"Quaint" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there will be no end of your impertinent scribble, if I don't write to you. I write therefore: but, without entering into argument with such a conceited and pert preacher and questioner, it is, to forbid you to plague me with your quaint nonsense. I know not what wit in a woman is good for, but to make her overvalue herself, and despise every other person. Yours, Miss Pert, has set you above your duty, and above being taught or prescribed to, either by parents, or any body else. But go on, Miss: your mortification ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... pleasant and fertile valley, and is built partly on an island and partly on both sides of the river, which is canalized from this point to the estuary. The streets are narrow, and the houses are mostly picturesque old structures, built of wood, with many quaint gables and dark archways. The most remarkable building is the church of St Vulfran, erected in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. The original design was not completed. The nave has only two bays and the choir is insignificant. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sea, on the River Loire, in France, stands the quaint, sleepy old town of Nantes. The Erdre and the Sevre, two smaller streams unite with the Loire just here and the town is spread out in an irregular fashion over the islands, the little capes between the rivers, and the hills that stand round about. The ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... head of the steps leading down into the living-room, where Sabella, unconscious of the impending peril, was singing a quaint old hymn as she set the table for dinner. He had heard his mother sing that hymn when he was a boy at home. So long ago, and so far away. A second more and this sweet young life would be blotted out, and the little body, crushed beyond recognition, would be buried ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... do," said the hypnotist. "It carries one out of oneself to hear of those quaint, adventurous, half-civilised days of the nineteenth century, when men were stout and women simple. I like a good swaggering story before all things. Curious times they were, with their smutty railways and puffing old iron trains, their rum little houses ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... was quaint, it could scarcely be styled exaggerated, for the swamp was absolutely alive with animal life. The principal occupant of these marshes is the elephant, and hundreds of these monster animals may be seen in one herd, feeding like cattle ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... fifty years ago, but might have been five thousand years old or older. Phoenicians, one felt, trading on those strange shores in the morning of the world, might have combed or curled or braided their blue-black hair into some such quaint patterns. For this patch of population was as much a corner of Cornwall as Cornwall is a corner of England; a tragic and unique race, small and interrelated like a Celtic clan. The clan was older than the Vane family, though that ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... astonished that he had to lean out of his box and watch the blasphemer—a quaint figure, bowed as though under a heavy burden, its hands thrust hard into its trousers pockets—stalk away from the great tent and without so much as a backward glance lose itself ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... With what quaint simplicity does the thirteenth chapter tell of the Holy Spirit's initiation of those great missionary journeys of Paul from the new center of world evangelization? "the Holy Spirit said, etc." ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... treasure was worth more than Bahama Bill had said. Roughly estimated it would foot up to over a hundred thousand dollars, and this figure did not take in some jewelry of quaint design with precious stones which were ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... brandy sent to him by his creole friend in New Orleans. He had been gone from Vincennes several months when the batteau arrived, having been recalled to Detroit by the British authorities; and he never returned. Meantime the little post with its quaint cabins and its dilapidated block-house, called Fort Sackville, lay sunning drowsily by the river in a blissful state of helplessness from the military point of view. There was no garrison; the two or three pieces of artillery, abandoned and exposed, gathered ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... the cloak-room adjoining the Assembly Room; Miss Matty gave a sigh or two to her departed youth, and the remembrance of the last time she had been there, as she adjusted her pretty new cap before the strange, quaint old mirror in the cloak-room. The Assembly Room had been added to the inn, about a hundred years before, by the different county families, who met together there once a month during the winter to dance and play at cards. ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... west by an immense black beam. The fire-place, which is at the south, is very large and seemingly of high antiquity. The windows, which are two in number and look westward into the street, have a quaint and singular appearance. Of all the houses in Llandovery the old vicarage is by far the most worthy of attention, irrespective of the wonderful monument of God's providence and grace who once ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... Some quaint, old-fashioned air, That all the children knew, Shall run before us everywhere, Like a little maid with flying hair, To guide ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... by a teacher in those schools, and all the examples in it are genuine; none of them have been tampered with, or doctored in any way. From time to time, during several years, whenever a pupil has delivered himself of anything peculiarly quaint or toothsome in the course of his recitations, this teacher and her associates have privately set that thing down in a memorandum-book; strictly following the original, as to grammar, construction, spelling, and all; and the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was drawn to the young man, and her consciousness of it plucked her back to caution with occasional jerks—quaint alternations of the familiar and the harshly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the birthday of every child in the village, and was fond of hanging on the cottage door some little gift his loving hands had made. He could mend a child's broken windmill and carve quaint faces from walnut shells. He made beautiful crosses of silvery gray lichens, and pressed mosses and rosy weeds from the seashore. The same tender hands were ready to pick up a fallen baby, or carry the water bucket for ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... period had married a woman from Heanor, a daughter of the "Black Horse". She was a slim, pretty, dark woman, quaint in her speech, whimsical, so that the sharp things she said did not hurt. She was oddly a thing to herself, rather querulous in her manner, but intrinsically separate and indifferent, so that her long lamentable ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Song," so it may be worth trying over again. It is more familiar now, and you begin to associate the rapid, whirring phrases with its title—with the idea of "spinning." How clear it suddenly becomes. You even conjure up in your mind the picture of some young woman in quaint garb seated at a spinning wheel in an old-fashioned room—and you find yourself experiencing all the pleasure that comes from association of ideas, the keenest enjoyment that art affords. You are making rapid progress now, so rapid ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... Oh, the gems on tables, walls, and floor— Rare first editions, etchings, and old crockery galore. Why, talk about the Indies and the wealth of Orient things— They couldn't hold a candle to these quaint and sumptuous things; In such profusion, too—Ah me! how dearly I recall How I have sat and watched 'em and ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... "You quaint child!" said the man, with a quiver of strong feeling in his tone. "You would like something prized by the giver, would you?" he added, musingly. "Well, ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... come To the quaint margin of his courtly sphere, And bid us eloquent welcome to his home. Scarce could we pass, so great a crowd was there Of points and lines; and nimble Wit beside Upon the back ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... lying 'twixt two streams, Sung through of birds and haunted of dim dreams; That in its league-long hand of trunk and leaf Lifts a green wand that charms away all grief; Wrought of quaint silence and the stealth of things, Vague, whispering' touches, gleams and twitterings, Dews and cool shadows—that the mystic soul Of Nature permeates with suave control, And waves o'er Earth to make the sad heart whole. There lies the road, they ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... just given, in his driest manner, a description of his recent visit to receive the accolade from the Queen. It was replete with the usual quaint Vicary details—such as the solemn warning whisper of an equerry in Vicary's ear as he walked backwards, 'Mind the edge of the carpet'; and we all laughed, I absently, and yet a little hysterically—all save Vicary, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... the St. Charles, covered with green fields and ripening harvests, and dotted with quaint old homesteads, redolent with memories of Normandy and Brittany, rose a long mountain ridge covered with primeval woods, on the slope of which rose the glittering spire of Charlebourg, once a dangerous outpost of civilization. The pastoral Lairet was seen mingling its waters with the St. Charles ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... that he is going some day to be somebody, though sorely puzzled to surmise what thing or when, so pleasantly does he take life), from all sorts of out-of-the-way country places, where he lodges with quaint old landladies who wonder maternally why he never gets drunk, and generally mistake him for an author until he pays his bill. When in town he frequented debating societies in Fleet Street and Covent Garden, and made his first speeches; for which purpose he would, unlike some debaters, devote ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... make-up, the Patchwork Girl was magically alive and had proved herself not the least jolly and agreeable of the many quaint characters who inhabit the astonishing Fairyland of Oz. Indeed, Scraps was a general favorite, although she was rather flighty and erratic and did and said many things that surprised her friends. She was ...
— The Lost Princess of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... sociability pervaded the quaint room that the Spectacle Man called his study, when on Friday evening, two weeks after the candy pulling, his ...
— The Spectacle Man - A Story of the Missing Bridge • Mary F. Leonard
... that of the nineteenth century, with its impatience of title, caste, form, and ceremony, its trust in equal right, its insistence on freedom of belief, came suddenly. In shaking off their ancient political and religious bonds the Filipinos may lose some of the quaint and poetic records of their ancient faiths; for the first progress of a nation after a long sleep is a material one, and art, literature, all the more delicate expressions of national taste, history, and tendency, have ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... which, fortunately for the tourist, has no notable church or ruin to be visited nolens volens. The place has, however, a Continental air, caused principally by the very curious clock tower in the market place; a quaint spire, in the background, adding to the effect of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... arms, with the motto, "Floreat semper fidelis civitas." The lower hall contains a collection of interesting specimens of ancient armour, gleaned from the battlefields of Worcester, and one of those quaint old instruments of punishment formerly used for scolds, called a "brank." In the municipal hall, on the second floor, is a portrait of George III., who presented it to the inhabitants, and others of citizens who have done good service to the town, or in some way distinguished ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... the bank of a shallow stream, a tributary of the Severn. Wanley consists in the main of one long street; the houses are stone-built, with mullioned windows, here and there showing a picturesque gable or a quaint old chimney. The oldest buildings are four cottages which stand at the end of the street; once upon a time they formed the country residence of the abbots of Belwick. The abbey of that name still claims for its ruined self a portion of earth's surface; but, as it had the misfortune to be erected ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... in general, Peter Smith's book contains about ninety prescriptions for the cure of as many diseases or forms of disease, to be compounded generally from now well-known medicine, roots, herbs, etc., some of them heroic, others quaint, etc. He did not recommend dispensing wholly with the then universal practice of bleeding patients, but ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... Dr. Pusey preach. The crowd was great, and he had to stand, while for an hour and a half or so the great man poured out a learned disquisition against the Jews! Here too, about the same time, the youthful members of the University flocked to hear Burgon's evening sermons—quaint and original as the man himself—in one of which, after describing the episode of Balaam and the ass, he threw up his hands and cried, "To think that that type of brutality should speak with the voice of ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... of meeting at my father-in-law Mr. Grogan's, where he often dined, a most worthy priest, Father O'Leary, and have listened frequently, with great zest, to anecdotes which he used to tell with a quaint yet spirited humor, quite unique. His manner, his air, his countenance, all bespoke wit, talent, and a good heart. I liked his company excessively, and have often regretted I did not cultivate ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... N.C.O.s and men was sent to join the 17th H.L.I. at Codford. What was left of "E" Coy. entrained on 26th October, 1915, at Gailes for Ripon. The men were billeted in excellent huts in the South Camp of that quaint old cathedral town, where route marches took place and many excursions were made to many of the interesting ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... to me indirectly through a friend by Mr. Andrew Lang. They have been translated from the modern version written by Sadanami Sanjin. These stories are not literal translations, and though the Japanese story and all quaint Japanese expressions have been faithfully preserved, they have been told more with the view to interest young readers of the West than ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... to be seen in Singapore; their quaint architecture is always interesting to the occidental tourist, and the hideous images to be seen within will repay the trouble of removing one's shoes, which must be ...
— Wanderings in the Orient • Albert M. Reese
... sing, a quaint old Island lullaby, which rang weird and melancholy. William looked at her in alarm, but said nothing, and the other passengers watched her curiously, half in fear. She lifted her child from her knee to her breast, and held it there clasped ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... ourselves with the general effect, there still remains a number of details, picturesque, interesting, or quaint. There is the Golden Gate Park, the cypresses and eucalypti at one end of which testify to the balminess of the climate, while the sand-dunes at its other end show the original condition of the whole surface of the peninsula, and add to our admiration of nature ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... was long and trying. In the first stage of it—from Majorca to Malaga—the dangers and difficulties of seafaring were varied, if not relieved by strange experiences, of which Palou has left us a quaint and graphic account. Their vessel was a small English coaster, in command of a stubborn cross-patch of a captain, who combined navigation with theology, and whose violent protestations and fondness for doctrinal dispute allowed his ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... treat. The most penitent of all was the deviser of the original idea. He had generously offered to stay at home with the little patient, which was as generously refused; but the next evening he was allowed to come and sit on his bed, and describe it all for the amusement of his friend. He was a quaint boy, this urchin, with a face as broad as an American Indian's, eyes as bright as a squirrel's, and all the mischief in life lurking about him, till you could see roguishness in the very folds of his hooded Indian winter coat of blue and scarlet. In his hand he brought ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... architectural beauty. Near it there is a large and ancient mosque, with a minaret of singular elegance. It is about 120 feet high, with two hanging galleries; the whole built of blue and red bricks, the latter projecting so as to form quaint patterns or designs. Several ancient buildings near this mosque are surmounted with pyramidal towers, resembling Pagodas of India. Following the long, crooked lanes between mud buildings, we passed these curious structures and reached ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... demanded his opinion of their productions, would mention vaguely, yet with perfect sincerity, a sense of dreamy, wild, indefinite, and he would perhaps say, indefinable delight; on being required to point out the source of this so shadowy pleasure, he would be apt to speak of the quaint in phraseology and in general handling. This quaintness is, in fact, a very powerful adjunct to ideality, but in the case in question it arises independently of the author's will, and is altogether apart from his intention. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the quaint old town of Clifton. The gray old buildings never knew the use of paint. Nature was trying her best to make them a part of the landscape. But why use artificial means to create beauty, when Nature all around was so prodigal? How one loves to contemplate architecture like this, ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... all, there glowed with stronger radiance the charm of his quaint genius and his magnetic personality—tragic, homely, gentle, humorous, honest, merciful, ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... above turret and clerestory that it at last becomes a mere line against the ether. In morning, as in afternoon, or in evening, here is a perpetual atmosphere of rest; and not around the great church alone, but in the quaint and ancient houses which fence in the Close. Little less old than the mighty mass of stone on which their ivy-framed windows look, these houses make the casual observer feel that here, if anywhere in the world, life must needs run smoothly. Under those high gables, behind ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... the meantime taken out a small case, and leaning down from her horse towards me, she said, in a tone in which an effort at her usual quaint lightness of expression contended with a deeper and more grave tone of sentiment, "You see, my dear coz, I was born to be your better angel. Rashleigh has been compelled to yield up his spoil, and had we reached this same village ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Murano hour-glass, filled with sand from the dreary valley of El Ghor. A huge plaster Trimurti stood close to the wall, on a triangular pedestal of black rock, and the Siva-face and the writhing cobra confronted all who entered. Just opposite grinned a red granite slab with a quaint basso-relievo taken from the ruins of Elora. Near the door were two silken divans, and a richly carved urn, three feet high, which had once ornamented the facade of a tomb in the royal days of Petra, ere the curse fell on Edom, now stood an in memoriam of the original Necropolis. For what purpose ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... necessity for continuous labor no longer spurred them to exertion during every moment of daylight, they tackled the box of books and read, not volumes which appealed to them in common, but quaint tomes in the use of which Jenks was tutor and ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... that to destroy insects is the only use of birds. The day is far more delightful when the birds sing, and when we see them flit in and out, giving us a glimpse now and then of their pretty coats and quaint ways. By giving them a home we can surround ourselves with many birds, sweet of ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... drawer of the quaint little bureau which he used, were kept the relics of his father; very few and poor, and of no interest to any one but himself,—only the letter telling of his death, a worn-out watch-chain, and a photograph ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... Sicilian muse, And call the vales, and bid them hither cast Their bells, and flowerets of a thousand hues. Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks, On whose fresh lap the swart-star sparely looks, Throw hither all your quaint enamelled eyes, That on the green turf suck the honeyed showers, And purple all the ground with vernal flowers. Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine, The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, The glowing violet, The musk-rose, and ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... get used to the quaint language of the people, and from the helpless way in which they stare at me, my tongue must be equally unintelligible. A delightful camaraderie exists; every one knows every one else, or they all act as if they did. As ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... reservation. Doctor Holland regarded Mark Twain as a mere fun maker of ephemeral popularity, and was not altogether pleasant in his dictum. Doctor Holmes, in a letter to the author, speaks of the "frequently quaint and amusing conceits," but does not find it in his heart to refer to the book as literature. It was naturally difficult for the East to concede a serious value to one who approached his subject with such militant aboriginality, and occasionally wrote "those kind." William Dean Howells reviewed ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... pleasures was to watch Aunt Hannah spinning on her flax-wheel, wetting her thumb and forefinger at her lips to twist the thread, keeping time, meanwhile, to some quaint old tune with her foot upon ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... jokes! Careless person, too, has been hanging my old grey wideawake on the clock in my study. Rather a liberty! Don't like liberties. Always courteous to everybody—consequently, expect everybody to be courteous to me! Still, can't help smiling. It was a quaint idea to hang my old wideawake on the clock in my study. I wonder what put such a freak into the joker's head! Now let me look at the paper that has just reached me from London. Dear me, "The Vacant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... appear to be three grey tin-helmeted figures, but I could see nothing of our infantry. The shelling went on, but time pressed, and the colonel, packing up his glasses, led us eastwards again, down to a light-railway junction, and through a quaint little ravine lined with willow-trees. Many German dead lay here. One young soldier, who had died with his head thrown back resting against a green bank, his blue eyes open to the sky, wore a strangely perfect expression of ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... to my mind, neutralize all other power; the porcelains of Luca della Robbia are painful examples, and in lower art, Florentine mosaic in relief; gilding is more admissible, and tells sometimes sweetly upon figures of quaint design, as on the pulpit of St^a. Maria Novella, while it spoils the classical ornaments of the mouldings. But the truest grandeur of sculpture I believe to be in the white form; something of this feeling may be owing to the difficulty, or ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... faithful servant to his master, was always longing to enjoy his free liberty, to wander uncontrolled in the air, like a wild bird, under green trees, among pleasant fruits, and sweet-smelling flowers. 'My quaint Ariel,' said Prospero to the little sprite when he made him free, 'I shall miss you; yet you shall have your freedom.' 'Thank you, my dear master,' said Ariel; 'but give me leave to attend your ship home with prosperous gales, before you bid farewell to the ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... steamships of 4000 and 5000 tons burden can now be berthed at these wharfs, and there is a constant and convenient service of trains between the port and the town. Even to-day the presence of superannuated Dutch warships and quaint craft from China and the Malay islands relieves the monotony of the vast hulls of the steamships of the British India, the Messageries Maritimes, and the Netherlands ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... them, for they were fine, healthy young birds, and although they had rather a quaint air—being covered with a curious, bristly-looking growth, which made them look like young hedgehogs—from the very day they kicked off the thick, glossy, yellowish-white shell which had covered them, they could run about and even pick up ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... side of the square, and half hidden in ivy, was a Noah's Ark church, topped by a quaint belfry holding a bell that had not rung for years, and faced by a clock-dial all weather-stains and cracks, around which travelled a single rusty hand. In its shadow to the right lay the home of the archdeacon, a stately ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... circuit of the aquarium he will have seen and marvelled at some hundreds of curious creatures utterly unlike anything to be found above water. Brightly colored starfishes, beautiful sea-urchins, strange stationary ascidians, and flower-like sea-anemones, quaint sea-horses, and filmy, fragile jellyfishes and their multiform kin—all seem novel and wonderful as one sees them in their native element. Things that appear to be parts of the rocky or sandy bed of the grottos startle one by moving about, and thus discovering ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... train coming down," explained Malcolm with his quaint drawl. "Thought I might as well save the time as long as there wasn't anything else ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... day, a picturesque old town, dominated by the ruins of a fine royal castle, and with a quaint Grammar School and hospital. At the present time it is going through immense transformation. It has become a favorite retiring place for old officers of the army, supplanting in this respect Cheltenham. But at the period of this tale it was a sleepy, ancient, ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... very dreadful cell. A bright, clean, fresh little room, all white and blue. White walls, white bedstead, with oh! such snowy coverings, white dimity curtains at the windows, with old-fashioned ball fringes, a little dimity-covered toilet-table, with a quaint looking-glass framed with fat gilt cherubs, all apparently trying to fold their wings in such a way as to enable them to get a peep at themselves in the mirror, and not one succeeding. Then there was a low rocking-chair, ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... jerked herself up, and flirted her wings and tail, as if to say, "I know you. You needn't try to hide." When I went too near, as on the occasion spoken of, while she was much more wary she was not afraid, and I had no compunctions about studying her quaint ways. ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... and makes it play, as if in wanton, upon the ceiling, lies that big book, reverenced of your New England parents—the Family Bible. It is a ponderous, square volume, with heavy silver clasps, that you have often pressed open for a look at its quaint, old pictures, for a study of those prettily bordered pages, which lie between the Testaments, and which ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... stranger, that as the gable-ended houses, which obtrude themselves corner-wise on the widening street, fall vacant, they are pulled down to allow of greater space for traffic, and a more modern style of architecture. The quaint and narrow shop-windows of fifty years ago, are giving way to large panes and plate-glass. Nearly every dwelling seems devoted to some branch of commerce. In passing hastily through the town, one hardly perceives where the necessary lawyer and doctor can live, so little appearance is ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... was secured by The New York Public Library with the manuscripts of the Ford Collection, presented by the late J. Pierpont Morgan. It has a quaint manuscript title-page, as follows: Narative of a Journal [sic] across the "Plains" in 1852 by Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell. Illustrated by several original drawings. And to my relatives, and friends, respectfully subscribed. A later ...
— Across the Plains to California in 1852 - Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell • Lodisa Frizell
... a history of its own; and this quaint representation of the woman of Samaria was fated to be of great interest to succeeding generations. But the busy worker little guessed what memories would hereafter cling to that morning's labour, nor dreamed that some day those very stitches ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... laughed, Teeth like cream, and lips that quaffed All the genial country's wealth Of large cheer and perfect health, Gown—well, yes—old-fashioned quite, You would call it "just a fright," But I love that quaint attire. (Tildy wore it in ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... of her paint and powder, her lithe body clad in a prim, navy blue frock, the skirt of which came below the tops of her high-laced boots, approached hastily from the women's section. She was tying the strings of her quaint poke-bonnet under her chin, and her ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... case——" There was little or no excitement. We had most of us seen too much by this time to be either unduly pessimistic or over-confident about our own chances, so that everything seemed to go quietly and smoothly. The first steel helmets had just arrived—quaint, antique, Japanese looking things, with ingenious corrugations to catch the bullets—and were issued to the Machine Gunners, who had also received the first supply of the new Box Respirator, issued in place of ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... animals—deer, for instance, who are hunted successfully with torches; and he relates, further, that in Abyssinia artificers of pottery and iron are thus fearfully endowed, and are consequently forbidden to join in the sacred rites of religion, as fire is their chief agent. Isn't this a strange, quaint volume, to set before a king? and how do you like ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... winds along the side of the valley, following the graceful curves and swellings of the hills. The little towns are so lost in the recesses that one comes upon them quite unexpectedly, and, whirling through their one long main street, catches glimpses of quaint churches and buildings which fairly overhang the highway, and narrow vistas of lawns, trees, shrubbery, and flowers; then all is hidden by the ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... attired little damsel placed between us had been one of our neighbors. Kindly receive my book with the same indulgent smile, without seeking therein a meaning either good or bad, in the same spirit in which you would receive some quaint bit of pottery, some grotesquely carved ivory idol, or some fantastic trifle brought to you from this singular ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... presence of terror, perhaps because the alternative to jesting is either fear or tears. Others may misunderstand us. Often we do not understand ourselves. It is not easy to think of Sam Weller or Mark Tapley as the hero of a stricken field. Yet it is by men with Sam Weller's quaint turn of wit and Mark Tapley's unfailing cheerfulness that the great battles in France ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... block below Kling's in those other days was the quaint Book Shop owned by Tim Kelsey, the hunchback, a walking encyclopaedia of knowledge, much of it as musty and out of date as most of his books; while overtopping all else in importance, so far as this story is concerned, was the shabby, old-fashioned two-story house known the town over ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the ancient town of Bruges, In the quaint old Flemish city, As the evening shades descended, Low and loud, and sweetly blended, Low at times and loud at times, And changing like a poet's rhymes, Rang the beautiful wild chimes From the belfry in the market Of the ancient town ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... are undoubtedly romantic; but again I ask, are they stories of romantic love? There is romance and quaint local color in the feat of the girl who, reversing the story of Hero and Leander, swam over to her lover; in the wooing of the two girls proposing to an unseen man up a tree; in the action of the chief who saved the beautiful girl and her father from ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of candles With their quaint coquettish way, But alas! I wooed too often, And now my ...
— Songs for Parents • John Farrar
... the next summer she had a letter from the place. It was from Dr. Zimmermann. There is no need here to trace the quaint German phrases, the formalism, the cold terms of science in which he made his meaning plain. It spoke of erosion; of the movement of the summer; of the action of the under-waters on the ice. And it told her, with tender sympathy oddly blended with the pride of scientific success, that he had ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... applauded. It was the delight of the learned, the solace of the indolent, and the refuge of the uninformed. It passed through at least eight editions, by which the bookseller, as WOOD records, got an estate; and, notwithstanding the objection sometimes opposed against it, of a quaint style, and too great an accumulation of authorities, the fascination of its wit, fancy, and sterling sense, have borne down all censures, and extorted praise from the first Writers in the English language. The grave JOHNSON has praised it in the warmest terms, and the ludicrous ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... for it is probable that the Britons had stout ships long before the legions of Cassar set their feet upon our shores. I am inclined to agree with an ancient writer who gives it as his opinion that the British were always a naval people. "For," says he, in somewhat quaint phraseology, "as Britain was an island, the inhabitants could only have come to it across the ocean in ships, and they could scarcely have had ships unless they were nautically inclined." The same writer asserts that the Britons had vessels of large size long before ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... attention and commendation by their quaint delicacy of style, their faithful delineation of Creole character, and a marked originality."—The ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... some statement about Orangemen, who of course are nearly all Imperialists. Yet these very Orangemen represent an intense phase of Canadian life; the backwoods era, the simple industries, the old villages, the quaint settlements of the U.E. Loyalists as picturesque on the Upper, as the dormer-windowed villages of the French are on the Lower St. Lawrence. To these men the Empire is as visual, as to the intense Quebecker it is nebulous. And as the politician in Ontario has to regard carefully ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... this stool he had been so long attached—physically—that he had begun to regard it almost as part and parcel of himself, and had made up his mind that he would have to stick to it through life. He even sometimes took a quaint view of the matter, and tried to imagine that through long habit it would stick to him at last, and oblige him to carry it about sticking straight out behind him; perhaps even require him to take it to bed with him, in ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... 15th I took a steamer for Richmond, Virginia, and arrived on the 16th at Fredericksburg. Here were standing many chimneys, showing us the waste places and burned houses in this small but quaint old city. I called at the teachers' boarding-house, kept by a good Union family, Wm. J. Jeffries. Mrs. King accompanied me to the soldiers' hospital. Here, as elsewhere, the poor suffering soldier seemed rejoiced to see and hear ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... stood on the floor. On the table were huge earthen dishes ready for the pared fruit. Equipped with a paring knife and a tin pie-plate for parings every member of the household drew near the table and began snitzing. There was much merry conversation, some in quaint Pennsylvania Dutch, then again in English tinged with the distinctive accent. There was also much laughter as Uncle Amos vied with Millie for the honor of making the ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... to visit Blato, an inland village of 8000 inhabitants. De Michaelis regretted very much that he had no carriage, but a Yugoslav had a quaint little car on which he was learning how to drive and he was kind enough to take us—for which he was afterwards deported to Italy. The good man made so much noise in changing his gears that our progress was advertised in the uttermost fields, and ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... explained Betty,—"that lovely one with the amethyst in the centre and the ring of little pearls in a quaint old setting. It used to be her great-grandmother's. Mine wasn't much to lose, and I felt sure until to-day that it would turn up, but it hasn't, and now I'm afraid it was ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... often the dream turns out to have been a half-waking one, presaging a reality. Ovid foreshadowed the discoveries of the geologist: the Atlantis was an imagination, but Columbus found a western world: and though the quaint forms of Centaurs and Satyrs have an existence only in the realms of art, creatures approaching man more nearly than they in essential structure, and yet as thoroughly brutal as the goat's or horse's half of the mythical compound, are ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Wren with another chop. 'You have changed me wiser, godmother.—Not,' she added with the quaint hitch of her chin and eyes, 'that you need be a very wonderful godmother to do ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... "did you ever hear a quaint Asiatic legend—scarcely a legend, perhaps, but a superstition—that many and many a wise man, four thousand years ago, spent his nights and his days, not as our more modern scientists of a few hundred years ago have done, in the attempt to turn baser metals into gold, but in the attempt ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... loved indeed in those quaint times, and authors were actually authorities. Gentlemen appealed to Virgil or Lucan in the Courts or the House of Commons. What said Statius, Juvenal—let alone Tully or Tacitus—on such and such a point? Their reign ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... end, outside castle walls, grim and grey, but imposing as ever, though they were in reality but a shell, surrounding a plot of innocent green grass. There were isolated towers still standing, however, approached by winding stone stairways, and short lengths of walks along the ramparts, and quaint little barred windows through which one could view the surrounding country. When Margot thrust her pretty laughing face through one of these latter to greet her friends below, every photographer among ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... traded for himself, and bought Quaint monsters for the market of those times, A gilded dragon, also, for ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... three friends, in the quaint little garden of the hotel, with its purple-flowering vines of Bougainvillea, fragrant orange-trees, drooping palms, and long-tailed cockatoos drowsing on their perches. When people really know each other an unfamiliar ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... if he happen to be the owner of a soke-mill, has always been deemed fair game for the village satirist. Of the numerous songs written in ridicule of the calling of the 'rogues in grain,' the following is one of the best and most popular: its quaint humour will recommend it to our readers. For the tune, see ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... determination it is impossible to say, as the house we saw was burnt to the ground later on, and is now rebuilt on exactly the same lines, but with electric light, every modern comfort, and lovely old red tiles to replace the quaint ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... had driven Leonard to lie on his bed, Aubrey persuaded his sister to come to see his greatest prize; a quaint old local naturalist, a seafaring man, with a cottage crammed with pans of live wonders of the deep in water, and shelves of extinct ones, 'done up in stane pies,' not a creature, by sea or land, that had haunted Coombe for a few million of ages, seemed to have escaped him. Such sea-side sojourns ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I went softly down the side-wall of the Dial-court (for there was no getting through the place where I had been peeping) to the bottom, where there used to be an old flint wall, and a hedge of sweet-briar in front of it. You remember the pretty conceit I made—quaint and wholesome as one of Herrick's—when you said something—but I verily believe we were better in those days than we ever have been since. Now don't interrupt me about that, ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... was taken from The Mariners' Chronicle, compiled by a person named Scott early in the last century—a curious book of narratives of maritime adventures, with exceedingly quaint illustrations. Nothing has ever shown me more plainly that truth is stranger than fiction, for all that is most improbable ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... last he decided: "A little man, well groomed, clean shaven, a soldierly appearance." The other smiled: "All right, come along." A quaint building in the form of a chalet appeared to the left; and to the right side, almost opposite, was the main house. It was a strange-looking building, where there was a mixture of everything, a mingling of Gothic ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... quaint old Fuller, "must be located in the back of the head, because there men dig for it." Some speakers appear to imagine it can be found in the links of a watch chain, or observed in the chinks in ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... originally printed in India, but subsequently re-issued in an embellished form at home (see over leaf). To the end of his life, Yule looked back to this "social progress up the Irawady, with its many quaint and pleasant memories, as to a bright and joyous holiday."[37] It was a delight to him to work under Phayre, whose noble and lovable character he had already learned to appreciate two years before in Pegu. Then, too, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... hands, and Lennox stiffened himself out, to hang rigidly, feeling his back rest against the wet rock, over which he began to glide slowly, and then faster and faster as he was let down hand over hand, seeing nothing but the black darkness lit up like a quaint halo in front of him, and going down what he felt to be a terrible depth. He fought hard against one horrible thought which would trouble him: should he ever be pulled up again? And no sooner had he mastered this than ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... ye spritefull Quire with choicest sports, All pastime fit for Phoebus Courts; And Thou great Master of the Revels, joyne The Graces, to thy Daughters nine; Witt pure and quaint, with rich conceits and free From all obscaene scurrilitie: Here free from care, nimbly let's dance a round ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski
... Stiff, quaint, and awkward sounds old Bokenham's translation of the 'Golden Legend,' but to Eleanor it had much power. The whole history was new to her, after her life in Scotland, where information had been slow to reach her, and books had been few. The gewgaws spread out before Jean ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... grateful moisture, but she did not allow them to overflow. She nodded rapidly once or twice in a quaint, characteristic little fashion, and then sat silent, examining the links in her silver-meshed purse, with ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... and Ian's face cleared a little. If all the difficulties perplexing his life would only clear like that! The babe and the suckling had found the way so simple, so natural; and it was a comforting way, for he had a deep and tender regard for this quaint, clever waif who had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Rallywood, a tall figure in a military cloak, turned the corner of a side street and met its full blast. He faced it for some yards along the empty pavements, then ran up the steps of his club. A few minutes later he passed through a lofty corridor and entered a door over which is set a quaint invitation to smokers, which may not be written down here, for it is the jealously guarded copyright ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... his quaint Survey of the Co. of Devon, after mentioning the foundation of the church of High Bickington ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... private buffoon is a light-hearted loon, If you listen to popular rumour; From morning to night he's so joyous and bright, And he bubbles with wit and good humour! He's so quaint and so terse, both in prose and in verse; Yet though people forgive his transgression, There are one or two rules that all Family Fools Must observe, if they love their profession. There are one or two rules, Half-a-dozen, maybe, That all family ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... grammar," said Aleta. "Mother's never wanted me to talk slang like the other girls. She says if you're careless with your English you get careless of your principles. Mother's got a lot of quaint ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... at last he rose to go. Her slanting rays drew all the houses into new perspective, so that their roofs, already glistening with dew, seemed to stretch much higher into the sky than usual, and their gables and quaint old towers lay far away in its ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... never left alone together, and he is not allowed to pay her any marked attention even before others. They may exchange photographs, and she may work him a little present; but it is all lifeless, passionless, and business-like. Among the peasantry there is more of the picturesque, and many quaint customs still survive. Marriage-brokers do a good trade, and get a percentage on each pair that they see through the ordeal of a wedding. In Frascati, parents with marriageable sons and daughters assemble ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... indeed, that the whole room was a harmony in scarlet, with a scarlet ceiling and scarlet hangings; but the luxury of it was unmistakable, and the feet sank above the ankles in the soft Indian rug, which was ornate with the quaint mosaic-like workings and penetrating colours of all Eastern tapestry. For light, there was an arc-lamp, veiled with gauze of the faintest yellow; and upon the table in the centre stood a decanter of wine and a box of cigars. ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... captain spoke, with his strange, humorous, arrogant abruptness, I observed Jim to be sizing him up, like a thing at once quaint and familiar, and with a scrutiny that was both ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Lansdown fresh as flowers of May, And Berkely lady blithe and gay, And Anglesea, whose speech exceeds The voice of pipe or oaten reeds; And blooming Hyde, with eyes so rare, And Montague beyond compare. Such ladies fair wou'd I depaint In roundelay or sonnet quaint. ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... retreat, inexpensive and simply furnished. But his experience was that of all who buy, and renovate, and build. The farm had on it a small stone Dutch cottage, built about a century before, and inhabited by one of the Van Tassels. This was enlarged, still preserving the quaint Dutch characteristics; it acquired a tower and a whimsical weathercock, the delight of the owner ("it was brought from Holland by Gill Davis, the King of Coney Island, who says he got it from a windmill which ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... of them! This corridor was close to the Dining-rooms, and the Committee (ha! ha! ha!) had called it (he! he! he!) after COOK! (Ho! ho! ho!) Oh, the wit of it! How the Members of the Executive must have nudged one another in the ribs as the quaint idea dawned upon them! And how they must have laughed, too, on the Opening Day, when the Guard of Honour, presenting arms, and the "Greenwich Boys" singing "Ye Mariners of England," were drenched in the rain! And what a capital notion it was on that occasion to put "the Representatives ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... Pleasant old town, which slopes down the hill-side to the old church,—just "restored," though by Lords Minchampstead and Vieuxbois, not without Mark Armsworth's help, to its ancient beauty of grey flint and white clunch chequer-work, and quaint wooden spire. Pleasant churchyard round it, where the dead lie looking up to the bright southern sun, among huge black yews, upon their knoll of white chalk above the ancient stream. Pleasant white wooden bridge, with its row of urchins dropping flints ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... panels at one end of the hall are huge coats of arms carved in stone and gorgeously coloured; and at the other end is a gallery of carved oak with the gilded pipes of an organ shining above it. A great part of the outer wall is taken up by a very large mullioned window with quaint round panes, many of them filled with old stained glass; and on the wall opposite to it is a great fireplace of carved stone, the centre of it showing the crest of a mailed arm and the motto, ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... the wit of the other—men whom nature made rivals, and time made friends or enemies, as it happened. A curious observer, in looking over a collection of the Cambridge poems, which were formerly composed by its students, has remarked that "Cowley from the first was quaint, Milton sublime, and Barrow copious." If then the characteristic disposition may reveal itself thus early, it affords a principle which ought not to be neglected at ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... certainly saw in that house, which, somehow or other, had got a bad name in the neighbourhood. I had the curiosity to go and look at the place for myself. It's a saddening kind of street; the houses are old enough to be mean and dreary, but not old enough to be quaint. As far as I could see most of them are let in lodgings, furnished and unfurnished, and almost every door has three bells to it. Here and there the ground floors have been made into shops of the commonest kind; it's a dismal street in every way. I found Number 20 was ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen |
