"Rococo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fine characterization; he stood for a few moments staring with a blank and helpless air, as if, for the first time in his life, he was beginning to question the finality of his own judgment. Then his eyes wandered off to the cornice of the wall, whose florid rococo upholstery won his ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... not so much a culture as a temperament, and Bladery—if the thing may have the name—a code of sentiments rather than a ritual. It is the rococo school of behaviour, the flamboyant gentleman, the gargoyle life. The Blade is the tribute innocence pays to vice. He may look like a devil and belong to a church. And the clothing of the Blade, being symbolical, is a very important part of him. It must show not only a certain tastiness, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... by the imitators, whose inventive powers were atrophied, while their skill and knowledge left nothing to be desired. Excluding the Cosmati, Rome was the mother of no period or movement of art excepting the Rococo. As for Donatello himself, he was but slightly influenced by classical motives. His sojourn in Rome was short, his time fully occupied; he was forty-seven years old and had long passed the most impressionable years of his life. He was a noted ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... the early painters of Florence. Out of that "infancy," however, there had arisen no "titanically infantine" Michelangelo, but a race of accomplished petits maitres, whose characteristic achievement was the opera of the rococo age. A Goldsmith or a Sterne can make the light songs of their contemporaries eloquent even to us of gracious amenities and cultivated charm; but Browning, with the eternal April in his heart and brain, heard in the stately measures it danced to, only the eloquence of a dirge, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Even in the rococo vestibule of the yellow-brick apartment house, while he pressed the bell below Miss Lily Dale's letter box, he began to feel a glow of comfort; and when Lily let him into her little parlor, all clean and vulgar and warm, and fragrant with blossoming bulbs, and gave him a greeting that was almost ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... objects, which now strike the eye as unconscious freaks, were originally conscious freaks. Our ancestors, to do them justice, did not think them casual or commonplace; they thought them, if not ridiculous, at least rococo. The top-hat was the topmost point of a riot of Regency dandyism, and bucks wore trousers while business men were still wearing knee-breeches. It will not be fanciful to see a certain oriental touch in trousers, which the later Romans also regarded as effeminately ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... [A Garden Pavilion in rococo style with high windows. In the middle of the room there is a large writing desk on which are various pieces of chemical and physical apparatus. Two copper wires are suspended from the ceiling to an electroscope ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... was deposited under the bronze shelter of the porte-cochere belonging to an extremely expensive mansion overlooking the park; and presently, admitted, he prowled ponderously and softly about an over-gilded rococo reception-room. But all anxiety had now fled from his face; he coyly nipped the atmosphere at intervals as various portions of the furniture attracted his approval; he stood before a splendid canvas of Goya and pushed ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... if they were a rare and holiday treat, but a most common, every-day occurrence. There is not much work to be seen about, and not a book! On the other hand, lounging-chairs, suited to the length or shortness of any back; rococo photograph stands, framing either a great many men, or a few men in a great many attitudes; soothing pictures—decollete Venuses, Love's greuze heads—tied up with rose-ribbon, and a sleepy half-light. On a small table at the ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Platonic influence which the Renaissance exercised on both.[142] Sidney, however full of it elsewhere, put less of it in his actual novel; while, on the other hand, nothing did so much to create and spread the rather rococo notion of pseudo-platonic love in France, and from France throughout Europe, as the Astree itself. The further union of the philosophic mind with an eminently cavalier temperament—the united ethos ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... furniture are of various kinds. The rococo styles (Louis XV and the Regency) are overluxurious and often weak; the curves in Arabic or Celtic ornamentation vague and obscure. The undulating curves of Persian rugs suggest movement. Curves, in general, which turn ...
— Prepare and Serve a Meal and Interior Decoration • Lillian B. Lansdown
... consoles; then a great rose-colored wall in which is cut a large window with columnets; all styles are found there—the Byzantine, the Saracen, the Lombard, the Gothic, the Roman, the Greek, and even the Rococo; the column and the columnet; the lancet and the semicircle; the fanciful capital, full of birds and of flowers, brought from Acre or from Jaffa; the Greek capital found in Athenian ruins; the mosaic and the bas-relief; the classic severity and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... pretensions are a drugget on the floor, a plaster ceiling between the timbers and chairs which, though not upholstered, are stained and polished. The fine arts are represented by a mezzotint portrait of some Presbyterian divine, a copperplate of Raphael's St. Paul preaching at Athens, a rococo presentation clock on the mantelshelf, flanked by a couple of miniatures, a pair of crockery dogs with baskets in their mouths, and, at the corners, two large cowrie shells. A pretty feature of ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... in slumber, And its fountains also sleeping, Mildewed, lovely, and rococo, Lo ... Vienna, ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... monsieur sitting complacently at the door and madame, fat and voluble, at the money-drawer, and on the floor above, a still more expensive suite of rooms to let—rooms panelled in white and gold, resplendent with rococo mouldings, and crowded with abominable furniture, intended to be coquettish—gilt chairs, scalloped tables, embroidered lambrequins, ottomans smothered in plush and fringe, beds draped with curtains until they were all but air-tight—in effect more ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... in sight from Riviere's quarters, and he soon learned that it belonged to a royalist widow and her daughters, who all three held themselves quite aloof from the rest of the world. "Ah," said the young citizen, "I see. If these rococo citizens play that game with me, I shall have to take them down." Thus a fresh peril menaced this family, on whose hearts and fortunes such heavy blows ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... well-dressed, and a very large man, very badly dressed, wearing a kind of curious, rococo straw hat. I know," he mused, "that you could not have forgotten that hat. ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Horticulture. It is French Renaissance, influenced by Byzantine, and its proportions (it is one hundred and fifty-two feet in diameter and one hundred and eighty-two feet high) are almost perfect. The spires and porticos, the colonnades and entrances are replete with rococo decorations. There are garlands of girls used in the friezes at the base of the minarets, caryatides repeated in the vestibules, and everywhere a wealth of ornamentation suggestive of a bountiful harvest. The brilliancy of design is heightened by the color scheme of green and ivory used upon the ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... length at a station far up in the Bronx, and after looking carefully about he started off toward the west, where the mushroom growth of the new city sprang up in rows of rococo brick and stone houses with oases of green fields and open lots between. He turned up a little lane of tiny frame houses, each set in its trim garden, and stopped ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... pretty brick and wood villas, and apartment "houses," the upper flats of which are reached by curving iron Jacob stairways, that make habitable Quebec there are patches of cramped wooden houses, each built under the architectural stimulus of the packing-case, though rococo little porches and scalloped roofs add a wedding-cake charm to the poverty of size and design. But though there are these small but not mean houses, there appear to be ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... stampede, settled back into a sort of lamplit quiet, dark figures, the dregs of a city day, here and there on its benches. The back-drop of office-lights began to blink out then, all except the tallest tower in the world, rising in the glory of its own spotlight into a rococo pinnacle of ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... detached and architectural importance, often as not a gravel driveway dividing lawns, and out farther still, where the street eventually flows into Forest Park, the Italian Renaissance invades, somebody's rococo money's worth. ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... added bigotry, a well-assorted lining. She belonged to the society of the Virgin, wore a white veil on certain festivals, mumbled special orisons, revered "the holy blood," venerated "the sacred heart," remained for hours in contemplation before a rococo-jesuit altar in a chapel which was inaccessible to the rank and file of the faithful, and there allowed her soul to soar among little clouds of marble, and through great rays of ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Riverside Drive, past rows of rococo apartment houses, along the Lafayette Boulevard and through Yonkers. It was a glorious autumn day. The Palisades shone red and yellow with turning foliage. There was a fresh breeze down the river and a thousand whitecaps gleamed ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... faces are spoilt by flaws such as every Mrs. Moggridge can point out,—faces that begin in one style and end in another, half Greek perhaps and half Gothic; yet even such faces, if their individuality is strong enough, have their own rococo charm. For all but supremely great faces, of which perhaps the world has not seen half-a-dozen, absolute regularity, so-called correctness, of features is a calamity, and regular beauty on the ordinary human levels is only another form ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... all dedicated to some mistress real or imaginary. Pastorals, too, were written in great number, such as William Browne's Britannia's Pastorals and Shephera's Pipe (1613-1616) and Marlowe's charmingly rococo little idyl, {95} The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, which Shakspere quoted in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply. There were love stories in verse, like Arthur Brooke's Romeo and Juliet (the source of Shakspere's tragedy), Marlowe's fragment, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... and became king. The influence of the Regent was, naturally, still strong, and unfortunately did much to form the character of the young king. Selfishness, pleasure, and low ideals, were the order of court life, and paved the way for the debased taste for rococo ornament which was one marked phase of the style of ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... it could throb with the very pulse of the traffic in which we all innocently rejoiced—believing it, I surmise, the liveliest conceivable: a fact that is by itself, in the light of the present, an odd rococo note. The lower Broadway—I allude to the whole Fourth Street and Bond Street (where now is the Bond Street of that antiquity?)—was then a seat of education, since we had not done with it, as I shall presently show, even when we had done with the Institution, a prompt disillusionment; ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... present suburb its name. Here the idolized Queen Louise in the early part of this century lived much, and here are many portraits and marbles bearing her likeness. The palace and front garden are in unattractive "rococo" style, especially the rooms occupied by Frederick the Great; but the gardens in the rear of the palace are large and most attractive. The fame of the place arises chiefly from the beautiful Doric mausoleum to Frederick ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton |
