"Gape" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... men, one standing under the bow and one under the stern, their arms extended and their hands clutching the sides. The beach was forty yards away; the current was swift and as opaque as chocolate; they could not see what depths might gape before them; but they must do the distance without ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Let other hungry mortals gape on, And on the bones their stomach fill hard; But let All Souls men have their mallard. Oh, by the blood of King Edward, It ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... we do no longer gape on the aristocracy admiringly, and write of them curiously, as if they were creatures in a Paradise? Is it that Thackeray has converted us? In part, surely, we are just as snobbish as ever, though the gods of our adoration totter to their fall, and "a hideous hum" from the ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage—who can tell?—but truth—truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder—the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff—with his own inborn strength. Principles won't do. ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... his throat a huge blast, half roar, half howl. When Clare came to himself he knew, though he had never heard it before, that the fearful sound was the voice of the lion. He did not know that all it meant was, that his majesty had thought of his dinner. It was not indeed much more than an audible gape. He stood for a moment, not at all terrified, but half expecting to see a huge yellow animal burst out of one of the caravans—he could not guess which: the roar was much too loud to indicate one rather than another. He sat down again, but was not any longer inclined ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... the arm from which hemorrhage was similarly absent. Later observations have shown that in this accident absence of hemorrhage is the rule and not the exception. The wound is generally lacerated and contused and the mouths of the vessels do not gape, but are twisted and crushed. The skin usually separates at the highest point and the muscles protrude, appearing to be tightly embraced and almost strangulated by the skin, and also by the tendons, vessels, and nerves which, crushed ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... two horns CC, of a shape sufficiently differing from those of a blew Fly, though indeed they seem to be both the same kind of Organ, and to serve for a kind of smelling; beyond these were two indented jaws DD, which he open'd side-wayes, and was able to gape them asunder very wide; and the ends of them being armed with teeth, which meeting went between each other, it was able to grasp and hold a heavy body, three or four times the bulk and weight of its own body: It ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... assumed that he jolted rather horribly at the splintering bite of bone into brain. But who can say he did not reach a point-of-prescience, that his neuro-thalamics did not leap to span the eons, and gape in horror, in that precise and endless time just before his brains spewed in a gush of gray and gore, to ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... our direct course with a small gale of winde, and this day we had sight of the Island of Cyprus. [Sidenote: Cauo de la Griega.] The first land that we discouered was a headland called Cauo de la Criega, and about midnight we ankered by North of the Gape. This cape is a high hil, long and square, and on the East corner it hath a high cop, that appeareth vnto those at the sea, like a white cloud, for toward the sea it is white, and it lieth into the sea Southwest. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... Aldithely thyself. For who but the brave taketh time to think of another, and he only a serving-man, when himself is in danger? But all this talk procureth us no safe place to lie, and methinks already there be some in the streets that gape upon us." ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... At the first glimpse of her in her cobweb fineries, I was ill-bred enough to gape, whereat ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... chest with money, or to add another manor to his estate, who never grieved but at a bad mortgage, or entered a company but to make a bargain, would be astonished to hear of beings known among the polite and gay by the denomination of wits. How would he gape with curiosity, or grin with contempt, at the mention of beings who have no wish but to speak what was never spoken before; who, if they happen to inherit wealth, often exhaust their patrimonies in treating those ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... produced a swarm of imitators, some of whom, like Velasquez, Zurbaran, Ribera and Murillo, having spun their cocoons, passed through the chrysalis stage, developed wings, and soared to high heaven. But the generations of imitators who followed these have usually done little better than gape. