"Centenarian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... most interesting. There was Mr. Alexander Hamill, the father of Congressman Hamill of Jersey City, a student of Queen's College in Ireland and who afterward taught in the National Schools of Ireland, a well-read, highly cultured, broad-minded man of affairs; and dear Uncle Jimmie Kelter, almost a centenarian, whose fine old gray hair gave him the appearance of a patriarch. Uncle Jimmie nightly revelled in the recital to those who were present as ready listeners, his experience when he was present at a session of the House of Parliament in London and heard the famous Irish ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... shade of the centenarian trees was a rough-hewn bench that they themselves had made years before; there Gorgo seated herself, but ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Somerville, to whom we owe the English translation of Laplace's Mecanique celeste, of whom Humboldt said, "In pure mathematics, Mrs. Somerville is absolutely superior." Like Caroline Herschel, she was almost a centenarian, appearing always much younger than her years: she died at Naples, in 1872, at the age of ninety-two.—So, too, the Russian Sophie Kovalevsky, descendant of Mathias Corvinus, King of Hungary, who, an accomplished mathematician at sixteen, married at eighteen, in order ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... at this point but something which I cannot explain induces me to keep it up a few minutes longer, in order to tell you that the little McTougalls grew up to be splendid men and women; that dear old granny is still alive and well, insomuch that she bids fair to become a serene centenarian; that my sweet Edie is now "fair, fat, and forty;" that I am grey and hearty; that Dumps is greyer, and so fat, as well as stiff, that he wags his ridiculous tail with the utmost difficulty; that Brassey and the Slogger ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... vigour very rare in a man of his age. Even to the last his strength seemed unimpaired, and he succumbed to a chance attack of bronchitis, but for which his constitution seemed to possess sufficient stamina to have made him a centenarian. He died at his residence on the 15th of February, 1873, being then in his ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... welcomes you home, Miss Sybil! Even the Black Torrent! I never heard the cascade sing so loud and merry as it does to-night!" said Old Abe, or Father Abraham, as he was called, for being a full centenarian, and the oldest negro, by twenty years, of any ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... his last visit he had told Paul Hayne that he did not wish to live to be old—"an octogenarian, far less a centenarian, like old Parr." He hoped that he might stay until he was fifty or fifty-five; "one hates the idea of a mummy, intellectual or physical." If those coveted years had been added to his thirty-eight beautiful ones, a brighter radiance might ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... him many more years, well and good. Further, if the woman in the casting office persisted, as she had for ten days, in saying "Nothing yet" to inquiring screen artists, he might be compelled to intensify the regime of the Ohio centenarian. Perhaps a glass of clear cold water at night, after a hearty midday meal of drug—store sandwiches and pie, would ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... stories in many various metres, to be called "Roses of Midnight." One of the characteristics of the volume was that daylight was banished from its pages. In the sensual lamplight of yellow boudoirs, or the wild moonlight of centenarian forests, my fantastic loves lived out their lives, died with the dawn which was supposed to be an awakening to consciousness ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... glory-hole, eh, Kwaque?" Daughtry told his seventeen-years- old brown-skinned Papuan with the withered ancient face of a centenarian, the legs of a living skeleton, and the huge-stomached torso of an elderly Japanese wrestler. "Eh, ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... He was born before Napoleon had been heard of. He went through a battle before the death of Nelson. He outlived Wellington by forty years. His name stood on the Active List for all but the final decade of the nineteenth century. And, as an honoured centenarian, he is vividly remembered by many who were still called young a century after the battle that brought him ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... to her senses and the public had forgotten her want of modesty and discretion. This ought to be called the Age of Fireworks. The craze for notoriety is penetrating our very almshouses, and every toothless old mumbler of ninety wants to get himself palmed off as a centenarian in the papers and have a lot of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... men who can wear a coat as a red Indian will ride a mustang which a white man has left for dead, beyond the period predetermined by the nature of tailoring as the natural term of existence allotted to earthly garments. We look upon a centenarian as a miracle of longevity, and he is careful to tell us his age if he have not lost the power of speech; but if the coats of poor men could speak, how much more marvellous in our eyes would their powers of life ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... wife's mother's mother, a lady of sweet seventy. Only a minority of mankind can obtain a grandmother-in-law by marrying, but Wimp was not unduly conceited. The old lady suffered from delusions. One of them was that she was a centenarian. She dressed for the part. It is extraordinary what pains ladies will take to conceal their age. Another of Wimp's grandmother-in-law's delusions was that Wimp had married to get her into the family. ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... corner stood an oak spinning-wheel, more than centenarian in age, fallen into hopeless desuetude, but gay with the strings of scarlet pepper pods hung up to dry, and twined among its silent spokes. On a trivet provided with lizard feet that threatened to crawl away, rested a copper kettle bereft of its top, once the idol of three generations ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the hill, and drove into the forest. The road in front of me wound along among thick clumps of hazel-bushes, and was already inundated with gloom; I advanced with difficulty. My gig jolted over the firm roots of the centenarian oaks and lindens, which incessantly intersected the long, deep ruts—the traces of cart-wheels; my horse began to stumble. A strong wind suddenly began to drone up above, the trees grew turbulent, big drops of rain clattered sharply, and splashed ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... lustre and popularity of the Holy See, published a bull which granted indulgences to the pilgrims who should that year, and every centenary to come, visit the church of the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul at Rome. At this first celebration of the centenarian Christian jubilee the concourse was immense; the most moderate historians say that there were never fewer than a hundred thousand pilgrims at Rome; others put the numbers as high as two hundred thousand, and contemporary poetry as well ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... somebody's faith,—as if faith did not require exercise as much as any other living thing, and were not all the better for a shaking up now and then. I don't mean that it would be fair to bother Bridget, the wild Irish girl, or Joice Heth, the centenarian, or any other intellectual non-combatant; but all persons who proclaim a belief which passes judgment on their neighbors must be ready to have it "unsettled," that is, questioned, at all times and by anybody,—just as those ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... statue and had it reproduced in marble; it is in the Albani Museum to-day. In 1794 the Lanty family discovered it there, and asked Vien to copy it. The portrait which showed you Zambinella at twenty, a moment after you had seen him as a centenarian, afterward figured in Girodet's Endymion; you yourself ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... that swept the salt sea-ridges When VERE BROKE of the Shannon smote The foe, and, struck, left WALLIS smiting,— Sends echoes down the years that float To Thobal o'er the sounds of fighting. Memories of greatness make men great! Brave centenarian, you with pleasure May greet the youth who guard our State. You, whose long memories can measure So wide a sweep of England's war, Must joy to see her served as boldly As in those sad mad days afar, When, gazing on her children coldly, She alienated kindred ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various
... dat." He had no idea of his age. The longer the Davenports knew him, the more they realized the truth of this. Sometimes he would make himself out a centenarian, and then, by his own reckoning, he was ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine |
