"Gawky" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... d'Annunzio's novels were a revelation, dazzling. And who that began even "Il Fuoco" could resist it? How adult, how subtle, how (in the proper signification) refined, seems the sexuality of d'Annunzio after the timid, gawky, infantile, barbaric sexuality of our "island story"! People are not far wrong on the Continent when they say, as they do say, that English novelists cannot deal with an Englishwoman—or could not up till a few years ago. They never get into the same room with her. ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... Dives's table doubles his soup, knifes his fish, tilts his plate into his lap, puts muscle into the crushing of his meringue, and tosses off the warm beaker in his finger-bowl. Camps by Tacoma sneer not at all, but candidly roar, at parallel accidents. Gawky makes a cushion of his flapjack. Butterfingers drops his red-hot rasher into his bosom, or lets slip his mug of coffee into his boot drying at the fire,—a boot henceforth saccharine. A mule, slipping his halter, steps forward unnoticed, puts his nose into the circle, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Plutarch Byle," said the stranger, raising his gaunt, gawky figure to a posture which, though far from erect, revealed a stature so much above the average height that the negro stepped back a few paces and stared with astonishment. Plutarch Byle's feet, hands and head seemed somewhat too ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... customs, and so the secret-society men were not attracted to him. The "trotting" or preliminary attentions to freshmen constitute a great and revered feature of college life. When I saw Field "trotting" a lank and gawky freshman for the "Mills Theological Society," the humor of it appealed to one soaked in the traditions of a college town, and we "became acquainted." Field left the class about ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... gawky young tenderfoot, both as to the West and the details of journalism, came into the office and asked me for a job as correspondent to write up the mines in North Park. He wore his hair longish and tried to make it curl. The result was a greasy coat collar and the general tout ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... in the early sunshine, and Natalie's mamma, comely and portly, did chaperonage duty. It was not long before the sails gave swell into the breeze and the little boat scurried to the Sound. Past the lighthouse on its gawky iron stalls, she flew, and now rounded the white sands ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... doorway and came slowly toward them, eyeing the two from the Sawtooth curiously while he chewed tobacco. His hands rested on his hips, his thumbs hooked inside his overalls; a gawky pose that fitted well his colourless personality,—and left his right hand close to ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... clergy, who, for the most part, so far from troubling their heads about persecuting people, only think of securing their tithes, eating their heavy dinners, puffing out their cheeks with importance on country justice benches, and occasionally exhibiting their conceited wives, hoyden daughters, and gawky sons ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Shosshi was a gawky young man with a blotched sandy face ever ready to blush deeper with the suspicion that conversations going on at a distance were all about him. His eyes were shifty and catlike; one shoulder overbalanced ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Clare-market, who had indeed from nature, the grace of being cross-eyed, now looked in ten thousand more various directions than she ever did before. Miss Prim, agitated in every limb, cracked her fan into twenty pieces. Miss Gawky, who had unfortunately been initiated by the chamber maid in the art of snuff-taking, plied her box with more zeal than ever. Miss Languish actually fainted, and was with some difficulty conveyed into the air. Such was the confusion ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... Musk-rat of honour and eminence, a chief of high degree among his people. The chief of the Musk-rats bade the Nanticoke enter this cabin, but a moment after he said, "No, no, that cannot be done. It is not high enough for such a tall, strapping gawky as you are. So sit you here, while I go and fetch you food." So the Nanticoke seated himself on the sward, while the chief of the Musk-rats went to his house to ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... importance to which no talents or virtues of his own entitled him. The Marquis de La Fayette was a young man of ancient family, and of fair but not excessive fortune. He was awkward in appearance and manner, gawky, red-haired, and singularly deficient in the accomplishments which were cultivated by other youths of his age and rank.[5] But he was deeply imbued with the doctrines of the new philosophy which saw virtue in the mere fact of resistance to authority; and ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... left school that day, and what his eyes saw as he leaned on the bridge was not a willing beast and a gladdened infant, but the puzzling world and the advance guard of its problems bearing down on him. Slim, gawky, untidy, fair, with his worn black-braided clothes, and slung over his shoulders in a bursting satchel the last load of his schoolbooks, and on his bright, rough hair a shapeless cap whose lining protruded behind, he had the ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... that comes in early youth—and always it does come then, though it is not always confessed—is a gawky and somewhat guilty joy that spends itself in sighs and blushes and Heaven knows what of self-discovery. Thus Grant in Laura's autograph album after all his versifying on the kitchen table could only write "Truly ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... by her, too, Aunt Emily. I rather shy at perfect types; girls, at the best, make me skittish. They make me think of myself and then I get gawky." ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... Patty, dainty, graceful and sweet, was the very antithesis of tall, gawky Azalea, with her countrified dress and badly made black shoes. Her careless air, too, was unattractive,—for it was not the nonchalance of experience, but the unselfconsciousness of sheer ignorance of urban ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... looked at her face in the glass more critically than she had done for years. Anne Stockard at her best had never been pretty. When young she had been called "gawky." She was very tall and her figure was lank and angular. She had a long, pale face and dusky hair. Her eyes had been good—a glimmering hazel, large and long-lashed. They were pretty yet, but the crow's feet about ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... not Drusy won't hev nothin' tew say tew him," said the girl. "That gawky-lookin' John Barker 'pears tew be hangin' raound her consid'able. 'Twould be kind er funny ef she should like him better." And she ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... claim was not endorsed, even by the humbler gentry with whom she was forced to associate, while as for the county proper it is not too much to say that that august community had never even heard of her. The Miss MacTavishes, ranging in age from fifteen to five-and-twenty, were rather gawky young persons, with red hair and a perpetual giggle; in fact they could not speak without giggling, even if it was to tell you that somebody was dead. Every now and then Mrs MacTavish would proclaim, with portentous complacency, that Florrie, or Lizzie, or Aggie, was "out"—to ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... few perilous weeks throve amazingly. He ceased to be a pretty creature, pathetic in his helplessness, and grew into a gawky hobbledehoy, rough and ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... at Puberty.— The angular, gawky feeling gradually disappears; the girl becomes self-conscious; new impulses arise, and she gives up many of the hoydenish ways of childhood. The girl's imagination is more lively, and just at this time mathematics form an excellent subject for mental occupation. ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... played it well, but I did not look well, and I must contradict emphatically the kind assumption that I must have been a "delightful little fairy." As Mamilius I was really a sweet little thing, but while I was playing Puck I grew very gawky—not to say ugly! My hair had been cut short, and my red cheeks stuck out too much. ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... good at anything—a harmless mafflin; he was a long gaumless gawky when he went awa," said Richard Turnbull. "The Feltrams and the Mardykes was sib, ye know; and that made what passed in the misfortune o' that young lady spoken of all the harder; and this young man ye speak of is a grandson ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... and paidilt i' the burn, gettin' geyan weet the while. Then Sally pu'd the gowans wat wi' dew an' twined her bree wi' tasselled broom, while I had a wee crackie wi' Tibby Buchan, the flesher's dochter frae Auld Reekie. Tibby's nae giglet gawky like the lave, ye ken,—she's a sonsie maid, as sweet as ony hinny pear, wi' her twa pawky een an' her ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... they had been emptied of air, a pompous nose that drooped till it very nearly touched a projecting underlip like a bracket, giving her an expression of determined contempt which she very certainly had never felt. In short, she suggested the absurd idea of a solemn, gawky Marlborough disguised ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... was the first of Edison's masters, and perhaps his fellows, who appreciated him. Mediocrity had only seen the gawky stripling, with his moonstruck air, and pestilent habit of trying some new crotchet. Himself an inventor, Milliken recognised in his deep-set eye and musing brow the fire of a suppressed genius. He was then just twenty-one. The friendship of Mr. Milliken, and ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... clumsy, ungraceful, bungling, maladroit, gawky, inelegant, ungainly, loutish, unskillful, unwieldy, uncourtly; embarrassing. Antonyms: graceful, dexterous, deft, courtly, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... so by dint of digging his weapon into the ribs of all and sundry, they being, as he expressed it, too thick on the clod, he cleared a path for the grocer-mayor, who had gotten himself again into his scarlet gown. His worship was gawky, flustered, and uncertain, and listened like a scared rabbit to mine host, a man of much talk, who explained proudly what was ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... Courcy Vavasour bending over her in an attitude that betokened the utmost admiration for both parties to the tete-a-tete. Under ordinary conditions,—that is to say, if Vavasour's existence depended on his own exertions,—Helen's eyes would have dwelt on a gawky youth endowed with a certain pertness that might in time have brought him from behind the counter of a drapery store to the wider arena of the floor. As it was, a reasonably large income gave him unbounded assurance, and his credit with a good tailor was unquestionable. ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... graduate of a Normal School is exempted by military law from more than a year's service in the army: he leaves college a trained soldier. Deportment is also a requisite: special marks are given for it; and however gawky a freshman may prove at the time of his admission, he cannot remain so. A spirit of manliness is cultivated, which excludes roughness but develops self-reliance and self-control. The student is required, when speaking, to look his teacher in the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... of Catie? If she had had the chances which had come to him, if she could have gone to Smith, for instance, or Bryn Mawr, she would have come out of the mill a finished little product, clever, adaptable, and not a gawky, under-nourished, over-strenuous bumpkin like himself. In the depths of his self-abasement, Scott Brenton did not hesitate to ply himself with ugly adjectives. Indeed, they seemed to him to be doing something towards the removal of his ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... much of society. Well, since she is not gawky, I like her better than if she were blase. Anything but your blase girls," he observed to himself, with a consciousness that he was an ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... class had turned out to hear the new boy preacher, filling every chair, even the one behind which I was to stand, and every bench that had been provided was full, and the sides of each of the two beds in the room, and some were standing. Among these was a gawky youth, about twenty years of age, green—that is, immature—in appearance, and dressed in store clothes. I noticed that after meeting, with a great many others, he stayed to dinner. Later on I learned that he was a son of the heroic man and woman whose house had been open for years for preaching ...
— The Heroic Women of Early Indiana Methodism: An Address Delivered Before the Indiana Methodist Historical Society • Thomas Aiken Goodwin
... had armed himself with a bunch of enormous red roses from the leading florist of Albany and set forth upon his expedition with any formulated plot against the little heiress who was the company's ward. He recalled her in fact as a most unattractive, gawky little girl, who must have changed inconceivably for the better if she were to interest Mr. Ashly Crane personally. But the Clark estate, under the skillful method of treatment for which he was largely responsible, ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... was standing at the open stable door, his grey-bearded chin resting on his big brown hand, his eyes staring meditatively in front of him. It was a breezy, sunny autumn day, and all the world about him was astir with life; gawky yellow-legged fowls pecked and scratched round his feet with prodigious activity, calves were bleating in the adjacent pens, while the very pigs were scuttling about their styes, squealing the while as though it ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... expression, which insensibly gave confidence to his friends, although it aroused their irritation. A spirit of boyish rebellion and importance looked out of Ephraim's black eyes; his mouth was demure with mischief, his gawky figure perpetually uneasy and twisting, as if to find entrance into small forbidden places. There was something in Ephraim's face, when she looked suddenly at him, which continually led his mother to infer that he had been transgressing. "What have you been doin', Ephraim?" ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... opening on the lawn, and all about the ground floor generally, Jessica, who was now a lean and lined and baldish but still very efficient and energetic old woman, kept her three cows and a multitude of gawky hens. These two were part of a little community of stragglers and returned fugitives, perhaps a hundred and fifty souls of them all together, that had settled down to the new conditions of things after the Panic and Famine and ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... Cleopatra had looked on, wistfully it is true, but not enviously at her sister's astonishingly successful career: for was not Baby only a child after all? And, from the age of eleven to fourteen, Leonetta had been so outrageously gawky and unattractive, no matter how beautifully she happened to be clad, that Cleopatra's feelings of uneasiness about her sister were laid to rest as if for ever during ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... French novel, but the place held me and I stayed. I sat down in an arm-chair before the fireplace and the stone birds. Very odd those gawky things, like prehistoric Great Auks, looked in the moonlight. I remember that the alabaster moon shimmered like translucent pearl, and I fell to wondering about its history. Had the old Sabaens used such a jewel in their rites ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... fishermen; loose-jointed, easy-swinging trappers; athletes from the city foot-ball and hockey teams; and gawky, long-armed farmers joined the First Newfoundland Regiment at the outbreak of war. A rigid medical examination sorted out the best of them, and ten months of bayonet fighting, physical drill, and twenty-mile route marches over Scottish ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... pattern. At any rate he was distinctly hairy, like the Ainos, or aborigines of Japan, in our own day, of whom Miss Isabella Bird has drawn so startling and sensational a picture. Several of the pre-Glacial sketches show us lank and gawky savages with the body covered with long scratches, answering exactly to the scratches which represent the hanging hair of the mammoth, and suggesting that man then still retained his old original hairy ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... to the unfurnished and somewhat dingy kitchen. It had a low window-seat, from the extreme ends of which, as the two skippers entered, two figures—a middle-aged woman and a gawky lad— arose and saluted them; the one with a highly genteel curtsey, the other with an awkward half-pull at his forelock, and much scraping with ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... all the luck," remarked an enamelled dame, whose bridge and dressmakers' debts were on a par with those of her three daughters who had safely, oh! quite, but most unsuccessfully survived many seasons, "I wonder how Susie managed it? Gawky young miss, isn't she? Just out ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... in their youth. He cared little for boyish games, and still less for the bright eyes of the girls. He had remarkably long arms and legs, which were too often in the way of his comrades, and from which he derived the nickname at the Latin-School of "gawky Sumner"; and it may be well to notice here that there is no better sign for future superiority than for a lad to be ridiculed in this manner; while the wags who invent such sobriquets usually come to no good end. [Footnote: More than one such has died the death of an inebriate.] ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... gawky roadster when he met Gabriel Druse making for the bridge. Their greeting was as cordial as hasty. Anxious as was the Ry to learn what was going on in the towns, Jowett's mount caught his eye. It was but ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... very sadly needed. As he climbed the hill the reaction from the excitement of his late adventure suddenly made him very miserable indeed, so that he had an immediate impulse to cry, but he stood still in the middle of the street and made fists with his hands and called himself "a damned gawky idiot," words that he had admired in the mouth of Sam Figgis some days before. "Gawky" was certainly the last thing that he was, but it was a nice queer word, and it ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... its appearance in 1819: this was the velocipede, or as it was then called "the hobby," the grandfather of the bicycle and tricycle of our day. A tall gawky perched on the summit of a lofty bicycle, with an enormous wheel gyrating between a couple of spindle shanks capped with enormous crab-shells, is a sufficiently familiar and ridiculous object in our times; but the appearance presented by the people of 1819, who adopted the spider looking thing ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... remark the new boy walked forward with no more articulate complaints, though his face was drawn and he bit his lips. He was shown the chicken-yard—full of gawky, half-grown chickens shedding their down and growing their feathers—and forgot his feet in the fascination of scattering grain to them and watching their fluttering scrambles. He was shown the rabbit-house and allowed to take one of the limp, unresponsive little ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... trailer's shoulder and waiting for his turn in the line in front of the ticket window, when a tall, gawky, good- looking country lad sprang out of it and at him with an expression of surprise and anxiety. "Father," he said, "father, what's wrong? What are you doing here? Is anybody ill at ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... too many for us all three, we were to demand the assistance of our competitors, who should be ready to enforce us, or oppose anything that might be undertaken for the master's relief. One of my principal assistants was called Jeremy Gawky, son and heir of a wealthy gentleman in the neighbourhood; and the name of the other, Hugh Strap, the cadet of a family which had given shoemakers to the village time out of mind. I had once saved Gawky's life, by plunging ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... deil-ma-care about their jaw, The senseless, gawky million; I'll cock my nose abune them ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns |
