"Gamin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hand, the second phalanx of the thumb resting on the tip of the nose, and the remaining digits diverging from each other, in the plane of the median line of the face,—I suppose this is the way he would have described the gesture, which is almost a specialty of the Parisian gamin. That Boy immediately copied it, and added greatly to its effect by extending the fingers of the other hand in a line with those of the first, and vigorously agitating those of the two hands,—a gesture which acts like a puncture on the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... more than two hundred years, shows a much juster estimate of the actual facts of language. If ever there was a word born in the streets, and bearing about it tokens of the place of its birth, it is 'gamin'; moreover it cannot be traced farther back than the year 1835; when first it appeared in a book, though it may have lived some while before on the lips of the people. All this did not hinder his finding room for it in the pages of his Dictionary. He ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... was dressed as a bargee and affected the manner of a street gamin. She likes to go to those places that the court detests the most, *the theatres and ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... appropriate to it. In your own dress we might for a short time walk the street without observation; but if you sallied out in that blouse with your white hands and your head thrown back, and a look of disdain and disgust on your face, the first gamin who met you would cry out, 'There is an aristocrat ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... landscapes, two representing September and October at Saint-Cloud; two of fruit and flowers; all of which were admired, while the "Dreamer" was honored with a place in the Luxembourg. In the same Salon she exhibited six pictures in pastel: four portraits, and heads of a gamin and of a little girl. The portrait of Margot is an ideal picture of a happy child, seated at a table, resting her head on her left hand while with the right she turns the leaves of a book. A toy chicken and a doll are on the table beside her. In the Salon of 1903 she exhibited ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... the homuncio enters a theatre. On crossing that magic threshold, he becomes transfigured; he was the street Arab, he becomes the titi.[18] Theatres are a sort of ship turned upside down with the keel in the air. It is in that keel that the titi huddle together. The titi is to the gamin what the moth is to the larva; the same being endowed with wings and soaring. It suffices for him to be there, with his radiance of happiness, with his power of enthusiasm and joy, with his hand-clapping, which resembles a clapping of wings, to confer on that narrow, dark, fetid, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the sale with great interest. Then he would turn to his roaster, and work it violently for a few moments, then be off to the curbstone or crossing, exchanging some, probably not very choice, joke with some other street-gamin, or the conductor or driver of a ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... Morgan, Senior, was noted for being unapproachable. But it is said that he took a great liking to a certain newsboy who never acted afraid of him and who treated him as an ordinary mortal. This gamin always had a cheery word for everybody. That he made no exception in Mr. Morgan's case won the heart of the austere financier, who helped the boy to get an education and to start ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... beautiful light hair, teeth like a young dog's, and large, impudent eyes. Merely upon seeing her go along, her head high with an air of saucy indifference, coquettish under her rags, and walking with elastic steps, you would have guessed in her the young Parisian girl, the sister of the poor 'gamin,' a thousand times more wicked than her brothers, and far more dangerous to society. She was as depraved as the worst of sinners, fearing neither God nor the Devil, ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... went on. "You see, the street gamin loves nothing better in the way of diversion than throwing things at somebody, particularly if that somebody is what is known to his vernacular as a Willie-boy. As between eating an over-ripe peach and throwing it at the pot-hat of a Willie-boy, ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... how brightly the sun seemed to shine now, she thought, pausing at the door on her way out. Her small finger-tips, still bedewed with holy water, rested caressingly on a gamin's head. The ivy which enfolds the quaint chapel never seemed so green; the shrines which serve as the Way of the Cross never seemed so artistic; the ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... a long time in silence. Claire thought over what he had said, and her heart went out to this man as if he were still the little gamin of the hills. ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... the morning, Manuel found himself at noon on the Ronda de Toledo, leaning against the wall of Las Americas, at a loss to know what to do with himself. To one side, likewise seated upon the turf, was a loathsome, terribly ugly, flat-nosed gamin, with a clouded eye, bare feet, and a tattered jacket through whose rents could be glimpsed his dark skin, which had been tanned by the sun and wind. Hanging from his neck was a canister into which he threw the ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... sunny hair blew across her crimson cheek; slender, active, excitedly unconscious of self, she seemed like some eager, adorable little gamin perched ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... on the balusters, and gets his four ten-dollar bills that had been folded away all neat at the bottom of his trunk, and before I could think of anythin' wholesome to say—I was that scandalised—they was goin' off across the street to the Horseshoe Gamin' Parlour, this feller Hoover seemin' very sanguine and asking Bernal whether he was sure they was a party in town could do it up right after they'd went and won ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... contest that another man might have felt in the outcome of a Newport tournament. His wife had long ago learned, so she said, that any attempt to catch his mental eye while an interesting trial was in progress was as unavailing as to try to call a street gamin away from a knot-hole in a fence around a ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... wide—dead flat banks—mimosas on west bank. My two cabin boys are very useful, and Osman's ringing laugh and constant impertinence to the crew and soldiers keep the boat alive; he is a capital boy, a perfect gamin, and being a tailor by trade he is very useful: this accounts for his father wishing to detain him. The horses and donkeys very snug on board. At 1 p.m. passed Gebel Ouli, a small hill on south bank—course S.W. 1/2 S. At 8.30 p.m. reached Cetene, a village of mixed Arabs ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... rashly assumed spencer, you would scarcely have thought, after a glance at the contours of the man's bony frame, that this was an artist—that conventional type which is privileged, in something of the same way as a Paris gamin, to represent riotous living to the bourgeois and philistine mind, the most mirific joviality, in short (to use the old Rabelaisian word newly taken into use). Yet this elderly person had once taken the medal and the traveling scholarship; he had composed the first cantata crowned ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... fights would start all over again. The owners would try to keep out the big fish, las piezas gordas; while the buyers would object to including the small fry. Rough scales were being fashioned of baskets hung on ropes, big stones serving as weights. Some gamin from the village, who had been to school, was always on hand to volunteer as book-keeper for the owners, entering the sales in pencil on almost any ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... school within easy reach, and besides this, though I hate the pretension of gentility, manners and companionship have to be considered as well as education in the choice of a school. A child may take no harm by sitting on the same bench with village children, but the London gamin is not a desirable acquaintance. In this, as in other matters, I paid through the nose for my position; and the convention cost me a clear 35 pounds per annum. Thus I calculated that out of a nominal income of 250 pounds per annum 100 pounds ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... come to draw lots to see who is to go and kill M. Thiers," cries a red-haired gamin.—"Idiot," retorts his comrade, "they have no arms!"—"Listen, and you will hear," says the first, which is capital advice, if I could but follow it. The pushing becomes intolerable, when suddenly ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... in my favorite position on the divan, the bell would ring and we would he honored by a visit from the printer's boy Adolphe, a little fellow in a blue blouse, the true type of Paris gamin. Adolphe rejoiced in a broken nose, a pair of crafty eyes, and had his fists always full of manuscripts which he treated with a carelessness that would have driven a literary novice to despair. The long rolls of yellow paper would hang out of his trousers pockets ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... another. The king's manners were such that it was difficult to say whether he cared about anybody,—except, indeed, one person; and that person was not the queen, nor his aunts, nor his children, but—a locksmith of the name of Gamin. ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... Irma had taken them all by storm. Sandoz declared that her name of Becot was very well suited for a novel; Claude asked whether she would consent to pose for a sketch; while Mahoudeau already pictured her as a Paris gamin, a statuette that would be sure to sell. She soon went off, however, and behind the gentleman's back she wafted kisses to the whole party, a shower of kisses which ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... stripling, master, youth, son, minor, junior, youngling, cadet, chap, urchin, bub, sprig, callant, younker, hobbledehoy; gamin, gutter-snipe. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... "Nothing but money counts with his wife. In telling me of this boy, Minturn confessed that he was forced, forced mind you, to see his sons ruined, while he is building a street gamin as he ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... this vagabondizing start upon our tale; which, however, we here sum up in an observation both useful and novel, as far as any observation can be novel in Paris, where there is nothing new,—not even the statue erected yesterday, on which some young gamin has already ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... fallen asleep when he entered, and lay as sweetly beautiful as the little vivid beauty he had left in the other room. The man of the world paused and instinctively exclaimed in wonder. He had been told that it was a little gamin who had saved his daughter from the assassin's bullet, but the features of this child were as delicately chiseled, his form as finely modeled, his hair as soft and fine as any scion of a noble house might boast. He, ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... and danced in 'the streets of Paris,' wid bullyvard cafes, they called 'em, built into the dance hall, an actress singin' the Marseillaise in a flag, and a Roosian hussy dancin' in boots. And Mr. O'Neill, God save him for a pleasant gentleman though a bit wild in the eye, took my Dinny up to be a gamin. Gay-min. I thought myself he said a 'gay mon' and Dinny's a bit young; but I found he meant him to peddle ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... with which he "could hardly believe his eyes" were exceedingly droll. After a while he saw through their little game, and took to watching, and when a sparrow appeared too much interested in his operations, he made a feint of going for him, which warned the gamin that he would better look out ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller |