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... went into the society, to speak from three to ten minutes) I thought it must be one of the finest things in the world to speak for three-quarters of an hour, and there was a legend circulated about an old member of the society's having done so, which used to make us all gape and stare. However, I fear it does not necessarily imply much more than length. Doyle spoke remarkably well, and made a violent attack on Mr. Canning's friends, which Gaskell did his best to answer, but very ineffectually from the nature ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... like some other marvels of the ancient time, this is a secret process that perished with the people who employed it. Did we desire it, we could embalm our princes and our priests, and retain their shrunken similitudes for distant coming times to gaze and gape upon, as skilfully as they who practised this art in Egypt's palmiest days. Nay, it is doubtless far within the truth to claim that better than they did we could do; and we are actually apprised of better methods and results than they employed or could attain, and it is not unlikely ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... by the picketed Horse. Tito crept near softly, so softly that the Horse did not see her till she was within twenty feet; then he gave a start that swung the tightened picket-rope up into the air, and snorted gently. Tito went quietly forward, and opening her wide gape, took the rope in, almost under her ears, between the great scissor-like back teeth, then chewed it for a few seconds. The fibres quickly frayed, and, aided by the strain the nervous Horse still kept up, the last of the strands ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... said the landlady, stepping back a pace, "I don't know as I can tell there ain't no sort o' likelihood that he's to hum this time o' day. Sam! you lazy feller, you han't got nothing to do but gape at folks ha' you seen the doctor go ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Thorndyke, "was based on several facts. In the first place, a wound inflicted on a living body gapes rather widely, owing to the retraction of the living skin. The skin of a dead body does not retract, and the wound, consequently, does not gape. This wound gaped very slightly, showing that death was recent, I should say, within half an hour. Then a wound on the living body becomes filled with blood, and blood is shed freely on the clothing. But ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... was too scared to do more than gape at th' skipper like a codfish three days out er water, an th' old man gits ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... crust With Anti-Judaic various carmagnole, Whooped praise of the Anti-just; Her boulevard brood Gyratory in convolvements militant-mad; Theatrical of faith in the Belliform, Her Og, Her Monstrous. Fled what force she had To buckle the jaw-gape, wide agog For the Preconcerted One, The Anticipated, ripe to clinch the whole; Queen-bee to hive the hither ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... me witless: I could only gape. He nodded confirmation, with a most serious mien. At length I found strength to ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... but think with yourself, with what a sting we read Plato's "Atlantic" and the conclusion of the "Iliad," and how we hanker and gape after the rest of the tale, as when some beautiful temple or theatre is shut up. But now the informing of ourselves with the truth herself is a thing so delectable and lovely as if our very life and being were for the sake of knowing. And the darkest and grimmest things in death ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... walking in his sleep. He tottered past them, however, hurried up the aisle, which was so narrow that Dan'l Ross could only reach his seat by walking sideways, and was gone before the minister could do more than stop in the middle of a whirl and gape in horror after him. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... window, and right away he noticed somethin'. 'Twas a beautiful, clear moonlight night, and the high board fence around the buildin's showed black against the white sand. And in that white strip was a ten-foot white gape. Nate had shut that gate afore he went upstairs. Who'd opened it? Then he heard the noise in the kitchen again. ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... had been walking to and fro round the wheels of his carriage, whistling briskly, could only gape when he heard these words; while Arkady coolly pulled his luggage out of the carriage, took his seat beside Bazarov, and bowing politely to his former fellow-traveller, he called, 'Whip up!' The coach rolled away, and was soon out of sight.... Sitnikov, utterly confused, looked at his coachman, ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... th' gate off th' hinges an' propt it up between th' shafts asteead o'th' horse, an' hung th' harness ovver it; then they teed th' appron strings fast soa as he could'nt get off his seeat, an' waited wol he wakkened agean. They hadn't long to wait before he gave a gape or two, an' then he sed, "Awm nooan baan to caar here ony longer! Aw nobbut agreed to come to th' burrin, aw didn't bargain to stop wol they lettered th' gravestooan! Gee up!" An' he started floggin th' horse for owt he knew, but it nivver stirred. "Ger on wi' thi! or else awl bury thee an' ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... discerned through the blur Mrs. Beale seated there with a gentleman who immediately drew the pain from her predicament by rising before her as the original of the photograph of Sir Claude. She felt the moment she looked at him that he was by far the most shining presence that had ever made her gape, and her pleasure in seeing him, in knowing that he took hold of her and kissed her, as quickly throbbed into a strange shy pride in him, a perception of his making up for her fallen state, for Susan's public nudges, which quite bruised her, and for all ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... in a jostling crowd, soared away after the midges and May-flies and pestilent gnats that rise from marsh and pond to hold their joyous dances under the blue dome. Continually rushing open-mouthed after these, they have stretched their gape from ear to ear; but their bills have dwindled by disuse and left only an apology for ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... under the glare of an electric light, sat forty or fifty men, and for their use and amusement were provided spittoons of infinite capacity and generous gape. Most of the men wore frock-coats and top-hats—the things that we in India put on at a wedding-breakfast, if we possess them—but they all spat. They spat on principle. The spittoons were on the staircases, in each bedroom—yea, and in chambers even more sacred than these. They chased ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... tips of his plumped-out plumage pencilled plainly on the illuminated screen. As they looked, the sleepy little fellow stirred uneasily, woke, shook himself, and raised his head. They could see the gape of his tiny beak as he yawned in a bored sort of way, looked round, and then settled his head into his back again, while the ruffled feathers gradually subsided into perfect stillness. Then a gust of bitter ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... throat. This species differs from the rest of its tribe, by having its tongue free and pointing forwards. Its rounded head sinks completely into the body, the muzzle being abruptly truncated, so as to form a circular disc in front. So extremely small is the gape, that it would not be supposed, if separated from the body, to have belonged to a frog. On each side of the neck there is a gland, deeply sunk, and almost ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... up from his chair, and, leaning over the lamp chimney, drew wheezily on his cigarette to get a light. His eyes sought the Tocsin's face. To all intents and purposes she was entirely absorbed in the Magpie. He sat down again to gape, with well-stimulated, doglike admiration, at Slimmy Joe. WAS THIS, TOO, A PLANT? Why had the Magpie come to THEM with this story of Henry LaSalle? And then, the next instant, as the Magpie spoke, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... Stevenson in later Victorian letters cannot begin to be understood. For he was a very universal man; and talked some sense not only on every subject, but, so far as it is logically possible, in every sense. But the glaring deficiencies of the Victorian compromise had by that time begun to gape so wide that he was forced, by mere freedom of philosophy and fancy, to urge the neglected things. And yet this very urgency certainly brought on an opposite fever, which he would not have liked if he had lived to understand it. He liked Kipling, though with many healthy hesitations; but he ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... things, indeed, you have articulated, Proclaim'd at market-tables, read at churches, To face the garment of rebellion With some fine colour that may please the eye Of fickle changelings and poor discontents, Which gape and rub the elbows at the news Of hurly burly innovation; And never yet did Insurrection want Such water-colours ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... editor who is afraid to offend both must make a colorless paper indeed. He must discuss only those things about which every one agrees or nobody cares. The attitude of such an editor to his readers is, "Gape, sinner, and swallow," and to his advertisers, as Senator Brandegee said at a recent Yale Commencement in regard to a proposed Rockefeller bequest, "Bring on your tainted money." As a rule, the yellows are most in awe of the mob, while ...
— Commercialism and Journalism • Hamilton Holt
... Let me think. Ach! Gott im Himmel! He's in the hall!" She sank wretchedly into a chair. "Can you do nothing but gape and mutter?" In her desperation her tone ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... the snow there appears besides a number of inequalities, and the clefts previously covered with a fragile snow-bridge now gape before the wanderer where he goes forward, with their bluish-black abysses, bottomless as far as we can depend on ocular evidence. At some places there are also to be found in the ice extensive shallow depressions, down whose sides innumerable rapid streams flow in beds of azure-blue ice, often of ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... javelins were borne by these chosen knights. Siegfried wielded one full two spans broad, which upon its edges cut most dangerously. In their hands they held gold-colored bridles; their martingales were silken: so they came into the land. Everywhere the folk began to gape amazed and many of Gunther's men fared forth to meet them. High-mettled warriors, both knight and squire, betook them to the lords (as was but right), and received into the land of their lords these guests and took from their hands the black sumpters which bore the shields. ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... on her,' said she, 'but I niver thought she's be so pretty, and so staid and quiet-like too. T' most part o' girls as has looks like hers are always gape-gazing to catch other folks's eyes, and see what is thought on 'em; but she looks just like a child, a bit flustered wi' coming into company, and gettin' into as dark a corner and bidin' as ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... ventral elements fuse in the middle line to form a common plate of cartilage. Outside these arches are certain small cartilages, the extra branchials (ex.b.) which, together with certain small labials by the nostrils and at the sides of the gape, probably represent structures of considerably greater importance in that still more primitive fish, the lamprey. The deep groove figured lateral to the otic capsule is the connecting line of the orbital and anterior cardinal sinuses; the outline ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... be versed in all particulars concerning her sable liege subjects, and to be able to relate so fluently how Cato had run a splinter into his foot, Pompey had a touch of fever, and fifty other details, which, although doubtless very interesting to Menou, made me gape a little. I amused myself by looking round the dining-room, in which we then were, the furniture and appearance of which rather improved my opinion of Creole civilization and comfort. The matting that covered the floor ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... paneling, glaring in lattice-work, bosses, scrolls and frets, and trickling everywhere over the efflorescence of the plaster decorations. There are two or three committee-rooms, likewise, very elaborately, though very questionably, decorated, and usually on exhibition to rural visitors, who gape at them with a happy sense of the proprietorship of such pomp. The least unworthy of these is the room set apart for the Committee on Military Affairs: vivid wreaths of laurel decorate the ceiling much more effectively than do the sprawling females of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... the only one of the quartet unable to give utterance to his feelings. He could only cower there, and gape, while the unknown sailing craft was bearing down straight for the little motor-boat, and apparently bound ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... call that? I know I'll get my governor to make a row about it. It won't wash, I can tell you. What business has he to make us tub, eh, do you hear? That's only one thing. He came and jawed us in the big room this morning, and said he meant to make football compulsory! There! You needn't gape as if you thought I was gammoning. I'm not, I mean it. Football's to be compulsory. Every man Jack's got to play, whether he can or not. I call it brutal! The only thing is, it won't be done. The fellows will kick. I shall. I'm not going to play football to please ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... whose commonness alone prevents it from being most impressive, that departure of the night-express. The two hundred miles it is to travel stretch before it, traced by those slender clews, to lose which is ruin, and about which hang so many dangers. The drawbridges that gape upon the way, the trains that stand smoking and steaming on the track, the rail that has borne the wear so long that it must soon snap under it, the deep cut where the overhanging mass of rocks trembles to its fall, the obstruction that a pitiless malice ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... Shaking the dust from their feet, and fanning themselves with their kerchiefs. Then was the doctor, as soon as exchanged were the mutual greetings, First to begin, and said, almost in a tone of vexation: "Such is mankind, forsooth! and one man is just like another, Liking to gape and to stare when ill-luck has befallen his neighbor. Every one hurries to look at the flames, as they soar in destruction; Runs to behold the poor culprit, to execution conducted: Now all are sallying forth to gaze on the need of these exiles, Nor is there one who considers ...
— Hermann and Dorothea • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... observation. "Dearest, I told you, I warned you. I left you alone for ten weeks; but could that make you doubt it was coming? Not for worlds, not for millions, shall you give yourself to that roaring crowd. Don't ask me to care for them, or for any one! What do they care for you but to gape and grin and babble? You are ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... your suppliants, Mr. Osbaldistone," he said, "and we claim the refuge and protection of your roof till we can pursue a journey where dungeons and death gape for me at ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... they were as helpless as so many stone images. They made laws which nobody minded and which could not be executed. The federal judges opened court in a land filled with crime and violence and sat as holiday spectacles for insolent crowds to gape at—for there was nothing to try, nothing to do nothing on the dockets! And if a Gentile brought a suit, the Mormon jury would do just as it pleased about bringing in a verdict, and when the judgment of the court was rendered no Mormon cared for it and no officer could execute it. Our ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of mere straws. With the flying timbers came what seemed to be a stream of dirty water, flying far up in the air, as though a fireman's hose had been turned on! That must be the dark-looking crude oil, mingled with water, Toby conjectured, as he continued to gape and wonder. Then after all the suspicions of Maurice Dangerfield had proven true, and the Pontico Hills region did harbor rich deposits ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... that the British Museum at night, rid at last of those who gape at Egypt's dishonoured dead, may not be filled with snatches of music from throat or hand of those unfortunates, priest, priestess, fair woman and honoured man, dug out and laid upon a slab of grass for the education of the revellers of a wet Bank Holiday, or those others from Northern ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... a frantic dance round the combatants, screamed shrilly, and made dangerous, ineffectual darts at Tray. The servant girl neither danced, nor screamed, nor made darts; she stood stolidly still, with something between a gape and a grin on her broad red face. She had not the passion for dog-fights entertained by the gamins of the streets, such fights were simply immaterial trifles to her amidst the weightier concerns of her life; and she had seen her master's dog get too many kicks in the ribs—a ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... he gives not in mercy; he gives to some an inferior, and to some a superior portion; and yet so also he answereth them in the joy of their heart. Some men's hearts are narrow upwards, and wide downwards; narrow as to God, but wide for the world; they gape for the one, but shut themselves up against the other; so as they desire they have of what they desire; 'whose belly thou fillest with thy hid treasure,' for that they do desire; but 'as for me,' said David, these things will not satisfy, 'I shall ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the cursed house, where Gismund dwells. Sent from the grisly god, that holds his reign In Tartar's ugly realm, where Pelops' sire (Who with his own son's flesh, whom he had slain, Did feast the gods) with famine hath his hire; To gape and catch at flying fruits in vain, And yielding waters to his gasping throat; Where stormy Aeol's son with endless pain Rolls up the rock; where Tytius hath his lot To feed the gripe that gnaws his growing heart;[68] Where proud ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... know what he thinks in his heart. Let him, then, in all his walk and conduct, be anxious only to praise God, and serve his neighbor, and be afraid of no one; and let every one be in heart what he is in appearance, and not act a feigned part, whereby he shall make others gape with wonder. ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... devise To bear their pilgrim through the skies. Athwart her mouth a stick they throw: "Now bite it hard, and don't let go," They say, and seize each duck an end, And, swiftly flying, upward tend. It made the people gape and stare Beyond the expressive power of words, To see a tortoise cut the air, Exactly poised between two birds. "A miracle," they cried, "is seen! There goes the flying tortoise queen!" "The queen!" ('twas thus the tortoise spoke;) "I'm truly that, without a joke." Much better had she held her ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... abominate what are called popular lectures for that very reason. If you can be made to understand the apparent revolution of the heavens, that is better than all speculation. To understand is the great thing, not to gape. Now I assume you know that the earth goes round on its axis, and that consequently the stars seem to revolve round the earth. But the great difficulty is to realise how they go round, because the axis is not upright, nor yet horizontal, but inclined, and points to that star up there, ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... department store was reached and Mrs. Bobbsey let Freddie and Flossie take their time in looking into the several windows. One was full of dolls, which made the little girl gape in wonder ...
— The Bobbsey Twins - Or, Merry Days Indoors and Out • Laura Lee Hope
... myself! But my fear of ridicule was greater than my fear of vice. 'Bless me, my dear Lady Delacour,' whispered Harriot, as we left this house, 'what can make you in such a desperate hurry to get home? You gape and fidget: one would think you had never sat up a night before in your life. I verily believe you are afraid to trust yourself with us. Which of us are you afraid of, Lawless, or me, or yourself?' There ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... other idle hussies to gape and grin at? No. Bring them to the library," he snapped, and then he stalked ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... 44: The billows allow.—Ver. 566. 'Quoties sinit hiscere fluctus' is rendered by Clarke, 'As oft as the waves suffer him to gape.'] ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... they're rugged at edge and at rim; Scrub! Scrub! Scrub! Till with scissors the cuffs I must trim. Seam, and gusset, and band, Band, and gusset, and seam; And all the buttonholes gape, and the studs Drop out in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... quite easy to an aristocracy. For the aristocracy are the supreme instances of that frame of mind of which we spoke just now. Novelty is to them a luxury verging on a necessity. They, above all, are so bored with the past and with the present, that they gape, with a horrible ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... kitchen through a creaking door,—a normal, noisy soul, to whom life was a succession of laborious days spent between the cooking stove and the washtub with a regular Saturday night, in her best clothes, at the motion-picture theater at Sag Harbor to gape at the abnormality of Theda Bara and scream with uncontrolled mirth at the ingenious antics of Charlie Chaplin. An ancient Ford made possible this weekly dip ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... while she makes use of them for the purpose of deception. She persuades him that a thing costs so much because he would kick up a row if its price were higher. And she always extricates herself from the difficulty cunningly by a means so simple and so sly that we gape with amazement when by chance we discover them. We say to ourselves in a stupefied state of mind 'How is it we did not see this ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... fire,— When life is not alone a wasting scourge, But from the swamps of soulless strife emerge Some Pisgah peaks of promise where the dove Finds footing, high the whirling gulfs above,— Now the intrusion of this loathly shape, With pestilence-breathing jaws that blackly gape For indiscriminate prey, is sure a thing To set celestial guards once more a-wing; To fire a new St. Michael or St. George With the bright death to cleave the monster's gorge, And trample out the Laidly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... caverns underneath, by the insidious beating of the trade wind waves. The chiseled doorways to those caves are rare specimens of Nature's mysterious work; some large, some small and of queer, fantastic shapes; that black-mouthed gape at chance passers, while towering high above, a roof of table land—arid, scorching pampas, is just as uninviting as the water way below. So desolate is that part of the coast that it is but little known. Don Nicholas ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... there in their fishing-boats and look wonderingly after the Fram as she slowly and heavily steams along on her northward course. Many of them wave their sou'-westers and shout "Hurrah!" Others have barely time to gape at us in wonderment. In on the point are a troop of women waving and shouting; outside a few boats with ladies in light summer-dresses, and gentlemen at the oars entertaining them with small-talk as they wave their parasols and pocket-handkerchiefs. Yes; it is they who are sending us out. It ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... fell blue Plague upon the race of man. 'O, for the sheathed steel, so late which gave 3965 Oblivion to the dead, when the streets ran With brothers' blood! O, that the earthquake's grave Would gape, or Ocean lift its stifling wave!' Vain cries—throughout the streets thousands pursued Each by his fiery torture howl and rave, 3970 Or sit in frenzy's unimagined mood, Upon fresh heaps of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... them of mightier monsters than his own Mediterranean breeds; of the Leviathan, the whale, larger than the largest ship which he has ever seen, rolling and spouting among the ocean billows, far out of sight of land, and swallowing, at every gape of its huge jaws, hundreds of living creatures for its food. But he does not talk of it as a cruel and devouring monster, formed by a cruel and destroying deity, such as the old Canaanites imagined, ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... monarch of insatiate Death; The shark rapacious with descending blow Darts on the scaly brood, that swims below; The crawling crocodiles, beneath that move, Arrest with rising jaw the tribes above; 60 With monstrous gape sepulchral whales devour Shoals at a gulp, a million in an hour. —Air, earth, and ocean, to astonish'd day One scene of blood, one mighty tomb display! From Hunger's arm the shafts of Death are hurl'd, And one great Slaughter-house ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... father himself could not well brook to hear the girl blamed, and both he and Humfrey could not help treating her with a kind of deference that made the younger brothers gape and wonder what had come to Humfrey on his travels "to make him treat our Cis as a ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and effects in Nature are not without charm and beauty, as the little cracks in the crust of a loaf, though not intended by the baker, are agreeable and invite the appetite. Thus figs, when they are ripest, open and gape; and olives, when they are near decaying, are peculiarly attractive. The bending of an ear of corn, the frown of a lion, the foam of a boar, and many other like things, if you take them singly, are far from beautiful; ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... suburban peace, to feed them.... On the title-page there were the old names and some new ones, but the same grist,—a "homely" story of "real life" among the tenements, a "humorous" story of the new school, an article on a marvellous invention to set the public on the gape, etc.... Fosdick had an article of a serious nature, on Trades Unions and Socialism. 'So Dickie, having ceased to roll about the world,' thought Isabelle, 'has begun to write about it.' She turned down the page at his article and looked into the advertising ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... knew he had them in mind as strongly as ever. He was the sort of man who must have an objective, and what other objective could there be for him who cared for and believed in the conventional ambitions and triumphs only—the successes that made the respectable world gape and ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... still peace to grow. No foreign banish'd wight shall anchor in this port; Our realm it brooks no strangers' force, let them elsewhere resort. Our rusty sword with rest shall first his edge employ, To poll their tops that seek such change, and gape for joy. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... greatly displeased at the antics of the bench, a sob came to his ears. Turning his head swiftly, he caught sight of the stranger's face, and sorrow was marked so strongly upon it that the sight made Hopalong gape. His hand opened slowly and he cautiously sidled back again, disgruntled, puzzled, and vexed at himself for having strayed into a game where he was so hopelessly at sea. He thought it all over carefully and then gave it up as being too deep for him to solve. But he determined one thing: He ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... "Herald!" "Transkip!" Last'—a great gape swallowed up the 'last edition,' and he stood blinking at us like a ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... the chief, turning from them presently with a long gape, terminating in a ructatious sigh, "I'll shake out all the drunks in the calaboose this afternoon, and if your friend's among 'em I'll send him on over to you. No harm could happen to him here in Comanche. He'd be as safe here, night or day, as he would be playin' tennis ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... (with a smile). Hm! (To FINN.) Tell me—is there any way of leaving the castle but by the gate? Gape not at me so! I mean—can one escape from Ostrat unseen, while the ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... inconvenience. Plums and nuts abound, and are followed by a second course of hard, unripe, and tasteless nectarines and peaches. The season is closing fast, for the prickly pods of the ripening chestnut now begin to gape, and the indifferent grapes of the district attain their imperfect maturity, and are gathered for the wine-press. September is in its last week, and in less than another month we must all migrate somewhere for the winter. The baths, on the 15th of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... (ii. 91), 'was very subject to have his jaw dislocated; so that when he opened his mouth wider than ordinary, or when he yawned, he could not shut it again. In the midst of his harangues, therefore, if any of his pupils began to be tired of his lecture, he had only to gape or yawn, and the professor instantly caught the sympathetic affection; so that he thus continued to stand speechless, with his mouth wide open, till his servant, from the next room, was called in to set ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Then he got out the knife and the cup and one of the citrons. He cut the citron, and at once one of the Princesses appeared before him. If she had looked a beauty when he saw her in the mountain she was ten times lovelier, now that he saw her in the light of day. The Prince could only gape and gape ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... call it learning—'tis mother-wit. No one else sees the lady-moon sit On the sea, her nest, all night, but the owl, Hatching the boats and the long-legged fowl. When the oysters gape to sing by rote, She crams a pearl down each stupid throat. Howlowlwhitit that's wit, ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... but a little before you came to me, that he had followed me to half a dozen shops to see when I would take notice of him, and was at last going away with a belief 'twas not I, because I did not seem to know him. Other people make it so much their business to gape, that I'll swear they put me so out of countenance I dare not look up ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... with you. Sweet indeed is the community of interest, delightful the intercourse which a common foible begets; but correspondingly bitter and distressful is the forced union of nervous zeal and pitiless indifference. Spare us the so-called friends who come and gape and stare and go! What is more painful than the chatter of the connoisseur as it falls upon the long ears of the ignoramus! Collecting is a secret sin—the great pushing public must be kept out. It is sheer madness to puff and praise your hobby, and to invite Dick, Tom, and ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... inches square, some about a yard long and twelve inches wide. Cut thin, roll up like thin bread and butter. When they are laid down, fit close together, like bits of a puzzle, and roll well after laying. If they gape with shrinking, fill in between with finely sifted soil, and roll ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... proportion and shape of an Estrich. On the breast of the horse were the forepartes of this greedie birde aduaunced, whence as his manner is, hee reacht out his long necke to the raines of the bridle, thinking they had beene yron, and styll seemed to gape after the golden bit, and euer as the courser dyd rayse or curuet, to haue swallowed it halfe in. His winges, which hee neuer vseth but running, beeing spreaded full sayle, made his lustie steede as proude vnder him as he had beene some other Pegasus, and so quieueringly and tenderly were these ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... Come hither, Harry Cromwell. Mark, boy, the last words that I speak to thee. Flatter not Fortune, neither fawn upon her; Gape not for state, yet lose no spark of honor; Ambition, like the plague see thou eschew it; I die for treason, boy, and never knew it. Yet let thy faith as spotless be as mine, And Cromwell's virtues in thy face shall shine. Come, go along and ...
— Cromwell • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... Hind, how many sons have you Who call you mother, whom you never knew! But most of them who that relation plead Are such ungracious youths as wish you dead; They gape at rich revenues which you hold, And fain would nibble at your grandame ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... matter Or AEmilius' mouth choose I to smell or his —— Nothing is this more clean, uncleaner nothing that other, Yet I ajudge —— cleaner and nicer to be; For while this one lacks teeth, that one has cubit-long tushes, 5 Set in their battered gums favouring a muddy old box, Not to say aught of gape like wide-cleft gap of a she-mule Whenas in summer-heat wont peradventure to stale. Yet has he many a motte and holds himself to be handsome— Why wi' the baker's ass is he not bound to the mill? 10 Him if a damsel kiss we ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... for the grave doth gape, And strangely altered reflects thy shape; No dainty charms it doth disclose, Death will ravish thy beauty's rose; And all the rest will leave to thee When dug ...
— Mollie Charane - and Other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... other,—"Wait awhile!" By-and-by the flow of life in the streets ebbs, and the old leafy inhabitants—the smaller tribes always in front—saunter in, one by one, very careless seemingly, but very tenacious, until they swarm so that the great stones gape from each other with the crowding of their roots, and the feldspar begins to be picked out of the granite to find them food. At last the trees take up their solemn line of march, and never rest until they have encamped in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... all-bearing earth Which men do gape for till thou cram'st their mouths And choak'st their throats for dust: O charme thy breast And let me sinke into thee. Look who knocks; Andrugio calls. But O, she's deafe and blinde. A wretch but leane relief on ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... that time the winds fell away altogether, and the voyagers found themselves in that flat equatorial calm known to mariners as the Doldrums. The vertical rays of the sun shone blisteringly down upon them, making the seams of the ships gape and causing the unhappy crews mental as well as bodily distress, for they began to fear that they had reached that zone of fire which had always been said to ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... a hill, and as soon as you pass along its green channel, between rising thickets where rabbits come out to gape, you feel as though walking into a poem by Walter de la Mare. This road, if pursued, passes by a pleasing spot where four ways cross in an attenuated X. Off to one side is a field that is very theatrical in effect: it always reminds ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... title right or wrong, Lord Clifford vows to fight in thy defence. May that ground gape and swallow me alive, Where I shall kneel to him ...
— King Henry VI, Third Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... able to help yourself when the day of trial and judgment, of which I was speaking, comes upon you; you will go before the judge, the son of Aegina, and, when he has got you in his grip and is carrying you off, you will gape and your head will swim round, just as mine would in the courts of this world, and very likely some one will shamefully box you on the ears, and put upon you any ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... in his pocket. What a selfish beast, to be sure, must this same Peter Westcott, be, for here he was wishing—yes, almost wishing—that Stephen's happiness had not come to him. Always at the back of everything there had been the thought of Stephen Brant. Let all the pits in the world gape and yawn, there was one person in the world to whom Peter was precious. Now—in America—with a wife... some of the sunlight had gone out of the air and Peter's heart was suddenly ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... tender Lady, Queen Mary, Thou gentleness that dost enmoss and drape The Cross's rigorous austerity, Wipe thou the blood from wounds that needs must gape. ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... make the Pots, that when they are athirst being at a Hondrew's House, they may take his Pot, which hath a Pipe to it, and pour the Water into their mouths themselves: which none other of these inferior degrees may be admitted to do: but they must hold their hands to their mouths and gape, and the Hondrews themselves will pour the Water in. The Potters were at first denied this Honour, upon which they joyntly agreed to make Pots with Pipes only for themselves, and would sell none to the Hondrews that wanted; whereat being constrained, ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... contemporary multitude. It is huge and good-natured and common. It likes big, unmistakable, knock-down effects; it likes to get its money back in palpable, computable change. It's in a tremendous hurry, squeezed together, with a sort of generalized gape, and the last thing it expects of you is that you will spin things fine. You can't portray a character, alas, or even, vividly, any sort of human figure, unless, in some degree, you do that. Therefore the ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... that the good lady I have mentioned was, in the discharge of her function, showing the apartments to a cockney from London—not one of your quiet, dull, commonplace visitors, who gape, yawn, and listen with an acquiescent "umph" to the information doled out by the provincial cicerone. No such thing: this was the brisk, alert agent of a great house in the city, who missed no opportunity of doing business, as ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... truth; but he managed so well that the creature joined the honey-cakes in his bag. We were now obliged to descend toward the shore, the crest becoming impracticable. Above us the crater seemed to gape like the mouth of a well. From this place the sky could be clearly seen, and clouds, dissipated by the west wind, leaving behind them, even on the summit of the mountain, their misty remnants—certain proof that they were only moderately high, ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... down the letter as he said, "D——n it!" but took it up again in a few seconds, and catching it edgewise between his forefinger and thumb, gave a gentle pressure that made the letter gape at its extremities, and then, exercising that sidelong glance which is peculiar to postmasters, waiting-maids, and magpies who inspect marrowbones, peeped into the interior of the epistle, saying to himself as he did so, "All's fair in war, and why not ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... was angry; but that the Gilsons and Mrs. Corey, flap-eared, gape-mouthed, forward-bending, were very proud of their little Jeff. He saw that, except for their clothes and self-conscious coiffures, they were exactly like a gang of cracker-box loafers at Heinie Rauskukle's badgering a new boy ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... these people, to my taste, are immeasurably our superiors; and by ours, you know I include the English stage. The different lines here, are divided among the different theatres; so that if you wish to laugh, you can go to the Varietes; to weep, to the Theatre Francais; or, to gape, to the Odeon. At the Porte St. Martin, one finds vigorous touches of national character, and at the Gymnase, the fashionable place of resort, just at this moment, national traits polished by convention. Besides these, there are many other theatres, not one of which, in its way, can ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper |
