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Gape   Listen
noun
Gape  n.  
1.
The act of gaping; a yawn.
2.
(Zool.) The width of the mouth when opened, as of birds, fishes, etc.
The gapes.
(a)
A fit of yawning.
(b)
A disease of young poultry and other birds, attended with much gaping. It is caused by a parasitic nematode worm (Syngamus trachealis), in the windpipe, which obstructs the breathing. See Gapeworm.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Gape" Quotes from Famous Books



... his basket before us, All trembling alive With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit; You touch the strange lumps, And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner Of horns and of humps, Which only ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... part of it, the ruin of the whole, or nearly of the whole, was, at some time or other, a certainty. For that reason I honor and shall forever honor and love you, and those who first caused it to stagger, crack, and gape. Others may finish; the beginners have the glory; and, take what part you please at this hour, (I think you will take the best,) your first services will never be forgotten by a grateful country. Adieu! Present my ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... and effects in Nature are not without charm and beauty, as the little cracks in the crust of a loaf, though not intended by the baker, are agreeable and invite the appetite. Thus figs, when they are ripest, open and gape; and olives, when they are near decaying, are peculiarly attractive. The bending of an ear of corn, the frown of a lion, the foam of a boar, and many other like things, if you take them singly, are far from beautiful; but seen ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various

... the world again inch by inch after so many thousand years. Of course, before it could come all out, the soil must open first, and when Robinson, glaring down, saw a square foot of earth part and gape as the nugget came majestically up, he gave another cry, and with trembling hands laid hold of the prize, and pulled and tugged and rolled it on the clean moss—to lift it was not so easy. They fell down on their knees by the side of it ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... moment, music, lights, flowers, beauties, all became odious and insipid to Louis XIV. After he had a hundred times bitten his lips, stretched his legs and his arms like a well-brought-up child who, without daring to gape, exhausts all the modes of evincing his weariness—after having uselessly again implored his mother and the minister, he turned a despairing look towards the door, that ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... the stream a huge muzzle. The lower jaw lay flat, the upper reached as high as Amyas's head. He could see the long fangs gleam white in the moonshine; he could see for one moment, full down the monstrous depths of that great gape, which would have crushed a buffalo. Three inches, and no more, from that soft ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... with thunder stroke on stroke, and followed again, close as a chasing wolf, trying with hammering on hammering to beat in the wide-wombed bottom and suck out the frightened lives through one black gape. A wave fell on a ship and sunk it down with a thrust, stern as though a whole sky had tumbled at it, and the barque did not cease to go down until it crashed and sank in the sand at the ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens

... citrons. He cut the citron, and at once one of the Princesses appeared before him. If she had looked a beauty when he saw her in the mountain she was ten times lovelier, now that he saw her in the light of day. The Prince could only gape and gape ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle

... is the chief object of interest in Heidelberg. What there is of interest in the sight of a big beer-barrel it is difficult, in one's calmer moments, to understand; but the guide book says that it is a thing to be seen, and so all we tourists go and stand in a row and gape at it. We are a sheep-headed lot. If, by a printer's error, no mention were made in the guide book of the Colosseum, we should spend a month in Rome, and not think it worth going across the road to look ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome

... from yonder peak, the Fool turned to gaze at them as they wound past. In sooth, had it not been for that, he would never have given them a glance at all, not having much curiosity about the things other people love to gape at. ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park

... large department store was reached and Mrs. Bobbsey let Freddie and Flossie take their time in looking into the several windows. One was full of dolls, which made the little girl gape ...
— The Bobbsey Twins - Or, Merry Days Indoors and Out • Laura Lee Hope

... Russian pilgrims in huge fur gloves. If these works of art find few purchasers, they at least attract a throng of starers; drunken ragamuffin lacqueys on their way from the cook's shop, bearing piles of plates with their masters' dinners, which grow cold whilst they gape at the pictures; great-coated Russian soldiers with penknives for sale; Okhta pedlar-women with boxes of shoes. Each spectator expresses his admiration in his own peculiar way: peasants point with their fingers; soldiers gaze with stolid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various

... knew he was an enemy, knew that the man he watched boded no good to his comrades, and knew also that the fellow represented some subtle form of danger. Yet he could not move, could do no more than gape and grin and grimace, and could not properly realize the meaning of the situation. Then suddenly he started, for another crawling figure came from behind him, and a ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton

... stand in the street and gape at the passers-by: thus do they also wait, and gape at the ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... one of the quartet unable to give utterance to his feelings. He could only cower there, and gape, while the unknown sailing craft was bearing down straight for the little motor-boat, and apparently bound to smash her ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen

... taught still peace to grow. No foreign banish'd wight shall anchor in this port; Our realm it brooks no strangers' force, let them elsewhere resort. Our rusty sword with rest shall first his edge employ, To poll their tops that seek such change, and gape for joy. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... of hay an elephant dispatches in a month. And to what end? To the end, principally, that a horde of superintendents and keepers may be kept in easy jobs. To the end, secondarily, that the least intelligent minority of the population may have an idiotic show to gape at on Sunday afternoons, and that the young of the species may be instructed in the methods of amour prevailing among chimpanzees and become privy to the technic employed by jaguars, hyenas and polar bears in ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken

... purchase, the property of Mr. Joseph Banks, M.P. for Grimsby, born in 1681, and eventually came to his distinguished descendant, Sir Joseph Banks; and on his death some of the Mareham land passed to the ancestors of the present Sir Henry M. Hawley. Other proprietors are now Major Gape, Messrs. J. R. Chapman, Joseph Lake, and ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter

... devil broil your bones, lay on to him. What now? Od rot you, Antony, you'll see no money this month, you—" She became unprintable. As she took breath again, she saw Harry Boyce calmly contemplative. "You dog, who bade you stand and gape? Go, give ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey

... I and all these mail-clad men Stand and give ear, or gape and catch at flies, While ye wage warring words that wound not? When Have I been found of you so wordy-wise That thou or he should call to counsel one So slow of speech and wit as thou and he, Who know my hand no ...
— Locrine - A Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... them napping, however; I cling to the wisdom of ignorance, and childishly enjoy the way in which things work themselves out— the cul-de-sac resolving itself at the very last moment into a promising corridor toward the outer air. At every rebuff it is my happiness to be hopelessly bewildered; and I gape with admiration when the Gordian knot is untied. If the author be old-fashioned enough to apostrophize the Gentle Reader, I know he must mean me, and docilely give ear, and presently tumble head-foremost into the treacherous pit he has digged for me. In brief, I am there to be sold, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... filed after the Governor's carriage, the lancers wheeled and formed along Fifth Avenue to wait for the commandant of the garrison, and the mounted police followed them. I left the crowd to gape and stare at the white marble Death Chamber, and, crossing South Fifth Avenue, walked along the western side of that thoroughfare to Bleecker Street. Then I turned to the right and stopped before a dingy shop which ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers

... having its tongue free and pointing forwards. Its rounded head sinks completely into the body, the muzzle being abruptly truncated, so as to form a circular disc in front. So extremely small is the gape, that it would not be supposed, if separated from the body, to have belonged to a frog. On each side of the neck there is a gland, deeply sunk, and ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... of them all that is whole; their lips gape open for breath; They are clothed with sickness of soul, and the shape of the shadow ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn

... entailing corresponding differences in their skulls. The carrier, more especially the male bird, is also remarkable from the wonderful development of the carunculated skin about the head, and this is accompanied by greatly elongated eyelids, very large external orifices to the nostrils, and a wide gape of mouth. The short-faced tumbler has a beak in outline almost like that of a finch; and the common tumbler has the singular inherited habit of flying at a great height in a compact flock, and tumbling in the air head over heels. ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin

... or Fleet Ditch— And scarce a pin's head difference which— Mixes, tho' even to Greece we run, With every rill from Helicon! And if this rage for travelling lasts, If Cockneys of all sects and castes, Old maidens, aldermen, and squires, Will leave their puddings and coal fires, To gape at things in foreign lands No soul among them understands; If Blues desert their coteries, To show off 'mong the Wahabees; If neither sex nor age controls, Nor fear of Mamelukes forbids Young ladies with pink parasols To ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... Mr. Osbaldistone," he said, "and we claim the refuge and protection of your roof till we can pursue a journey where dungeons and death gape for me ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... gifts, the acceptance of which will make the bargain binding. So the clever agent proceeds to exhibit tokens, which so dazzle the old peasant that he greedily accepts them all, while admiring neighbors gape at them in wonder. ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... Shapes all his universe to feel And know and be; the clinging stream Closes his memory, glooms his dream, Who lips the roots o' the shore, and glides Superb on unreturning tides. Those silent waters weave for him A fluctuant mutable world and dim, Where wavering masses bulge and gape Mysterious, and shape to shape Dies momently through whorl and hollow, And form and line and solid follow Solid and line and form to dream Fantastic down the eternal stream; An obscure world, a shifting world, ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke

... but think with yourself, with what a sting we read Plato's "Atlantic" and the conclusion of the "Iliad," and how we hanker and gape after the rest of the tale, as when some beautiful temple or theatre is shut up. But now the informing of ourselves with the truth herself is a thing so delectable and lovely as if our very life and being were for the sake of knowing. And the darkest ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... in every other rispect completely answers my most sanguine expectation; she is not yet dry and eight men can carry her with the greatest ease; she is strong and will carry at least 8,000 lbs. with her suit of hands; her form is as complete as I could wish it. the stitches begin to gape very much since she has began to dry; I am now convinced this would not have been the case had the skins been sewed with a sharp point only and the leather not cut by the edges of a sharp nedle. about ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... were industriously digging dandelions on the side lawn. I inconsistently let the dear, cheery flowers grow and bloom their fill in the early season, when they lie close to the sward, but when they begin to stretch awkward, rubbery necks, and gape about as if to see where they might best shake out their seed puffs, they must be routed. Do it as thoroughly as possible, enough always remain to repay my cruelty with a shower of golden coin the next spring. Bertel spends all his ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright

... But from the swamps of soulless strife emerge Some Pisgah peaks of promise where the dove Finds footing, high the whirling gulfs above,— Now the intrusion of this loathly shape, With pestilence-breathing jaws that blackly gape For indiscriminate prey, is sure a thing To set celestial guards once more a-wing; To fire a new St. Michael or St. George With the bright death to cleave the monster's gorge, And trample out the Laidly Worm's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various

... And letting all those things go, do they not gape, and even with open mouth fix their eyes fast on her; and have not all men more desire unto her than unto silver or gold, or ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous

... of the one you mean, Flix; but this isn't that one at all, at all," said the captain with a long gape. ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic

... Tito crept near softly, so softly that the Horse did not see her till she was within twenty feet; then he gave a start that swung the tightened picket-rope up into the air, and snorted gently. Tito went quietly forward, and opening her wide gape, took the rope in, almost under her ears, between the great scissor-like back teeth, then chewed it for a few seconds. The fibres quickly frayed, and, aided by the strain the nervous Horse still kept up, the last of the strands gave way, and the ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton

... her,' said she, 'but I niver thought she's be so pretty, and so staid and quiet-like too. T' most part o' girls as has looks like hers are always gape-gazing to catch other folks's eyes, and see what is thought on 'em; but she looks just like a child, a bit flustered wi' coming into company, and gettin' into as dark a corner and bidin' ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell

... that we do no longer gape on the aristocracy admiringly, and write of them curiously, as if they were creatures in a Paradise? Is it that Thackeray has converted us? In part, surely, we are just as snobbish as ever, though the gods of our adoration ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... absence was short he would be only the more agitated. When you were away what good did it do. There is only one way and that is to conceal the truth from him, to put him on a wrong track. Let him cherish his passion, read verses, and gape at the moon, since he is an incurable Romanticist. Later on he will sober down and ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov

... Madrid produced a swarm of imitators, some of whom, like Velasquez, Zurbaran, Ribera and Murillo, having spun their cocoons, passed through the chrysalis stage, developed wings, and soared to high heaven. But the generations of imitators who followed these have usually done little better than gape. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard

... piteous bones protruded, Shroudless, down the loose collapsing banks, Crumble, from their constant place detruded, That the sea devours and gives not thanks. Graves where hope and prayer and sorrow brooded Gape and slide ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... how inconvenient it is to have no pocket in her gown, and she also knows how strongly the dressmakers protest against putting one in, because it is sure to gape open and look ugly. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 30, June 3, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... flow of life in the streets ebbs, and the old leafy inhabitants—the smaller tribes always in front—saunter in, one by one, very careless seemingly, but very tenacious, until they swarm so that the great stones gape from each other with the crowding of their roots, and the feldspar begins to be picked out of the granite to find them food. At last the trees take up their solemn line of march, and never rest until they have encamped ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... derrick upwards as though it were composed of mere straws. With the flying timbers came what seemed to be a stream of dirty water, flying far up in the air, as though a fireman's hose had been turned on! That must be the dark-looking crude oil, mingled with water, Toby conjectured, as he continued to gape and wonder. Then after all the suspicions of Maurice Dangerfield had proven true, and the Pontico Hills region did harbor rich ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton

... Heigh-ho!—I gape like an unfledged kite in its nest, wanting to swallow a chicken, bobbed at its mouth by ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... enough, Smarly," gibed the Pippin, as he passed by on his way toward the door, "maybe some of the rubber-necks off the gape-wagon will take pity on you and buy you another—the slumming parties are just crazy about ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... it all! We want to stay precisely where we are, shoemakers and bakers, all together! But we must demand proper conditions! Scarcely one out of thousands can come out on top; and then the rest can sit where they are and gape after him! But do you believe he'd get a chance of rising if it wasn't that society needs him—wants to use him to strike at his own people and keep them down? 'Now you can see for yourself what a poor man can do ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... the ancient time, this is a secret process that perished with the people who employed it. Did we desire it, we could embalm our princes and our priests, and retain their shrunken similitudes for distant coming times to gaze and gape upon, as skilfully as they who practised this art in Egypt's palmiest days. Nay, it is doubtless far within the truth to claim that better than they did we could do; and we are actually apprised of better ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various

... IV. "But O! gape Earth, or may the Sire of might Hurl me with lightning to the Shades amain, Pale shades of Erebus and abysmal Night, Ere, wifely modesty, thy name I stain, Or dare thy sacred precepts to profane. Nay, he whose love first linked us long ago, Took ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil

... explanation of a circumstance which has frequently caused them great perplexity. Oh! the English are a clever people, and have a deep meaning in all they do. What a vision of deep policy opens itself to my view: they do not send their fool to Vienna in order to gape at processions, and to bow and scrape at a base Papist court, but to drink at the great dinners the celebrated Tokay of Hungary, which the Hungarians, though they do not drink it, are very proud of, and by doing so to intimate the sympathy which the English entertain for ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... throng of people, was rather overwhelming to Akaky Akakiyevich. He simply did not know where he stood, or where to put his hands, his feet, and his whole body. Finally he sat down by the players, looked at the cards, gazed at the face of one and another, and after a while began to gape, and to feel that it was wearisome, the more so, as the hour was already long past when he usually went to bed. He wanted to take leave of the host, but they would not let him go, saying that he must not fail to drink a glass of champagne, in honour of his new garment. In the course of an hour, ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... efficient crew. As soon as she was clear of the ship she was brought to the wind, under an enormous spread of exquisitely cut canvas, and away she went, close-hauled on the port tack, heading to the northward at a pace which made us gape with astonishment; while the ship, with squared yards, gathered stern-way and first fell broadside-on to us, then gradually paid off until she was before the wind, when down she came driving toward us, yawing so broadly to port and starboard that it was easy to see ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood

... who seek to bridge the chasm 'Twixt man to-day and protoplasm, Who theorize and probe and gape, And finally evolve an ape— Yours is a harmless sort of cult, If you are pleased with the result. Some folks admit, with cynic grace, That you have rather proved your case. These dogmatists are so severe! Enough for me that Fanny's here, Enough that, ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... to and fro round the wheels of his carriage, whistling briskly, could only gape when he heard these words; while Arkady coolly pulled his luggage out of the carriage, took his seat beside Bazarov, and bowing politely to his former fellow-traveller, he called, 'Whip up!' The coach rolled away, and was soon out of sight.... Sitnikov, utterly confused, looked at his coachman, ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... What a selfish beast, to be sure, must this same Peter Westcott, be, for here he was wishing—yes, almost wishing—that Stephen's happiness had not come to him. Always at the back of everything there had been the thought of Stephen Brant. Let all the pits in the world gape and yawn, there was one person in the world to whom Peter was precious. Now—in America—with a wife... some of the sunlight had gone out of the air and Peter's heart was suddenly cold with that ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... drew the startled attention of everyone. The gape-mouthed overseer lowered his whip while the slaves stumbled and halted and the wheel groaned to a stop. In the sudden silence Edipon's steps echoed loudly as he ran to Jason, halting a hand's breadth away, ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey

... inconvenience. Plums and nuts abound, and are followed by a second course of hard, unripe, and tasteless nectarines and peaches. The season is closing fast, for the prickly pods of the ripening chestnut now begin to gape, and the indifferent grapes of the district attain their imperfect maturity, and are gathered for the wine-press. September is in its last week, and in less than another month we must all migrate somewhere for the winter. The baths, on the 15th ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... declare," said the landlady, stepping back a pace, "I don't know as I can tell there ain't no sort o' likelihood that he's to hum this time o' day. Sam! you lazy feller, you han't got nothing to do but gape at folks ha' you seen the doctor ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell

... sea-monster, in fact, shows by the narrow and prolonged interorbital region; the extensive union of the parietal bones in a sagittal suture; the well-developed nasal bones; the distinct and large incisors implanted in premaxillary bones, which take a full share in bounding the fore part of the gape; the two-fanged molar teeth with triangular and serrated crowns, not exceeding five on each side in each jaw; and the existence of a deciduous dentition—its close relation with the Seals. While, on the other hand, the produced rostral form of the snout, the long symphysis, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... smothered a yawn, a deliberate yawn—not the kind you can't repress because the air is close and you feel like a goldfish when the water in the bowl has not been changed and you must gape for breath. The fat boy had been dancing attendance on her for the last hour and she was wearied with his witty sallies. Jeff and Willis Truman, a former classmate, had started a game of bridge with two of the ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson

... this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... very stupid, the three of us, so dumbfounded that we could do nothing but gape incredulously at that extraordinary creature and her equally extraordinary utterance. She immediately did her best to atone ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... thirty aurei for this girl; art set there slave, to gape at the praefect, or to do thy duty to the State that employs thee? Is there a higher bid for the maid? She pleaseth me, and I'll give sixty or an hundred for her. This is a public auction as by law directed. I appeal to thee, oh Taurus Antinor, to give orders to thy slaves, ere I appeal ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... same words. We are both of a carefully selected breed and of a diminished usefulness. But because of our high position we are fed and housed not merely in comfort but in luxury; and wherever we go crowds stand to gape at us and applaud when we nod our heads at them. We live always in the purlieus of palaces, and never have we known what it is to throw up our heels in a green pasture, nor in our old age are we turned out comfortably ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... turn back and Arnold is wounded in the same leg that was shot during the attack on Quebec. The British admire bravery and Arnold's portrait is to decorate shop windows in London for the curious to gape at. Alas for Arnold that the bullet was not ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane

... was no denying that the procession looked strange. File clerks and receptionists stopped their work to gape at the four bedizened walkers and their plainly dressed satellites. Malone needed no telepathic talent to tell what they ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)

... in to-day, an elegant bird, eyes nearly white, tinged with grey; legs and beak yellow, base of gape leaden-blue, junction of ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... Sweet indeed is the community of interest, delightful the intercourse which a common foible begets; but correspondingly bitter and distressful is the forced union of nervous zeal and pitiless indifference. Spare us the so-called friends who come and gape and stare and go! What is more painful than the chatter of the connoisseur as it falls upon the long ears of the ignoramus! Collecting is a secret sin—the great pushing public must be kept out. It is sheer madness to puff and ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell

... sending us out into the great hazardous unknown; the very folk who stand there in their fishing-boats and look wonderingly after the Fram as she slowly and heavily steams along on her northward course. Many of them wave their sou'-westers and shout "Hurrah!" Others have barely time to gape at us in wonderment. In on the point are a troop of women waving and shouting; outside a few boats with ladies in light summer-dresses, and gentlemen at the oars entertaining them with small-talk ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... exclaimed she, "oh, most pure and immaculate of virgins! thou seest our extremity. The ravager is at the gate, and there is none on earth to help us! Look down with pity, and grant that the earth may gape and swallow us rather than that our ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving

... to put his head in, That looks like a black pot tipp'd with tin; While with antic gestures he doth gape and grin; The sisters admire, and he wheedles them in, Who to cheat their husbands think no sin; ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay

... saw the lazy sluttish beast lounging over the kitchen bench and doing nothing but gape through the window-panes at his boats, which lay down by the bridge laden with train-oil, he was downright furious. "Pack yourself off ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie

... Bill Westaway knows better. Yes, you may gape your hateful eyes out of your head; but Bill Westaway's my friend; and he's straight; and he's took good care to keep me in touch with the facts ever since I came here—so now then! You was after Chuff from the minute he went ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts

... Where were those terrible things I had read of? Where was this hell which I had reasonably expected would gape leagues of sulphur and blue flame beneath the little marble table? I mentally resolved to bring an action against Baedeker for false information. For what did I see? Simply pairs and groups of young men and women chattering ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne

... Gape Cod harbor. Second Sunday in harbor. Services aboard ship. Seamen ashore. Change ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames

... the quiet, empty steppe, and, bearing in me the recollection of this woman, to resume my lonely journey towards the region where the silver wall of the mountains merges with the sky, and the dark ravines gape at the steppe with their chilly jaws. At the moment, however, I cannot so do, for the Cossacks have temporarily deprived ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky

... ceased to be objects of admiration, and the War Office would have howled with exquisite torture at sight of their hair and clothes. Speak of wrapping clothes around head or body to keep out the dust? It is sheer nonsense to prate so. Why it is hard enough to gape and gasp and catch a mouthful of sanded breath, without that added worry. There is nothing for it, but to grin and bear it and get through with the swallowing of that proverbial peck of dust in a life-time, as quickly and ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... this speech, the State Councillor could only gape, for he had not expected Tientietnikov's torrent of words. He reflected a few ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... Rub! Rub! Till they're rugged at edge and at rim; Scrub! Scrub! Scrub! Till with scissors the cuffs I must trim. Seam, and gusset, and band, Band, and gusset, and seam; And all the buttonholes gape, and the studs Drop out in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various

... to sin against the Gods in the pride of his heart. And do thou that art his mother go to thy house, and take from it such apparel as is seemly, and go to meet thy son, for the many rents that he hath made for grief gape in his garments about him. Comfort him also with gentle words; for I know that 'tis thy voice only that he will hear. And to you old men, farewell; and live happily while ye may, for there is no profit of wealth in the ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church

... truth must be told, an uninteresting stage-play. The story is of the slightest; there is scarcely a genuinely dramatic incident from beginning to end. The audience wearies of a succession of pretty pictures and sentimental soliloquies or dialogues, mouths begin to gape, and the attention wanders. Is this sacrilege? If it be, I must be content to be sacrilegious. But there is scope for careful and graceful acting, and of this the O. U. D. S. took ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various

... already spoken of. When they came nigh they halted irresolutely: the man who was in front (a silent and perturbed sergeant) turned fiercely to the others "Come on, can't you?" said he; "what the devil are you waiting for?" and he strode forward into the black gape. ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens

... cause of it," she cried impatiently. "Canst do naught but stare? Am I the mother of a fool? Wilt thou simper and gape and trifle away thy days whilst that dog-descended Frank tramples thee underfoot, using thee but as a stepping-stone to the power that should be thine own? And that be so, Marzak, I would thou hadst been strangled in ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini

... disclosed the tiny feet seeming already to kick feebly at existence. The nurse said something in French which Maria could not understand. Ida answered also in French. Then the baby seemed to experience a convulsion; its whole face seemed to open into one gape of expostulation at fate. Then its feeble, futile wail ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... here, as long as I think proper, ma'am,' rejoined Mr. Bumble; 'and although I was not snoring, I shall snore, gape, sneeze, laugh, or cry, as the humour strikes ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens

... pawn, no doubt, (Miss this chance, glance untried aside?) John's shirt, my—no! Ay, so—the lout! Let yet the door gape, store on floor And not a ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... was all the landlord would say. He had no mind to wear his heart upon his sleeve for this idle crowd to gape at. ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson

... concerning her sable liege subjects, and to be able to relate so fluently how Cato had run a splinter into his foot, Pompey had a touch of fever, and fifty other details, which, although doubtless very interesting to Menou, made me gape a little. I amused myself by looking round the dining-room, in which we then were, the furniture and appearance of which rather improved my opinion of Creole civilization and comfort. The matting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... size too large for him. When he extended his hand even my bewilderment did not blind me to the half-inch of flat dead tips to the fingers. Beneath his arm was an umbrella—on a broiling August morning! He wore spats—in mid-summer! His trousers were fawn coloured. I could only gape at him as he ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... edge of the bulk split and began to gape. Ed found himself looking down a manhole-sized gullet into a shallow puddle of slime with bits of bone sticking up here and there. Toward the near end a soggy mass of fur that might have been the rabbit seemed to be visibly melting down. At the same moment, ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams

... something?" cried the girl, at length. "It seems to me if I were a man I could think of something to do besides stand and gape!" ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... now lay stretched out before us. My uncle eagerly went forward to the tree, and looking up about fifteen feet from the ground, we saw a small hole surrounded by mud. Directly afterwards, out came the white end of a beak, which seemed to gape as if expecting to have some food put into it. We were silent for an instant, and then heard the harsh croaking of a bird, which seemed to come from the interior of the tree. How to get at it, however, ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... assume my noble father's person, I'll speak to it, though hell itself should gape, And bid me ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding

... capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage—who can tell?—but truth—truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder—the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff—with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... (with a smile). Hm! (To FINN.) Tell me—is there any way of leaving the castle but by the gate? Gape not at me so! I mean—can one escape from Ostrat unseen, while the castle gate ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen

... and ashes, are vomitted vp and discharged, and that for the most part not without an earthquake which, if it commeth from the depth of the earth, (being called by Possidonius, Succussio) it must either be either an opening or a quaking. Opening causeth the earth in some places to gape, and fall a sunder. By quaking the earth is heaued vp and swelleth, and sometimes (as Plinie saith) [Sidenote: Lib. 20. cap. 20.] casteth out huge heaps: such an earth-quake was the same which I euen now mentioned, which in the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt

... daring; but it was a very cheap kind of daring. The fundamental laws of life are occasionally enunciated by commonplace people, and that gives an opportunity to be startling. But I leave it for small boys to gape at such fireworks; my interest is in ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair

... WISH TO BE ADMIRED.—When a man holds his proper station in life, he does not gape after things beyond it. Man, what do you wish to happen to you? I am satisfied if I desire and avoid conformably to nature, if I employ movements towards and from an object as I am by nature formed to do, and purpose and design and assent. Why then do you ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus

... "was based on several facts. In the first place, a wound inflicted on a living body gapes rather widely, owing to the retraction of the living skin. The skin of a dead body does not retract, and the wound, consequently, does not gape. This wound gaped very slightly, showing that death was recent, I should say, within half an hour. Then a wound on the living body becomes filled with blood, and blood is shed freely on the clothing. But the wound on the deceased contained only a little blood-clot. There was hardly any blood on ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman

... stones and the dead sands commence at once. And sometimes, even, the desert chain closes in so as to overhang the river with its reddish-white cliffs, which no rain ever comes to freshen, and in which, at different heights, gape the square holes leading to the habitations of the mummies. These mountains, which in the distance look so beautiful in their rose-colour, and make, as it were, interminable back-cloths to all ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... say they never could be tired; How often have we stray'd, whilst sportive rhyme Deceived the way and clipp'd the wings of Time, 400 O'er hill, o'er dale; how often laugh'd to see, Yourselves made visible to none but me, The clown, his works suspended, gape and stare, And seem to think that I conversed with air! When the sun, beating on the parched soil, Seem'd to proclaim an interval of toil; When a faint langour crept through every breast, And things most used to labour wish'd for rest, How often, underneath ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... nor tail of it, and seeing lights in the house, he had just dropped in for a glass of porter - and at this point he became aware of the third person. Archie saw the cod's mouth and the blunt lips of Glenkindie gape at him for a moment, and the recognition ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... instantly, and put some saul in ye, by the bread and the salt, I'll put it down your throat wi' the cutty [*Short.] spoon, scaulding as it is, and whether ye will or no. Gape, sinner, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... trailing over it. At first, four brown-speckled eggs,— then two little bare young ones, which, on the slightest noise, lift their heads, and open wide mouths for food,—immediately dropping their heads, after a broad gape. The action looks as if they were making a most earnest, agonized petition. In another egg, as in a coffin, I could discern the quiet, death-like form of the little bird. The whole thing had something awful and ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... business man of Chung-king, and Mr. Cheo, the elderly head of the Chinese Imperial Telegraph, who has now been succeeded by another member whom I also met. When I left they all escorted me most courteously to my chair, the passers-by stopping to gape with surprise. So far as I know the club is a new departure in mission work, and most worthy of support as a rational and hopeful method of presenting the best of Christian civilization to a class often ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall

... tentacled grip, and his neck was many-jointed in the usual way, but exceptionally short and thick. His head, says Cavor—apparently alluding to some previous description that has gone astray in space—"is of the common lunar type, but strangely modified. The mouth has the usual expressionless gape, but it is unusually small and pointing downward, and the mask is reduced to the size of a large flat nose-flap. On either side are the ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... earth Which men do gape for till thou cram'st their mouths And choak'st their throats for dust: O charme thy breast And let me sinke into thee. Look who knocks; Andrugio calls. But O, she's deafe and blinde. A wretch but leane relief ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... an' theft, For battery, arson and hate, >From breakin' the Sabbath to coveting cows, An' false affidavits an' perjurin' vows, I'm adept at whatever the law disallows, And the gallowsmen gape at the noose that I left, For I flit ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... foe, and frowns on him; For he has stolen a pix,[9] and hang'd must 'a be.(B) A damned death! Let gallows gape for dog; ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare

... every shade and salience. The revulsion, for our friend, had become, before he knew it, immense—this drop, in the act of apprehension, to the sense of his adversary's inscrutable manoeuvre. That meaning at least, while he gaped, it offered him; for he could but gape at his other self in this other anguish, gape as a proof that he, standing there for the achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldn't be faced in his triumph. Wasn't the proof in the splendid covering hands, ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James

... have flung the dice; The destinies depend On feet that run for fearful price, And fangs that gape to rend; And still the footsteps of his Vice Pursue him to the end:— The feet of his incarnate Vice Shall dog ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... To gape in such unseemely sort, with ugly gaping mouth, Is like an image pictured a blowing from the ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various

... Mrs. Burrell who came in and out of the kitchen through a creaking door,—a normal, noisy soul, to whom life was a succession of laborious days spent between the cooking stove and the washtub with a regular Saturday night, in her best clothes, at the motion-picture theater at Sag Harbor to gape at the abnormality of Theda Bara and scream with uncontrolled mirth at the ingenious antics of Charlie Chaplin. An ancient Ford made possible this weekly dip into ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... Never mind; here by good luck we find seats where we can watch the throng passing and repassing. It is a great review of the people. On the whole, how respectable they are, how sober, how deadly dull! See how worn-out the poor girls are becoming, how they gape, what listless eyes most of them have! The stoop in the shoulders so universal among them merely means over-toil in the workroom. Not one in a thousand shows the elements of taste in dress; vulgarity and worse glares in all but every costume. Observe the middle-aged women; it would be small ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... Life as it might be, And from his dream forthright a picture grew, A painting all the people thronged to see, And joyed therein — till came the Man Who Knew, Saying: "'Tis bad! Why do ye gape, ye fools! He painteth not according ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service

... ever said he was a coward or effeminate because he said this. Why, if Mr. Fields would permit an excursus in twelve numbers here, on this theme, we would defer Sybaris to the 1st of April, 1868, while we illustrated the Sybarite's manly epigram, which these stupid Spartans could only gape ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various

... whither it goes; the next moment he comes up out of the earth under your feet. The night cuckoo might make another of his many names; his colour, ways, and food are all cuckoo-like; so, too, his immense gape—a cave in which endless moths end their lives; the eggs are laid on the ground, for there is no night-feeding bird into whose nest they could be put, else, perhaps, they would be. There is no night-feeding bird to feed the fern owl's ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... Ulysses got, But closed the bargain on the spot. A nice machine the birds devise To bear their pilgrim through the skies.— Athwart her mouth a stick they throw: 'Now bite it hard, and don't let go,' They say, and seize each duck an end, And, swiftly flying, upward tend. It made the people gape and stare Beyond the expressive power of words, To see a tortoise cut the air, Exactly poised between two birds. 'A miracle,' they cried, 'is seen! There goes the flying tortoise queen!' 'The queen!' ('twas thus the tortoise spoke;) 'I'm truly ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine



Words linked to "Gape" :   yaw, look, goggle, facial gesture, be, stare, gawk, rictus



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