbinical and cabalistic that he would ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier
... during the interview) could not tell me what he had been—exactly. He was a universal genius—on that point I agreed with the old chap, who thereupon blew his nose noisily into a large cotton handkerchief and withdrew in senile agitation, bearing off some family letters and memoranda without importance. Ultimately a journalist anxious to know something of the fate of his 'dear colleague' turned up. This visitor informed me Kurtz's proper ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... may call (for the lack of an accepted expression) a Squirradical. Having acquired years without experience, he carried into the Radical side of politics those noisy, after-dinner-table passions, which we are more accustomed to connect with Toryism in its severe and senile aspects. To the opinions of Mr Bradlaugh, in fact, he added the temper and the sympathies of that extinct animal, the Squire; he admired pugilism, he carried a formidable oaken staff, he was a reverent churchman, and it was hard to know which would have more volcanically stirred his choler—a person ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... There is also in existence a letter written by Giuffre to the same Gonzaga, dated Nepi, September 18th. While here Caesar learned that his protector and friend, Amboise, had not been elected pope as he had hoped, but that Piccolomini had been chosen. September 22d this cardinal, senile and moribund, ascended the papal throne, assuming the name Pius III. He was the happy father of no less than twelve children, boys and girls, who would have been brought up in the Vatican as princes but for his early death. He permitted Caesar to return to Rome and even showed ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... forest. America! He had chosen! Her youth called to his. He wanted to forget everything that had gone before, the horrors through which he had passed, both physical and spiritual,—the dying struggles of the senile nation, born in intolerance, grown in ignorance and stupidity which, with a mad gesture, had cast him forth with a curse. He had doffed the empty prerogatives of blood and station and left them in the mire and blood. The soul of Russia ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... sent under the royal sign-manual to Parliament, it was invoked to take measures "for better securing the execution of the laws," and it acquiesced in the suggestion. Just as now, a senile executive, under the sinister influence of insane counsels, is proposing, with your assent, "to secure the better execution of the laws," by blockading ports and turning upon the people of the States the artillery which they provided ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... launched himself into the thickening crowd. The old gentleman, who was lank and tall, folded himself down into it, He continued as tranquilly as if seated quite alone with Mrs. Brinkley, and not minding that his voice, with the senile crow in it, made itself heard by others. "I'm always surprised to find sensible people at these things of Jane's. They're most extraordinary things. Jane's idea of society is to turn a herd of human beings loose in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... crying because Zillah can't kiss anybody any more! Isn't everything the limit? Well, it wasn't a fractured Yale student she got sent out on this time. If it had been, she might have been living yet. What they sent her out on this time was a Senile Dementia,—an old lady more than eighty years old. And they were in a sanitarium or something like that. And there was a fire in the night. And the old lady just up and positively refused to escape. And ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... according to the constitution of Athens or of Sparta, nor, least of all, to that of the United States. The Athenians were the student-youths of mankind; their constitution was a species of academic freedom, and it would be mere folly to seek to introduce it in this our matured age, to revive it in our senile Europe. And how could we put up with that of Sparta, that great and tiresome manufactory of patriotism, that soldiers' barrack of republican virtue, that sublimely bad kitchen of equality, in which black broth ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and by reciprocal influences from one another, the literatures of modern Europe came into existence with composite dialects and obeyed confused canons of taste, exhibited their adolescent vigour with affected graces and showed themselves senile in their cradles." In the field of literature to-day the standards are more numerous, but more distinctive, than those of the Elizabethans. Our ideals are classified with almost scientific exactness, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... little snowy hand with almost senile delight, and holds it for—as long as he dares. During this undefined period he tells himself what a perfect picture she is, with her clear, pale, beautiful face, and her nut-brown hair, and the tender sweetness of her attitude, as she bends over the smiling baby. Could ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... il, as fertil, not fertile, in all words except chamomile (cam), exile, gentile, infantile, reconcile, and senile, which should ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... guillotined as a conspirator, "for having thrown a rotten herring in the face of his jailer, who had served it to him to eat." Madame de Puy-Verin was guillotined as "guilty" because she had not taken away from her deaf, blind and senile husband a bag of card-counters, marked with the royal effigy.—In default of any pretext,[4131] there was the supposition of a conspiracy; blank lists were given to paid emissaries, who undertook to search the various prisons and select the requisite number ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... to Claire. He had thought her straight. And all the time that she had been saying those things to him that night of their last meeting she had been engaged to another man, a fat, bald, doddering, senile fool, whose only merit was his money. Scarcely a fair description of Mr Pickering, but in a man in Bill's position ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... mantle has fallen; a young actor who personates old age so admirably that the oldest men in the audience cannot help laughing. With that quavering voice of his, that bald forehead, and those spindle shanks trembling under the weight of a senile frame, he may look forward to a long career of decrepitude. There is something alarming about the young actor's old age; he is so very old; you feel nervous lest senility should be infectious. And what an admirable Alcalde he makes! What a delightful, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... senile fashion at the loose ends which lay nearest her old hand, knotted two tightly together with a bit of rare golden strand she kept tucked away in ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... for the undeveloped man-animal, and that is the reason why man-made laws have been necessary. The objection to them is not in their original intention, but in their failure to die after they have become senile. ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... black and glowing, and she could read and do coarse crocheting without spectacles. All her skin, especially round about the eyes, was yellowish brown and very deeply wrinkled indeed; a decrepit, senile skin, which seemed to contradict the youth of her pose and her glance. The cast of her features was benign. She had passed through desolating and violent experiences, and then through a long, long period of withdrawn tranquillity; and from end to end of her life she had consistently thought the ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... the Bath-sheba episode, but the Abishag, that the author treated at length—one of the most revolting transactions in history, especially as there is some reason to believe that the unfortunate girl was, when it was perpetrated, already attached to one of the sons of the loathsome, senile sensualist. ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... up on the clock," Lanyard replied stolidly in French. He turned and faced Bannon squarely, loosing a glance of venomous hatred into the other's eyes. "The longer I have to stop here listening to your senile monologue, the more you'll have to pay. What address, please?" he added, turning back to get a glimpse ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... unmoved wonder, the senile scholar listened to the broken sobs of the child of Valerie Delavigne. He was astounded at her ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... listlessly through life, there are. But many words are born in an entirely normal way; have a grubby boyhood, a vigorous youth, and a sober maturity; marry, beget sons and daughters, become old, enfeebled, even senile; and suffer neglect, if not death. In their advanced age they are exempted by the discerning from enterprises that call for a lusty agility, but are drafted into service by those to whom all levies are alike. Indeed in their very prime of manhood their vicissitudes are ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... is at its maximum among animals, among savages,[413] among children,[414] in the senile, in the degenerate, and very specially in chronic alcoholics.[415] It is worthy of note that the supreme artists and masters of the human heart who have most consummately represented the tragedy of jealousy clearly recognized that it is either ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... you laughing at, man?" I demanded, whipping off the goggles that made me look like a senile owl, and facing him angrily, as he had a sudden need to cover his ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... won't live long enough,' I says, 'to use as an exhibit in your senile fireside mendacity. Your grandchildren will have to take your word for it. I'll give you one hundred ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... dogs, and children. We ought to have remained indoors. Thither we retired for coffee and cigars and a liqueur, of the last of which my friend refused to partake. He fears and distrusts all liqueurs; it is one of his many senile traits. The stuff proved, to my surprise, to be orthodox Strega, likewise a rarity ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... circumstances, Sir Joseph's senile raptures were simply tiresome, and had he not been enormously rich she would have thought them a little presumptuous. But there were many ways in which Sir Joseph Bullion's friendship proved useful to her. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... imprudent woman who had signed her name. But the rigorous correctness of the marquis made him afraid. How could he distract his attention—get him away? The opportunity occurred of its own accord. Among the letters, a tiny page written in a senile and shaky hand, caught the attention of the charlatan, who said with an ingenuous air: "Oh, oh! here is something that does not look much like a billet-doux. 'Mon Duc, to the rescue—I am sinking! The Court of Exchequer has once more stuck its ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... it—did you ever see such a beauty? Such firmness—roundness—such delicious smoothness to the touch?' It was as if he had said 'she' instead of 'it,' and when he put out his senile hand and touched the melon I positively had ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... to use that correspondence as a weapon against the imprudent creature who had signed it. But the marquis's rigid demeanor frightened him. How could he divert his attention, get rid of him? An opportunity presented itself unsought. A tiny sheet, written in a senile, tremulous hand, had found its way between those same letters, and attracted the attention of the charlatan, who ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... my bewilderment for incredulity and his confidential finger dropped from my sleeve. "Eh, that's the story. I tell what I've heard. What do I know?" He resumed his senile shuffle across the marble. "This is a bad place to stay in—no one comes here. It's too cold. But the gentleman said, I ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... a modest clue to Swift's Toryism, and it is associated with the Jacobitism of which his Whiggish enemies accused him. Yet an unusual reading of the Struldbruggs in the third voyage (particularly the controls imposed on the senile creatures in order to prevent their engrossing the civil power) as an attack on the religious dissenters demonstrates that Curll and Swift agreed on the issue of an established church. The clergy who wished to separate state from church, or ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... which Spencer has made in Justice—(and, let us say between parentheses, this work, together with his "Positive and Negative Beneficence" furnishes sad evidence of the senile mental retrogression that even Herbert Spencer has been unable to escape; moreover its subjective aridity is in strange contrast with the marvelous wealth of scientific evidence poured forth in his earlier works)—is based on these two arguments: ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... entirely different with the criminal who suffers from a degenerative prison psychosis. Here we are not dealing with individuals who tend to dement, who have little or no conception of whether they are in a prison or in a hospital. In short, we are not dealing here with paretics or senile dements, who, although being at the same time prisoners, remain subject to the same unavoidable lot of the paretic or the senile dement. The habitual criminal who suffers from a degenerative psychosis, unless he is in a stupor, is constantly on the alert for a chance to escape. No matter how delusional ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... Una could shut her heart. To one absurd thing, because it was living, Una could not shut her heart—to the senile canary. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... ophthalmia in some parts of India and Mauritius. The pounded bark is applied locally in orchitis and epididymitis. We have had occasion to use a mixture of equal parts of the resin with white vaseline spread on linen and applied between the shoulder blades; in the persistent cough of senile bronchitis the relief ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... a game," he said, with his little laugh, which somehow sounded quite different—less senile, less helpless. "It is not a ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... wrought. "That is roughly correct. And I believe, if you search your memory, you won't recall even a mention of a treatment center. This sort of place is virtually extinct, nowadays. There are still some institutions for those suffering from functional mental disorders—paresis, senile dementia, congenital abnormalities. But regular check-ups and preventative therapy take care of the great majority. We've ceased concentrating on the result of mental illnesses and learned to ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... trumpet. So, biding his time, he bellowed, but it was the Comedie Francaise that was the loser, not the people, when he sailed away in his balloon, posed, squatting majestically as the god of war above the clouds of battle. And little Thiers, furtive, timid, delighting in senile efforts to stir the ferment of chaos till it boiled, he, too, was there, owl-like, squeaky-voiced, a true "Bombyx a Lunettes." There, too, was Hugo—often ridiculous in his terrible moods, egotistical, sloppy, roaring. The Empire ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... the carriages. A few of them looked weary and careworn. Now and then under the smart bonnet one saw the pinched weazened face of old age,—dowagers in big fur capes looking out with their dim hungry eyes on the follies of Vanity Fair. One wondered at the set senile smile on these old faces; they had fed on husks all their lives, and the food had failed to nourish them; their strength had failed over the battle of life, but they still refused to leave the field of their ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... is so undeveloped that the mechanism of association is inactive, hence pain and tenderness, which are among the oldest of the associations, are wanting. Senility and infancy are by nature normally narcotized. The senile are passing through the twilight into the night; while infants are traversing through the dawn into the day. Hence it is that the diagnosis of injury and disease in the extremes oflife is beset by especial difficulties, since the entire body is as silent ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... impress ninety summers. "Yes, I could have told yer that," assented the sage, with senile complacence. "My wife could have told yer that. Any smart girl could have told ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... antagonism, whereas their more intimate acquaintance with one another produced personal and national ill-will. The people of the West now appeared more than ever barbarous and overbearing, and the Court of Constantinople more than ever senile and designing. The crafty policy of Alexius Comnenus in transferring his allies with all speed into Asia, and declining to take the lead in the expedition, was almost justified by the necessity of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... blood. A horse mercilessly starved in the fields; a wild bird wailing for its murdered mate; a tramp driven by hunger and primitive desire, and harried by the "insolence of office"; an old man denied the little luxuries of his senile greed; an old maid torn and rent in the flesh that is barren and the breasts that never gave suck; these are the natural subjects of his genius—the sort of "copy" that one certainly need not leave ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Infusorians are capable of reproducing asexually for a number of generations, but that, unless the individuals are sexually fertilized by crossing with unrelated forms of the same species, they finally exhibit all the signs of senile degeneration, ending in death.[17] After sexual conjugation there was an access of vitality, and the asexual reproduction proceeded as before. "The evident result of these long and fatiguing experiments is that among the ciliates the life of the species ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... knowing that her husband had been rebuked, but feeling that he had deserved it. He, however, was not abashed; but changed the conversation, dashing into city rumours, and legal reforms. The old man from time to time said sharp little things, showing that his intellect was not senile, all of which his son-in-law bore imperturbably. It was not that he liked it, or was indifferent, but that he knew that he could not get the good things which Mr. Wharton could do for him without making some kind of payment. He must take the sharp words of the old man,—and take all ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... pillow to ease the trembling that seized her. The moon had passed on, and darkness, which is allied to fear, closed her in—the fear of unthinking youth who knows not that the grave is full of peace; the fear of abundant life for senile death; the cold agony that comes in the night-watches, when the business of the day is but a dream ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... dignity; should so far descend from argument, from discussion of law to unseemly banter on the question of sex; that it should so far stoop from a canvass of the most important trial that ever took place, to a senile jest on woman, must be matter of astonishment to every candid mind in the legal fraternity, and certainly has a tendency to convince the female portion of the country that the male man is fast losing his right to the definition of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... literally drained to death. Even the tributaries have formed deep lateral canyons that meet the level of the main stream. It staggers the mind to try to grasp the time expressed in countless eons since the youth of this now senile river. ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... leaned across the table. "You still don't believe we're near Sol, do you? You're getting senile, Hugh! You know the mathematics of our position ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... xv. 60, 'Sequitur caedes Annaei Senecae, laetissima principi, non quia coniurationis manifestum compererat, sed ut ferro grassaretur, quando veneno non processerat ... (Ch. 63) Post quae eodem ictu brachia ferro exsolvunt. Seneca, quoniam senile corpus et parco victu tenuatum lenta effugia sanguini praebebat, crurum quoque et poplitum venas abrumpit. Saevisque cruciatibus defessus, ne dolore suo animum uxoris infringeret atque ipse visendo eius tormenta ad impatientiam delaberetur, ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... the entire society of modern times, from the potentiated egotism which spurs man on in overhaste, and in all departments of mental and physical life, to a feverish activity, and then leads to an early senile decay of both body and mind; from that terrible materialism which causes the modern individual in every class of society to find satisfaction in over excited taste and ingenious luxury. It is necessary to strengthen more than has been done heretofore the young, by means of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... beautiful to her in its sadness: she contemplated it with vague bliss. At their last meeting, during the Sunday School Centenary, he had annoyed her; he had even drawn her disdain, by his lack of initiative and male force in the incident of the senile Sunday School teacher. He had profoundly disappointed her. Now, she simply forgot this; the sinister impression vanished from her mind. She recalled her first vision of him in the lighted doorway of his father's shop. Her present vision confirmed that sympathetic vision. She liked ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... vita umile e queta, Ed in alto intelletto un puro core Frutto senile in sul giovenil fibre, E in aspetto ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... which Italian painting plunged from the height of its maturity. This toleration and acceptance of unavoidable change need not imply want of discriminative perception. We can apply the evolutionary canon in all strictness without ignoring that adult manhood is preferable to senile decrepitude, that Pheidias surpasses the sculptors of Antinous, that one Madonna of Gian Bellini is worth all the pictures of the younger Palma, and that Dossi's portrait of the Ferrarese jester is better worth having than the whole of Annibale Caracci's Galleria ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... if more than one, and does not mention Warner, or lead us to believe that he was sole editor. Only a small portion of this projected criticism seems ever to have been written. It appears to have been begun in senile peevishness, containing only a few prefatory remarks and discussing some algebraical questions with the fancied errors of the editors. No mention is made of the'Atomic Theory,'as promised on the title-page, which is here done into English, ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... tiredly. Senile old devil! No wonder things were going to pot, if this was a sample of E training. "Send me your notes so I can follow them carefully," he ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... suspicious silence is a common paranoid symptom; one often finds such symptoms in cases of senile dementia," Doctor ...
— Dearest • Henry Beam Piper
... surprised to meet his daughter, who swept past with a white, scornful face, which was a second enigma. If she had been with O'Brien, where was O'Brien! If she had not been with O'Brien, where had she been? With a sort of senile and passionate suspicion he groped his way to the dark back parts of the mansion, and eventually found a servants' entrance that opened on to the garden. The moon with her scimitar had now ripped up and rolled away all the storm-wrack. The argent light lit up all four corners of the garden. A tall ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... move, he was so stiff. But his mind was working well enough to see that Bud rubbed the saddle print off Boise and turned his own horses loose in the pasture, before he let him go on to the house. The last Bud heard from Pop that forenoon was a senile chuckle and a cackling, "Outrun Boise in a quarter dash! Shucks a'mighty! But I knew it—I knew he had the speed—sho! Ye ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... senile lover writes, "In an hour I depart for Germany; and, as the wind is north, with every step I take I shall say: 'This breeze comes perhaps from her; it has touched her rosy lips and mingled its scent with the perfume of her breath which I shall inhale, the ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... the huge fine to Government. Tamiya Yoemon and Kondo[u] Rokuro[u]bei underwent degradation from the caste. There was no disposition to overlook the offence of usury. Beggary was to be the portion of Yoemon, the destitution of the outcast. For some years the senile old man, the virago of a woman once the wife of Kondo[u] Rokuro[u]bei, were stationed at the Nio[u]mon, to attract and amuse the worshippers passing up to the great temple of the Asakusa Kwannon. Not for long could the woman hold her tongue. Abuse passed with the ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... youth, whose destinies are now inextricably mingled with those of Seneca, was accompanied to the throne by the acclamations of the people. Wearied by the astuteness of an Augustus, the sullen wrath of a Tiberius, the mad ferocity of a Caius, the senile insensibility of a Claudius, they could not but welcome the succession of a bright and beautiful youth, whose fair hair floated over his shoulders, and whose features displayed the finest type of Roman beauty. There was nothing in his antecedents to give a sinister ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... generations youth is prolonged, for play is always and everywhere the best synonym of youth. All are young at play and only in play, and the best possible characterization of old age is the absence of the soul and body of play. Only senile and overspecialized tissues of brain, heart, and muscles know ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... divinity. But while the Shilluk hold their kings in high, indeed religious reverence and take every precaution against their accidental death, nevertheless they cherish "the conviction that the king must not be allowed to become ill or senile, lest with his diminishing vigour the cattle should sicken and fail to bear their increase, the crops should rot in the fields, and man, stricken with disease, should die in ever-increasing numbers." To prevent these ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... broad nose. Then he wiped his beard on the palm of his hand, and his hand on his knee; whereafter, as he stretched forth the pair of senile, dark-coloured hands, and held them over ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... close of the war the darkest and most difficult days of our existence. The crisis through which we are passing is the gravest we have yet encountered. Let us make it a crisis of growth, not a symptom of irreparable senile decay. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Valmond and his General talked, devised, planned, schemed, till the old man grew husky and pale. The sight of his senile weariness flashed the irony of the whole wild dream into Valmond's mind. He rose, and, giving his arm, led Lagroin to his bedroom, and bade him good-night. When he returned to the room, it ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... heedless, our attention taken away from his senile prattle by the timely noise of a cart that ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... persecutor outside whose abuse they can not avoid hearing. In cases of violent sick headache we often miscall objects without detecting it ourselves, and in delirium the speech mechanism works from violent organic discharges altogether without control. The senile old man talks nonsense—so-called ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... she had been playing badly, he had caught her! But he laughed, a feeble, senile laugh, and leaned back, altogether pleased ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... which I had sent upstairs a reply to the letter which Minna had seen her mother writing? Was the widow now informed that the senile old admirer who had advanced the money to pay her creditors had been found dead in his bed? and that her promissory note had passed into the possession of the heir-at-law? If this was the right reading of the riddle, no wonder she had sent her daughter ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... celebrated art of divination amongst the Tuscans took its beginning thus: A labourer striking deep with his cutter into the earth, saw the demigod Tages ascend, with an infantine aspect, but endued with a mature and senile wisdom. Upon the rumour of which, all the people ran to see the sight, by whom his words and science, containing the principles and means to attain to this art, were recorded, and kept for many ages.—[Cicero, De Devina, ii. 23]—A birth suitable to ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Europe, and known only as a horsebreeder until he began to write abrupt little letters about the Budget. He led the French Duke upstairs, talking trivialties in a hearty way, and there presented him to another and more important English oligarch, who got up from a writing-desk with a slightly senile jerk. He had a gleaming bald head and glasses; the lower part of his face was masked with a short, dark beard, which did not conceal a beaming smile, not unmixed with sharpness. He stooped a little as he ran, like some sedentary head clerk or cashier; and even without ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... wholesome as it was fresh and sparkling, the professor had given him into the safe hands of Reed Opdyke. It was as he said: he was quite well aware that, although Reed had his sirens, they all were curiously clean ones; in short, that his young Mammon was nobler far than many a senile God. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... inextinguishable flame. So powerful is this instinctive faith, that men of simple modes of character are prone to antedate its consummation. And thus it happened with poor Grandsir Dolliver, who often awoke from an old man's fitful sleep with a sense that his senile predicament was but a dream of the past night; and hobbling hastily across the cold floor to the looking-glass, he would be grievously disappointed at beholding the white hair, the wrinkles and furrows, the ashen visage and bent form, the melancholy ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... They exchanged one glance of consternation, and the fancied security in which they had dwelt, as fragile as a crystal sphere, was shattered in an instant. The old man was broken by his illness, his recent hardships. He was verging on his dotage. His senile folly might well cost ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... we ready to give up all the results we have attained with such effort, results of which we have been boasting for three centuries; to give up every convenience and charm of our existence, to prefer savage youth to the senile decay of civilization, to pull down the palace raised for us by our ancestors only for the pleasure of having a hand in the founding of a new house, which will doubtless be built long after we are gone?" (Herzen, vol. v. ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... childhood. Has the immortal spirit decayed with the organisation, or is it dwelling in sorrow, bound in its 'house of clay'? If this be so, the 'spirit' must be unconscious, or else separate from the very individual whose essence it is supposed to be, for the old man does not suffer when his mind is senile, but is contented as a little child. And not only is this constant, simultaneous growth and decay of body and mind to be observed, but we know that mental functions are disordered and suspended by various physical conditions. Alcohol, many drugs, fever, disorder ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... withal—and have been admitted to be so by the most captious critics. Many of the very strong things in Chaucer, which you may call coarse and gross if you will, are omitted by Pope, and many softened down; nor is there a single line in which the spirit is not the spirit of satire. The folly of senile dotage is throughout exposed as unsparingly, though with a difference in the imitation, as in the original. Even Joseph Warton and Bowles, affectedly fastidious over-much as both too often are, and culpably prompt to find fault, acknowledge that Pope's versions are blameless. "In ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... produces no better fruits than tyranny, murder, rapine, and destitution of national morality, I would rather wish our country to be ignorant, honest, and estimable, as our neighboring savages are. But whither is senile garrulity leading me? Into politics, of which I have taken final leave. I think little of them, and say less. I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... contemplated the reflection of his face in the small oval mirror which hung on the rough gray plaster wall opposite, just over the small, cheap, brown-stained wooden bureau. The sight of his countenance, as is the case with most of us who have not yet entered the limbo of senile decrepitude and still dare look ourselves in the face, was always a source of extreme satisfaction to him. He held it in the highest esteem as though it were the head of some beautiful antique Apollo, and in his, the Colonel's estimation, was ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... avidity, how, after her removal to apartments of her own, he used to spend hours in the adjoining park just to catch a glimpse of her figure as she crossed the sidewalk on her way to and from her carriage. Indeed, his senseless, almost senile passion for this magnificent beauty became a by-word in some mouths, and it only escaped being mentioned at the inquest from respect to Mr. Fairbrother, who had never recognized this weakness in his steward, and from its lack of visible connection with her horrible death and the stealing ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... in Chicago and New York but whom it had not seen since, had returned home and taken charge of the Express, which had been willed him by the late editor, his uncle. The Express, which had been a slippered, dozing, senile sheet under old Jimmie Bruce, burst suddenly into a volcanic youth. The new editor used huge, vociferous headlines instead of the mere whispering, timorous types of his uncle; he wrote a rousing, rough-and-ready English; occasionally he placed an important editorial, set up in heavy-faced ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... for China, it became my duty daily to dress the foot of a patient suffering from senile gangrene. The disease commenced, as usual, insidiously, and the patient had little idea that he was a doomed man, and probably had not long to live. I was not the first to attend to him, but when the case was transferred ...
— A Retrospect • James Hudson Taylor
... him back his ring, and then he broke down pitifully. Doubtless there was good in him, but I saw him only once; and with nothing to contrast against it, I may not now attempt to breathe life into the dust of his senile passion. These were the last words that passed between ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... but to a sluggish, spiritless, and sleepy old age. Young men are more frequently wanton and dissolute than old men; but yet, as it is not all young men that are so, but the bad set among them, even so senile folly—usually called imbecility—applies to old men of unsound character, not to all. Appius governed four sturdy sons, five daughters, that great establishment, and all those clients, though he ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... said to me in a low voice, "that the poor woman has fallen into senile imbecility, and that is the cause of her looks, which are so strange, considering the terrible sight she ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... of the knock he raised his head, an expression, which was a mixture of fear and senile cunning came into his lined and pallid face, his dull eyes peered from under their lids with a flash of sudden alertness, and with one motion of his long hands he hurriedly folded the deed before ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... he is really older and has lived before at some remote period, and that his conduct fully justifies his title as A Venerable Impostor. A variety of circumstances corroborate this impression: His tottering walk, which is a senile as well as a juvenile condition; his venerable head, thatched with such imperceptible hair that, at a distance, it looks like a mild aureola, and his imperfect dental exhibition. But beside these physical peculiarities may be observed certain moral ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... the ville septenaire; for it had, it is said, seven churches, seven fountains, seven mills, seven woods, seven vineyards, seven gates, and seven towers on the ramparts. It is another senile hamlet now, and imagination must do all the work. Even the cathedral has been altered, and in its large, rather plain interior are few relics of its earlier state, few marks to tell of the after-despoiled ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... insinuation disgusted Crane. Was everything in the world vile? He had left a young life swimming hopelessly in the breakers of disaster, buoyed only by faith and love; and at his side sat a man who winked complacently, and beamed upon him with senile admiration because of ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... monstrous serpent, broods on the gold in a hole in the rocks. Mimmy needs the help of a hero for that; and he has craft enough to know that it is quite possible, and indeed much in the ordinary way of the world, for senile avarice and craft to set youth and bravery to work to win empire for it. He knows the pedigree of the child left on his hands, and nurses it to ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... I," replied Marston, dryly. "And I'm growing senile, too, I'm afraid. I went forward and wasted as much anathema on that skipper of mine as I would use up in putting through a half-million deal with an opposition traffic line. Next thing I know I'll be arguing with, the smoke-stack. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... that? Was he born thus? To love is as natural as to eat and to drink. He is not a man. Is he a dwarf or a giant? What! always that impassive body? Upon what does he feed, what brew does he drink? Behold him at thirty as old as the senile Mithridates; the poisons of vipers ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... triumphs came to him in his final years of melancholy isolation; but in spite of the applause that greeted The Drapier Letters and Gulliver's Travels, he brooded morbidly over his past life. At last his powerful mind gave way, so that he died a victim to senile dementia. By his directions his body was interred in the same coffin with Stella's, in the cathedral of which ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... messenger to inform Domine Rodgers that his services would not be needed that evening for the marriage, as Colonel Crawford had been called to Albany by telegraph, at a moment's notice, on government business. It seemed idle to attempt, in her father's senile and helpless condition, to make him acquainted with the real circumstances of the case; and so Joe's suggestion was carried much further than she had intended, and the old man and all the household were led to the same understanding, with the additional ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... life which have been put into practice by a large number of people during the last two or three years, and are steadily gaining more attention. Sour milk as an article of diet appears to have a peculiar value in arresting the supposed senile changes which are largely due to ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... extreme fecundity of nature, who, as before stated, has in all the varieties of her offspring a prolific power much beyond (in many cases a thousandfold) what is necessary to fill up the vacancies caused by senile decay. As the field of existence is limited and preoccupied, it is only the hardier, more robust, better suited to circumstance individuals, who are able to struggle forward to maturity, these inhabiting only the situations to which they have superior adaptation and greater power of ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... a long while at one of the copyists—an old man, decrepit and almost blind, with heavy convex spectacles that gave him the appearance of a sea-monster, whose hands trembled with senile unsteadiness. Renovales recognized him. Twenty years before, when he used to study in the Museo, he had seen him in the same spot, always copying Los Borrachos. Even if he should become completely ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... at him with the greatest respect, and listens to his querulous plaint patiently. For that great dome of silence, his brain, repository of so many state-secrets, is still a redoubtable instrument: its wit and its magician's cunning have not yet lapsed into the dull inane of senile decay. Though fallen from power, after a bad beating at the polls, there is no knowing but that he may rise again, and hold once more in those tired old hands, shiny with rheumatic gout, and now twitching feebly under the discomfort of a superimposed malady, ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... indifference. With the increase of the years you come to a time when nothing matters. Anything which helps hearty youth this way is harmful. In ninety cases in a hundred age is a crime against the hopes of the world, and nothing ages like cynicism. This is the beginning of senile decay. And what is a man to do who has lavished his heart, and has always found that the woman has played counters of affectation against the sincere gold of his soul? Obviously he turns cynic, despising himself and his too cheap emotions; and to cheapen one's own emotions is to play the very devil. ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... would make our greatest modern achievements look small: common sense would say, probably the reminiscence of something actual. Certainly the Chinese emerged from it, and into daylight history, not primitive but effete: senile, not childlike. That may be only a racial peculiarity, a ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... XIV. curls, whose intrigues won for her husband command of the army, for another province? It was whispered, too, that the military glory of him of the Marshal Ney physiognomy was due to the good fortune of a senile field-marshal for an opponent. But no matter. These gentlemen had seen the enemy fly. They had won. Therefore, they were the supermen of sagas who ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... response of any kind; the undershot jaw became more intolerant. The personage made his opinion of the group disconcertingly plain, and the old boys understood that he knew them for a worthless lot of senile loafers, as great a nuisance in his building as was the snow without; and much too evident was his unspoken threat to see that the manager cleared them out ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... eyes were blazing when he cried, furiously: "Cut that 'old' out, or I'll show you something. Your mind's gone— senile ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... don't understand," he said furiously, "is why you have to lend yourself to this senile idiocy. Because some old women choose to sink themselves in a swamp is no reason why you should ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart |
