"Tahitian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pictures of which a dozen years ago I was certainly quite incapable of perceiving the beauty. The best still-life studies of Cezanne seem to me to have the grandiose quality of epics. And that picture by Gauguin, showing the back of a Tahitian young man with a Tahitian girl on either side of him, is an affair which I regard with acute pleasure every morning. There are compositions by Vuillard which equally enchant me. Naturally I cannot accept the whole school—no more than the whole ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... 146. "Omare," pronounce as a dactyl. A loaded quarterstaff, one of the two favourite weapons of the Tahitian brave; the javelin, or casting spear, was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... may be tempted to stumble over some foreign words. I have put them in only when necessary, to give the color and rhythm of Tahiti. The Tahitian words are very easily pronounced and they are music in the mouth of any one who sounds them properly. Every letter and syllable is pronounced plainly. The letters have the Latin value and if one will remember this in reading, the Tahitian words will flow ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... dialect gets so strangely altered as virtually to lose its identity. Even numerals and personal pronouns, which the Aryan has preserved for fifty centuries, get lost every few years in Polynesia. Since the time of Captain Cook the Tahitian language has thrown away five out of its ten simple numerals, and replaced them by brand-new ones; and on the Amazon you may acquire a fluent command of some Indian dialect, and then, coming back after twenty years, find yourself worse off than ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... missionaries, who were then on their way to attempt the conversion of his people. The third event occurred in 1829. It was the conversion of a powerful chief of the Friendly Islands, who afterwards became King George of Tonga. Some time before this, two Tahitian teachers connected with the London Missionary Society, on their way to Fiji had resided with Tubou, chief of Nukualofa. Under their influence and instruction Tubou gave up the Tonga gods, destroyed the spirit house, and erected a place for Christian worship, in which he and his people, ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... head, and is now used for to enter a house. Ruku, which had the same original meaning in New Zealand, now expresses the act of diving. The Polynesian word toro at first indicated anything in the position of a hand with extended fingers, whence comes the Tahitian term for an ox, puaatoro, stretching pig, in allusion to the way in which an ox carries his head. Too (Marquesas), to put forward the hand, is now used for to take. Tongo (Marquesas), to grope with extended ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... like the lives of the Tahitian shepherds in the Anti-Jacobin—the shepherds whose occupation was a sinecure, as there were no ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... beyond Prison Hill; and the gardeners, being all convicts, had no choice but to continue to obey. All other folks slumbered and took their rest: Vaekehu, the native Queen, in her trim house under the rustling palms; the Tahitian commissary, in his beflagged official residence; the merchants, in their deserted stores; and even the club-servant in the club, his head fallen forward on the bottle-counter, under the map of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
